Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 34
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
232/365: 12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995) (Vudu, YouTube, Peacock, Amazon)
Gilliam’s beloved toyshop nightmare conjures up a time-travel hamster wheel yanked into motion by global viral devastation and frantically run by a beleaguered schmuck who’s never sure he’s just not nuts. Using the basic plot arc of La Jetee, the classic, somber 1962 Chris Marker short from which it is “inspired,” the movie contemplates the circularities of time, apocalypse culture and movies themselves, all for their own mind-altering buzz. Cassandra-like Bruce Willis bounces off the walls between the subterranean, post-viral future and the oblivious ’90s present, searching for ground zero of the viral outbreak that killed, or will kill, five billion people. Glancing off Brad Pitt’s Marty Feldman-eyed nutcase and Madeleine Stowe’s motherly shrink, Willis is lost in red-herring hell, trying to retain his sanity (and, later, to disavow it), until time, as it always does when travelled out of sequence, eats its tail and smites the luckless.
Gilliam’s true concerns are, as always, visual. The camera’s cartwheeling around the cramped dystopia of the future is Brazil redux, while the visions of Baltimore overrun with animals — especially the giraffes galloping along an elevated highway — are entrancing. Once we get to the stranger-in-a-strange-land present, 12 Monkeys loses some of its sorcery, but still, fascinating subtextual grist lurks everywhere — a surprising interface is with Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which Willis and Stowe see hiding out in a theater. “I was born here, and died here,” Kim Novak dreamily says fingering the time-rings of a crosscut redwood, and Willis is struck dumb considering his life as a movie that’s already happened. Gilliam remains a marvelously rococo image-maker, and his rubber-hose-and-Mylar set designs invoke a world imagined from cultural effluvia — every one of his movies is like a giant cardboard refrigerator box. More claustrophobic than exciting, Gilliam’s vision is uniquely childlike — he couldn’t make an authentically scary movie if you paid him. He’s too in love with being a nursery ghost, the new Grimm brother.
233/365: Love and Anger (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Carlo Lizzani, Jean-Luc Godard & Marco Bellocchio; 1969) (Mubi)
One of the loveliest free-form ideas to find patronage and popularity in the New Wavey 1960s was the portmanteau film, a rarely successful but always tempting quasi-genre that usually imposed a general theme on a murderers’ row of star arthouse filmmakers, and let them make their special kind of havoc. Always, it’s a mixed bag that doesn’t cohere into a satisfying meal, but who can resist the crazed variety of the idea, and the who-knows-what-you’ll get box-of-chocolates effect? Often you could hope for one beaut out of five, but this Italian-made anthology film, concerned with the tension between society and bloodshed, is relatively thick with home runs.
Pasolini, whose Christ-movie vignette La Ricotta is the only world-beater in that more famous omnibus, RoGoPaG (1963), scores again with a derisive essay contrasting a cavorting flower child with news footage of contemporaneous atrocities. Bertolucci oddly goes meta, documenting the death of the human race — by way of Julian Beck and the Living Theatre. Relative nobody Carlo Lizzani hilariously lambastes modern culture for disaffection (a rape goes unnoticed, while a car wreck victim gets victimized all over again on the way to the hospital), while Godard (who was a slut for short film commissions like this; it’s hard to find a ’60s omnibus he’s not in) typically dialogues about love and war and the film itself. Best of all, Bellocchio chronicles the collapse of civilization in a classroom overrun by ‘Nam protesters. Bristly and mad as hell, the coalescent result is both a fabulous time capsule and a prescient rediscovery for contemporary anti-war movements — it pays to be reminded how furious and committed anti-jingoistic voices were way back in the day.
234/365: The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, 2013) (Vudu, Kanopy, Amazon, YouTube)
Political non-fiction cinema may not have ever come up against a challenge as formidable as the legacy of Cambodia. Only recently have filmmakers attempted to document or reconstruct what happened there between 1975 and 1979, a project akin to trying to photograph a memory even as it’s dissipating with time. This is because the Khmer Rouge had a rather unique, radically single-minded, hyper-Maoist agenda, to scour the nation of existing culture entirely. Movies, records, family photos, books — everything was torched. In four short years, the nation became a cultural crater, a black hole, the facts of social legacy all but erased. Panh, a childhood alum of the Rouge “rehabilitation” camps, has been fearlessly creative about reconstituting his country’s trauma on film, and this film explores life under the Rouge by juxtaposing the regime’s cartoonishly unconvincing propaganda films (in which the enslaved populace happily toil in the fields, and applaud their new rulers) with handmade clay-figure dioramas silently recreating Panh’s childhood memories of ritual, torture, labor and indoctrination. The childlike use of the clay figures is a profound and poetic device, both necessary (to replace personal documentary evidence that doesn’t exist) and inventive, particularly when the figures are caught mutely watching propaganda footage on tiny toy screens in a tabletop village square.
