Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 17
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
113/365: High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, 1973) (Hulu, Vudu, Fubo TV, Sling TV, Apple TV, Amazon, YouTube)
The 60s-70s “anti-western” took the genre’s set of totems and stereotypes — good guy, bad guy, gunfight, hard-working frontier town — and autopsied them right down to their amoral hypocrisy and pathological psyches, a process that no film underwent as explicitly as this Clint epic, his second as a director. The film is raw pulp, with plenty of adolescent over-ripeness narrative ideas, but the bones of it are outrageously metaphoric: Eastwood plays a nameless gunslinger who simply rides into Lago, a small, spare mining town built on the edge of a huge mountain lake. He doesn’t talk much, in the classic early-Eastwood vein, but the townspeople are all wary, suspicious, openly hostile and plagued with shame. Our anti-hero is confronted time and again, leading to a few impromptu corpses and violations, and it’s clear that what we’ve got here is a postmodern morality play, in which justice is methodically served but no one is heroic or good at heart. The town’s backstory hovers over the action like a thunderhead — in the recent past, a sheriff who’d been gearing up to report the mining company’s territorial infractions got horsewhipped to death in town, and virtually every citizen had either participated or watched. Eastwood’s mystery man is either a ghost, an avenging angel, or simply a walking-talking deus ex machina, personifying the townspeoples’ self-immolating guilt, and preparing to bring grief to an American frontier founded on bloodshed, capitalist greed, rampant self-interest and immigrant exploitation. Taking advantage of the town’s quaking fear over a trio of returning outlaws (led by Geoffrey Lewis, Juliette’s dad), the gunslinger essentially takes over, making a put-upon midget (Billy Curtis) sheriff and mayor, and forcing the townspeople to literally paint the entire town blood red (one of the gritty ‘70s’ most Boschian images). Despite his dogged ham-and-egger-ism, Eastwood has fashioned a parable about our national state of mind and its long history of carnage and usurpation, including the injustice of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
114/365: The Insider (Michael Mann, 1999) (Vudu, Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
Mann can make movies that boil (Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, Heat), and this one percolates despite the subject matter: the very true story of Jeffrey Wigand, a research scientist for Big Tobacco who violated his code of silence and ratted on the industry’s knowledge about tobacco hazards to 60 Minutes. Wigand’s life becomes a temple-throbbing hell of paranoia, death threats and domestic chaos, and then, in a galling irony, the show cuts him from their broadcast. This could’ve been a TV movie, but Mann shot and cut this movie about frayed interior states as if world peace depended on it. It’s an actor’s show — Al Pacino, as idealistic 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman, hadn’t cooked on his ultra-realist burners like this since the 70s. Christopher Plummer is devastatingly plummy, smart and shallow as Mike Wallace (the real Wallace publicly dissed the movie, unsurprisingly). But the movie’s engine is Russell Crowe in a stunning anti-star turn as the paunchy, uncomfortable, edge-of-throttling-someone Wigand, and it’s the definitive portrait of an educated white-collar American man under humongous pressure. Superbly inhabited (watch Bruce McGill take over the world in one scene as a fat Southern D.A.), it’s a thick cut of liberal Hollywood stake, laying out the Big Tobacco venery better than any documentary could.
