Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 33
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
225/365: The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, 1940) (Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Apple TV, Kanopy, Amazon)
Even for the Keatonians, preferring Buster’s grace under pressure over Chaplin’s faux innocence, this pivotal farce stands as a radical nonpareil, a film that had to be made. City Lights may have been Chaplin’s anti-talkie hold-out, and Modern Times a sub-futurist footnote to Rene Clair, but this movie was something new, a case of conceptual postmodern brio born inevitably but courageously out of the bipolar synchronicity between two little men with toothbrush mustaches born four days apart and then simultaneously world famous for years running. (“He’s the madman, I’m the comic. But it could have been the other way around,” Chaplin was quoted by his son.) The film that resulted is an unrepeatable explosion of doublings — the most renowned entertainer in the world laying his own persona down on the railroad tracks of fascist mania.
It was the first film to josh about genocide, even as it was still in the planning stage, but if we’re a trifle innured to Nazi jokes by now, Chaplin’s high-spirited mockery shouldn’t be taken for granted — production began in 1937, before even the annexation of Austria, and when it was finally released, ripping Hitler every which way and derisively airing the matters of concentration camps, mass slaughter and “MARVelous poison gas!”, the U.S. was still neutral. As an individual political act, it marched alone in Golden Age Hollywood. Like all major Chaplin, it was a methodically made film, a cardboard act of humanist defiance, and thanks to its purity of purpose, the cheesier the jokes get (famously, the German language itself receives a phlegmatic hosing) the more they land with inspired concussion. Reportedly, Hitler banned it then watched it alone, twice.
226/365: Cosmos (Andrzej Zulawski, 2015) (Mubi, Kanopy, Amazon)
An adaptation of the famously unadaptable Witold Gombrowicz novel, this was Zulawski’s first film in fifteen years and his final work (he died a year later), and it’s also his least characteristic film — come expecting to have your skull split by emotional stress and careening visual hyperbole in the Zulawskian mode, a la Possession or L’Amour Braque or On the Silver Globe, and you’ll be disappointed. Rather, this is a toast-dry absurdity, translating (and retranslating via English subtitles) Gombrowicz’s untranslatable linguistic pranks and making wry farce out of the meaningfully meaningless tale about the denizens of a Portuguese guest house, each one amiably deranged by existentialist obsessions that amount to nothing at all. Dead animals left mysteriously hanging on strings, unanswerable lusts and unbearable smells, a creeping mold stain shaped like a giant vagina, slugs on the tea tray, all of it signs to a mystery plumbed by a frustrated young novelist (the dazzlingly epicene Jonathan Genet), who may be writing Cosmos itself. Zulawski’s lurid intensity is detectable, but relaxed and salted with cinematic in-jokes; it’s a septuagenarian’s semi-surreal afternoon idyll, without any spikes in blood pressure.
227/365: Gold (Karl Hartl, 1934) (Kino Now)
Nazi alchemy! Released alongside the rise of National Socialism, this forgotten UFA “epic sound film” picks up where Lang left off (after he’d literally left Germany) by coopting rafts of futuro-expressionist Mabuse and Metropolis imagery, for a tale about atomic physicists attempting to perfect a vast reactor that transforms lead into gold. Personal espionage rules: Hans Albers — Goebbels’ pick for Baron Munchausen in 1943 — is the vengeance-minded scientist looking to sabotage the experiment, courted by ultra-vamp Brigitte Helm as a mega-industrialist’s rebel daughter. The odd German jones for medieval myth in a modern context is a given, while no one (like all alchemists going back centuries) seems concerned enough about how unlimited gold would become worthless, and would sink the world economy. The final Langian flood-destruction of the massive sets was inevitable, and spectacular enough for Roger Corman to reuse it almost 20 years later in The Magnetic Monster (1953). A megadose of retro-futurist fascist sci-fi THC.
228/365: The Hidden Blade (Yoji Yamada, 2004) (Tubi, Hoopla, Kanopy, Amazon)
Septuagenarian workaholic Yamada topped off a long career making dozens of romantic comedies with this, his 67th film, a mature, brooding, revisionist samurai epic, executed with unpretentious expertise. Set in the fading dusk of the samurai era, when artillery and modern military methods began to change the manner of war and render swordsman norms obsolete, the narrative has an inevitable but natural frontier logic, and boils down to the tender moral sphere of Munezo (Masatoshi Nagase, his wary stare having accumulated gravity in the 15 years since Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train), a low-level samurai pining for his family’s maid Kie (Takako Matsu). As his clan slowly struggles with the adoption of gun warfare, Munezo watches Kie get married away, and then learns a few years on that she is a slave in her new home, sickly and abused. Worrisomely violating the first of many conduct codes, Munezo charges in and rescues her; back at the homestead, Kie’s nursed back to health and becomes again the family’s servant.
Her lower station forbids marriage, and as the couple’s story begins to hit the brick wall of propriety, a parallel thread emerges, forcing Munezo to confront his Hamletian stasis: an old friend is brought back to town in a cage, arrested as an usurper. Munezo is accused of consorting with the renegade, and is even pressured, HUAC-style, to inform on mutual friends, before the prisoner escapes and Munezo is commanded to settle the business for both his own good and that of the corrupt clan. The air of ethical crisis is germane to the Western even more so than to the samurai genre, and The Hidden Blade evokes the cream of the Ford-Mann-Boetticher prairie dramas along the way. Yamada’s decidedly undazzling yet expressive filmmaking approaches classicism, from a sensei training session captured in one lengthy shot, to the final showdown, seen with the shifting point-of-views that suggest a relativist unease with the cut-and-dried judgments of war culture.
