Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 4
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
22/365: The Quince Tree Light (Dream of Light) (Victor Erice, 1992) (RareFilmm.com)
Only Spanish master Erice’s third feature film (after The Spirit of the Beehive and El Sur), this masterpiece bears a title that’s understood as what they call the morning glow in early autumnal Spain when the light hits the ripe quinces in a certain way. Erice’s film is after that light in an almost radical way: he patiently tracks the creation of a single painting by hailed Madrid artist Antonio Lopez Garcia, a still-life of a quince tree in the artist’s small courtyard. Garcia is an old-school brand of craftsman, too, and the process takes many weeks; a lengthy and wordless opening sequence follows Garcia as he prepares his canvas, positions his easel, mixes his paints (at first, for a preliminary color study), fashions a plumbline (to determine the exact center of his composition), and even drives nails into the dirt so he’ll stand in exactly the same place every day. Garcia has an entire battery of almost totemic habits (including marking the fruit and leaves themselves up with paint), the reason for all of which becomes apparent as the film bears on. Erice intercuts Garcia’s attentive work with visitors, his wife’s daily ministrations, and a team of laborers fixing the walls in Garcia’s old house, and the effect is a genuine experience of life and art that movies rarely if ever produce. Not a true documentary any more than it is a “narrative” film in the traditional sense, Erice’s film is a meditation on creation and on the life that must surround it; Garcia is never put off by the human traffic, or even the often contentious weather. It’s all part of the process; Garcia says that just being close to the tree is what matters, and you sense that was true for Erice as well.
23/365: Riot (Buzz Kulik, 1969) (YouTube, Amazon)
Produced by William Castle as, undoubtedly, an effort to capitalize after a fashion on Roger Corman’s women’s prison exploitationeers and Cool Hand Luke in the same stroke, this cheap and gritty potboiler exhibits the residual influence of experimental theater and one-camera TV dramas, but remains resolutely devoted to drive-in pulp. Like the makers of Easy Rider that same year, Castle and Kulik decided to make a prison-break movie using mostly real convicts and guards, on their own turf (namely, the Arizona State Prison). Jim Brown is “the man” the croony R&B title song warbles about, a surly con who just wants to do straight time in an old-school, sun-blasted institution prone to corporeal punishment and confinement, but a full-scale uprising, led by megalomaniac Gene Hackman, scotches his plans, sucking the even-tempered, strong-willed hulk into a leadership role he doesn’t want. The arc of the story doesn’t move quickly, but there’s an interesting tension between Hackman’s real scheme — hold hostages and make demands as if in protest, while digging a tunnel out past the wall — and his succumbing to the lures of power and political bargaining. The film’s texture is rough and uneven — unsurprisingly, since only seven of the actors in total were professionals, and hundreds of real inmates and prison personnel essentially played themselves, including a handful of drag queens and Arizona State’s Warden Frank A. Eyman as himself. The often clumsy acting, then, has an unavoidable veracity to it; these are real men, enacting their own daydream of rebellion and escape, and the prison locale itself is virtually a character all its own. In his scene-chewing prime, Hackman naturally steals the film with his pugnacious energy.
