Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 22: Chrimbo Limbo Edition
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
That odd week between Christmas and New Years — the Brits, with their penchant for cutsey neologisms, have come to call it Chrimbo Limbo, which is as good a label as any for what can seem an unstuck-in-time midwinter daydream of aimless diversions and inertia. So, movies, in a counter-programming frame of mind.
148/365: Pioneers of African-American Cinema (Oscar Micheaux, Spencer Williams et al., 1918–46) (Criterion Channel, Netflix, Kanopy)
Not one movie, but an entire neglected arm of American film history. This suite of movies of restored “race” films, almost 20 hours’ worth, was made by and for black people, beginning historically with several 1918 comedy shorts from trailblazing Ebony Productions and rounding off in 1946 with Dirty Gertie from Harlem U.S.A. Rough, passionate and unconcerned with Hollywood syntax and expertise, these films constitute now a bedrock of pre-Civil Rights Era culture, something like an African-American codex of early-century norms and identity. Via outriders like Oscar Micheaux, Spencer Williams, R.W. Phillips, and James and Eloyce Gist, the black subculture we see here, shot with on the fringe-business super-cheap, is wracked by poverty and vice: families plagued by booze and gambling, goldbricking men trying to sully honest women, nest-eggs stolen, duplicitous preachers, debt-ridden husbands dying in card-game shoot-outs. Often, whites are entirely absent; often, the early-20th-century struggle for identity as an American class was one blacks were seen from their ground zero to have waged on their own. It is all invariably staged primitively, full-frontal, so you can’t look away, with acting that reaches the back row. But coarseness is not an issue; who made the films is as important as the experience of watching them. Peaks in the pack include the lurid showstoppers of Oscar Micheaux (particularly 1920’s The Symbol of the Unconquered, in which a self-tortured mulatto man even ends up inadvertently heading a KKK raid), Williams’ lovely 1943 morality play The Blood of Jesus (the first race film to be included in the National Film Registry), the Gists’ hallucinatory anti-vice church film Hell-Bound Train (1930), and documentary footage of Florida and South Carolina black life shot by novelist Zora Neale Hurston. Some of the films are already passed the point of nitrate-decay return, and watching them is like witnessing a hidden history refound yet dissolving in front of your eyes.
149/365: The Killer Shrews (Ray Kellogg, 1959) (YouTube, Tubi, DailyMotion, Amazon)
This infamous dirtbagger — a penniless, Texas-shot “regional” indie of the drive-in heyday — is one of those genre films — nominally hapless and hilariously inept, it also occupies your head and your mood like a bad dream. It hardly matters, with Kellogg (a veteran F/X whizz) and untold legions before him, that cheap sets and barren locations and stilted dialogue add up to an almost Beckettian nightmare; here, the vibe is almost early David Lynch, lost in the gray purgatory of wintertime Texas brushland and in a closed house as grime-walled and comfortless as a jail cell. A number of often drunk characters (a scientist, a pilot, a German woman, etc.; Sidney Lumet’s father Baruch plays the old scientist in charge) are trapped behind walls on a remote island — outside, giant lab-experiment shrews roam, eating everything and looking for ways in. That’s it. The shrews are merely dogs with fake added fur and ungainly fangs, but we barely see them, and when we do they’re simply wrong — top-heavy, shaggy, but moving fast and in packs, formidable and wild enough to look like something unknown you might see moving through the Texas lowland wilderness, getting to you before you can find a road or a house. The shrews serve as a muscular and upsetting metaphor for the backbiting human hatred going on in the house, culminating as it does with more than one character, good and bad, simply throwing their nemesis to the mouths outside. It could be an off-off play, post-Theater of the Absurd and pre-apocalypse. Chortle if you can at the painful line readings, and then feel the smile die when this very simple piece of psychotronica finishes generating a cloud of oppressive moodiness that could numb any ironic-hipster defense.
