Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 16
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
106/365: Once (John Carney, 2007) (Vudu, YouTube, Amazon, Apple TV, Hulu)
This beloved indie is nothing more than a romance-that-never-happened idyll, set in Dublin and taking place entirely between an itinerant busker (fulltime folk-rocker Glen Hansard) and a Czech immigrant (real-life folkie Marketa Irglova), as they meet and, simply, begin to make music. Of course, Hansard’s keening, aching songs (several culled from his years as front man to The Frames, of which Carney was also a member) work their peculiar magic, and Hansard sings them with selfless passion, as his earnest, nameless street musician is, under his friendly surface, virtually boiling with grief over the betrayal and loss of his girlfriend, now in London. He only expresses himself in the songs, which once they begin explode into such naked wailing it’s hard to imagine any viewer being untrammeled by their visceral thrust. Irglova plays a completely disingenuous single mom with an errant husband, and the film’s grown-up assumptions about adult behavior and history is bracing (no one in the film resembles a stock dramatic character; even Hansard’s gruff vacuum-shop da is revealed to be matter-of-factly gracious and generous). The integration of the songs is wholly organic and often inspired, as with the exquisite long traveling shot of Irglova walking home at night listening to one of Hansard’s lyric-less tunes on earphones and singing her own words to it as she goes. The first impromptu of Hansard’s “Falling Slowly,” pieced together by the two musicians in a piano store, is surely one of the most transportive musical moments in the last half-century of movies.
107/365: Feed (Kevin Rafferty & James Ridgeway, 1992) (Kino Now, Ovid, Amazon)
Even in 1992 there seemed to be no such thing as an election year, just an election reality, in which national politics became its own 24/7 entertainment culture, coming at us like a non-stop TV show that plays on all channels. This sobering doc should play differently today, in the days of post-Trump — it’s a found-footage portrait of the 1991 campaign circus, in and around the New Hampshire primaries, that eventually led to Bill Clinton’s party nomination and presidency. The primary visual tool at work here is the satellite feed, the video footage sent out to the networks (and therefore out into space, to be captured by satellite geeks) during the unbroadcast moments of the candidates’ appearances, during which Clinton, Paul Tsongas, Jerry Brown, George H.W. Bush, John Kerrey, etc., comb their hair, make lame jokes, pick their noses, chat inanely with makeup people, and often sit doing nothing at all. The upshot is access to precious visions of our ostensible leaders, whose political machines work so hard to exalt them, as little more than opportunists and showbiz canards and empty-headed buffoons. The film goes a certain way toward demonstrating that, in many ways, elected disasters like Bush II and Trump were something of a fulfillment of tendencies inherent in American politics (one could only dream about what their stray satellite footage looked like, if the technology hadn’t significantly changed in the meantime). Rafferty and Ridgeway filled out the movie with public appearance footage of all kinds, much of which, years later, has its own lessons to tell about the catastrophic distance between why we elect certain types of men to office (and what types of men want to be), and exactly what the job might require.
108/365: The Moon and Sixpence (Albert Lewin, 1942) (YouTube)
In this dreamy Maugham adaptation, a Maughamian novelist (Herbert Marshall, again) meets the acquaintance of one Charles Strickland (George Sanders), a bland London stockbroker who, just like Paul Gauguin, suddenly dumps his family in a single misanthropic flourish, in order to reinvent his life as a painter. Marshall’s buttoned-down observer is asked to intervene, and so the two men begin a testy relationship, in London and Paris, marked by the inquisitive writer’s shocked middle-class values as they’re assaulted by Strickland’s callous, misogynistic, completely self-absorbed “beast” persona, which itself leads to various suicides and degradations, and eventually steers him toward the tropics, where an asocial white man can be left alone to make art among the sexually available natives. Lewin’s film is hardly explicit about much of this, of course, but it is more explicit about it than you’d imagine; sexual abuse and exploitation are so close under the service it seems to make some of the actors uncomfortable. The story, after all, pits Art vs. Society, elitist nihilism vs. civilized community, and in the end, just as in life, the fight is a strange and disquieting draw, as Strickland’s cosmic lout finds heaven in Tahiti and then pays for his aesthetic triumphs with a dark twist of fate, heralded by the appearance of infamous Hollywood acromegaly victim Rondo Hatton as a village leper. Lewin remains something of an unsung auteur, nursing an obsession with the mythos of bohemian art and transgression (The Picture of Dorian Gray, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman), and this was his first big shot, a film he had to make independently, and which he crafted an unusual visual scheme: when the narrative transitions to Tahiti, the film’s black-&-white photography gets tinted amber, and the last reel explodes into full-on Technicolor, as Strickland’s giant, Gauguinesque paintings are revealed. Lewin pulled a similar stunt in Dorian Gray three years later, when that tale’s pivotal canvas is revealed in startling color, and there’s no underestimating the sorcerous allure that painting had on Lewin, who pivoted each of his philosophically loaded films on the evasive transcendence of art.