115/365: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno (Henri-Georges Clouzot, Serge Bromberg & Ruxandra Medrea, 2009) (YouTube, Mubi, Amazon, Apple TV)
Film follies come in many forms; some are destroyed by their own ambition and compulsive production, and that’s where we find Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, shot but left unfinished in 1964. A psychological melodrama that endeavored to visualize derangement and madness by way of a vast array of visual tropes and effects, Clouzot’s movie died in its cans and was completely forgotten until French distributor/producer Bromberg became trapped in an elevator years ago with Clouzot’s widow, who evoked this lost film and compelled Bromberg to find the archived celluloid and make a film out of and about it. Which puts Bromberg’s film, the one that got finished, in a closeted little subgenre of film — the post-mortem/reconstruction film, movies that craft an epitaph for an unfinished projects using its own footage. Clouzot’s production, financed by an enthusiastic Columbia Pictures with “no limit” to its budget, left behind a mountain of screen tests and location footage, some of it merely beautiful, much of it bizarrely, fancifully experimental. The film’s story involved a middle-aged seaside hotel proprietor (Serge Reggiani) consumed with suspicions and jealousies surrounding his young wife, played by Romy Schneider in the full blossom of her youth. It was Clouzot’s scheme to shoot the objective action in black-&-white but the husband’s feverish point of view in eye-trouncing color, freely using all manner of mirrored images, optical illusions, fragmented lenses, kinetic sculptures, color reversals (forcing the actresses to wear blue lipstick much of the time), expressionistic lighting effects, and scads of stark, body-paint surrealism that more closely resembled the films of underground godling Kenneth Anger than any mainstream French film of the ’60s. The doc tracks how Clouzot, a revered auteur, apparently went crazy, overpreparing, indulging in every visual trick he could dream up (or find in galleries of moving sculpture and Op Art), and demanding ceaseless takes and additional tests from his actors. The shoot went on for many weeks this way, with three camera crews on call at all times, with Clouzot in a permanent state of frustrated indecision; after a while, the crew began to defect. What was left is many things, perhaps fragments of a masterpiece and certainly a catalogue of expressionistic ’60s ideas intent on giving color and shape to subjective emotional states. But it’s also something of a cataract of ardor for Schneider, or at least for her youthful, smiling beauty, which Clouzot shoots in enough crazy, worshipful contexts to fill three movies.
116/365: 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008) (Topic, Kanopy, Amazon, Mubi)
A lovely, ruminative, impressionistic, elusive, sensitive movie by a beloved filmmaker, rich in Denis’s signature brand of elliptical hodgepodge and brimming with the-state-of-us-now immediacy. It’s essentially an Ozuian love story between a working father (the great brooder Alex Descas) and his commuter-student daughter (Mati Diop), as they live happily together in a rather comfortable apartment but naturally sense a teetering toward the inevitable moment of separation. She attracts men (including far-too-cool nomadic hipster Gregoire Colin), he resists a neighbor’s romantic pressure, and eventually their co-existence suffers from enough unspoken feelings that the two are compelled to drive together to Germany, and visit the dead mother’s family. Denis is masterful at laying out a place and time via fragments coalescing into a whole. We get an acute sense of life on the Paris-suburb rail lines (on which Descas’s Gibraltar of a man works, amid a crowd of mixed emigre compatriots) and in the characters’ unremarkable banlieue, which seems to be completely free of crime or conflict. Large swatches of the film are taken up with life, not story — a central set-piece involves the whole group heading to a concert in the rain, only to have the car break down and the evening salvaged in a local café, where everybody gets a little drunk and jealous glares fly like boomerangs. That’s it for incident, and the texture is paramount — most of what we know about the characters is expressed in silent looks, not dialogue. Diop, the niece of Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambety), went on to direct Atlantics (2019), a prize winner at Cannes.
117/365: This Man Must Die (Claude Chabrol, 1970) (Mubi)
Simultaneously the most orthodox of the French New Wavers, and the most commercially successful, catnip to middle-class audiences who like their Euro art films with a dose of genre plot and not so much esoterica, Chabrol was also a consummate craftsman, perhaps with more in common with elder statesmen Henri-George Clouzot and Georges Franju than his Cahiers du cinema-grad contemporaries. Habitually drawn to the wet pulp of murder thrillers (taking on Rendell, Highsmith, Simenon), Chabrol didn’t turn the suspense crank so much as ponder the genre’s ambivalences. Chabrol made films about homicide and its vapor trails as if he loved to see modest, middle-class French life hit with a silent bullet and then shatter, in undramatic slow-motion. This film is one of Chabrol’s most memorable strait-jackets — a vital predecessor of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance films — in which the father (Michel Duchaussoy) of a hit-&-run victim sets out to find the culprit and make him pay. This leads him to the killer’s sister-in-law, with whom he fakes a romance in order to insinuate himself into the family. Naturally, the family itself (including the boorish killer’s own son), with whom Duchaussoy’s rather featureless hero grows perilously close, complicates his allegiances. But the revenge plot never disappears, and what some characters know before others know they know them, makes the movie roil like a sulfur pit — but quietly. Hitchcock would’ve been consumed with the visual/physical cascade of events, but Chabrol’s is all about the unbroadcast tickertape going on behind everyone’s eyes. In the end, the mysteries aren’t solved (and therefore safely diminished) but only get larger.
