Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 15
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
99/365: Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964) (HBO Max, The Criterion Channel, Kanopy)
On your knees, 21st-century philistines, before the cataract of existential glamour that is Antonioni’s deserto rosso (it used to be called The Red Desert), a kind of fourth triangle corner to the white-hot Italian’s alienation “trilogy” (L’Avventura, L’Eclisse, La Notte). This famously Technicolor odyssey finds muse-slash-desolation goddess Monica Vitti lost in the supermarket of life, an unstable young mother wandering the fabulously gray industrial wastelands of Ravenna’s shipyards and entertaining the seductions of trenchcoated engineer Richard Harris. Intimations of infection loom (ships pass waving polio quarantine flags) and sexual games are played, but Antonioni was then the most obsessively compositional filmmaker alive, and the movie is all about the scary, foggy, metaphysical negative spaces. The face of ’60s unhappiness, Vitti still fascinates, while Harris, all dimply and young-Dennis-Hopper-ish, seems dropped in by helicopter, but both are subservient to the imagery. Which desaturates, beautifully, when the world isn’t simply painted neutral, as with the famous cart of gray fruit (no one noticed that gray fruit appeared also in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer that same year), and the mountains of streaming ash that could, if you’re of a mind, represent Everything.
100/365: The Falls (Peter Greenaway, 1980) (Amazon, Kanopy)
An OCD structuralist-fabulist in a class by himself, Brit filmmaker Greenaway is more famous for The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover than for his overtly experimental work, but his earlier, more hermetic films are often more fascinating, constructed in the abstracted-sand-castle tradition of Borges and Calvino. These fake histories and web-like chronicles of portent culminated in this taletelling epic, a three-and-a-quarter-hour powerhouse display of imaginative dissonance, detailing the deranged effects of the V.U.E. (Violent Unknown Event) on the section of British population — 92 individuals, in fact — with names beginning with the letters F-A-L-L. Technically a mock-documentary and so therefore seemingly built around narrative discourse, The Falls is actually an intricate puzzle without a solution, and its web of elocutionary exposition is, in a rather Joycean way, more an exploration of language and and its discontents than an actual fiction. The briefly seen “Fallari” twins are in fact Stephen and Timothy Quay.
101/365: Filibus (Mario Roncoroni, 1915) (Free Movie Classics)
Subtitled “The Mysterious Air Pirate,” this now beloved adventure-mystery from the heyday of Louis Feuillade has found its moment, more than a century after it died at the box-office and was dished by unimpressed critics. The new blurb — “the incredible 1915 Italian feminist, steampunk, jewel thief, cross-dressing aviatrix thriller!” — is apt even in its breathlessness; from the first five minutes, in which the titular multiple-identity baroness-thief (Valeria Creti) enlists a lawyer to help her win the reward for her own capture, and then begins plotting to frame the detective hunting her as being the arch-criminal in question, the film packs enough preposterous plot and giddy leaps of logic for a serial five times the length. Still, it’s 1915, and like Feuillade’s much more elaborate constructions the plot rockets along as the visual compositions sit still and at a respectful reach. Most of all, of course, Filibus — the film and the character — have found 21st-century adoration as an uncanny ahead-of-her-time exultation of female empowerment (she captains a cheap-F/X sci-fi airship, no questions asked, with a crafty gondola that’s always lowering down unseen onto verandas) and transgenderism (part of her plot involves masquerading as a mustachioed young count who romances the detective’s sister), at a time in Italy when women had virtually no rights at all. More exhilarating today, perhaps, than it was in its day, and a dizzy spray of retro pretend-time fun.
102/365: Safe Conduct (Laissez Passer) (Bertrand Tavernier, 2002) (Apple TV, Amazon, Kanopy)
A rangy, irreverent, episodic odyssey through French filmmaking during the Occupation, this late Tavernier is, like L’Appat, Capitaine Conan, and It All Starts Today, a full-course meal for grown men and women in a time of fast-food malnutrition. This epic love letter evolved organically from conversations Tavernier has had over the years with screenwriter Jean Aurenche (who died in 1992 at 88 and wrote Sylvia and the Phantom, The Walls of Malapaga, Occupe-toi d’Amelie, and Forbidden Games), and director Jean Devaivre (who assisted Maurice Tournier, Andre Cayatte and Richard Pottier during the war), as well as from Devaivre’s recent memoirs. At the time, French filmmakers were under enormous pressure to work for the Nazi-controlled Continental Films, and amid a hailstorm of micro-stories, offscreen cataclysms, chance encounters and principled debates, Aurenche (Denis Podalydes) and his struggle to not write German-produced movies becomes overshadowed by the roughly parallel odyssey of quiet, conscientious Devaivre (Jacques Gamblin), who decides to accept Continental employment to abet his hair-raising participation in the Resistance. Tavernier’s exposition is invisible, his textures evocative and unpretentious, his regard for his characters fundamental and kind. A tense force field of moral ambiguity haunts every scene — the unsteady line between aiding the occupiers and resisting them varies for every context and very participant. Chutzpah is as common as compromise, but Devaivre emerges as a genuine hero, tested in every manner conceivable (even by the idiotic muddling of British spies). In weaving historical detail with ethical conflict, the movie is enormously sophisticated but ebullient and free-form. In fact, modest at nearly three hours, Safe Conduct could’ve made a glorious 8-hour mini-series. Meanwhile, Nazi victim/30s icon Harry Baur is movingly eulogized, and one Nazi-executed young man — Devaivre’s brother-in-law, and a fleetingly seen extra in Au bonheur des dames (1943) — gets his moment in the cinematic sun.
