Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 18
By: Michael Atkinson
Tags: Werner Herzog, Opera, Albania, Surrealism, Bollywood

Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 4, Week 18

A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming

120/365: Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005) (Tubi, YouTube, WatchDocumentaries.com, Amazon)

This beloved doc is Herzog’s first authentic found-footage movie — the majority of the footage was taken by Timothy Treadwell, the amateur conservationist and budding tele-zoologist who was killed and eaten by a grizzly bear in 2003. Unmistakably Herzogian, the film nevertheless is the work of two men, two competing visions, two antithetical agendas. Indeed, Herzog admits admiration for Treadwell’s video work, considering him more of a compatriot than a subject. A failed actor, ex-surfer, and soul-searching recovered drinker, Treadwell found satisfaction and meaning spending 13 long summers living unarmed among grizzlies in Katmai National Park. Since 1999, he videotaped his adventures, shooting the beasts hunting salmon and mating, and filming himself for hundreds of hours talking about the bears to the camera as if he were in fact taping a television show. His shade-wearing, sandy-haired dude persona, complete with high-pitched kid-show delivery, is compelling, particularly when one of the 800-pound animals he so childishly praises creeps up behind him on camera. Its clear that Treadwell, alone and self-sanctifying in the woods with only a lens to talk to, identifies more with the bears than with the society that had in effect exiled him. Famously, Herzog doesn’t share the audio of the killing (in which Treadwell’s girlfriend was also torn up and eaten), but instead grimly listens to it on camera, and then instructs Treadwell’s surviving ex-girlfriend to destroy the tape immediately. Fascinated though he may be by the beauty and hellfire of natural forces, Herzog is no naturalist; his career project reflects a bitterly pragmatic view of nature as ravenous, amoral and empty-headed. Regarding the bears only as deux ex machina within Treadwell’s bizarre saga, Herzog asserts again one of modern moviedom’s wisest, plainest humanistic sensibilities, sympathetic to man’s neverending war with the planet but aware that the struggle will always draw ambiguous blood. Treadwell is simply another lost foot soldier, killed in the ongoing collision between human obsession and untamed reality.

121/365: The Mikado (Victor Schertzinger, 1939) (Criterion Channel, YouTube, Amazon)

Opera on film has always been a sticky widget — the two uber-forms go together like elephants and hippos, cluttering up the same waterhole. The lone notable filmization of the Gilbert & Sullivan arsenal, this film not only captures the spirit of the original British stagings of the operetta, but also employs the original D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, which debuted most of the G&S works and staged the catalogue in London and worldwide for over a century, from the 1870s until it finally closed in 1982. The name D’Oyly Carte is enough to send any Gilbert-Sullivanian into a salivating swoon — theater is by definition a transitory art form, but Schertzinger’s movie provides fans with the only imperishable artifact connected to the original Savoy opera productions. It’s self-evidently a stage production, but at the same time, a subtle effort is made to manifest the space of Titipu in ways that no stage production could manage. (It was released in the same year as the equally Technicolor Warner release of The Wizard of Oz, and several characters, including Sydney Granville’s Pooh-Bah, look and behave like inflated Munchkins.) The story — a forbidden love between Ko-Ko’s designated ward and fiancee Yum-Yum and Nanki-Poo, the undercover wandering son of the titular Japanese emperor — is ironic fluff and treated so in the operetta, and its sense of sardonic absurdity certainly rescues the film from any retrospective accusations of exoticism or Orientalist caricature. We could balk if we wished at all of these Anglo-Saxon actors with slanty-eye make-up and outrageous pidgin-English accents, but The Mikado is nothing if not a play and film about 19th-century Britishers, and a scathing farce about how the Brits saw ill-explored Asian cultures, and about the British royals. The faux-Oriental design of the sets is like a deranged, half-informed child’s idea of Japan, down to the mysterious presence of a giant Buddha, whose retractable belly becomes a hiding spot deep in the story. In 1939, that meaning stood, but as something nostalgic — as WWII loomed, the foibles of Victorians and the matter of fading empire were almost quaint satirizables, bid farewell with the merriest, literally, of how-de-do’s.

