Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 47
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
323/365: Laila (George Schneevoigt, 1929) (Vimeo, Kanopy, Fandor, Amazon)
A majestic Norwegian epic set entirely in Sapmi, the northern Scandinavian areas occupied by the nomadic Sami (otherwise and derogatorily known as Lapps), this stirring, muscly silent melodrama recalls and bests contemporaneous sagas from Griffith and Sjostrom, and yet outside of Norway it has been all but forgotten. The 19th-century story unrolls in classic tradition right on the frontier border between the “civilized” Norwegians and their churches and trading posts, and the Arctic wilderness of the Sami and their teeming reindeer herds. Adapting a hot novel from the 1880s, Schneevoigt (who shot several films for Carl Dreyer) adores Victorian cliche but avoids stereotype, in the story of a “white” girl lost by her parents and then found and raised by a Sami chieftain and his wild manservant (who, charmingly, grow old together as her twin fathers). Grown into a vivacious, hot-tempered teen, Laila (Mona Martenson) finds herself the apex in a love triangle, between her foster brother and a storeowner whom Laila doesn’t know is her cousin. The racial tension between the two peoples brews hotly behind every scene, with the child-like heroine, decked out in spectacular white reindeer-pelt ensembles, stuck in between, presaging scads of similar settlers-vs.-Native Americans and colonials-vs.-Indians pulp dramas since, but proving only that the borderlands between natives and encroaching societies share the same dilemmas, regardless of territory. There’s a plague, tundra race between reindeer-sleighs and wolves, a canoe chase down a waterfall, and more — all of it deliberately staged and framed to exploit the grand, rocky, snowy Norwegian landscapes.
324/365: Looks and Smiles (Ken Loach, 1981) (YouTube, Amazon)
It has been easy to underestimate Loach, by far the most distinctive, profound and consistent filmmaker to work in Great Britain in the last 40 years. A hard-bitten ultra-realist, and a Socialist provocateur for whom social activism is more important than cinema, Loach has unparalleled deftness with naturally-lit docudrama veracity, objective camera manner, and the expressive grasp of off-frame space. Typically, this mid-career film resolutely focuses on the matter of socioeconomic injustice as it impacts, in ways looming and subtle, on an unexceptional member of the downtrodden classes: Mick (baby-faced non-pro Graham Green), a north-British lad not far from 20 facing a jobless Thatcher-era England and little or no alternatives for a future, outside of joining the Army like his friends and being sent to kick down doors in Northern Ireland. He’s a guileless, somewhat immature, not terribly bright rube already jaded by weekly rounds of fruitless job interviews and welfare meetings; he’d like to be trained as a motorcycle mechanic, but positions are not forthcoming. The story, from frequent Loach source-novelist Barry Hines, has little arc but tons of texture, as Mick sees his options dwindle along with his pocket cash, and eventually meets Karen (Carolyn Nicholson), a far-from-pretty shoe shop clerk whose own problems at home become the troubled couple’s final crucible. Like most Loach films, it looks and feels as real as the tenth worst day of your year, and Green makes for an oddly inexpressive, unengaging hero — Loach tends toward decreasing charisma in his workaday characters, lest they seem less like us and more like fake cinematic constructions, with superhuman reserves of charm and capability. The real achievement here is making the society’s inequitable pressure permeate every surface in Mick and Karen’s narrative, without melodrama or contrivance.
325/365: The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (Timothy & Stephen Quay, 2005) (Amazon)
Twin brothers from Philadelphia, the Quays have been for more than 30 years the preeminent stop-motion animators of the English-speaking world, technically unearthly, uniquely evocative and stylistically unforgettable. This, their second semi-live-action feature film since Institute Benjamenta (1995), exchanges the Quays’ passionate devotion to Mitteleuropan industrial decay for a suddenly warm, almost Tuscan fantasy-scape. It’s all mood, but there is a story: a maniacal toy engineer (Gottfried John) living on a secluded, cypress-lined island, who kidnaps an opera diva (Amira Casar); soon a guileless piano tuner (Cesar Sarachu) is summoned to the isle, to tune-up the evil doctor’s “automata” (room-sized boxes with mechanical tableaux, their microscopic gears in need of fungal cleansing); he falls in love with the zombified maiden, and hopes to free her… It’s the kind of film experience that seems to oxygen-deprive the front-brain, and therefore ignites subconscious associations and daydream conclusions. The movie itself is one looming automaton, down to the stunning dream sequence in which Sarachu’s ineffectual hero ventures forth into a blue birch forest at night where the mad doctor’s servants run in silent backward fits, and his pillow is waiting for him under a tree. The moments of visual dislocation are golden: the automaton of a rowboat on a stream going berserk, the woodcutter’s dollhead turning to stare at you as if hearing your thoughts, the room suddenly revealed to be miniature by a hand coming through the door.