103/365: When You Wore a Tulip and I Wore a Big Red Rose (Stephen Schaller, 1983) (Kanopy, Fandor)
It’s a forgotten barnstorming early-cinema phenomenon — what’s been labeled since “itinerant filmmaking,” and was called then “home talent movies” or “local movies.” The dynamic, which lasted into the sound era, had small production companies enter small American towns and cities and enlist the locals — often for a fee — to star in a film themselves, about their town. The resultant two-reeler, processed and edited, would be brought back for a complimentary showing in a week’s time, for presumably its only public showing. Often funded by local businesses, these films are of purely historical interest — tapping the history of their locality, of course, but also of this unique branch of coming-to-the-people cinema, where the novelty of being in a film superseded the nature of quality one might find in the movie as a spectator. It’s the American version of the Soviet movies manufactured aboard Medvedkin’s “film train,” a development-lab-equipped train the filmmaker drove across the USSR in the ’30s, shooting and printing films on the spot, showing them to the peasants they’d filmed, and then often discarding the celluloid thereafter. Where else did this happen? This doc follows the young filmmaker interviewing the elderly citizens of Wausau, Wisconsin about the itinerant filming in their town of O.W. Lamb’s The Lumberjack in 1914. The short itself is almost irrelevant by the time Schaller and his doted-upon octogenarians dissect its imagery, its personae, the changes in Wausau’s architecture, and the fate of the film company’s treasurer, killed during filming by a quarry explosion. Schaller’s film is messy and unfocused, but as a tissue of cinephilia and microhistory both it’s entrancing.
104/365: Dead Men’s Letters (Konstantin Lopushansky, (1987) (SovietMoviesOnline)
The distinct personality of Communist Bloc sci-fi tended to be far weirder, and willfully modernist, than we were used to in the 20th-century west. The pressures of real-life totalitarianism could squeeze the speculative/prophetic imagination into plasma, and as a result the subculture often sought detours around reason, looking inward, eschewing the easy equations of chase-&-fight action scenarios so beloved by a century of Americans, and embracing the indefatigably ambiguous. Reality itself was often under question, as though the entire Bloc was the cause-&-effect-free Zone of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. This neglected saga, written by one of the Strugatsky brothers responsible for Tarkovsky’s source novel, is a ferocious anti-nuclear death march that may be the most visually daunting portrait of an irradiated society ever shot. We’re in the cellars of a great museum, now in ruins, where the staff and various stragglers face slow poisoning in the dark or deportation to a great central bunker; our hero, an aging scholar (Rolan Bykov), watches his wife in her final throes and is determined to venture outside in the toxic ruins, stepping amid the scorched corpses, to find his lost son. Lopushansky is waist-deep in details and ideas, and his film gulps up monstrous amounts of convincing iodine-tinted imagery, as the dead souls of the story suggest dust-covered Beckett figures in gas masks as much as walking warnings about atomic holocaust. It was Lopushansky’s first feature of six, none of which have had American releases.
105/365: The Great Yokai War (Takashi Miike, 2005) (YouTube, Apple TV)
Even if he’s never actually made a film you can stand, you cannot ignore Miike — no one working today is as preposterously fecund, has visited as many genres (gangster, musical, horror, psychodrama, fantasy, oy), or has made each as perversely his own. With this bizarre outing, add children’s film to the CV — even if it seems a miracle Japanese kids can sleep if *this* is the kind of film they get made for them. It’s really not a shock if you contemplate the state of popness in that manga-anime-deranged culture, but still, it’s Miike, chronicling with as big a budget as he’s ever had the Neverending Story-ish saga of a young boy lured into helping out the spirit world against the encroaching forces of robotic technology. Fittingly, the mecha-villainry is digital-&-stop-motion, while the Edenic “yokai” creatures, which take hundreds of jostling, bouncing, arguing Bosch-slash-Pufnstuf shapes, are all the eye-stunning analog work of makeup and costume. The film makes no more or less sense than Ridley Scott’s Legend or Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, and in fact has a creaky, blue-gel ‘80s-ness to it, but for many, keeping up with Miike’s cranked movie-factory output is an end to itself. The ground covered between this and, say, the icky underground transgressions of Visitor Q (2001) and the somber, tasteful epicness of Hara-kiri: Death of a Samurai (2011), dwarfs the varied terrain of any other filmmaker, to name only three of the more than 35 films he made that decade.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
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, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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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