Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 25
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
169/365: You, the Living (Roy Andersson, 2007) (Mubi, Kanopy, Amazon Prime)
Swedish master Andersson has an entirely distinctive way of making movies — shot in wide-angle from a personal-space-respecting distance in a fluorescent-lit world of moldy green pastels and ashen-faced zombie-humans acting out the absurd machinations of modern life, Andersson’s mature films are both dryly funny and scarifyingly ecstatic. In this world, the various characters we meet often speak directly to us, often about their dreams, which are then revealed as well, in real time. All the while, we see these people in entire rooms, and there’s no hurry. A man stuck in a drizzly traffic jam shouts at us from his car, telling us about a dream that we then see, and which ends badly, in the electric chair. Desolate musicians abound, practicing their tuba and bass drum at home and driving their neighbors insane, and they reappear endlessly, playing at funerals and in parades in which other characters participate, before meeting to practice and ripping into a Dixie riff during a hellacious lightning storm. A young waif recounts her daydreamy crush on a local club-band guitarist, and her dream is a show-stopper: the two are newlyweds, and as the hyper-coiffed rocker vamps on his axe, the whole apartment block they’re in motors across the landscape like a train, eventually pulling into a station where a crowd of hundreds congratulates them. All of this in one shot, of course — the film is all set-piece, all the time — it doesn’t tell a story so much as tracks the fissures in everyday life. But Andersson’s single-shot wonders are not just digitized-Steadicam maneuvers, but the results of extraordinary orchestration, as well as fascinating spatial depth and expert comic timing. The physical dynamics of the film remind you of what’s possible with expertly timed stop-motion animation — but of course Andersson’s canvas is huge and actually alive, and sometimes involves entire city blocks.
170/365: Diva Dolorosa (Peter Delpeut, 1999) (YouTube, Amazon Prime)
A film simply assembled from other films, this Dutch meta-doc is an unnarrated ode constructed out of footage from a particular genre of Italian silent: the Black Romantic melodramas of the 1910s, in which tragically willful, independent fin-de-siecle aristocratic women self-destructed, dramatically and hyper-tragically, in the name of love. The genre, which pervaded other mediums as well, might be the first and last word on the communion between sex and death, and the clips Delpeut uses are chockablock with swoony melancholy and suicidal ardor. Many of them, despite their age, look remarkably accomplished as pieces of cinema; perhaps someday we will see complete editions of Rapsodia Satanica (1915) and La Donna Nuda (1914) (both, and others, starring the Black Romantic Garbo, Lyda Borelli). But Delpeut is crafting a found-object poem here, with a rhapsodic orchestral score and a sure sense of how so much weepy, proto-campy mega-sadness can collect in your head as a statement about its own culture, and also as a palpably beautiful, tragic spectacle despite the odor of antique cheese. It’s really about cinema itself, and therefore about lost time, and therein lies its loveliest sorrow.
171/365: The Singing Revolution (James and Maureen Castle Tusty, 2006) (Kanopy, Amazon Prime, SingingRevolution.com)
Get past the swoony Linda Hunt narration and PBS reflexes, and the political thrust of this doc gathers its own relevance: it is simply a 20th-century history of Estonia, a tiny country overrun by first the Russian empire, then the Soviets, then the Nazis, then the Soviets again, all the while fiercely holding onto its own national identity and culture. It’s a doleful story in the buildup, thick with gulag stories and execution news footage, but then the film blooms as the resistance to Soviet oppression enjoys its first sparks and eventually, in the ’80s, becomes a fire. The various stories of how Eastern Bloc countries and ex-Soviet states like Estonia finally acquired their independence are all genuinely inspiring in their own way, beginning with Solidarnosc and the Czech “velvet revolution,” but Estonia’s is especially lovely: the nation has a long tradition of mass choral concerts, wherein up to 30,000 people will sing patriotic songs to an audience two or three times that size. Solidarity, indeed: in a number of distinct incidents that mark modern history for Estonians like lightning strikes, thousands, and often hundreds of thousands, of citizens have gathered in open defiance of Soviet threats (and tanks), and sang Estonian ballads. The collective power of the concerts spurred on more political, and always peaceful, defiance, and eventually an Estonian legislature declared itself independent. In one such pre-Soviet-collapse open-air concert, one out of every three Estonians was present, a kind of ecstatic mega-Woodstock with a righteous purpose. You’ll sniffle, not for an individual but for a crowd of a half-million.
172/365: David and Lisa (Frank Perry, 1962) (Criterion Channel, Tubi, Pluto.tv, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
Mid-century Freudianism as it was shaped in the pop consciousness was raw, fresh material in the ’60s, taking center stage in this classic gray-sky melodrama, in which two near-psychotic teenagers in an old-estate sanitarium overcome their inner barriers and connect. Pre-2001, Keir Dullea is a wealthy, unbearably snooty anal-compulsive whose social tools are restricted to derision and dashing from the room; Janet Margolin is a chatterbox schizophrenic who must rhyme to prevent sinking into a complete dolorousness. Something of a sensation at the time among sensitive middle-classers, Perry’s film (written by his wife, Eleanor) does date a little, clearing the feverish, mannered stage where the committed portrayal of mental disturbance ends and sheer, unfettered overacting begins. But it’s exactly that stage that’s interesting today — part Twilight Zone hysteria, part earnest Actors’ Studio “method,” part fashionable psychobabble, the movie is something like the act of healing made in response to Hitchcock’s Psycho, made two years earlier. (The source of both films’ sicknesses are horribly maternal.) Watching it is not unlike viewing the black-&-white home movies of American movies’ maturation, from pure and innocent Golden Age dream machine to struggling but hopeful realism of the American New Wave.