122/365: Clean (Olivier Assayas, 2004) (Vudu, Amazon)

Assayas’s film, like virtually every major film about scag users and their long haul out of the darkness, is a movie made at a remove, and out of fascinated pity. He crafts a bitter, spot-on poison-pen sketch of the airless, stenchy subterraniums of the fringe rock world, down to the bad hygiene and inveterate dream-spinning, and Maggie Cheung (a winner at Cannes) stalks through the film’s cellars, all-night diners, cretinous fashion strokes and nimbus of cheap ideas with a guileless awkwardness, never fitting in and aware of being loathed. When we’re introduced, her Emily Wang is already a low-level never-was — a failed post-New Wave diva in England’s grimiest clubs, and companion to a genuine has-been (James Johnston), the two of them caught in the perfectly rendered state of whining anxiety about scoring that eventually besets all junkies. The worms turns once Johnston’s mealy-mouthed lout buys the farm on some dodgy dope, and Emily does time in Canadian prison. Once out, she’s kindly kissed off by her dead boyfriend’s dad (Nick Nolte, in a masterfully grave and sympathetic performance), and attempts to reconstruct her life while weaning herself of drugs, for the sake of a son she may not see again. It’s a film of frustrated meetings, humiliations and petty struggle — working in a Parisian Chinese eatery, eating crow with successful ex-partners, hawking a demo tape made in stir, attacking an acquaintance’s medicine cabinet in a moment of emotional collapse. A woman without a country, Emily is a square peg and a lousy actress — on methadone, the effort to craft a normal conversational response is palpable; off it, the tension of being straight makes her creepy. Cheung and Assayas famously signed their divorce on the set, and the circumstances could only have added to Cheung/Emily’s fierce unlikability. Hitting the ground in his ultra-naturalistic mode, Assayas only uncages his star’s formidable smile once or twice, never demanding our empathy, making Clean a uniquely pungent portrait of dependent personalities and the strain they put on the social weave.

123/365: The Forgiveness of Blood (Joshua Marston, 2011) (Amazon, Apple TV, YouTube)

An adroit, acerbic, visually eloquent, ethnographic Eastern European drama, of the kind regularly crafted by festival-beloved filmmakers in Romania, Russia, Poland, and the Balkans — except that Marston was a youngish Californian, whose first film, Maria Full of Grace (2004) was set primarily in Colombia. This film is set deep in the rocky soil of Albania, where modernity struggles to get a foothold, and ancient traditions linger like genetic malformations. The opening shot, behind the credits, is the first tip of the dominoes: a horse-drawn cart crosses a field, diagonally across the screen, along a weedy path, until it meets a line of large rocks, placed as obstructions. Simply, the gruff father (Refet Abazi), accompanied by his high school-age son Nik (Tristan Halilaj), gets out and moves the stones, and all is well until later, in the local watering hole, Nik and his father are chided and vaguely threatened by men at another table — the rocks were put there to prevent just such trespassing. The next time the bead-selling cart passes that same spot, the owner and Dad exchange some tame words we understand to be boiling over with ancestral menace and spite, and in a time-leap cut, everything has happened. We learn as Nic does that his father returned with his uncle to the owner’s land, there was a fight, and the owner died on his own knife. No one knows exactly what happened, because Nic’s father is in hiding, not from the law so much as from the dead man’s family, who will in accordance to tradition kill any grown male member of the family in retribution. So Nic is suddenly sequestered, imprisoned in his own home, as the blood feud begins and quickly festers. The family faces destitution, the dead landowner’s family tries to turn the community against them, and Nic’s teen sister Rudina, played with tense serenity by Sindi Lacej, puts herself on the frontline by quitting school and hustling bread and cigarettes from her father’s cart. The focus is on Nic and his generational angst, stuck in a terminal trap that follows tribal rules first coded in the 15th century. The blood feud particulars, especially once the village elders get involved in the mechanics of seeking a truce, is always fascinating, like an ancient logistical ghost haunting the present.

124/365: Zanjeer (Prakash Mehra, 1973) (YouTube, Amazon)

To watch this aboriginal Bollywood blockbuster is to be bodily transported to a very particular cinemanic place and time: the moment when the Indian film industry, already one of if not the world’s most prolific, fully recognized its crazy commercial potential outside of a set of popular genre frameworks, and galvanized the world’s second largest population into a movie-mad frenzy. A rough-and-tumble crime saga oozing with moral indignation, Prakash Mehra’s film instituted a new wave in Indian pulp movies, at a time when Indian society itself was plagued by corruption, post-colonial difficulties, and a sluggish economy. The poverty-stricken lower classes seemed to be just getting larger and poorer, and social discontent was in the air, and this film channeled the Indian proletariat’s frustration and rage, with a tale hinging on insatiable vengeance and chockablock with brawls, executions, persecutions and righteous kick-ass. Famously, star Amitabh Bachchan became a generational icon, a pure-hearted and fearless “angry young man” whose ethical balance was only compromised by how he disposable he thought the rules of law and order were if they got in his way. The film looks different, too, apparently made in a state of panicky, breathless emergency, without the slightest minute to spare on cinematic niceties like establishing shots, steady zooms, and tidy shot-counter-shot close-ups. By 1973 it was already a movie culture that did not prize smoothness, continuity or convincing illusion, in the Hollywood vein — rather, Bollywood movies prized propulsive forward motion, totemic emotional peaks (no visual or aural emphasis was too strong), and theatrical soap-opera hyperbole. They also, famously, prioritized musical dance numbers, five of which stop the plot of Zanjeer dead for more or less extraneous folk dancing and “filmi” songs, some last six minutes or more, a dynamic that sounds trying but is actually the most entertaining part of almost any Bollywood film. Here, once Jaya Bhaduri (the future Mrs. Bachchan) begins dashing around warbling “Get Your Knives Sharpened,” changing outfits in mid-song, you know that whatever disasters will befall the characters, the visceral energy of movies will prevail.

