Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 8
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
50/365: Made in U.S.A. (Jean-Luc Godard, 1966) (The Criterion Channel)
Ah, JLG, our premier modernist and most recalcitrant anti-sellout rebel god — what will we do without him? Return to his inexhaustible corpus, that’s what, starting perhaps with films, like Made in U.S.A., that weren’t released properly outside of France and never got their English-speaking cinemaniac due. Inadvertently embargoed due to its producer’s farragoes and muddled property rights (relating to a minor Donald E. Westlake thriller), the film is uncut late-‘60s Godard, willfully troublesome and gloriously unclear, mocking the very idea of narrative while exulting in the coolness of cinematic memory, and providing a perfect ligament in the transition from the lovestruck, yen-zesty auteur behind Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou and Masculin-Feminin, to his gradual plunge into Marxist commitment of La Chinoise and Week-End. Freely non-sequitur-doped and built around a connection between real life and film noir that is sometimes mysteriously private, the movie is abstruse, fragmentary and deadpan in the filmmaker’s inimitable fashion from the day, but with a crushing difference: aside from the sci-fi short Godard contributed to the omnibus The Oldest Profession (1966), this is the final film he made with Anna Karina, who occupies the film’s center with an air of distracted melancholy. The New Wave era’s premier romance-marriage is dissolving as we watch, and any devotee will experience a crashing sense of mourning, particularly in the early brasserie scene where Karina and her shady noirish pursuers evade each others’ eyes as Marianne Faithfull, as herself, sits in a booth and warbles the Stones’ “As Tears Go By.”
51/365: Verdun, Visions of History (Leon Poirier, 1928) (YouTube)
Outside of France a completely forgotten epic undertaking from that silent-cinema halcyon days between 1926 and 1929, this fastidious recreation of the Battle of Verdun is a different kind of interbellum WWI war film, one that hews so close to the facts of military history that it seamlessly intercuts archival footage with new material shot in the region and on the old battlefields, and thus features actual French and German military leaders in supporting roles, captured exactly on location at the moment in the timeline that film is tracking. Poirier was clever enough to cut famous footage of world leaders with matching answer shots featuring his fictional characters, and the effect is seamless. However much it may have borrowed from Abel Gance (double exposures, metaphor-laden montages, etc.), Poirier’s movie strives to balance a handful of human stories (primarily, fresh-faced French soldier Albert Prejean’s trial by fire) with behind-the-scenes reenactments of the Allied and Axis leaders strategizing, and the nitty-gritty of the maneuvers themselves are heavily augmented with animated maps and scenes in which the demolished terrain gets demolished all over again by the filmmakers’ load of explosives. (Often, the actors, almost all of whom were real Great War veterans, are so close to the blasts you’re not sure it isn’t archival, and therefore real.) There’s room in the expansive running time for Antonin Artaud (in a small role as the stay-at-home “intellectual,” disdainful of conflict), and plenty of poetic asides, including a haunting passage in which Prejean’s trench-trapped grunt dreams that his ghost returns home, and confronts his grieving family. Rarely seen for decades, and then only in an edited version reissued in 1931, Poirier’s mega-project was actually achieved on a modest budget.
52/365: Kissed (Lynne Stopkewich, 1996) (Tubi, Amazon Prime)
However sober and serene, this is a freak-out: a Canadian indie-art movie about necrophilia, which isn’t a radical kink here so much as a way to transcend death and touch the cosmic. “I’ve seen bodies shining like stars,” Sandra (the oddly lovely Molly Parker) intones early on, and it’s her animistic sympathy for cadavers, as well as her reading of orgasms as released spiritual energy, that controls the film. We follow her from an outcast, death-obsessed schoolgirl who can’t help fondling and tasting dead birds to an undergrad student of embalming who relates to no one as well as the still, cool bodies she dances around and mounts after hours. (The sex scenes are intimate, surreal and tasteful.) Her secret life hits open air once she meets Matt (Peter Outerbridge), a med student/metaphorical male who is not only not revolted by Sandra’s sexual preference but wants to share it with her. He can’t, of course, and his agonized efforts to become Sandra’s object of desire escalate into a full-blown sex-and-death showdown. Stopkewich never judges her heroine, who might be a visionary, a deviant or anywhere in between. Stripped of non-essentials, the film is rarely a breath away from cold flesh. Sandra herself — who is given to comforting corpses of their awful, fascinating stillness by murmuring “It’s OK, don’t worry” as she caresses them — is a thoroughly original creation, and Parker gives her a gentle, otherworldly vulnerability.
