Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 37
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
253/365: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring (Kim Ki-duk, 2003) (Tubi, Vudu, Pluto TV, Amazon, YouTube)
Kim, known mostly for the symbolic-fishhook stomach-flipper The Isle, delivers here a thoroughly meta-Buddhist film, entirely concerned with the quotidian of work and human vice, and in total thrall to the philosophy’s poetic juxtapositions. It certainly sells an audiovisual ideal of meditational tranquility that could produce some converts as well as tourists to Kyungsang, even if Kim actually invented most of the rituals and totems himself. Like The Isle, the film is focused entirely on a shelter floating on a lake — in this case, a hermitage on man-made Jusan Pond, surrounded by lush woodland. The shrine is inhabited by a wizened monk (Oh Young-soo) and his grade-school-age protege (Kim Jong-ho); with each of the five seasonal chapters, anywhere between ten to 15 years pass. The arc belongs to the boy (embodied in the last, grown-up chapters by the director himself), for whom everything turns out to be a koan-esque metaphor for human folly and life’s resulting tribulations. After the tyke impishly tortures small forest creatures by tying stones to them, his mentor ties a rock to the boy’s torso, a recurring physical trial that evokes both self-destructive burden and entrapment. As the years pass, the ordeals escalate, but neither the old man nor the filmmaker pass judgment. Of course, the movie is decadently gorgeous, and its cyclical construction is fearsomely neat. But Kim’s tone has an ancient simplicity, something like the fundamental eloquence of a silent film or an enduring children’s book. And his images have a surrealist integrity: the swimming frog dragging a stone, the monk painting sutras with a mewling cat’s tail, the prodigal monk chopping through a frozen waterfall, an infant crawling across the ice searching for his mother. Far from a maxim-expounding sermon, the film is a fresh spring of irrational visual pleasure.
254/365: Model Shop (Jacques Demy, 1969) (Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon)
This ‘Nam-era lark represented Demy’s almost obligatory effort, after his ’60s successes, to try on Hollywood for size, and therein to try to make sense of the California counter-culture zeitgeist that then so fascinated the world. Another Euro-auteur lost in America, Demy ends up forecasting Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point — the two films’ dull American lead actors resemble each other, their characters’ aimless rebellion entails a good deal of driving (this is, after all, California), and the hippie-legacy disappointment seeps through the cracks. But whereas Antonioni opened the throttle and reached for epic visual expressiveness and broad satire, Demy plays his non-fable close to the vest; Gary Lockwood’s unemployed nowhere man faces an unsatisfied girlfriend (bubble-eyed blonde Alexandra Hay), an imminent car repossession, and a draft notice, and his response is to fall in first-sight love with Lola (Anouk Aimee), a mysterious French woman who works as a softcore model-for-hire. Aimee is, of course, recreating her role from Demy’s first feature, to which this is a sequel of sorts, and there is a sad sort of desperation in imagining saucy Lola having graduated to dawdling in L.A. doing minor sex work and toying with the mumbling likes of Lockwood. Just as in Antonioni, Los Angeles takes a beating here, as a cardboard Gomorrah filled with cheap shops and shotgun shacks and backyard oil rigs. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Carole Eastman co-wrote the script a year before she wrote Five Easy Pieces.) Aimee, with her bone-china skin and Cadillac cheekbones and huge cat eyes draped with heavy velvet lids, is as always a living cinematic axiom; an early traffic-jam pursuit scored to Rimsky-Korsakov is delightful; and the movie’s time-capsule nature, of ’60s LA and of another New Waver trying to adapt his arthouse sensibility to the crassness of Hollywood, is tantalizing.
255/365: Mountain Patrol: Kekexili (Lu Chuan, 2004) (Tubi, Pluto TV, Vudu, Amazon, YouTube)
This spirited Chinese adventure saga tackles the conservationist issue of poaching, of the endangered Tibetan antelope, but the outrage never boils over; instead, the film basks before mountains saturated with unearthly tropospheric light. Few films display such a ferocious intimacy with extreme landscape. It’s also an elegy for a band of paramilitary volunteers that in the mid-‘90s patrolled the titular highlands encompassing hunks of Tibet, Qinghai Province and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, prowling after outlaw hunting. The combat was both genuine and hopeless — the patrol could only confiscate and fine, not arrest or defend themselves with gunfire, while the poachers regularly assassinated lone guards and shot over their shoulders. Brought in from Beijing after one such murder, an obligatorily fresh-faced reporter (Zhang Lei) is our eyes and ears among the motley, outlaw-glam wild bunch, led by a grizzled, taciturn man-of-ideals (Duo Bujie). Together they launch out onto the endless frontier for a weeks-long sojourn of frustration, ethical muddiness and butcherblock residue. Vultures attend the funeral services, and pulmonary edema is a pervasive threat. The terrain is both victim and destiny-dealer — an encounter with desert quicksand is just as viscerally roiling as it was in the matinee-programmers of George Lucas’s childhood, while getting a truck loosed from a bog of icy mud becomes a major dramatic issue. Tellingly, few antelope are seen — as if the hopes for a national preserve, and therefore state policing, are already dashed.