125/365: Woman Is the Future of Man (Hong Sang-soo, 2004) (fShareTV, Amazon)

Famed as a kind of South Korean Woody Allen figure, Hong’s first movies were bitter and often chillingly sad. This, his fifth film, is still focused on twentysomething Korean urbanites and their untethered life path of power-boozing, disconnection and romantic failure. More often than not, the men are treacherous louts — “You’re all animals,” Sunhwa (Sung Hyunah), the inevitable vertex of the new film’s triangulated anti-menage, morosely says at one point. We first meet two grown school buddies as they reunite for drinks after several years; Munho (Yoo Jitae) is a married suburbanite with a huge mortgage, while Hunjoon (Kim Taewoo) is returning from years at a U.S. film school. In the first of the film’s patient set-pieces, Hong sits the men in a noodle shop booth for almost six solid minutes, engaged in a conversation simmering with resentment and hostility. Hong then leaps backward to Sunhwa, who after another old boyfriend’s off-screen rape is gently left behind by Hunjoon; we leap ahead again to the restaurant booth, and back again (Munho linked with Sunhwa in his friend’s long absence), until the two drunken semi-friends, somewhat reluctantly, decide to visit their old girlfriend, each harboring their own secrets and each obliviously at a loss as to what Sunhwa might want from them years after the fact. Often, Hong’s two lonely fools don’t quite know what they’re thinking, either — the film can sometimes come off something like an introverted Carnal Knowledge with two Jack Nicholsons. Hong’s film cuts from one flashback happy, flirty meeting between Munho and Sunhwa to a follow-up sex scene in which they can barely tolerate each other, show-jumping over months or even years and illustrating with a thwack the melancholy dissolution of sexual ardor.

126/365: Viva la Muerte (Fernando Arrabal, 1971) (Midnight Pulp, Kanopy, Amazon)

Once upon a time, the magical, hedonistic dream-train of Surrealism came, in the ’20s, and then summarily left the station. But then in the 60s, it enjoyed a kind of resurrection — Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor founded the neo-Surrealist “Panic Movement” in Paris, which manifested, as these kinds of things used to do, in theater performances, movies, books, and heaps of public outrage. Jodorowsky’s films were widely seen and argued about, but Arrabal’s films are even more “Panicky,” or subversively profane. Shot mostly in France, Italy and Tunisia, Arrabal’s films are not polished art objects, but, deliberately, anarchic spit-shots in society’s eye, chockablock with taboo tableaux and violative juxtapositions. The Panickers, like the Surrealists before them, spoke in terms of liberation, of sundering social restrictions and defying power. It’s always been a questionable approach — who’s being liberated, from what, exactly? — but Arrabal’s films are the closest either movement came to a legitimate political act, confronting as he does again and again police force, military might and capitalist decadence. The problem is, the alternatives he offers are ridiculous, and the pagan vocabulary he uses absurd — but you don’t go the Surrealists of any era for answers or solid argument. You go for the brio of adolescent resistance, the messy nuttiness of life and culture lived (or attempted) outside of civilization’s bell jar, whether or not it makes sense, speaks a truth or gets a little too involved with Catholicism, farm animals and feces. Arrabal skirts the line in this, his first film, an autobiographical sketch about a boy with rampaging Oedipal problems growing up during the Spanish Civil War and after his father was murdered for being a Communist. More to the point, it’s a roughshod stew of subjective dream imagery — genital mutilation (fake), slaughtered animals (real), crucifixions, sexual play, random violence, nude children, etc., all solarized with video colors and shot with the bull-headed thrust of a mushroom-addled teenager determined to piss off his parents.

Previous 365

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

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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