109/365: La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) (Vimeo, Archive. org, Kanopy, Amazon)
“A Film in the Making” is how Jean-Luc Godard defined this classic within the film itself, in one of its many aphoristic title-card face-slaps, and it’s a simple parameter with which to view all Godard: as a process, not a product, as interrogation, not “entertainment,” and as a refutation of commercial culture and every easy market-driven conclusion it encourages. Of course, a filmmaker can hardly take a more politically radical position, and here we have Godard entering, at the spiraling end of the 60s, into his most radicalized and notoriously forbidding period, when the youthful ardor for old Hollywood began to slip away and a maddened attention to the unsolvable political present gripped him like a fever. This movie uses an apartment full of Maoist students spouting dogma and half-assedly planning terrorist action as base materials to form a screaming, yowling, uneasy, tongue-in-cheek collage of capitalist and Communist chic, and it’s a fabulously ambivalent film, embracing the hot contradictions in Paris culture at the time. It was decried as being pro-totalitarian and pro-terrorism, but presumably only by people who haven’t seen it. In reality, amid its cacophony, it explores the idea that Marxism in its Soviet and Maoist forms wasn’t Marxism at all but rather new “brands,” to be hawked and consumed and argued over, like Coca-Cola and Marlboro. Jingled together with news photos, laughable faux-radical pop songs, play executions, sloganeering so incessant it begins to mock itself, arguments about piddling 1967 controversies surely forgotten by the next spring, vandalism (the apartment is not the kids’ to deface, it turns out), and Godard’s most explicit self-reflexivity (the camera operator and sound man are addressed, and film themselves), the movie’s characters are simultaneously satirical caricatures and painfully realist, and Godard loves them (Jean-Pierre Leaud, Juliet Berto, Anne Wiazemsky) for their self-absorbed foolishness and youthful rage. Even as they brandish weapons and rationalize sacrificing lives for the greater good.
110/365: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (David Lee Fisher, 2005) (Amazon)
The mid-aughts were the brief heyday of the greenscreen feature (300, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Immortal), a film-thing that shouldered a few inherent hurdles: first, the compositional fauxness flattens the film’s environments into unnatural tableaux not entirely unlike those in pioneering turn-of-the-century film, which took its first formal cues from theater. Second, there’s something fundamentally strange about computer-mustered milieus that leads the filmmakers to comic books — no surprise — but also to the deep, stylized past. So, this low-budget “remix” of the seminal, all-fake 1920 German Expressionist classic makes perfect sense. The original Robert Weine film is a still-hypnotizing antique that knocked its contemporaneous audiences’ eyes out, and it remains the most famous, and culturally eloquent, set design flourish in the history of cinema: lurid, patently fake, illogically abstruse sets full of acute angles, painted shadows and disquieting perspectives. Fisher’s strategy was simple: scan the film’s sets (digitally cleaned up) onto a hard drive, and then recreate the foreground story with actors in front of a greenscreen. Add ripe dialogue, earnest acting, music, and narrative backstory. It’s inherently ironic — how could it not be, given the technology? — but it’s never camps it up, being both a respectful and insightful homage to a film history monument, and a darkling nightmare all its own, abetted to no small degree by a fiercely convincing cast that includes, as Cesare the somnambulist, mime/actor Doug Jones. Unlike the bigger budgeted films using this technology, Fisher’s throwback makes a kind of analytical sense as well — if greenscreening for the moment is all about appropriating the contextual imagery of the past, then you should begin with Caligari, the movie with which modern movies began, shouldn’t you?