326/365: Crime and Punishment (Josef von Sternberg, 1935) (DailyMotion, YouTube)
This early-talkie take on Dostoyevsky doesn’t feel like a von Sternberg film as we’d come to know them — it is spare, no-frills, unadorned, coming as a contractual obligation he made immediately after his last film with Marlene Dietrich. If anything, this almost rudimentary tour through the novel’s agonized psychology and ethical struggle plays something like a pre-noir — and it shares a lot of visual and thematic elements with another ultra-cheap tour of hell, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1946). Shot on barely decorated studio sets and shot with confrontational simplicity, von Sternberg’s film attends briskly to the book’s story: Raskolnikov (still-chubby recent emigre Peter Lorre) graduates from university a brilliant and cynical scholar, but is soon reduced to poverty, as is his family. As his sister contrives to wed a rich fool, Raskolnikov, thinking his intelligence places him on a distinct moral plane, decides to kill an usurious pawnbroker. Afterwards, his guilt and dread eat away at him, as a sporting police chief toys with the culprit, waiting for him to implicate himself or confess. It’s a grim, bell-jar dissertation on criminology and personal responsibility, resembling more an experimental play than a typical studio film of the ’30s, with its Nietzchean “ubermensch” talk echoing the mindset of murderers Leopold and Loeb (Rope, Compulsion, Swoon) a decade earlier. Lorre, so quickly a Warner Bros. character-actor joke that he was often caricaturized for Bugs Bunny cartoons, is surely one of the Golden Era’s most distinctive personages, a sweaty homunculus with eyes the size of 8-balls and a desperate whine of a voice that here, under von Sternberg’s sotte voce guidance, rarely rises above a self-involved mutter, and then it does rise, to a raspy bellow. Still, arguably, it’s the unseen man behind the camera that dominates the mood, casting about angry and desperate on these cheap sets, looking for the raison d’etre he’d just recently lost for good.
327/365: The Night of the Hunted (Jean Rollin, 1980) (Kanopy, Amazon)
In the occasional exploitation filmmaker’s oeuvre an art film blossoms: Rollin was a cheesy French lesbian-vampire provocateur, but this odd film has a premise and a formal execution that screams post-Antonioni-Resnais-Rivette alienation rat-maze tribulation. Blank-faced porn goddess Brigitte Lahaie in a flimsy nightgown is picked up off a night road by Vincent Gardere and takes her home; soon it’s clear that Lahaie’s vacant-eyed, voluptuously underdressed nowhere girl cannot even remember what her name is, and she continues to forget things moments after they happen. The next day he must go to work, leaving her to forget everything in his apartment, and then a mysterious doctor shows up to take her back where she came from, an anonymous office tower in the middle of the city inhabited entirely by other memory-less sleepwalkers, wandering the hallways in catatonic states, pursuing fragments of memory, and collapsing into vegetable-ness as their motor functions fail. Retaining only shreds of identity and will, Lahaie struggles to find a way out of the tower. You feel the uneasy metafictional lostness of Rivette lurking in those empty halls, while the chilly, anonymous-post-industrial settings recalls early Cronenberg and the somnambulistic performances evoke Herzog’s hypnotized Heart of Glass. Finally, as the characters desperately invent memories for each other (one woman searches for a lost child without being sure whether it’s a boy or a girl), and as Lahaie and various other mostly-naked maidens plot their escape from the white-walled maze while forgetting each other and where their rooms are, you get the sense of watching a low-budget exploitation film co-produced by Luis Bunuel and Samuel Beckett.
328/365: State of Siege (Costa-Gavras, 1972) (Criterion Channel, Vudu, Apple TV, Amazon, YouTube)
There’s no overlooking the systemic shock Costa-Gavras provided to European art film with his first six films, and therein no denying the film-culture electrocution further supplied by the Elvis season of Z (1969), The Confession (1970) and this thumper. In a stroke, the European political thriller was born but also cranked with both the energy of genre film without any loss of realistic sophistication or based-on-fact immediacy, and the balls-of-the-feet pertinence of protest usually reserved for anti-war documentaries. This international hit casts a cold eye on the mano a mano between homicidal dictatorship and grassroots terrorism-cum-freedom fighting, set in an unnamed Uruguay. The rich political fabric on hand — bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists, generals, double agents, citizens on the street — revolves around the young, floppy-haired guerrilla-terrorist gang the Tupamaros kidnapping an American (Yves Montand), whom they know to secretly be a CIA spook responsible for training the government’s forces in assassination and torture. It’s based on the case of assassinated CIA torturer Dan Mitrione, but the filmmaker’s sympathies are clearly against the ruling class and their American henchmen, and the prescient scent of generational fury is in the air. Costa-Gavras structures the film around a series of massive, roving rooftop-view tableaux of social militarization, as the army and police hunt the urban landscape for the insurrectionists; using real bystanders and routinely stretching for miles, it’s realism not only in detail but in scale, the sense of an entire society churning and eating itself alive. The deeper irony still is that C-G shot the film in Chile less than a year before the 1973 Pinochet coup and the echoing images of it in Patricio Guzman’s The Battle of Chile.
329/365: Play (Ruben Ostlund, 2011) (iTunes)
Ostlund’s Force Majeure surprised a lot of grown-up moviegoers, but it wasn’t a terrible stunner for Swedes and dedicated festival patrons, for whom Ostlund has been a burgeoning force ten years running. His masterpiece-so-far, this earlier film opens in a mall, where two boys get accosted by a group of five older black boys — “immigrants,” they’re referred to as later, but they may well be homegrown — who in short order perform a you-stole-from-my-brother role-playing scam and walk away with one of their phones. Next, the little fun-loving mobsters stalk another trio of younger out-of-town kids, and essentially terrorize-slash-cajole them with the same scam, taking them as hostages on an unbearably tense, day-long bullying jaunt across the city that evokes a messy brawl of conflicting ideas about race, justice, European politesse, totalitarian social patterns of control and collaboration, and even Stockholm Syndrome trauma. Based on a real Swedish petty crime wave, Play troubles the waters of any smugly held view, liberal or conservative, about how society should regard and handle its own rogue elements, a dilemma Ostlund obviously thinks is especially vital in countries like Sweden that are over-comfortable with their own homogenous reasonableness. Still, his camera strategy remains fascinating and elusive, always partially obscuring distant action with foreground reality, and patiently letting incidents play out in breath-holding takes that never look away. It’s the rare contemporary film that’s as majestically and gruelingly rigorous in its form as in its thematic interrogations.
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, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46
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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