229/365: Marjoe (Sarah Kernochan & Howard Smith, 1972) (Vudu, Apple TV, Tubi, Amazon)
Back when this eye-opening sensation won an Oscar, presidents did not hold prayer meetings in the White House, and 24-hour evangelical TV stations did not broadcast coast to coast. Honest-to-God Pentecostals were a subcultural stratum documentary-watchers had never seen before, and the movie is frank about its mondo-Jesus perspective, gazing upon the howlers, shakers, tongue-speakers and weepers as if they were the leaf-clothed Liawep “lost tribe” of Papua New Guinea. The focus, Marjoe Gortner, is by now something of a quasi-celebrity icon: notorious in mid-century as the “world’s youngest ordained minister,” Gortner returned to preaching in the late ’60s as a simple source of easy shuck money. (From there, in a life path suggesting the need for a Marjoe 2, Gortner became a recording artist and B-movie actor specializing in rapists and psychos; in 1976 he was battling fake giant rats in a film version of Wells’s The Food of the Gods.) Gortner’s participation in Kernochan and Smith’s movie is a crucial matter: lookin’ to get out, Gortner admits he’s a fraud and atheist, and derisively briefs the film crew on the meetings’ conservative norms and codes before they commence. When the holy-rolling is in full swing, only the crowds of middle-American spirit-receivers are oblivious to Gortner’s hucksterism.
The old promotional footage of Gortner and his mom (who trained him, abusively, from toddlerhood in the art of Christian crowd-madness) has an eerie, Ed Woodian mutant aura, but the hypnotized Nixon-era supplicants Gortner anoints as an adult are only nominally less otherworldly. Gortner was self-disgusted enough to go public and therein insure his departure from the lifestyle for good — but was he an insincere aberration, or are evangelists all conmen?
230/365: ¡O No Coronado! (Craig Baldwin, 1992) (American Indian Film Gallery, Amazon)
Subterranean pope-king of secret histories and subversive reappropriation, Baldwin makes movies out of yesteryear’s garbage celluloid, films that are half radical protests, half investigative media-missiles, and half pulpy poppycock. As cinema they’re ironically sui generis, Frankenstein ogres rippling with cheap jokes, Freudian free-associations and insurrectionary fury. Each time he redefines a chunk of bygone educational film or government propaganda or Mexican horror flick, he is questioning what the images mean, emphasizing how absurd their original intentions were, and suggesting how their political power can be used not for oppressive evil but for good — or, at least, sardonic hijinks. Anti-establishmentarian and uncommercial to the bone, Baldwin is less pedantic than he is pulp-satiric, and as a result the movies are endlessly dissectible, blooming with connections.
This featurette continued Baldwin’s interrogative course after RocketKitKongoKit and Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America, this time reconstructing the historiography surrounding the Spanish conquest of the New World as personified, in all his disaster-prone, loot-and-kill buffoonery, by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who journeyed across Mexico and the Southwest searching haplessly for the Seven Cities of Gold, a trek marked by tragedy, cannibalism, wholesale slaughter and madness. Simultaneously a risible, factually accurate chronicle of Coronado’s mishaps (one every schoolkid should see) and an outright parody of cinematic historicization (Baldwin pillages countless costume dramas and swashbucklers, as well as picture books, serials, Gulliver’s Travels and kitschy re-enactments Baldwin shot himself), the film is an object lesson in how to revivify the most moribund cinematic avenues. If only Baldwin had been commissioned to make [name your least favorite recent historical biopic].
231/365: Zama (Lucretia Martel, 2017) (Vudu, Apple TV, Kanopy, Amazon)
The legacy of colonialism gets sliced for sandwiches in Martel’s historical satire, adapted from a famous (but largely unknown in Anglo-speaking regions) novel of mid-century Argentine modernism, by Antonio di Benedetto. It’s the late 1700s, somewhere in some unnamed South American wilderness occupied by the Spanish, and we’re at the sea’s edge with the uniformed Don Diego de Zama (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), a colonial functionary now stranded on the edge of the empire, far from his home and family. From the outset he is a dour, haunted man, a lonely, xenophobic lost one already poisoned by the white man’s burden in the wilderness. Whether he’s confronted with the undressed natives or with scheming Spaniards, he struggles to understand everyone, gazing at the oppressive social dynamics around him in a frustrated daze. His primary ambition is to be sent back to civilization, but time passes, often to his bafflement and without our knowledge (a native child he’s fathered appears at one point, much to his chagrin). As the plague starts felling Europeans, the existential dilemma takes hold: he’s caught in the colonial clockwork like he’s in a dream of climbing stairs but never getting anywhere.
His worthless authority is a mockery; his servant seems to be the actual bureaucrat, succeeding socially where Zama fails, while other nobles treat him like an employee who doesn’t yet know he’s fired. (Meanwhile, Martel limns the racialized context of this internal crisis by way of scathing details, like the territorial governor playing backgammon for human ears.) Historical fiction is a first for Martel; this is only her fourth feature (and the first in nine years). But Zama is of a piece with her earlier films, which were immediately distinguished by the filmmaker’s unorthodox compositions and appetite for hyperrealist visuals. From her first film, La Cienega (2002), onward, Martel saw the world her own way — like a spy holding her breath lest she be discovered. You’re not omniscient watching Martel’s movies, but wandering uncertainly through a landscape of damage and sin, never sure if what’s really important remains unseen.
In its final third, Martel goes full Herzog and her protagonist is sent after a legendary bandit, into the interior, where dark and terrible but quite natural things befall him. Once he becomes literally lost in the wilderness of empire, he’s virtually a zombie, no longer a European but another piece of expendable wildlife in the untamed landscape. Martel’s movie plays like a toast-dry comedy for some viewers, but like much of Beckett it’s too chilling and resonant to seem chuckle-worthy.
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, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32
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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