Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 23: Alt-Viewing for an Alternative New Year
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
155/365: Cries and Whispers (Ingmar Bergman, 1972) (Criterion Channel, Apple TV, Kanopy, Amazon, HBO Max)
Bergman’s place on the high auteurist shelf seems to have been under question these last years; his earnest, soul-searching psychodrama palette is not quite the fashion anymore, the way cooler, more ironic voices (Godard, Antonioni, Rivette) are. But Bergman brings the pain, and this late-career corker is, among other things, one of the most appallingly beautiful color films ever photographed. Seen in this newly restored, impeccably prismatic form, it is clearly one of those totemic films that come at you with the conviction of a holy vision — except, of course, the experience is not sacred at all but psychosexual. All it is: three sisters (Liv Ullman, Ingrid Thulin, Harriet Andersson), one case of cancer, two sets of tortured sexual pathology, one grieving servant, sequestered in an estate house sometime in the late 1800s. Of course the thumbnail is a pathetic evocation; the psychodramas on top of and below the primary-colors-in-Vermeer’s-nightmares surface have their own Bergmanic inevitability and naked torque. So much has been written about the film already, especially in its day (when everyone had to see it, and weigh in on its magnificence, including the AMPAS, and every critics’ group worth anything), but little of it nails its impact, which is holistic and derives from a boiling mix of saturated color, scalding intimacy, compositional ideas that effortlessly evoke both medieval and Freudian iconography, immersive performances (Thulin in particular was never as mesmerizing), and a blood-pumping state of intense psychological and familial crisis.
156/365: Lan Yu (Stanley Kwan, 2001) (Mubi)
In the late 80s, Kwan was the Hong Kong New Wave’s Orpheus, assembling gorgeous elegies of doomed contemporary amour, and his most renowned films (1988’s Rouge, 1992’s Actress (Center Stage), and 1994’s Red Rose, White Rose) were that inflamed quarter’s equivalent to grown-up art films. For him, movies are merely a window on the dharma of love, a window with a memory, a whimsical fogginess, and a habit of telling lovely lies. His 15th film, Lan Yu beautifully traces the rise and fall of an unbalanced queer relationship, based upon a seminal (for China) online memoir by the anonymous “Beijing Comrade.” (The Mandarin comrade had by 2001 long since swapped its Maoist meaning for the slang equivalent of queer.) Kwan’s protagonists are the eponymous student (Liu Ye), having arrived in Beijing in 1988 with little more than a backpack, and Handong (Hu Jun), a wealthy, nearing-middle-age businessman-bachelor who on their first meeting lures Lan Yu away from a one-night hustle opportunity and into his own bed. Kwan ‘s movie was banned in China, what with its frontal nudity, the use of the Tiananmen Square massacre as an off-screen plot device, and sexually frank dialogue. (According to Kwan, the film was shot illegally in Beijing.) Kwan doles out details of the men’s subsequent union with confident jump-cuts and story elisions — enormous things happen off-camera, and a single suture can leap over months of incident. As in his previous films, much of the film’s point of view is refracted through mirrors — a time-honored but still eloquent metaphor for love’s and movies’ subjectivity. Naturally, the fissures in the landscape are culturally rooted: Handong enjoys Lan Yu as a boy-toy but believes he’s destined to be responsibly married. When he finally meets the right woman, the men’s intimate world-of-two disintegrates. Kwan is a master of shadow, quietude and room noise, and Lan Yu is a disarmingly lived-in movie. Liu Ye’s laconic country-lad Lan Yu is a masterwork of subtle physical acting: cow-eyed (giving Handong as well as us the idea he’s a bit dimmer than he actually is), slow to react and slack-limbed (the lazy walk is indelible), Liu makes an undeniable, and curiously irritating, impression. Decades later, it’s still a LGBQ landmark in China, seen mostly in illegal video copies.
