Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 9
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
57/365: Lola Montes (Max Ophuls, 1955) (HBO Max, Criterion Channel, Amazon)
Isn’t everyone an Ophulsians? Are there any anti-Ophulsians? The filmmaker’s baroque orchestrations and wide-screen embrace hit a pinnacle with this famous swan song (Ophuls died two years later, only 54). For Ophuls, the legendary demimondaine and golddigger of the title (the Irish-born, cigar-smoking dancer and bedmate of both Franz Liszt and Ludwig I) is only the iconic statue-figure in, literally, a vast circus of mythmaking, gossip-mongering, distorted history and entertainment-industry salesmanship, and it seems appropriate that this is Ophuls’ final film, because it cynically lambasts the essential untruths at the core of mass entertainment as mercilessly as Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians. It’s a frantic, arresting experience, with more than its fair share of swoony advocates; virtually all alone in the ’60s, Andrew Sarris claimed that it was the greatest film ever made. Today it is glowing in the warmth of the new Ophulsianism, as are The Earrings of Madame de…, La Ronde and Letter from an Unknown Woman. (In any case, by 1972’s Sight & Sound poll, Sarris placed in second behind Madame de…) Even if you prefer Ophuls’s twin noir home-runs of 1949, The Reckless Moment and Caught, this film’s climactic, full-blown carnival-mockery remains a one-of-a-kind folly, a movie that takes as its subject the very unknowability it insists we viewers tolerate in the narrative’s historical figure, and the very eruption of showbiz chicanery that’s supposed to distract us away from substance and, in the film itself, almost does. Ophuls’s famed romanticism is buried in this torrent somewhere — Lola (the full-figured Martine Carol) emerges as a tragic figure mostly by virtue of the heartlessness of the machine that operates around her, be it show business or the patriarchal social order — but mostly it’s a bitter, beautiful pill the size and hue of a five-pound gumdrop.
58/365: The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009) (SundanceNow, Vudu, Shudder, YouTube, Amazon, Apple TV, Kanopy)
A revered entry in Haneke’s majesterial late-career passage, this sumptuously-black-&-white film is a brooding, Bergmanesque portrait of historical tragedy in which something terrible is happening and we’re never quite sure what. But of course, we’re pretty sure it’s the children — Haneke’s movie is originally subtitled “A German Children’s Story,” and while the homicidal disasters that befall the tiny, pre-WWI Mitteleuropan village could be anyone’s doing, the blonde, oppressed herd of Protestant children are the most likely suspects (to us) and the most actively suspicious. It’s a gripping, secretive film, and the fact that the filmmaker keeps the “plot” unresolved is perfectly in keeping with his moral position — Haneke is a terrorism scholar, a comeuppance expert, and here few prime-mover venalities are left out for the village’s men, particularly the village pastor (who hogties his son rather have him masturbate at night) and the widowed doctor, who uses his 14-year-old daughter for sex. So the children fight back, off-screen and with implacably innocent faces, like the unseen hand of an entirely different God. The movie’s elusive metaphoric idea is made plain by a single line of narration — years after the events depicted, the narrator suggests that they “may cast a new light on some of the goings-on in this country.” We reflexively take this as the rise of National Socialism, of course, an idea that seems too neat at first but expands the more you ponder it.
