Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 19
By: Michael Atkinson
Tags: Science Fiction, Documentary, Brooklyn, Animation, Jean Luc Godard

A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming

128/365: Vivre sa Vie (My Life to Live) (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962) (YouTube, Criterion Channel, HBO Max, Kanopy)

Godard owned the 1960s’ generational mojo as no other international filmmaker did, with a run of some 15 masterpieces that rearranged our axons in considering movies not as an alternative to, an escape from, life, but rather life itself, as integral and luscious in the flow of our days as a sexual act or a game of tennis or a dockside lobster or you name it. Of course, history and politics and society are always autopsied as well in the process, even in this relatively small-framed but crystalline classic, a virtual dissertation on gender-exploitation ambivalence, as Anna Karina’s ocean-eyed gamine turns to prostitution to pay her rent, and the film documents her downward trajectory in twelve discreet chapters with a balance of pitiful fascination and icy critique. Sometimes overlooked in reconsiderations of Godard’s belle epoque, the movie is a formal gesture, spare on the surface but resonating with feeling. Sex work became here one of Godard’s ruling metaphors, but more importantly this is his second film with Karina and his first after their marriage, and the beautiful arc of their on-screen romance — thrumming for only a handful of years and a few films before collapsing and dying on the operating table that is 1966’s Made in U.S.A. — is here in its ardent-yet-questioning early stages. The justly famous sequence of Karina crying in the theater dark watching Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc is both a crucial thematic moment and a peerless paean to movie love. Godardians have no choice but to step up, even if you’ve seen it before.

129/365: Moon (Duncan Jones, (2009) (Hulu, Sling, Fubo, Vudu, Amazon Prime)

A ripe indie hit made by David Bowie’s son (born two years after his father recorded “Space Oddity”), this smart and cynical low-budgeter mashes up 2001, Silent Running, Solaris, Seconds, several Star Trek episodes, and even Bertolucci’s Partner, but that’s not a slam, especially since Jones managed to avoid a third-act chase-&-fight (between lonely moon-mining-operation manager Sam Rockwell and himself, essentially, brought together after one almost dies and his clone replacement is awakened prematurely). If you could hardly muffle the echoes of more original movies in your head, we can still agree that Jones’ attention to detail and to Rockwell are superlative; that the characterization of Gerty the station robot/computer (voiced, too familiarly, by Kevin Spacey) begins as far too HAL 9000-like but then shades into something more ambiguous; and that the doppelgangsterism meshes beautifully with the film’s anti-corporate thrust. An inspired touch that paid off long after the story became predictable was Gerty’s expression-delivery video screen, an image of a smiley face that often disingenuously gave away what Gertie was “feeling” even as he tried to deflect attention away from his human partner’s unanswerable questions. It’s a solid stretch of thinking-man’s sci-fi, if only done (as Jones has said in interviews) as a modestly-framed debut feature made before another, larger project he couldn’t get financing for.

130/365: My Friend Ivan Lapshin (Alexei German, 1984) (YouTube, SovietMoviesOnline.com)

There are plenty of candidates, but Alexei German might have been the globe’s greatest living barely-known filmmaker, the author of only five movies in a 30-year career that traded enraged spittle with every manner of Soviet and post-Soviet authority entity. This rarely-seen saga, based on semi-autobiographical stories from German’s father Yuri, chronicles life in a remote northern village at the onset of the Stalin era in the ’30s, where the dad and young son lived in a crowded apartment with, among others, a modest, taciturn, yet fearless police captain. “This will be a sad tale,” German’s narration begins, and he’s right about the sad part, but it’s not a tale so much as an act of time-travel. The restless, hungry camera is let loose on its own recognizance, roaming through that flat, around the frozen landscape and around the characters with less a thought toward cohesion than a passion for this life’s intimate textures, as it might be pieced together by a kid. Sudden deaths, mismanaged romances, memories of war, attempted suicides, drunken woes — all of it caught out of the corner of our eye, down hallways and amid drunken bustle, where Lapshin himself (Andrei Boltnev) is rarely singled out as the key figure. The sense is palpable that life under Stalin was compressed into a resonant communality. Reportedly revered by Russian critics, Lapshin doesn’t look like any other film (natural light is trusted to a disarming degree), and the respect it affords its beleaguered characters is Renoirian, if Renoir were a New Wave modernist who’d endured almost a half-century of Soviet stress.

131/365: Laws of Gravity (Nick Gomez, 1992) (Vudu, Tubi, Amazon Prime)

One of its decade’s rawest, most authentic indies, released within months of Quentin Tarantino’s decidedly unreal-LA debut Reservoir Dogs, Gomez’s nervous humdinger seems forgotten today, but in the day it was the more respected film — and the more convincing. Today it looks like an evidence file for a fading sense of American realness — the structural genuflection towards Scorsese’s aboriginal Mean Streets (1971) notwithstanding. It’s a bristlingly New York experience, dropping us like parachuters into a small, decidedly pre-hip Brooklyn community of goombahs, itinerant bums, petty crooks and beaten women, focusing on Jimmy (Peter Greene) and Jon (Adam Trese), two buddies teetering perilously on the edge of the outlawry but for two things: the bag of guns their smiling psycho of a friend Frankie (Paul Schulze) wants them to sell, and the inescapable fact that Jon is a violent nut, an accident that can’t stop happening. Hardly the Scorsese smalltime Mafiosos with Christ complexes, these are the kind of mooks who brag about knowing a “made” man and yet have to shoplift their toiletries. The brightest bulb in the room is Edie Falco, in her first sizable film role, as Jimmy’s wife Denise, turning a laser glare and a bitter tongue upon the collapsing mess of the characters’ lives. Which transpires with the handheld veracity of police footage — Gomez and his compatriots were mercilessly anthropological, and as it spurts out in complex, nervy, unbroken takes, Laws dares you to half-believe it’s completely unorchestrated. Crammed with non sequitur, side-life, select local fauna, and hilarious rivers of unaccountable slang — someone is called a “muckaferguson” at one point — the film is also, incidentally, the last glimpse of the Williamsburg of squatters’ floors, stripped cars, garbage lots, territorial graffiti, and lingering generations of Italian, Irish and Latino tribalism, right before fashion and gentrifying rents began to change it all for good.