157/365: Cinema Komunisto (Mila Turajlic, 2011) (Vimeo, EasternEuropeanMovies.com, Amazon)
As cinema bounces past its own quasquicentennial, documentaries excavating neglected film-history detours have proliferated, many coming from countries and cultures that have turned upside down since their film cultures began. This movie puts this idea up front, labeling itself as the story of a nation, Yugoslavia, that “doesn’t exist — except in movies.” It’s still there, of course, sliced bloodily up into seven smaller states, but Turajlic is right: the old Yugoslavia survives as a cinematic ideology, an idealized fantasy-world version of itself, complete with its own Oz-ish wizard-deity, Tito. The President for Life was, like so many 20th-century dictators, a bona fide movie geek, and the nation’s devotion to reinventing itself on screen reflected his own unquenchable cinemania. Tito watched a movie a day, so says his devoted projectionist, no matter how late he arrived home, and he regularly read and edited scripts for films going into production. Turajlic’s movie takes a slam-bang chronological approach, interviewing now-elderly production alumni (including ubiquitous movie star Bata Zivojinovic, the Yugoslavian Steve McQueen), and tracing the history of her erstwhile nation’s sole film studio, Avala, as the culture bumped and boogied alongside the struggles of European history since WWII. We go from the early Nazi-killing “partisan” war films, which one old-timer dubs as “terrible” but which look pretty dynamic, to the massive global co-productions of the ’60s (The Long Ships, Genghis Khan), employing Hollywood megastars and made possible only by the whole-hog allocation of state resources. (The ruins of a very real bridge filmmakers were allowed to blow up for Battle of Neretva remains a rusted tourist attraction.) Embedded in the story is a varietal of what critic J. Hoberman dubbed “the red Atlantis” — ideological nation-states expressly and at great effort conceiving of themselves by way of movies, and then, once they vanish, leaving only the illuminated daydreams of film behind.
158/365: 23rd Psalm Branch (Stan Brakhage, 1967) (Vimeo, YouTube)
It’s an unwritten law in the history of cinema that experimental — avant-garde, non-narrative — movies are fine as long they’re under 25 minutes or so. That’s about as long, it is thought, that even a seasoned cinephile can tolerate movieness without the progressive, empathic guiding hand of story. For most viewers the very idea of watching an 70 or 90 minute film that does not have a plot of some type is not only terrifying but flabbergasting — if it doesn’t tell a story, what does it do? The question is the problem — for an experimental filmmaker, films don’t do, they are. To turn that train around, you have to try to reinvent the presumptions of the medium (which are, let’s face it, corporate capitalist at heart) and thereby liberate the form. Needless to say, watching a non-narrative feature isn’t passive — you put your game face on, send up your best antennae, and consider moment to moment what movies are. Because they aren’t only what you thought they were. Brakhage was a giant in this realm — his films are timeless, as in, they could be the first films ever made, or they could come from an unfathomble future; either way, they are simultaneously the diametrical opposite of what we think of as “movies” and a precise expression of cinema’s elemental factors. (Which may be another way of saying what we ordinarily think of as cinema has more in common with theater, novels, circus and video games than movie-ness. Or at least Brakhage would have thought so.) “Poetic” Brakhage has been labeled by his acolytes, but it’s not the lyrical connectiveness of verse that’s intended — it’s the purely optical suggestiveness of images, abstracted away from their received meanings (as text, not as real objects), and from the reflexive significances we attach to experiences of film and photography. This anti-war howl is not “about” war but only itself, about the newsreel footage it collects and despoils in an editing-room assault that shrieks, silently, with anxiety, from Holocaust footage to perusals of fresh dead meat. The film never leaves you with one image for long and even resists the musical tendency to hit us with emotionally satisfying rhythms — it’s an asyncopated epic. With Brakhage there’s no escape, and any room in which 23rd Psalm Branch plays becomes a funeral chamber.
159/365: Beyond Zero: 1914–1918 (Bill Morrison, 2014) (Ovid, Amazon)
Comprised, like all of Morrison’s film, of disintegrating found footage, this assemblage tells the story of World War I in forty soul-haunting, eye-roasting minutes of molten decay and mortal shadow. Universally acclaimed and widely screened as “alternative” filmmakers hardly ever are anymore, Morrison has a M.O. that seems simple on the face of it — use neglected or leftover nitrate film footage that is at one stage or another of dissolving into toxic goo, slow it down to a poetic trance (so the rotting plastic undulates and seethes like a living thing), and score it with some variety of pensive, throbbing modern music. That’s it — but the emotional payout is always awesome. The reclaimed footage here literally limns the arc of the war, but in incidental moments no one remembers: troops (from at least four different participating countries) marching, digging trenches, training, fighting, retrieving corpses, and all the while the grainy cloud of the images’ world seizes and hemorrhages and warps (sometimes in fiery color), as if we’re watching time itself lay siege to the fading memory of the war. Images hold fast: a German Shepherd helping to ferret out a corpse in a spinach field, a solarized fairy-tale forest being assaulted by a tree-crushing tank, a melancholy vision of a lone parachutist falling through a boiling sky. All of Morrison’s films are, implicitly, about the devastation of time, and this featurette (scored like a dissonant horror film by composer Aleksandra Vrebalov and performed by the Kronos Quartet) puts a sociopolitically potent capstone on the filmmaker’s career so far.