59/365: Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1975) (Criterion Channel)
The most fabulous and fascinating thing about Pasolini’s notoriously terminal film is its intractability, its single-minded evasion of traditional matters of visual pleasure, narrative, spectator experience and thematic thrust. It’s a film with only a metaphorical agenda to recommend it, a movie that seeks to be repetitive and depressing and inhumane for the sake of its metaphors. Is this all to its credit, or not, and why or why not? Every viewer will have their own answers. Pasolini’s initial idea, apparently, was to film Sade’s book straight, as an 18th-century debauch which would helplessly excoriate the indulgences of old-time aristocracy. But then it occurred to him to transplant the action — four noblemen sequester themselves in a manor house with a herd of young boys and girls, and indulge their every sadistic whim — to Salo, the northern Italian town in which a post-arrest Mussolini was placed by the Nazis in 1943, and where the new, short-lived Fascist government was formed, becoming a semi-forgotten cesspool of power abuse. The timeless litany of humiliation and violence, perpetrated by the four implacable old gargoyles upon a platoon of teenagers (all between 15 and 18), include bondage, rape, coprophagy, torture and mutilation. (None of the action is either hardcore or snuff-ishly “real.”) Pasolini, perhaps sensibly, films it all with deliberate gracelessness; there’s not a single titillating or exciting moment amid the stiff-legged mayhem. There is no arguing with Pasolini’s sincerity — Salo is simply too dour, too dogged, too joyless to be mistaken as pulp or pornography, which is why, I suspect, it has disturbed so many. However offensive you may or may not find it, the movie is effectively soul-depleting, and in the end rather mysterious. Part of its mystique has been Pasolini’s still-unsolved murder, mere weeks before his film’s premiere, which lent the work a scary kind of requiem cachet.
60/365: Television under the Swastika (Michael Kloft, 1999) (Tubi, Vimeo, Kanopy, YouTube)
The sunnier side of fascism, if you will, is visible in all of its banality in this German TV doc, making use of the exhumed 35mm footage broadcast on Third Reich television beginning in 1935. The Nazis didn’t quite invent TV — otherwise, there’d have been no mention of it in Hollywood fluff like International House (1933) — but they were the first to get it up and running as an industry and as a social phenomenon, beginning with light entertainment broadcasts to “television parlors” frequented only by the Reich’s creme de la creme, and eventually using it to record and broadcast the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The near-instantaneous spontaneity of TV made it at first of little use to propagandists (Goebbels was horrified by his own unrehearsed image), and so the footage here paints a doubly-greasepainted portrait of Nazi life: cooking shows, housewife training films, rallies, dance acts, and uncontrolled footage of Der Fuhrer processions succumbing to large-crowd entropy. Propaganda can be beautiful, too — as with the wartime footage of five one-legged runners, all wounded vets, humping enthusiastically over a track-&-field obstacle course, in a vision not even Monty Python could’ve matched.
61/365: Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, 2013) (Netflix, Apple TV, YouTube, Amazon, Kanopy)
Carruth’s second film, this elliptical, deliriously metaphoric indie comes at you in gorgeous fragments, like an aggregate of incidents glimpsed while passing in and out of consciousness. The movie begins with plants, the discovery of nematodes in the soil, teens getting high, a mysterious man stalking strangers in public places. The surface story, once you unravel it, is pure symbology: the mysterious man (called The Thief in the credits) uses the nematode as a brain-washing agent, and soon enough Tasers a woman, Kris (Amy Seimetz), and forces the bug down her throat. She is thereafter hypnotized, selfless and receptive to controlling suggestion, leaving The Thief to hole her up in her apartment performing rote activities, as he systematically strips her of money and assets. Eventually abandoned, she wakes up in a wrecked flat to find worms under her skin, her internal organs scarred beyond repair, and her material life stolen from her. Then things get strange — Kris is saved from her infection via a blood transfusion with a piglet, managed by a sound recordist/pig farmer (“The Sampler”), who has astral-projective powers (or is he a deity?), and whose farm in the undeveloped outskirts, we eventually learn, is something like the nexus of the odd pharmo-entomological dynamic we’ve tasted. Which is in fact a cycle, both natural and toxic, but before that becomes apparent, Kris becomes pursued romantically by Jeff (Carruth), a somewhat shady single man who seems to have been through something similar to Kris’s traumatizing ordeal, and so may be responding to that same wound in her. Together, they attempt to commit to some kind of relationship, while retaining a metaphysical bond with the pigs, and while the predatory blue-secretional-nematode cycle seeks to restore itself through the water table… The film is intended as a tactile experience of essentially poetic ideas, of modern disconnection and biophysical insecurity and existential doubt, and the clarity of these anxieties is bruising and stunning; in its near-abstracted fashion, the movie howls painfully about contemporary loneliness, the dense unknowability of the social edifice, the dread of corporate poisoning, the unmooring of human beings from what was once a fully natural world.
