Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 7
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
43/365: The Dragon Painter (William Worthington 1919) (TVTime, YouTube)
An antique sample of outsider cinema produced within the American system, this forgotten film emerges as if returning from the underworld, where lost films are ordinarily consigned to flames. A gentle, unpretentious fable about a crazy hermit artist in the mountain wilds of Japan who, when he finds true love, loses his genius, the film is a historic remnant of a bygone age of specialized-audience moviemaking, when films (silent, and therefore without language barriers) were made with ghetto markets in mind. So, alongside the Yiddish cinema, the silents dedicated to Eastern European immigrants, and the post-slave-culture barnstormers of Oscar Micheaux, there was a subgenre of melodrama made in Hollywood exclusively for expatriated Asian viewers. This means Worthington’s film may therefore be the only American film we’ve seen from the first 60 years of the medium’s existence that treats Asian characters with respect and dignity. That is, until any of dozens of other films featuring its star Sessue Hayakawa emerge from the darkness — Hayakawa became famous again in 1957 with an Oscar win as the camp captain in David Lean’s The Bridge On the River Kwai, but in the silent years he was enough of a Hollywood star to warrant the formation of his own production company, Haworth Pictures, under which auspices this creaky oddball was made. Predictably, with the advent of sound, he moved his career to Japan.
44/365: Her Name Is Sabine (Sandrine Bonnaire, 2007) (Tubi, Kanopy, Amazon)
It is surely a first: an international movie star (Sandrine Bonnaire) making a patient, respectful, thoroughly un-narcissistic documentary about her own handicapped sister, and stumping for policy change as she considers painful mysteries about family and the passage of time in the process. It’s a simple, unpretentious piece of work — Bonnaire spends an enormous amount of time simply observing the managed-care home where Sabine, nearing 40, lives with a handful of other adults with varying modes and manifestations of autism. Slowly, Sabine’s history is dripped in — as a child, teen and young adult, she was different, “off,” but lucid, literate, energetic and capable of playing Chopin. She went without diagnosis for decades. As her siblings — ten of them — grew up one by one and left home, Sabine, robbed of stimulus, began to deteriorate; a series of hospital stays and hired nurses followed, and then a five-year-long institutional stay in which Sabine grew violent and was tamped down by strait-jackets and neuroleptic drugs. The filmmaker glosses over it, but Sabine, perhaps now permanently debilitated, was eventually rescued to a new facility that her famous sister had to raise money for herself, using her fame as an actress and festival celebrity. In her deliberately modest way, Bonnaire has a tiger by the tail here: searing pathos emerge from Bonnaire’s use of home videos shot by the family and by Bonnaire herself over the last 25 years or so, which are cut directly into segments of Sabine’s present-day existence, and the tragic contrast between them is bludgeoning, and not necessarily the complete result of her bad years of institutional care. When young, Sabine resembled her sister, and was clearly a tempestuous, fascinating, zesty whip of a girl, not at all unlike the reckless, trouble-seeking gamine Bonnaire made her global mark as, in Maurice Pialat’s A Nos Amours (1983). It could be a revelation, for serious students of Pialat’s depth-sounding movie: did the 16-year-old Bonnaire use her sister as a model, and was the film’s Suzanne intended to be slightly “off,” autistically disconnected in some hidden way from her family, helpless in her impulsiveness? It almost seems certain that Bonnaire was channeling her sister in Agnes Varda’s ferociously antisocial Vagabond (1985) — the existential tension of which could easily be read as an autistic crisis, or vice versa. Still, whatever the confluence of reasons that caused Sabine to devolve from a hungry, bright-eyed girl to the obese, slackjawed patient we see today, it’s a distillation of the costs of time on all of us. This comes to the surface when Bonnaire, perhaps somewhat brutally, shows Sabine the home videos of 10 or 20 years before, and we watch the torturous grief rise and fall on her sister’s face like ocean waves. Until it’s over, and Sabine asks to see it again, laughing.