132/365: The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (Kazuo Hara, 1987) (YouTube, Docsville)

“Kamikaze documentary” — that was the phrase used by more than one critic when Hara’s bristling, intensely odd film cut its recalcitrant swath through the world’s theaters in 1987. Life, as it happens, uncontrollable and chaotic, can be a documentary’s secret mega-weapon, and so it is with Hara’s film, a rough-and-tumble chronicle of the present life of a sociopathic moralist as he dramatically confronts postwar Japanese society. Kenzo Okuzai is that rare animal — an authentic anti-authoritarian who, because he’s willing to lose everything, cannot be intimidated or daunted by social norms and laws. By the time filming begins, the “anti-emperorist” Okuzai already has a long record of domestic resistance (including publicly pelting Hirohito with marbles in 1969, a notorious episode in modern Japanese lore), and is now committed to uncovering an illegal killing during WWII while his platoon was stationed in New Guinea. Investigating a murder that took place in the midst of the hellacious Pacific war of the ’40s has an ironic taste to it, but Okuzai is dead serious, and nothing stands in his way: demanding the truth be told, he routinely assaults and kicks his aging and sometimes ailing fellow veterans, who are naturally reticent to talk about 40-year-old crimes. He duplicitously presents his own family to the witnesses as survivors of the murdered soldier, and even pulls admissions of cannibalism from the old men. (They are more relaxed about sussing up to hunting the presumably more game-like natives for food; only when the Guineans proved too fleet and clever do the Emperor’s warriors resort to killing and eating each other.) Throughout, Okuzai carries himself with a bizarre mixture of polite Japanese stolidity and feverish anger; when the police deal with him (which is frequently), they are at a loss as to what to do — the man’s rampaging behavior sets society’s fragile structures shaking. Of course, Hara colludes with his subject (the film crew gives Okuzai’s crusade a legitimate feel), and reportedly the megalomaniacal Okuzai attempted to take over the film at several points.

133/365: The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Esfir Shub, 1927) (Kanopy, Amazon Prime)

Bullwhip documentaries tearing a ruling class apart can be easy — just compile a heap of self-promotional footage left behind by the rulers themselves, and let the judgments rain down like hail, a natural and inevitable autocritique. 2010’s The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu is the most recent and probably most punishing example, but the first of this subversive subgenre was this silent ribbon of agitprop, assembled by Shub (a pioneering early female filmmaker in the Soviet Union) out of the early-century castings left behind by the czar’s empire. In actuality the film has little to reveal about the Romanovs per se — they were not, apparently, a family given to home movies and “human interest” family newsreels — and sticks close to the ribs of a familiar historical tale: long-term injustice + lop-sided build-up to war + WWI in all of its hellacious derangements = revolution. But no film tosses up a window on what caused the Bolshevik uprising quite as intimately as Shub’s — Eisenstein’s grotesquely corpulent fat cats are here, too, but they’re not lens-distorted actors, just real politicians, millionaires and generals, with names. That many or maybe all of them had their heads on pikes by 1920 is Shub’s largest elision; here, the passage to full-on Soviet-ness happens bloodlessly, with a burst of flag-waving and happy marching. Still, insurrectionary fury and elan pulses out of the movie organically, and it’s a timeless vibe: much of what’s here was virtually reenacted as recently as the Arab Spring.

134/365: Sita Sings the Blues (Nina Paley, 2008) (Tubi, Vimeo, YouTube, Amazon Prime, SitaSingstheBlues.com)

Paley’s animated spree is pure anti-blockbuster — a one-woman, home-computer-fashioned animation that took years to make but may’ve cost nothing at all, with visual invention and ardor by the boatload. Paley tells the story of the Ramayana, an Indian folktale about love and betrayal and mistrust, full of demi-gods and demons, and she does it in over a half-dozen different distinct styles, including the narrational intervention of three ornate silhouette puppets, whose voices belong to three young Indians actually telling the story and deciphering it for gender politics and emotional truth. Part of Paley’s gambit here is her knack for synthesis — the cartoon myth is carried home by way of eleven old torch sungs recorded 80 years ago by Annette Henshaw, old classics by the likes of Irving Berlin, Fats Waller and Oscar Hammerstein II, each of them adorned with vibrating, loosey-goosey, crayon-box animated dance numbers-slash-music videos that capture something fundamentally fun about movies. But it’s her impish use of movement and iconography that sings. Watch the curvaceous, googly-eyed heroine shimmy across her 2-D landscapes, as well as Paley’s background business, a psychedelic explosion of dancing moons and synchronous butterflies and dreamy exaggerations, and you’ll get hit with a fresh dollop of visual wit every fifteen seconds or so. Never released to theaters but something of an online sensation, the movie is absolutely timely in its DIY aesthetic and reliance on nothing except its artist’s eye and sensibility.

Previous 365

Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18

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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