62/365: Sophie’s Place (Lawrence Jordan, 1986) (Fandor, YouTube, Amazon)
Nobody’s films come packing so many spontaneous ecstatic moments, in a recognizably and rapturously gorgeous context, as Jordon’s. His prodigious output has been dominated since the ’50s by collage animation, a style of which he is the undisputed pioneer. His signature trope is the use of images from 18th and 19th-century engravings, cut up and animated into ballets of semi-subconscious epiphany. Usually scoring his mashups with classical music, Jordan conjures dense, busy, unpredictable worlds cluttered with giant butterflies, automatons, angels, anatomical drawings come to life, Victorian damsels, flying orbs, hyperventilating stars, metaphysical light bursts, sentient balloons, disembodied limbs, phrenology figures, and so on and so on, layering on each other and connecting in physically specific but still mysterious ways, playing out cosmic dramas of unknowable tension before us. Because we never quite understand the laws that rule Jordan’s universe, we are children again, gasping at interpolations and visual explosions that defy our expectations and yet seem to make a particularly beautiful kind of sense. Terry Gilliam couldn’t have happened without Jordan, and if you consider Gilliam’s Monty Python cut-out cartoons ingenious, then Jordan’s poetic hurricanes will make you dizzy. The particulates of Jordan’s aesthetic aren’t easy to parse — the 19th-century antiquarian world most of the films inhabit and evoke is both ravishing in its ancient distance and kitschy in its familiarity. In 1980, Jordan tried to answer the “why old engravings?” question by in part saying, “they’re good actors, photograph well, and the original artists have paid enough attention to depth-illusion to give me an atmosphere in which to stage my visions…” Which perfectly sums up the graphic strength on hand. Jordan’s feature-length “alchemical autobiography,” and his magnum opus, Sophie’s Place is fin-de-siecle fever dream brimming with hundreds of inexplicable ascensions, and just the length, scale and inventive mass of the movie places it amongst the greatest full-length avant-garde films ever made. What’s it about? Wrong question. It’s about you watching, and falling into the dream.
63/365: Gigante (Adrian Biniez, 2009) (Amazon)
A gentle Uruguayan indie with Kaurismakian flavor notes, this dry comedy focuses on a lonely, obese and uncommunicative supermarket security guard (Joracio Camandule) in Montevideo gradually emerges from a dead-end routine and becomes engaged by life due to his crush on one of the cavernous store’s cleaning women (Leonor Svarcas), whom he observes only through surveillance cameras. Biniez’s full-frontal camera placement and precocious sense of waiting for something bad to happen in any given shot are the real action, because the characters are numb and sullen, and most of the story is made up by watching. Literally, Camandule’s sleepy-eyed, hulking hero spends most of the film trying to breach the divide he feels between himself, in the store’s surveillance booth, and the store’s after-hours action, which he monitors like an impassive God but cannot get the nerve up to enter. Thus, it’s a deadpan-romance sibling-film to Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, and a part of a lineage that began with Rear Window and may become, in the oncoming decades, one of the dominant social dynamics of our world, the tension between watching others, being watched and realizing that neither is the same as living. Camandule’s lug does engage, eventually, and Biniez keeps the falling dominoes — from decimated toilet paper display to nose punch to the crisis of lay-offs to a store-wrecking frenzy — at a satiric distance, making us wait out the suspense or discomfort of uncertainty in every off-screen moment. It’s a strategy the hero suffers as well — at one point, suspicious of a liaison involving the girl, he tries to follow her from one camera view to another through the back halls and stairwells, and loses her somewhere in between the “windows” of seeing.
Year Four Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
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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