45/365: Pocket Money (Stuart Rosenberg, 1972) (Vudu, Paramount +)
A quintessentially offbeat detour amid the American New Wave of the 60s and 70s, this neo-western farce is a conscientiously low-key dawdle written by “Terry” Malick and featuring Paul Newman as an unapologetically dopey and penniless Arizona livestock freelancer who accepts a shady deal to buy Mexican cattle and march them up across the border. Helping him is boozy, hedonistic negotiator Lee Marvin, in a filthy suit jacket and leather gloves; together, they spend most of the movie driving around in a shellshocked T-bird and wondering why the world doesn’t understand them. Sometimes the movie is so faithful to the characters’ reality that it loses track of its plot, but the Nixon-era, south-of-the-border sun-scorch is palpable, and the actors are clearly having a royal ball (you envy Newman, sharing a lazy film shoot in Mexico with Marvin). Remembered today only for Cool Hand Luke, Rosenberg was awake to the New Wave’s gritty, symbolic possibilities, and remains underrated. (He and Newman made a total of four films together.) This was a studio film, starring certifiable movie stars, and yet it has the shambolic air of an afternoon get-together, unpressured by narrative, disinterested in “arc,” and fond enough of its people to say, this is why we’re here. Those were the days.
46/365: Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008) (Tubi, MUBI, Sling TV, Amazon)
We’re in Kiyoshi Kurosawa-ville, a suburb of Japanese cinema that is commonly plagued by secret chaotic pressure, bubbling to the surface and causing cracks in the pavement. It begins when none-too-bright middle-manager Ryuhei (Teryuki Kagawa, swollen with anxiety) gets laid-off when his company decides to avail themselves of cheap Chinese labor. Kurosawa gets a curdled laugh from this in his typically smooth visual way: as Ryuhei exits the building with his bags of personal effluvia, he stalks distractedly toward a public square across the street where, revealed in the tracking shot, three other black-suited salarymen sit with their belongings, all equally lost. Like several other traumatized modern men in contemporary movies, Ryuhei can’t admit defeat to his wife, and he wanders the city for days pretending to be at work, meeting up with a seemingly unhinged friend from school who’s also been downsized and who enthusiastically embraces the masquerade lifestyle. Then, Ryuhei’s infrequently-seen teenage son impulsively decides to join the American military, just in time for the troop surge, and the younger son, all of 12, creates a mini-insurrection at school by calling a bullying teacher on his porn consumption (“Like a revolution!” his buddy crows as the classroom devolves into chaos). Soon, the friend disappears in a marching throng of homeless men; Ryuhei gets a job cleaning mall toilets, and sees his fellow janitor leave at shift’s end in a tidy business suit — everybody is lying about who they are. Slowly, the movie nudges into a classically irrational KK-esque realm when Koji Yakusho appears as a self-loathing burglar, kidnapping our hero’s befuddled wife and lighting out in a ridiculous stolen sportscar for whatever frontier they can find. Soon, the family’s disintegration seems to virally affect the whole city. Every one of Kurosawa’s shot has unpredictable layers and details, from the trains that continually plummet by the oblivious characters to the playful intimations of social collapse out on the streets.
47/365: The General (Clyde Bruckman & Buster Keaton, 1926) (Sling TV, Philo, YouTube, Apple TV, Vudu, Amazon)
What can be said? Keaton’s masterpiece has few rivals as untouchable canon-classic comedy, and today no reevaluation is necessary — it’s a perfect film, visually breathtaking, so confident and deft in its mise-en-scene that rewinding is mandatory, to see if what you thought just happened in real time actually did. Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. may be a more insightful metafictional creation, but The General is twice that film’s weight in physical wonder and heartbreaking heroism. No one else ever dared to use a very real, moving steam engine for slapstick comedy, and then destroy it at film’s end, in one of silent cinema’s most astonishing single shots. There is this, however: why hasn’t anyone, in this age of historical hyper-revisionism, pointed out that Keaton’s film demonizes the Union forces and heroizes, in a single-minded Hollywood way, the Confederacy and, implicitly, its defense of slavery? No one could suggest that Keaton, a Kansas-spawned vaudevillian born 30 years after the Civil War, was a slavery-nostalgic secessionist. Could they? What would you say the film endorses, politically? Could or should even this film, that most harmless and beautiful of film culture chestnuts, be stretched on the rack of historio-cultural correctness, especially in a BLM, post-George Floyd world? If not… why not?