150/365: Le Pont du Nord (Jacques Rivette, 1981) (Mubi, Amazon)
In many ways the French New Wave’s phantom outlaw, Rivette has remained a recalcitrant global giant despite the fact that many of his films — for reasons of extraordinary length and/or distributors’ befuddlement — have never been released in the U.S. This film is center-cut Rivette — a Parisian odyssey of jigsaw logic and amiably haunted intrigue. Here, two neurotic women meet in the streets: Bulle Ogier is a claustrophobic romantic just out of prison and embroiled in her lover’s unintelligible criminal mishigas, Pascale Ogier (Bulle’s daughter, tragically dead of an OD three years later) is a strutting punkette on a motorbike provoked by inanimate gazes, whether offered by faces on street posters or by the city’s many stone lions. It’s a time in Paris of rampaging crime, kidnappings, paranoia and political skullduggery. Complimenting each other in their loathing of modern society’s confinement and surveillance, the two Ogiers wander through the city’s fringe regions, bonding, debating free will, and eventually trying to decipher a coded map of Paris, and figure out who exactly are the shady men, all named Max, following them. Like many Rivettes the movie is a Bechtel Test champion, saturated with relaxed, self-possessed and undefensive womanhood. But most of all it has us dallying with these fabulous women on an almost child-like dream journey to nowhere — a form of play, and playacting — as though there were nothing better to do in the world. There may not be, frankly. Rivette’s idea of movies and life is as Zen as any filmmaker’s — now, stretched in some films to four hours or more but only 2+ hours here, matters. Where we’re going, or how the stories he never quite tells are resolved, never does. The pleasure of the mysteries is both why we watch film, and how we should live.
151/365: Slow Machine (Paul Felten and Joe DeNardo, 2020) (Apple TV, Mubi, Amazon)
A rare indie thing these days: an unstable experiment, a pro-am comedy of menace and uncertainty that inhabits a world — a New York — two degrees off from any we’d recognize. This film’s 16mm grain is virtually its main character, fusing with the faux-inept framing flubs and focus challenges to evoke the downtown indies of the late ’70s/early ’80s No Wave scene. The actual heroine is Stephanie (Stephanie Hayes), a struggling actress who appears to be Swedish (though her faint Euro-accent tilts soft Brit on occasion), and who attends NA meetings, confrontationally stumping for more judgment, not less, though we have no reason to think she was ever an addict. At times her accent goes all Texan — for a role she’s prepping for? — though only in the company of some people. (Hayes’ placid Joni Mitchell-with-owl-eyes affect doesn’t provide us with many clues.) Stephanie meets Gerard (Scott Shepard), a wily cadger in a suit who says he’s an NYPD counter-terrorism agent, but who may also be lying, and who may also be a predatory madman. Huge chunks of this palm-sized film coast on the untrustworthy banter between the two — at one point, the discussion ropes in a Lacanian Ph.D. dissertation on porn — and stories multiply, in various accents, at monologuing length, and in a persistent fog of fabrication. Toxic masculinity, surveillance concerns, things unseen, all lurk beneath the characters’ masks. Often, Stephanie loiters upstate with a band who never actually records and performs, and hangs with her seasoned friend Chloë (Chloë Sevigny), who lengthily recounts a bizarre audition scenario out of Eyes Wide Shut that might, you think, be how the actress had been asked to audition for this movie — developments that should get you thinking of Jacques Rivette. In fact, an acquaintance with, and a lust for, Rivette’s peculiar program might be the gateway tab you’d need to fully grok Slow Machine (though at 70 minutes it’s virtually the length of a trailer for one of Rivette’s monster marathons). By the last act, “some years later,” everything has evolved in secretive ways, including Hayes’ depth and range as an actress, as if years, and experiences, actually did pass by. Of course, wonderfully, there’s no ending. Or so it would seem.