24/365: Timbuktu (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2014) (Tubi, Vudu, YouTube, Amazon)
Mauritanian director Sissako’s film is a gorgeously simple, mythic look at a madly complex subject: the 2012 descent of Islamist militants enforcing sharia law in Mali. The Islamists, including Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, betrayed the Tuaregs after their rebellion in the north of the country. They began a siege of persecution, intolerance and torture that lasted the good part of the year, before being itself suppressed by the army and French forces. But Sissako leaves the politics out. Except for the film’s title, we’re given precious few clues as to where we are, and what spurned the Kalashnikov-touting jihadis to embark on their crusade. Mostly, we’re presented with a ravishing landscape that is much as it’s been for millennia, forcibly confronting the modern age. Likewise, he focuses on humble, old-fashioned, subsistence-worker Malians as they weather the absurd impositions and pious violence. Which isn’t severe; Sissako’s film goes easy on the Islamists’ actions. They most often cajole and threaten, and sometimes wither in the face of robust women and tribal recalcitrance, bedevilled by the simple absurdity of coming to these desolate places and insisting on these ridiculous rules. For their part, the militants are not always sure of themselves, and at least one of them is a shrugging opportunist, sneaking cigarettes and using his new power to try to get close to the wife of a farmer. (When he tells her, smiling, she should cover her hair, she simply tells him not to look.) The film’s rhythm doesn’t build to a crest of outrage, or even construct a straight narrative. Rather, it patiently and in no progressional hurry bops from one scenario to the next, tracking the downward spiral of the farmer, a loving family man guilty of manslaughter (an incident unrelated to the jihadis), but digressing to other scenes and gentle acts of resistance. Soccer is outlawed, so players play with an invisible ball. Singing is outlawed, so the Malians sing and dance in praise of Allah, leaving the militants comically confused. Sissako can be romantic about his West Africa — Timbuktu’s golden sandscapes are as improbably beautiful as his people are sweet-natured. But the filmmaker’s respect for Africans’ buoyant forbearance in the face of oppression is spot on. The jihadis did, eventually, fade away, just as the French colonials did decades ago, and life has gone on.
25/365: The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1965) (Apple TV, Amazon, YouTube)
One of the keystone projects of Lumet’s early post-TV-drama period, when Actors Studio-trained thespians flared their nostrils in super-close-up, slate-sky black-&-white commanded the urban landscape, and Sociopolitical Meaningfulness was always right under the skin. Based on a novel by Edward Lewis Wallant, this brooding, dark-dream chamber piece, released just a few years after the Eichmann trial, was one of the first instances of a Hollywood film seriously tackling the Holocaust in general, and absolutely the first to make the “secret society” of survivor trauma its primary subject. Famously, Rod Steiger is the bottled-up, post-menopausal Auschwitz alum managing a bedraggled pawnshop in Harlem, trying to keep order in his pennyante microcosm while being confronted with real people with desperate needs every day, and approaching implosion. The performative archness and early-Lumet emphasis is everywhere and forgivable, as is the heavy symbolism of the security caging of the pawnshop, making every shot a view through zoo bars, the shadows of imprisoning wire and steel mesh filling the frame. What’s vivid is the degree to which Steiger’s Nazerman, because of his past, lives in an entirely different 1965 New York than every other character — and the film is eloquent about the separation. Steiger, with his sad eyes hidden by the shadows of his eyeglass frame, is most effective when he doesn’t fume and seethe, but the whole cast pales before the nuanced and crystalline sincerity of Geraldine Fitzgerald, as an earnest charity solicitor who seems to want more from the recalcitrant Nazerman than he can give. An Oscar-built pathmark in the growth of American postwar cinema, Lumet’s movie does not seem ageless, but it doesn’t need to as a fact of history.
26/365: 5 Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi, 2011) (Tubi, Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon)
An eloquent, eye-opening Palestinian-view personal account of the Israeli settlement process, this doc was begun by Burnat in 2005, when he was simply a resident of olive-farming, settlement-encroached Bil’in on the West Bank videotaping his family and baby son. A separation wall was being built, and Burnat began taping his village’s fearless protests, which are routinely repelled with gas grenades and open gunfire. As the title suggests, Burnat goes through several cameras inhabiting the front line between Palestinians with banners and rocks, and Israeli soldiers who think nothing of shooting children, destroying homes, and — on tape — holding down a protester and unloading a rifle round into his leg. Years pass, as they do for us reading the news, but here you get a rare glimpse of exactly what the interface between West Bank resident and the Israeli army has been like — that is, it’s a free-for-all, where the Palestinians are regarded as little more than scrub wildlife to be shunted aside for the sake of the relatively wealthy Jews happily moving into their new settlement condos. Honestly, the very act of burning Bil’in’s olive trees at night, which the settlers routinely do, is a bald admission of malfeasance and injustice no cant about “security” can mitigate. In five years of filming, we see Bil’in go from a green, hilly village to a bulldozed construction site, and Burnat himself finds himself in harm’s way scores of times. (His cameras are sniper-shot off his shoulder at least three times.) The film is even-tempered because Burnat is, seemingly, and so the Holy Shit feelings of outrage are all ours, ignited by firsthand footage you’ll never see on network TV or described on the New York Times editorial page.