256/365: Kapo (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1959) (Criterion Channel, Amazon)
This neglected proto-Holocaust-film handgrenade is only famous in cinephilic circles for having been the subject of Jacques Rivette’s most famous line of film criticism — that Pontecorvo, in using a small tracking shot to reframe Emmanuelle Riva’s body on an electric fence, is “worthy of the most profound contempt,” and for how that one line, sans film, inspired the young Serge Daney to take up arms as a famously shoot-the-wounded movie critic (in the singularly famous essay “The Tracking Shot in Kapo”), and for how in the years since, as the movie was rarely seen, the question of whether or not the controversial shot even occurred was bandied relentlessly about amongt cinephiles. (Whether Pontecorvo was worthy of contempt or not wasn’t the real issue for Daney, as he made plain by writing his manifesto without having seen the film; the point was the necessity of ethical cultural intercourse.) Released the same year as The Diary of Anne Frank, Pontecorvo’s film was the first major European production, and the fourth or fifth all told in the 14 years since the end of the European war, depicting life inside the Nazi camps. The scenario focuses on the culpability and special brand of intimate evil perpetrated by the kapos, or prisoner-functionaries, who brutalized fellow prisoners in exchange for privilege and survival. A 20-year-old Susan Strasberg, having starred in the Broadway production of Anne Frank just a few years earlier, is an innocent Parisian teen shipped out to Auschwitz and then a Polish labor camp, and in a series of soul-killing accidents and tortures becomes a kapo herself, a hollowed-out agent of destruction in a crowd of starving women rending each other for bread scraps. Dogged and unsquinting, the movie’s visual sense has the high-contrast visceral smack of 1950s Wajda.
257/365: The Falls (Peter Greenaway, 1980) (Kanopy, Fandor, Amazon)
Obsessives who follow their vision and/ or aesthetic strategy over the cliff edge and right into the abyss are difficult to appreciate; how could their later work be so disastrously wrong, their initial projects be so sublime, and all of it of a piece? No one standing in the world’s film culture may personify this better than Peter Greenaway — his career stretches busily from the ’60s, but the last half of the span has produced strangely abstruse and annoying work. The first half, though, remains rigorously, fabulously, absurdly fascinating, beginning with the wealth of experimental shorts he made leading up to this unique and unwieldy feature. Greenaway was from the very beginning an ambitious sand castle builder in the tradition of Borges, Pynchon, and John Barth, revelling in fake histories and web-like chronicles of portent, and The Falls is pure lunatic mock-doc, a three-and-a-quarter-hour powerhouse display of imaginative dissonance, using every BBC doc trope in the book, as it details the deranged effects of the V.U.E. (Violent Unknown Event) on the section of British population — 92 individuals, presented alphabetically — with names including the word “fall.” (Two of them are represented by the young, then-unknown Timothy and Stephen Quay.) Why? By the exhaustive end of this bizarre exercise you won’t think to ask, such is the accumulation of the filmmaker’s invention; Greenaway’s gift was such that any associative piece of culture could and would find its way into his intricate alternate realities, and this film comes as close as any to the library-of-mazes style of mid-century postmodern fiction.
258/365: The North Star (Lewis Milestone, 1943) (YouTube, DailyMotion, Amazon)
A remarkable fossil from the brief span of years in which Hollywood actively made pro-Soviet agitprop to aid in the war effort against the Axis forces, The North Star was an independent super-production of Samuel Goldwyn’s, scripted by an under-contract Lillian Hellman, and stuffed with faux-Soviet choral-rally songs written by Aaron Copland and Ira Gershwin, all anti-anti-Communists whose lefty politics would become less fashionable at war’s end. A big hit in its day, and nominated for six minor Oscars, the film is as abject an effort to wring audience sympathies as any Soviet film; in fact, its sunny portrait of life on a bustling Ukrainian kolkhoz, complete with wise fathers, boisterous grown sons, tractor worship, and a battery of exultant musical numbers, plays as a stupefyingly unironic clone of contemporaneous Soviet movies, down to the field-&-sky compositions and dancing masses. More than a little surreal, then, to have Dana Andrews, Walter Huston, Anne Baxter and Farley Granger, in Russian peasant duds, join in with the Communism feel-goodism (singing! strumming a balalaika!), at least until the empty skies start ominously roaring with German bombers. Which is when Milestone, often inept with any scene that does not entail the stress or violence of war, comes to life; as air raids assault and Erich von Stroheim’s wehrmacht platoon occupy the border village, with stunning process shots, multi-plane tracking shots, and moments of painful poetry. Hellmanesque moments poke out of the mayhem, as when the village’s mamas morosely linger before setting their own homes on fire. There’s no shortage of death and sacrifice, as the villagers get mowed down by the soldiers (not a common sight in movies before this) and turn into partisans to resist the onslaught (it’s the only film you’ll ever see Jane Withers stand and blow away Nazis with a rifle). It was Life magazine’s Film of the Year, but by 1945 few wanted to remember it fondly, and it was only evoked years later once the HUAC hearings were under way, as evidence of subversion.
259/365: Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque (Jacques Richard, 2004) (Kanopy)
One of several docs about the world-famous, titular Parisian programmer/ archivist, this film is actually a memoir of a lost kingdom — where a theater manager could be so influential in his priorities, choices and aesthetic activism that he’d fuel twin revolutions in film criticism (auteurism) and filmmaking (the French New Wave). If you are among the cinema-besotted, this movie’s speaking your mother tongue, reconstituting the days when avuncular gadfly Langlois would frequent TV talk shows (!) and would eventually win an honorary Oscar — for showing films, in France! Not to mention, when a heated protest and riot caused by his political ejection from the Cinematheque Francaise, which he founded, was led in the street by Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, several of whom were clubbed by police. The astonishing street footage of “l’affaire Langlois” — perhaps more familiar to the French than to us — is where this exhaustive talking-heads portrait becomes beautifully, bafflingly surreal, while the whole project, however conventional, has the allure of a communal embrace, a home movie of a mother land left irrevocably in the past. (The violent confrontation actually succeeded in putting the rotund cinephile back at the prow of his ship.) Godard puts it best up front: Langlois was like “a producer who ‘produced’ a way of seeing films.”
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, 33, 34, 35, 36
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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