173/365: The Castle (Michael Haneke, 1997) (Criterion Channel, Amazon Prime)
A freak from Haneke’s years of work for Austrian TV, this Kafka adaptation is ingeniously faithful to its source — it’s a low-budge, streamlined vision, as gritty and cramped as other Kafka films (even Orson Welles’s fascinating version of The Trial) are grandiose and lurid. The odyssey of self-righteous and clueless Land Surveyor K. in the social nightmare that is the village surrounding the unseen castle, to which K. can never quite arrive or receive clear communications from, is shot in an indecorous, washed-out pallette that evokes Jan Svankmajer’s films — sunshine is nonexistent, surfaces are timeworn and rough, rooms are cheap, decaying and claustrophobically small. This is not the Kafka of surreal juxtapositions but of dusty, bureaucratic bad-dream-ness, Byzantine but unwritten social rules, and arbitrary governmental cruelty. Haneke virtually transcribes the book, emphasizing not Kafka’s now-mythic metaphors but his cut-to-the-bone mundaneity. In Kafka’s writing, essential anxiety isn’t supposed to be “felt,” viscerally, by the reader, but observed from a wry, appalled distance, and it’s this sense that Haneke nails — despite the fact that often the dithering irrationality of the castle’s paranoid minions is so in your face you can smell the clammy sweat. It is, in the end, a comedy whose chuckles dissolve like hopeful thoughts before they come clear of your throat. The unwashed cast handles Kafka’s cloggy dialogue with a conviction that sometimes borders on the manic, with the exception of Ulrich Muhe (of The Lives of Others) as K., exuding hilarious waves of maddened frustration and suspicion with sad, watchful eyes and a perfectly straight face.
174/365: The District (Aron Gauder, 2004) (Archive.org)
A filthy, confrontational, sophomoric animated feature from Hungary, Gauder’s film (I prefer the less prosaic, more punctuative Hungarian title, Nyocker!) has a surplus of borrowed hip-hop attitude and proudly low-brow ghetto texture, but it’s the absolutely distinctive visual docket that is ceaselessly arresting. Call it a smash-up between faux-3-D digital fluidity and cut-out cartooning and rotoscoped realism and Ralph Steadmanesque satiric caricature — the upshot is hypnotizing, even when the film’s gangsta material tends toward the idiotic. Gauder captures his actors in a broad variety of facial poses, and then animates using these images, but he also embellishes them graphically, distorts them digitally, and the folds them into hectic, many-layered urban tableaux, all of it seething and brawling and swarming like a real city neighborhood as seen through the scrim of very strong microdots. Watching the background characters’ expressions change on the off-beat, from deadpan to rageful to joyous, is often more fascinating than the foreground business, which often devolves into Magyar-hip-hop music videos (and accomplished farces of the form, at that). Seeing these 2-D digi-puppets meet gazes is alone funnier than the last five CGI-penguin movies. The plot, which moves like a driverless car, involves a gang of Budapest street kids, many of them Rom, deciding to get rich by traveling back to the Stone Age, killing and burying mammoths where their city block will later be, returning and digging for oil. Which they do (they’re even inadvertently responsible for continental drift), which naturally spirals out into an international debacle that ropes in Osama Bin Laden, the Pope and Bush II, all of them given a rightful satiric flogging in the process.
175/365: Scandal Sheet (Phil Karlson, 1952) (Archive.org, YouTube)
There always seems to be corners Samuel Fuller’s career that you haven’t yet explored, including stories directed by others, which always feel more than a little Fulleresque. This film noir, based on Fuller’s novel The Dark Page, published in 1944 while Fuller was fighting in Europe with the Big Red One, boils over with his storytelling energy and instinct for social autopsy. The set-up itself is nearly autobiographical: Fuller used to work on the New York Graphic, a truth-manipulating exploitative tabloid on Park Row that makes the contemporary New York Post look like The London Review of Books. Broderick Crawford’s bulldog editor, pulling the daily out of its economic doldrums with lurid front pages and invented news; John Derek is his amoral star reporter, the two of them heading a newsroom that has only Donna Reed to recommend it in the way of moral compunction and compassion. The thorny patter and amoral brio proceeds apace until Crawford is confronted at a publicity event by a middle-aged woman, who summons an entire unwanted past that eventually leads to her manslaughter and a hot news story that must be pursued even if Crawford is its last station. It’s a fast-gabbing, meat-eating show, with only one typical handicap: pretty boy star Derek is a baby-faced cipher beside the roaring rockface of Crawford, and even the quick-eyed beauty of Reed. But the story is expertly fashioned, scanning today as a prescient indictment of Rupert Murdoch-style media exploitation.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
Year One Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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