One of the takeaways of The Missing Picture is the inescapable void left by totalitarian destruction — if you destroy the materials of memory, eventually memory will die. Like Davy Chou’s doc Golden Slumbers (2011), another ghost chase in search of lost time, Panh’s has an urgency to it — the clock is ticking. This large project of cultural recovery has only gotten started — another doc, John Pirozzi’s Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll (2014), will surely not be the last film to attempt to reassemble the most thoroughly incinerated society of the 20th century. This is cinema, after all: life memorialized via the construction of stories.
235/365: Repeat Performance (Alfred L. Werker, 1947) (The Film Detective, Amazon, YouTube)
It’s little wonder that this adventurous Poverty Row oddball has been more or less elided from the various codifications of film noir, despite the marketing claims made for the new restoration, because though it shares some of the uber-genre’s classic tropes and visual moods, it’s an altogether freakier thing, written in the spirit of a Twilight Zone episode (by songsmith Walter Bullock — ? — from the cultishly beloved novel by William O’Farrell); focused on its heroine’s broken heart, not a crime; and briskly pivoting on an act of what-if time travel. Joan Leslie, in her first real adult part, is a stage star who shoots playwright-husband Louis Hayward dead, and then in a haze wishes the year that had led to that moment would start over — which it does. (A little like the last act of It’s a Wonderful Life!, but without the deus ex machina angel.)
She makes different decisions, confounding everyone, but then helplessly watches as her marriage, and the lives around her (especially maybe-gay-poet buddy Richard Basehart, who believes her mysterious story and ends up in an asylum), careen toward the same disastrous outcomes, or worse. How the two timelines differ is sometimes left mysterious (you half-expect Leslie to meet herself at one point), but the heroine’s earnest but doomed attempt to separate the awful 1946 she already lived away from the 1946 she’s trying to steer now, with Hayward at his most loathsome as her unctuous burden of an alcoholic spouse, keeps the film flitting anxiously along in a manner that’s unlike any other mid-century Hollywood film.
236/365: The Last Command (Josef von Sternberg, 1928) (The Criterion Channel, YouTube)
Von Sternberg is one of those auteurs we thought we had pegged — as Dietrich’s Svengali, as a petulant arch-expressionist wrestling with the studio system, as the artist who turned his ambiguous ardor for Marlene into absurd, campy sand castles of light and fetishized iconicity, and then wandered in the desert without her, creating dark fantasias out of lurid genre films (The Shanghai Gesture, Macao) that remain fascinating because of their wild wrongness. In fact, the Dietrich movies, which are slow and arch and extremely, knowingly silly, were a departure, a sea change for von Sternberg, who’d already worked on 13 movies before he met Dietrich, and who may’ve been first and foremost a silent film director. This isn’t unusual, given the nimbus that still lingers over the 1927–29 window, when it seems 50% of the greatest silent films, and therefore the greatest films period, were released, as if they were being rapped out in a pressurized creative flush before the apocalypse descended.
Under his hand dimensional space itself became a metaphor for the daydream fishtank of movie themselves, but in his silents there was also a degree of eloquence and mature observation that seemed largely evaporated once the microphones invaded his set. This Oscar-winner is the freak of the bunch, because it isn’t romantic pulp, but a deeply strange Hollywood tale, about the production of a film quite like The Last Command, for which a retired, traumatized Czarist general (Oscar-winner Emil Jannings) is recruited by the emigre director (William Powell) he persecuted years before. It’s a set-up pulsing with resonance, and the most textually loaded manifestation of Jannings’s patented humiliated-man routine. Dead-eyed and foggy, Jannings’s vacated majesty has never been more hypnotic (his spent, penniless hasbeen even has a palsy head shake), but then the film leaps into a lengthy flashback, which is nothing less than the stylized Russian Revolution film Guy Maddin always wanted to make, turning Eisenstein’s October, released a year earlier, inside out. Based roughly on the real post-revolution, film-extra studio career of one General Lodijensky, the movie is apolitical, and ends on an unlikely note of rueful honor. But it’s also really a residual love story, lost in the war.