118/365: It Came from Kuchar (Jennifer Kroot, 2009) (Kanopy, YouTube, Amazon)
This doc launches you into a movie-movie realm you might not have had a chance to experience before: the eccentric, dimestore film universe of the Brothers Kuchar. George and Mike Kuchar were just two intensely weird Bronx twins who went to the movies almost every day growing up and were given a 8mm camera for their 12th birthday. After that, American “underground cinema,” as it was beginning to be known then in the shape of Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, became a playground for the brothers, who made torrid, ludicrous, never-less-than-unconvincing horror films and melodramas in their mother’s apartment and on the city’s rooftops. Seeing a Kuchar film is like getting an intravenous eight-ball of movieness, but without the screenwriting, polish and taste. Kroot’s portrait of the brothers, contextualizes the bros’ movies with testimonials from John Waters, Guy Maddin, Atom Egoyan, comic artist Bill Griffith, and many others, and you’ll need context: Kuchar films are both unlike “regular” movies in every way and very much the essence of pop cinema distilled down to its vapors. Logical story, believable sets, honest acting — forget it. The Kuchars’ unspoken contention, from their first big “success” I Was a Teenage Rumpot (1960), was that what we love about movies more than cohesion and structure is sensational moments, raw emotional explosions. Kuchars take those little bits, which may be all they see, and hypercharge them, filling their cheapjack matinee scenarios with chintz, masturbatory comedy, overacting, clownish makeup, self-consciously ridiculous action, and an overall sensibility to which no amount of lurid nonsense is too much. Kroot’s doc is a companion to Mary Jordan’s doc Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, and like Smith’s self-created artificial world, the Kuchars could be said to persevered in crafting a new world out of movie reflexes, to replace the ordinary life that disinterested them so.
119/365: State Funeral (Sergei Loznitsa, 2019) (Vimeo, Mubi, Amazon)
Arguably the most ambitious, and historically conscientious, filmmaker from the ex-Soviet regions at work today, Loznitsa has always had a jones for the revealing hypocrisies of old footage, to resurrect and reconsider the deranged visual legacy of Communism and Fascism over the last 100 years. This new film takes a gargantuan reappraisal of a gargantuan event: the 1953 public funeral rites for Joseph Stalin, as they exploded as a kind of sleepwalking mass madness all over the empire, from Tallinn to Minsk to Azerbaijan to Krasnoyarsk. Loznitsa is no hand-holder, insisting that we take this dutiful journey for reasons we must arrive at on our own; he doesn’t even drop the revelatory fact that the footage he’s using, half black-&-white and half lushly Sovcolor, was shot specifically for a propaganda epic to be titled The Great Farewell — which in effect made the entire republic a film set, and the huge national mourning ritual a staged mega-drama. That film was never completed — the anti-Stalinists were gaining force by then, and it’s rumored they may’ve hurried the world-class liquidator to his death bed. Khrushchev’s famous speech denouncing Stalin came less than three years later, in any case, so the yen for a big-screen hagiographic send-off may’ve already seen its day come and go by the time Uncle Joe shuffled off for good. What we get are staggering but dumbly repetitive parades of Soviet citizens queuing up by the tens of thousands at a time, hefting a zillion wreaths and potted plants to the coffin side and various designated shrines, with the implacable demeanors of unhappy movie extras. How much of this colossal foolishness is movie-making coercion, or brainwashed derangement, or the mere madness of crowds? The filmmaker mutely nods toward his intentions with the final title card, reminding us of Stalin’s mass-murder scorecard of upwards of 42 million deaths. With that as context, the whole, exhaustive film replays in your head as a farce without laughs.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16
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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