111/365: A Trip to the Moon (Georges Melies, 1902) (YouTube, Kanopy, iTunes)
First, take a moment to consider the French pioneer Melies as other than a merely film-history staple and an oddity for scholars. There’s something effervescent and seductive there, a spirit of high innocence and ceaseless invention that transcends the films’ role as mere evidence of historical development. For one thing, Melies was a master image-maker, and several of his creations — most obviously, the man in the moon with the ship-bullet in his eye, from A Trip to the Moon — are undying cultural icons, familiar to the masses who aren’t particularly aware of or even interested in the fact the movies were being made during the McKinley administration. The essential elan and spectacle nature of movies can be found in their prenatal form in Melies’s short dreams, and it could be said that as a pioneer Melies expanded the cinematic vocabulary by skipping over the third dimension and extending toward a fourth — a way of seeing that evoked the unseen and the impossible, a use of recorded light that smacked of the metaphysical. He elaborated on a space familiar to everyone then (the theater proscenium) and then, as if by magic, transformed it into the saw-it-with-our-own-eyes unreality of the ghostly and the subconscious. Not for nothing was Freud a youthful contemporary — but Melies never dared to suggest textual insight, making only comedies and always, always striving toward a life-embracingly irreverence, another advantage he had and still has over Porter and Griffith. But more than that, Melies’s movies are beautiful to look at, the first triumphs of filmic design (and the most thoroughly conceived until German Expressionism.) Watching Melies is like seeing a secret, a lost and ancient universe of pretechnological inventions, nursery-rhyme caricature, painted landscapes, cartoon Victorian affluence, moons and stars with human faces, human butterflies, deceptive perspectives, movies within movies, relentless disappearances and reappearances, and so infinitely on. The recent restoration of Trip, his hallmark film, is all that and more — seething with vivid painterly color on every surface, it’s palpable proof of a long-forgotten fact: that after a certain point in Melies’s production, all of his films were hand-colored, frame by frame, print by print. It was thought that none had survived Melies’s famed 1923 bonfire of prints, ignited after his company was taken over by Pathe. But one semi-decayed copy did arise, in the ’90s, when it was then more or less put on ice until digital technology could catch up with its restorative requirements. The aspect of color is fascinating both in its origins and its contemporary guise: in Melies’s day, the task of hand-coloring his films was farmed out to a factory of 300 patient women painters, each creating in effect a unique version of a particular film with each brushstroke. This digital spiff-up was recolored with software that applies color only and exactly in the handmade patterns and style of the original colorist. (That is, in simulated digital brushstrokes.) Make sure you watch the version produced by Lobster Films and United Global Pictures.
112/365: Black Moon (Louis Malle, 1975) (Criterion Channel)
A long-unseen product of the lingering Art Film epoch, this is a freak in the Malle filmography — the man’s only pan-European, proto-Surrealist-Freudian dream-film, with dollops of tangy dystopian sci-fi satire and Bergmanic identity crisis dropped in like sour cream. As a film of its day, however, it’s lovably archetypal, sharing crazy style impulses and narrative impishness with the contemporaneous films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Harry Kumel, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roman Polanski. Set in a fantasy-future Europe where the landscape has been ravaged by armed combat between the sexes, Malle’s movie seems at first to be squaring off as feminist — the rebel guerrilla forces we see are all gorgeous women, captured and executed by an army of men, but this dynamic falls by the wayside, to some degree, as we follow escapee Lily (Cathryn Harrison) through the rural chaos, and to a seedy estate overheated with its own familial madnesses. The world of the film is overrun with wildlife, from the first road-busy badger (quickly smushed) to legions of millipedes, sheep, roaches, turkeys, and even a Shetland unicorn that eventually speaks. A tribe of naked children are relentlessly chasing down a huge sow through the undergrowth. And so on. Irrationality is the watchword. In the house a brother-sister pair of exchangeable, androgynous identical twins (Malle squeeze Alexandra Stewart and Warhol bad-boy Joe Dallesandro), who catatonically live out an ambiguous meta-sexual, semi-parental relationship with each other and with “the old lady” (Therese Giehse), a bedridden octogenarian who, at one point, is breast-fed by Stewart’s ghostly dominatrix. A can-do Alice not so much lost in this particular, symbol-ridden Wonderland as willfully exploring it for curiosity’s sake, Lily takes it all in stride, looking for answers but engaging in the absurdities as a child engages in a let’s-pretend play scenario. As should we — the film is rich in metaphoric possibilities, but its position toward the abstractly suggested sexual awakening of its heroine is exultant and frivolous, not analytical. Photographed by the legendary Sven Nykvist, shot entirely on Malle’s estate in southern France, and released in dubbed English, it’s a whimsically risky film like nobody makes anymore. Malle certainly never did again, wherever his peregrinations took him.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
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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