Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 33
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
225/365: The Dybbuk (Michal Waszynski, 1937) (Kino Now)
Have you seen a Yiddish film? An ethnic niche of cinema history intended, without subtitles, to be disseminated only to the diasporic Jewish communities that made up the neo-geographic “Yidisheland,” in the first half of the 20th century, Yiddish cinema was a unique creature, a nationless national cinema with viewer-citizens in urban enclaves all over the world, from Minsk to London to Brooklyn. It only lasted a few decades, from the silent days and then petering out after WWII, for obvious reasons. (Israel would opt for reconstituting Hebrew, so the old Yiddish movies going to Tel Aviv would need subtitles after all.) Like so many Yiddish films, this doom-laden fantasy is based on a stodgy old drama from the Yiddish theater, but its archaic, stagey vibe eventually conjures a uniquely qualmy lost-shtetl atmosphere, and the story — an elaborate generational tragedy of betrayals, family misfortune and demonic possession — takes on the gripping inevitability of genuinely felt folk art. It’s quite like a movie from a lost time, a myth-thing found in an old mausoleum. Floating around for decades in horrible prints, the film’s been newly restored, and deserves eyeballs.
226/365: Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) (Vudu, Apple TV+, Amazon, YouTube)
This landmark began as a low-budget quasi-Corman biker film with pretensions toward social profundity and, it was thought, little chance of doing more than earning its six figures back. A stunning 10,000% box office return later, the American New Wave was duly launched, dispensing with Bonnie & Clyde’s glossy look and TV staging, and instead creating a fashion for a Yankee version of the French and Czech yen for grit, natural light and off-screen life, paving the way and inspiring imitators from Martin Scorsese and Monte Hellman to Sidney Lumet. (Lumet, like many, didn’t make movies the same way after 1969 as he did before.) The Wave films sought to cater to the youth market, but did so with stories about lost and disaffected Americans in their 30s and beyond; anything less would’ve been pandering, and anti-commercial integrity was the era’s primary selling point. What made this simple film’s seditiousness so seductive to so many ticket-buyers may have been the basic fact that the film was obviously an act of sky-high improv, shot on the road across the real landscape, and offering up an anti-establishmentarianism with authentic lifestyle, not just with cant. In a 1969 filled with gurus and pontificators yowling about turning on and dropping out and standing up to The Man, Hopper’s inarticulate characters just rode their bikes, got high, observed their country’s forgotten stretches, and asked the silent questions. There were no sets, and no artifice; the making of the film was the story of the film. What many moviegoers got for the first time was a glimpse of a national cinema having spirited and unimpeachable intercourse with the nation itself.
227/365: Szindbad (Zoltan Huszarik, 1971) (EasternEuropeanMovies, DailyMotion)
A layered, rum-soaked torte of a movie, this long-ignored Hungarian New Waver — voted the best native film ever by Hungarians — evokes its hero’s dying moments via a hectic, time-line-skittering assemblage of impressions, memories, microscopic details, abrupt zooms and free associations, many of them only a few frames long, and all of them dripping with regret. The titular protagonist (Zoltan Latinovits), named after the Arabian Nights swashbuckler, is a fin-de-siecle womanizer and libertine given to Epicurean ideas and Romantic debates about fate and love and meaning. It’s rather Proustian, weaving the character’s adult life together out of stray threads and scraps of memory, beginning with massive close-ups (of embers, icons, food oil, flames, babbling water) that are all keys toward remembering. The fragmented incidents themselves are almost all liaisons and rendezvous, seductions and debates about the matters of the heart, with Szindbad sullenly strolling around the landscapes and 19th century rooms in a more or less constant state of romantic exhaustion. Likewise, we are in something like a state of suspension, sometimes forgetting and then reminding ourselves of the film’s diegetic “now” — Szindbad dying, glimpsed at the beginning set adrift across the snowy hills in a horsecart — even as the tumult of images and women and set-pieces skitter on, rarely bothering to evoke the consciousness to which we are privy. Appropriately, it’s also a beautiful film, alive with the earthen, gritty, sun-scorched textures of the ‘60s-‘70s, painterly but not simply pretty, with possibly the loveliest ice-skating sequence ever put on film. It just so happens that the ultra-cool Latinovits, like Polish icon Zbigniew Cybulski before him, fell under a train in his 40s, igniting a pop-romantic martyrdom legend that persists today and for which the film is a key totem.
228/365: Pusher / Pusher II / Pusher 3 (Nicholas Winding Refn, 1996–2005) (Tubi, Vudu, Amazon, YouTube)
Your first impression of this 5+-hour underworld air burst is that the tiny kingdom of Denmark is apparently a snake pit of narcotic squalor and homicidal chaos. But the Pusher films play most like the nastiest hit TV series HBO never made; shot handheld, dramatically focused not on large narrative arcs but vile criminal minutiae, and inhabited completely by scumbags dumbly searching for redemption they can’t put a name to, Refn’s films are intoxicated with the fact that, as Quentin Tarantino said somewhere, “gangsters have kitchens, too.” Drug lords cook for parties, hitmen dream about becoming restauranteurs. In the first film, the hero is Frank (Kim Bodnia), a mid-level dope dealer successful and hardcore enough to live his days in a fast, fun-loving tear, accompanied by his bullet-headed buddy/enforcer Tonny (Mads Mikkelson). Bad news arrives, of course, in the off-hand form of a score finagled with local kingpin Milo (Zlatko Buric) on credit, the destruction of the dope, and a frantic search for cash as the goons come hunting. Picking up this spare thread eight years later, we hone in on Mikkelson’s dimwit, fresh from prison, as he plunges into vice again but faces the appearence of a baby his old non-girlfriend claims is his; as the bitterness, betrayals and wholesale fuckups snowball, Tonny begins to wonder if he should rewrite his life. The third film rains in on Milo, the Balkan scag kingpin, who’s now in Narcotics Anonymous and truly interested only in cooking a massive birthday feast for his 25-year-old daughter (Marinela Dekic); meanwhile, an errant shipment of ecstacy and a handful of Albanian and Polish crooks are perpetually mucking up the works, until bodies start dropping and Milo succumbing to a smack high, endures a hair-raising night’s journey into corpse disposal.