237/365: Marjorie Prime (Michael Almereyda, 2017) (Vudu, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon, Pluto TV, Tubi, Sling TV, Apple TV)
Almereyda’s film couldn’t be smaller — four primary characters, one house, and a head-shaker of a central concept: a computer program that can create full-on hologram replicas of dead loved ones, for whatever purpose you may have for them. We’re plopped down in a lovely beach chateau between septuagenarian Lois Smith and spry 40s hunk Jon Hamm, sitting in the living room, talking, and only eventually do we realize that Hamm is the dead husband, as he looked decades before, created and summoned to ease Smith’s loneliness as she slowly succumbs to Alzheimer’s. Adapted from a play by Jordan Harrison, the film is very much a series of dialogues, about loomingly human issues — especially memory. Because the “Prime” program needs to be informed and taught about the person it’s duplicating, Smith’s Marjorie hears her own faulty memories come back as remembered fact, and then the forgetting starts all over again. This confounding arrangement is supported by Marjorie’s grown daughter Tess (Geena Davis) and son-in-law Jon (Tim Robbins); the movie ends up being about them, or about the family in toto, past and present, which encompasses a suicide, a misremembered succession of dogs, acres of narcissism and neglect, and now a swamp of bitterness.
Hamm’s Walter, in the present as a hologram, appearing and disappearing quite like a ghost, has to try to assimilate the knowledge that as a husband and father he was largely a piece of shit; Marjorie, freed from emotional responsibility by her illness, summons the memory of a dead son no one had mentioned in 50 years. Then the film jumps into the future, and Marjorie herself, dead offscreen, becomes a Prime talking-mate for the tightly-coiled and entirely unsettled Tess. (Teaching the Prime, she says, is not unlike talking to an Alzheimer’s patient.) The movie continues to leap forward, and suffice it to say that the Prime paradigm itself is an effortlessly slick metaphoric mirror for the uneasy relationships we have with the great triangulated slippages of human life: the inevitability of biological aging, the inadequacy of memory, and the unstoppable death march of time. Some of us might think we would like a Prime replacement of a loved one, but would we? Would our memories still grow unstable? Will, as the enigmatic end of Almereyda’s film suggests, technology outlive us all? Do you, or your memories, or your family history, really want to live forever?
238/365: Skullduggery (Gordon Douglas, 1970) (YouTube, Tubi, Amazon)
One of the more bizarre studio releases of the Nixon-‘Nam years, this shambling lark of a sci-fi adventure is more or less forgotten today, but its incendiary subject matter (the discovery of a “missing link” tribe in Papua New Guinea) extends, in a way, the bedevilling knot of issues inherent in Planet of The Apes two years earlier — namely, the far horizon of racism, what sociologists call “the Black-ape association” and the radical implicit equivalence of miscegenation and bestiality. Scammers Burt Reynolds and Roger C. Carmel Jr. glom onto an archeological expedition into the jungle interior, led by scientist Susan Clark; they find the “Tropis” — ape-people covered in golden-blonde fur (enacted by diminutive and otherwise nude Asian college students, plus singer Pat Suzuki) — and the evil machinations of white civilization begin all over again.
Enslaving the creatures for profit is reflexive for both Reynolds’s glib mercenary (whose real aim is to make a killing mining phosphorus) and the expedition’s millionaire funder, but eventually the larger issues of interspecies sex and the queasy fuzziness of the line between of human and animal are brought up. At one point, it’s revealed that the “regular” Papuans even roast and eat the Tropis, and at another a Black Nationalist character testifies in the climactic court case that the Tropis are, in fact, white. (Unsurprisingly somehow, the nutty script is, like Planet of the Apes, based on a French novel.) Shot mostly in Jamaica, the film is a glib mess about all of this weighty human mishigas, making light of even seducing an animal (“nice little figure under that fur,” Reynolds mutters), but the phobic debates about species mixture and the dire portrait of race-supremacist capitalism make it a crucial rediscovery.
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, 33
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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