27/365: It All Starts Today (Bertrand Tavernier, 1999) (Amazon)
Cursed with a resume free of sensational style and thematic homogeneity, Tavernier may be the most consummate among movie culture’s under-sung masters, and he bears down in this drama, a rambunctious, maddened portrait of a kindergarten principal (Philippe Torreton) trying to do right by his students in a small French town fraught with systemic poverty, unemployment and abuse. Look how Tavernier shoots it: his roving camera is, terrifyingly, often a what’s-that step away from the action, and approaches it in a panicked run (along with the principal) when it’s a little too late. Just a handful of such moments gives the movie a ballistic urgency, so that every day at pick-up and drop-off we expect the volcano to blow. Torreton is his own kind of volcano; forever erupting in Capitaine Conan, here he boils, his violence successfully lidded by an impeccable professionalism. Focused on Torreton’s Daniel, as at ease with the children as he is responsibly confrontational with parents and social service workers, the movie is essentially didactic, down to its repetitive episodism. The script, cowritten with longtime teacher Dominique Sampiero and Tiffany Tavernier, is not full of mounting tension alone; its shapelessness is neatly masqueraded by the director’s prowling presence. There are purposefully joyful interludes, but Tavernier supplies the sense of secret doom it’s hard not to get about some children — what do you do when parents neglect their kids? Dynamic but preachy (there are plenty of free-form Loachian policy discussions, and much of the cast are actual teachers), the movie has no answers where there aren’t any, and that’s the final source of its outrage.
28/365: How to Get Ahead in Advertising (Bruce Robinson, 1989) (Criterion Channel, Amazon)
Robinson’s an odd duck — he began as an actor, making a splash Zefferelli’s hit Romeo and Juliet (1968), but eventually began writing instead, getting Oscar-nominated for The Killing Fields and, in 1987, attaining more or less instant cult status writing and directing the semi-autobiographical Withnail & I, an oddly shaped comedy about two unemployed actors and their Herculean drug and booze consumption. This comedy is his definitive statement, a manic satire that brilliantly hones the amorality of an entire industry down to the trials of a single self-destructing man, and, more specifically, to a single, troublesome pimple. It’s not just any “boil” (in Brit parlance), popping up on the shoulder of one Denis Bimbleby Bagley (the inimitable Richard E. Grant), but a massive pustule that eventually grows a face, a voice, and a point of view. Bagley is of course engaged to write a commercial for a pimple cream he knows doesn’t work, and the cognitive dissonance precipitates a full-bore nervous breakdown, eventually manifesting physically as The Boil (voiced by Robinson), whose bottomless cynicism and right-wing bitterness aims to settle all of Bagley’s interior conflicts and eventually replace him, or his head anyway, as the living spirit of consumerist manipulation and evil. It’s a wicked lark, with teeth, but it might not have flown without Grant. Essentially discovered by Robinson for Withnail, Grant was immediately a unique species of character actor, a demonic, laser-eyed, bone-thin demiurge with the face of a vampire, the hapless zeal of a sugar-hopped grade-schooler, and the hyper-enunciated vocal delivery of a Shakespearean thespian teetering on the brink of dementia. Here he is the central and only attraction, crazily snarling through the scenario in varying degrees of hysteria, and breathlessly bullet-training through Robinson’s dialogue, which as dense as it is maniacally hilarious. The dissonance Denis experiences derives from a simple realization, pronounced in this film for perhaps the first time: that consumerism and advertising do not seek to satisfy desires, but instead to keep those consumer desires perpetually unsatisfied. Why wouldn’t such a purpose drive an intelligent man mad?
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3
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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