48/365: Raining Stones (Ken Loach, 1993) (ShoutFactoryTV, Tubi, Amazon)
By far the most distinctive, profound and consistent filmmaker to work in Great Britain in the last 40 years, Loach is a hard-bitten ultra-realist, and a Socialist provocateur for whom social activism is more important than cinema. The ambitions and priorities of most American filmmakers look gauche by comparison. His Anglo realism is so convincing you can smell the low-rent rooms the actors inhabit; it’s an unparalleled deftness with naturally-lit docudrama veracity, objective camera manner, and the expressive grasp of off-frame space. Due to its palm-sized story, this Loach entry might be one of his more overlooked films — despite an almost obligatory Jury Award from Cannes — but it’s paradigmatic. Set in scrubby Greater Manchester, the movie trails after the hob-kneed efforts of one Bob (Bruce Jones) to earn a buck anyway he knows how on the bottom runs of the capitalist ladder. This starts, for us, as an episode of pratfall-packed sheep rustling; of course, nobody wants to buy the single sheep’s meat once it’s slaughtered. Bob’s troubles earning a living accumulate, but for him a single issue rises above the rest: the absolute need, in his eyes, for his young daughter to wear a new, expensive white dress for her first Communion. To make this happen, Bob scrounges work, scouts for scams and, eventually, makes the bad mistake of borrowing the money from a loan shark. The story could be about virtually any mishap, incident or even utterly passive moment in this man’s life — or in the life of his community — and we’d still buy it whole hog, because it looks and feels as real as the tenth worst day of your year. (Still, the bump-&-grind of colloquialism-saturated north-English accents makes the movie, like Riff-Raff and other Loaches, splenetically funny.) Loach tolerates no movie-movie bullshit like American indie-makers often claim to do; if only we had even one lone ranger in our native midst to fight so well the good fight.
49/365: Camp de Thiaroye (Ousmane Sembene & Thierno Faty Sow, 1987) (YouTube)
Sembene was the grand elder-pope of sub-Saharan African filmmaking, and this is his most expansive film, a perpetual motion machine of ethical ambiguity and confrontational tension that was also one of the first African films to explore contemporary native history, and the first Pan-African feature produced completely without European technical aid or co-financing. With this Algerian-Tunisian-Senegalese co-production, in the late ’80s, West Africa could truly be said to have its own film industry. It’s a raw and subtle saga, shot in Sembene’s classical, methodical style, that excavates an repressed episode of down-home horror from the days following WWII. What actually happened at Camp de Thiaroye in 1944 could be read as an abstract of colonialist friction; it conforms so expressively to the themes of Sembene’s earlier films going back 20 years that one could be tempted to suspect he fashioned it from whole cloth. The film centers on the Senegalese infantrymen (drafted to fight on behalf of their colonizers, the French) who returned from the war expecting to be repatriated to their individual villages; instead, they were instead sequestered in the eponymous transit camp, and made to feel more like POWs (several are Buchenwald alumni) than victorious soldiers. It’s a purely political dynamic — not ever terribly personal or psychological — so each character occupies his own point along the scale stretching between collaborationism (a raw idea right after the fall of Vichy) and unbridled revolution. As the voltage between the dispirited men and their French guards rises, culminating in the seizure of the camp by its prisoners, Sembene’s reconstructed history lesson takes on the bitter menace of the familiar “Great Escape” prison-camp genre feeding upon itself like a cancer. Of course it climaxes in a massacre — dated in a title, Nov. 30, 1944, 10 Hours — which Sembene portrays with a hellish brio that’s as close as he’s ever come to hyperbole.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
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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