152/365: The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray, 1952) (Appl TV, Criterion Channel, Amazon)
A wise study of macho loneliness in a remorseless world, Ray’s classic neo-western drops down into the all-American rodeo circuit, taking on the subculture with a gentle gimlet eye for the first time in Hollywood movies. Alongside John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), David Miller’s Lonely Are the Brave (1962) and Martin Ritt’s Hud (1963), but bulldozing over each of them with a lyrical tenderness that was Ray through and through, the film probes the mythified West as it lumbers uneasily into the modern day. Robert Mitchum is the lost boy here, an erstwhile rodeo star aging out and finding himself with no life or home (he’s even compelled to return to his dilapidated family shack, still with toys hidden in the crawlspace, only to find it owned and inhabited). Unheroically, he latches onto childless couple Arthur Kennedy and Susan Hayward, who know they’ll never get ahead on a ranch-hand salary and use Mitchum as a guide to the supposedly easy money of the bronco circuit. The troika is never less than tense — Mitchum’s good ole boy tries to avoid the humiliation of his semi-retired consultant role, Kennedy’s go-getter eventually learns to resent the hanger-on, and Hayward’s tough and disapproving wife — her best role and most convincing performance by a country mile — gets fed up with men entirely, even as she waits for her husband to break his neck in the ring. Around them, Ray limns a busy, modern, multi-shaded milieu, full of internecine relationships, sexual history, rueful fondness, and lots of scars. It’s the first authentic film about rodeo, but the sense of the sport being a pathetic and pointless reenactment of obsolete American life is already there, in every one of Ray’s iconic images and moments of adult ambivalence.
153/365: Captive (Brillante Mendoza, 2012) (Vudu, Fandor, Kanopy, Hoopla)
A topical suspenser that, remarkably, pits Islamic terrorists against Isabelle Huppert, this Filipino movie was released nearly everywhere but in the U.S. Mendoza dives into the weeds of the Dos Palmas kidnapping crisis of May 2001, in which armed members of Islamic separatist group Abu Sayyaf abducted 20 hostages from a tourist area (including Americans, Europeans and Chinese), and dragged them into the jungle for over a year. As the Filipino army searches and assaults, the prisoners end up being either parceled out to the jihadis as wives or coming down with a grand case of Stockholm Syndrome. Huppert, as a French social worker, is to our eyes the hot core of indignation and horror, but in truth Mendoza spreads the angst out across a varied cast, and makes us feel the time spent trudging aimlessly and waiting for international rescue that doesn’t come. There are actionful peaks — a battle against the army in and around a country hospital is hair-raising — but the film’s strategy doesn’t condense or dramatize for convenience’s sake; the ordeal is open-ended, maddening, sometimes dull, always open to ambiguity and disappointment. At the same time, Mendoza’s in-your-grill filmmaking keeps us lost in the jungle, and we can feel the fire ants and smell the rot.
154/365: The Cremator (Juraj Herz, 1969) (Criterion Channel, YouTube, EasternEuropeanMovies.com, Kanopy)
A black-hearted daydream from the New wave era, Herz’s film constitutes what might be the Czech New Wave’s most nihilistic vision. Chubby, comb-over monster Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrusinsky) is the titular crematorium pro on the eve of the Nazi rise, talking right to the camera about the glory and honor of his work, giving us tours of his facility and their guests, and selling the advantages of believing in reincarnation. (The possibility of premature cremations — a prepped woman “is very likely really dead” — keeps arising, ironically given the history to come.) A tireless rationalizer, old-school family man, and ready-made Fascist, our hero eventually crosses the National Socialist party’s path, and in classic proto-Conformist style begins to talk himself into genocidal practice, blithely betraying his own half-Jewish nuclear unit. Kopfrkingl’s obsequious surface never changes, but both he and the society he lives in slowly turn into homicidal psychos — the new normal. Rarely seen in the US, it’s a darkling essay on Mitteleuropan conscience that makes most other Czechs of the day look like garden parties.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21
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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