53/365: What Price Hollywood (George Cukor, 1932) (Criterion Channel)
One of the first “serious” backstage Hollywood melodramas, and the rough draft for William Wellman’s full-blown A Star Is Born made just five years later (and all the versions since), this early talkie expose of heartless Tinseltown life hones in on sassy waitress Constance Bennett, who wheedles her way into the affections of a comically soused producer (short-lived character-star Lowell Sherman), and thereafter onto soundstages and into auditions. The story snugly expressed a rags-to-riches Hollywood myth that was already a cliche by 1932, and proceeds very briskly towards that myth’s counter-charge: the already die-hard belief in the film industry as a shallow, soulless media circus, in which honest entities like marriage and everyday “reality” get ground into dust. Once a star, Bennett’s wisecracking, alabaster demi-moll is largely a vision of mannequin poise in the films-within-the-film we see, and her marriage to Neil Hamilton’s wealthy anti-Dream Factory jock quickly becomes the story’s primary crisis point. (As opposed to subsequent versions of Adela Rogers St. John’s story, Sherman’s lame duck wastrel is not a romantic interest, but rather a curious mixture of unfulfilled ardor and slapsticky savoir faire.) It’s also justly famous for its cinematography by Charles Rosher, whose best visual set-pieces are rousing, mysterious dolly shots from silvery shadow into light, through the layers of illusion that comprise film sets.
54/365: Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996) (Netflix, Vudu, Amazon Prime)
This hyperventilating adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Scotch junkie saga vaunts its hip pedigree in every nervous frame, and shudders with as much pretension as it does with conviction and brio. Boyle’s up-your-nose style of filmmaking is a ghoulish hoot; he’s given to shoot scenes from the inside of hypos and toilets, and his camera angles and sharp edits are free-standing jokes, capturing the sardonic interior universe of Edinburgh dope demimonde while remaining true to its harrowing place and time. Our hero is Mark (Ewan MacGregor), the sensitive straight man to a cronie wolfpack of idiot losers, unscrupulous boytoys and psycho bar-brawlers, nearly all of whom climb aboard or jump off the smack wagon at a moment’s notice. The story, such as it is, whips from euphoric hit to doomed episode in a No Exit, no-future whorl; Boyle and Welsh aren’t interested in their gang of smackheads as addictive personalities — which they definitely are — but as the trickle-down refuse of social malaise, products of late capitalism and Reagan-Thatcher era regression. For all of its Clockwork Orange-borrowed visual hyperbole and hellbent soundtrack throb (Pulp, Elastica, Iggy Pop) and pratfalls, it ends up treating junkiehood as a a high-spirited life among the ruins.
55/365: Men in War (Anthony Mann, 1957) (Amazon Prime)
Maybe the first, and maybe the only, “art war film” — that is, a textually orthodox expression of a standard Hollywood genre with the pensive, interiorized personality of the Bergman/Mizoguchi/Antonioni Zeitgeist — Mann’s masterpiece for some reason still occupies a middling and dusty corner on the canon’s shelf. It is in any case the definitive existentialist war saga, and part of its ominous grace derives from what Mann and screenwriter Philip Yordan conscientiously leave out: voluminous backstory, heroic action, sociopolitical context, melodrama, patriotism. What’s left is the iconic, quasi-Beckettian prison-maze of the deracinated, war-wracked landscape, peopled by lost souls under mysterious fire — that is, war in its purest metaphoric form. Set in the Korean War, the narrative lands with a crippled platoon hunkered down in an anonymous valley, waiting and going slightly crazy and suffering the silence, led by Robert Ryan’s weathered lieutenant, a man clearly trying to hold onto his last strands of humanity by getting his men to safe ground. It’s all ellipses, whispers, unspoken fears and exhaustion, cut into a fragmented dream — until a recalcitrant Aldo Ray defiantly appears behind the wheel of a Jeep with his catatonic colonel (Robert Keith) in the passenger seat, initiating a last push for the men toward taking a hill and rejoining a regiment that may no longer be there. Historically, the film pioneers a few paradigms that would become ubiquitous social imagery in the ’60s, including the first infantry helmet decorated with flowers, and Ray’s pre-‘Nam proto-defector-rebel, ready to frag American officers to survive. But the film’s mastery is entirely textural: the hushed pallor that falls on the soldiers when faced with a mine field, the apocalyptic cant proclaiming “we’re the last” to fight a war with no discernible purpose, the overall attention given to space and time as the soldiers stalk, watch and encroach on each other. Arguably the most emotionally mature American war movie made before the ’70s, it deserves eyeballs.
56/365: Madadayo (Akira Kurosawa, 1993) (Criterion Channel)
One of film history’s grand old giants, Akira Kurosawa died at 88 not long after finishing this swansong, which is a film only an old man could’ve made — after a stormy and celebrated career, it’s an effort at understanding, a reconciliation and appreciation of life’s raw pleasures. Starting in 1943 Tokyo, we track the life of a student-worshipped, sardonic professor of German, Uchida (Tatsuo Matsumura), who at 60 announces his retirement. Hard as it might be to fathom in the West, where teachers are held in something less than high esteem, Uchida is perpetually surrounded by his former students, a gaggle of middle-aged men who honor and celebrate the grumpy geezer at every opportunity. Their relationship is the movie’s spine: as Kurosawa graduates from the war years to the reconstructive boon years to follow, Uchida diffidently enjoys one birthday celebration after another, until the bacchanals fill an entire banquet hall. Aping a childhood call-response rhyme that Kurosawa uses for a beautiful coda, the students always ask Uchida if he’s ready to pass into the next world, and his answer is a ceremonious “Madadayo!” — “No, not yet.” It’s a film of effusive affection, contemplative moments and kind deeds done in private.
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
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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