160/365: Under the Skin of the City (Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, 2001) (Mubi)
A cosmopolitan essay on future shock, Iran’s anti-feminism, and the stress-tattering of the familial fabric under Sharia law, Bani-Etemad’s generational melodrama observes a blue-collar dynastic collapse worthy of Lillian Hellman, but stays steadfastly fixed on the quotidian of Tehran life. A veteran of docs and fiction, Bani-Etemad is a pragmatic feminist, and this film was a conscientious taboo-breaker. She dares to glimpse a woman dancing and show us female hair being washed (the censors bitched, the filmmaker prevailed), but look at her strategy for managing the no-male-female-contact rule: a neighboring wall from beyond which hellacious brother-sister “honor” beatings can be heard. When the teenage victim runs away, her best friend (Baran Kowsari, Bani-Etemad’s daughter) furiously breaches the wall and smacks the abusive brother down. The family at the movie’s center is led by Tuba (Golab Adineh), an aging, co-dependent matriarch with a layabout husband and a textile factory job. The younger son (Ebraheem Sheibani) fights for reform, the eldest (Mohammed Reza Foroutan) struggles for a visa to Japan so he can support the family, and the eldest daughter (Homeira Riazi) routinely returns home with her children after spousal pummelings. Bani-Etemad adroitly erects intersecting social critiques within these commonplace lives, and avoids sermonizing in favor of experiential right hooks. What’s hard to forget is the volleyball game between dozens of pitch-black chadors, or the grim visage of the bruised eldest daughter as she’s told to kiss her enabling mother-in-law’s hand.
161/365: Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000) (Tubi, Vudu, YouTube, Kanopy, Amazon)
An uncategorizable indie that managed to please and haunt virtually every quadrant of moviegoing society, doing so with ideas and little else, Nolan’s film is a must-see. The brain-damaged hero, Leonard (Guy Ritchie), has persistent short-term memory loss, or anterograde amnesia, a condition that prevents him from effectively doing the only thing he knows he must do: find his wife’s killer. But as the other characters in the film learn, this doesn’t mean that Leonard hasn’t already avenged her death and forgotten, or killed her himself and forgotten. Every few minutes Leonard forgets where he is and why, and must immediately start piecing his reality together from clues, reconstructing his “plot” so it may be able to reenter “the present” and then move on. The result, as a movie, is a resonance machine, and Leonard’s situation suggests almost any existential crisis you could name, from your standard-issue identity crisis to the paranoid fear that your life might just be a virtual construction and your senses are lying to you, to a lostness in the absence of God. But if Memento conjures the ordeal of a consciousness under siege in its very structure, then it is also a movie about moviewatching, a brand of consciousness rarely contemplated as such. Like dreams, movies are stories and image parades, but they’re also time, time spent by us following in the present what is “past” as it unrolls along its own unshakable temporal track. Since Leonard’s missing the memory that allows us to follow stories to begin with, the movie of his life is a cataract of unknown unknowns, and like a mad movie critic in the dark he’s forced to scribble notes, on himself and any available surface, in order to make sense of events later, when he forgets it.
We are kept in a suspended state of conjecture throughout the film, but while the movie’s uncertainty principle may feel quantum for Leonard — every time he witnesses or experiences anything, it changes what he thinks he knows — for us it’s an epistemological trial. Do we ever “know” anything for sure? A large percentage of every film story actually takes place in our head rather than on the screen; every suture between shots depends on us to understand associative suggestions and draw conclusions, in order for the film tale to move forward. Knowledge per se is something we never have — we’re merely telling ourselves a story, linking incidents and emotional meanings together, taking cues, trying to remember everything that’s occurring off-screen (but of course isn’t) even as we strive to grasp what’s happening in front of us. Just like Leonard.
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, 22
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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