229/365: Neither the Sea Nor the Sand (Fred Burnley, 1972) (YouTube)
A distinctive, faintly strange bizarrery from the pulp wastelands of early ’70s Brit cinema, this swooning zombie romance may only be regarded as “forgotten” if it were in fact ever noticed at all. On the surface the film begins in full-on hyper-sacchrarine romance-fiction mode, with a bland blonde wife (Susan Hampshire) touring the Jersey Islands by herself, meeting up with a brooding lighthouse keeper (Michael Petrovitch) and falling dippily in love. She stays on, meets her lover’s neurotic-conservative brother (Frank Finlay), and in a fog of soft-focus the couple cavorts on the seashore — until Petrovitch’s dull hunk drops dead. Grief follows but soon the man reappears in the pair’s Scottish holiday cottage’s door, alive but mute and, we discover, slowly decaying. From there, Burnley’s film, like all living-dead movies that are worth watching, becomes all-metaphor-all-the-time — Hampshire’s self-involved bourgeoise enables the dysfunctional situation, holds conversations with herself, rationalizes the incomprehensible, while the man of the house remains unncommunicative and distant, and physically succumbs to entropy exactly like the relationship itself. As intolerable as the early, mushy parts of the film seem (abetted in their direness by wannabe-pop music by Israeli institution Nachum Heiman), all of it becomes integral if you see the film as a symbolic exploration of romantic delusion and troubled relationships; love may have brought Petrovitch’s islander back from the dead, but that doesn’t mean the idealized romance won’t run to an inevitable collapse (and spousal abuse and battery). Foreshadowing Bob Clarke’s antiwar zombie drama Deathdream (1974), the movie is a ramshackle affair, but it’s not a horror film so much as it is kind of absurdist ditty, an Ionesco idea in a grade-C movie universe.
230/365: My Country, My Country (Laura Poitras, 2006) (Amazon)
In the Iraq war’s heyday, embedded prevaricating docs like The War Tapes and Iraq in Fragments pulled in the fest awards, and the media was thick with amoral chitchat about exit strategies and oil prices. Poitras’s film was the antidote, the definitive non-fiction film about the occupation, and as a counterpoint against acres of corporate-spun non-news, it is indispensable. She managed to be where platoons of U.S. telejournalists were afraid to go, following a Sunni activist-doctor named Riyadh, a clear-thinking, educated Everyman on a quiet crusade in and around the Triangle to repair whatever damage he can, and to get as many Sunnis to vote as possible — even if it’s not for him. It’s a project that even takes him to the fences around Abu Ghraib: “We’re an occupied country with a puppet government,” Dr. Riyadh says to the pleading prisoners, “what do you expect?” Poitras, traveling alone, also rides with the Kurdish militia, records U.S. military briefings, attends outraged public hearings, listens in on security contractors trying to make sense out of chaos, sits in Sunni living rooms as shells fall in the street. She never intrudes on her own movie; what we see, remarkably, has the electric heat of a new experience, of seeing what has been heretofore officially proscribed. Best of all, the film is so immaculately constructed that it cannot be dismissed with charges of partisan subjectivity — Poitras covers the waterfront as she avoids ideology and cant, and yet everything that unfolds, from the combat-copter rides over Baghdad to the Arab TV footage of the Fallujah bombing, is first-hand evidence of an illegal occupation, an oppressed native people, and an abundance of unjust suffering and death.
231/365: Camille Claudel 1915 (Bruno Dumont, 2013) (Vudu, Apple TV+, Amazon, YouTube)
Carving his own Dreyerian passage among modern French art-film provocateurs, Dumont augments his catalogue of unstable heroines with the famous Claudel, famed sculptress and rebellious lover of Rodin who was committed to an asylum by her conservative family in 1913, and stayed there until she died 30 years later. No stranger to strung-out feminist outrage, Juliette Binoche grips the edge-of-madness title role with white bony hands, and at first Dumont’s movie seems to be no more than the actress’s austere showcase, as Claudel is surrounded by nuns and fellow patients, and chafes at her hopeless imprisonment to the detriment of her weakening sanity. But the rebel-yell flourish here is Dumont’s decision to populate the madhouse with authentic French psychotics and retarded adults (their real-life nurses play the nuns), so nearly every scene is dictated or influenced by their unpredictable behavior. Binoche bulldozes through the melee in character, interacting without mercy, but of course the texture of the film falls between horrific realism and freak-show exploitation, a tension that can either double-down the naturalistic impact of Claudel’s plight or make you speculate queasily about life on the set between takes. Or both. In all cases, it’s far more radical than Bruno Nuytten’s celebrated 1988 biopic, and a distinctively thorny experience.
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, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32
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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