The Art House Next Door: 6 Picks from Fandor

Every streaming service is a journey, and personally, I have been experiencing a heavy fatigue. Most digital streaming platforms favor content over quality, leaving viewers hanging in the void of indecisiveness, meandering endlessly from title to title in a cinematic fugue state. But do not be dismayed, fellow cinephile, for this very year, we at Movie Mezzanine are partnering with a service to guide us through the VOD wasteland. Fandor is on holy cinematic mission to “create a global community of film lovers and makers connected by meaningful and entertaining cinematic experiences.” Not only do they provide high-quality content, but the wonderful folks at Fandor offer a highly curated cinematic experience. It is loaded with hundreds of independent arthouse films of feature and short length, intensely categorized by filmmaker, region, genre, and theme, ranging from the early 20^th century to the modern-day. This service is the movie lover’s watering hole, where cinephiles can come to feast or where the average filmgoer can experience a respite in the art of cinema away from the multiplex.

I just began using Fandor at the end of 2014, where I watched my 10^th ranked best film of the year, The Strange Little Cat, and since then have fallen in love. I have finally found the streaming site to feed my love of cinema, offering me a journey none other service can. With its dense content, Fandor is a site that defies the mere “best-of” list, so to begin Movie Mezzanine’s affectionate partnership with this service, here are six very diverse films (3 features, 3 shorts) which represent my top discoveries of Fandor so far.

As of today we are pleased to offer Movie Mezzanine readers a 30% discount on a Fandor account. Go here to receive the deal, sign up, and try two weeks free on us.

The Strange Little Cat (2014) | Directed by Ramon Zürcher

Writer/Director Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat is a plotless slice of life piece about angles of the familial interior. As the lives of a German family converge within their apartment over a single day, it is quickly revealed that this film is not about this specific family’s arc. Rather, domesticity is the Mover here, embodied through the film’s human subjects. As the eccentricities of family and daily mundane-ities are seemingly heightened to levels of near-surrealism, when inspected their absurdity fades. These “strange” things are but simple happenings not unfamiliar to households around the world. Talks of vomit or dead rats, bottles spinning strangely in a pot or a coffee maker’s moaning brew, a child screaming for no reason or long-held, blank stares, these things are not unusual. It is Zürcher’s formal inventiveness that creates this space of domestic wonder and surreality. The camera is still throughout, holding on certain characters for minutes at a time. Frames are composed to communicate shades of domesticity – either in the human subjects or the layered fields of the apartment interior. In holding this gaze, Zürcher eschews human perspective, asking what vision of humanity would, say, a toaster or cat conceive if able, begging viewers hold their gaze a bit longer to see what lovely and strange eccentricities will bubble up from life’s surfaces.

Fata Morgana (1971) | Directed by Werner Herzog

I have an admission to make. Before I do so, hedge your judgment, I am but a fragile man of 26 years. I… just watched my first Werner Herzog film. I know, I know. I’m supposed to be a cinephile. I should have been eating Herzog for breakfast when I was 10. Alas, I did not. And If I’m lucky enough to continue on writing for Movie Mezzanine, there will be many more instances wherein I will beg your mercy for not having watched any single film from so-and-so, a certain cinephile-beloved filmmaker. I apologize in advance. Now to Fata Morgana.

For his third feature-length film, German filmmaker Werner Herzog wanted to make a sci-fi tale but instead ended up making an experimental quasi-documentary of the Saharan Desert. Slow, contemplative, and harsh, the only camera movements here are pans and tracking shots. In its precision, Fata Morgana presents the Sahara like an alien wasteland, ravaged by death (visualized in shots of animal carcasses) and soullessness (pans of the desert). These images’ sci-fi origins are evident as the tug of what it was and what it has become is tangible. (The film could rightfully be called Herzog’s Dune). Though most intriguing are the shots of literal fata morgana which, according to Wikipedia, is “an unusual and complex form of superior mirage that is seen in a narrow band right above the horizon.” From what seems like miles of distance, Herzog latches onto one specific iteration of the mirage where a car drives in circles within the hazy space where the sky meets the earth, an insect with a broken wing struggling back home. His camera lingers as if seeing something there other than what’s visible. Maybe the car is humanity seeking the transcendent? Herzog certainly doesn’t tell us, but that “otherness” is hinted at in the film’s structure: Part I. Creation; Part II. The Paradise; Part III. The Golden Age. This is Herzog’s creation/fall narrative, the thesis for his filmmaking to come. And luckily for us, Fandor secured exclusive streaming rights to 16 Herzog films, giving this monumental filmmaker a deserved VOD home.

Sita Sings the Blues (2009) | Directed by Nina Paley

If there is a film tailor-made for Fandor, it is most definitely Nina Paley’s 2009 film Sita Sings the Blues . Visually inventive? Check. Compelling, layered narrative? Check. Humanistic themes? Check. Unique, global perspective? Check. On top of all that, Paley’s film is pure independent cinema – completely audience-funded (attested to at the film’s opening title card) and distributed with extremely lax copyright restrictions. Paley essentially gave her work away, yet, in a true honoring of artistry, Sita has brought forth great payoff – critically and monetarily. The film is an exercise in interpretation, as Nina views one of her real-life breakups in relationship to the “Ramayana” – a traditional sacred Hindu text telling the story of Rama and Sita. Sita sings the blues as she experiences the denial of her devoted love to her man. Playing with form, Paley merges singing numbers (Sita singing old Annette Hanshaw-blues standards), actual episodes from the “Ramayana”, narration/conversations amongst three characters retelling the “Ramayana”, and Nina’s own relationship woes. The animation is beautifully homegrown, a labor of love from a woman fully invested in her material. From Paley’s careful and loving attention, an authentic tale of humanity is conceived revealing how all of our tales – ancient and modern – are connected by similar pains and joys.

Bimbo’s Initiation (1931) | Directed by Dave Fleischer

The visual gags in Dave Fleischer’s famous animated short Bimbo’s Initiation  are as plentiful as its constant and literal butt-slapping. (There really are a shocking amount of butts slapped within this 6 minute film.) Bimbo the dog becomes ensnared in a fatalistically inevitable madhouse of the strange and macabre, being constantly asked, “Wanna be a member?” by a group of candle-headed ninnymugginses (to borrow a phrase). He is chased and pestered through a sadistically droll set of traps and devices, all bent on breaking his will. But what is this organization that Bimbo is being asked to become a member of? Honestly, I’m not at all sure where this short stands in its historical context (what it was commenting on and why), but despite cultural dissonance, Bimbo’s seemingly never-ending running reminded me an awful lot of our culture’s need to be a member of something and businesses’ exploitative pursuits of the humans they service. Classic and inventive, this short shows that even in the younger years of animation, the art form was never dull but always a funhouse of imagination and wit.

Begone Dull Care (1949) | Directed by Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart

With its kinetically pulsating blend of three distinct mediums (music, painting, and cinema), this 1949(!) short film’s bursts of pure joy will certainly rid its partakers of any dull cares. I sat gleefully transfixed, tapping my feet and bobbing my head as the rousing jazz of Oscar Peterson was lathered upon the Jackson Pollock-like splashes of color literally painted onto the film. Now, I’m sure it’s certainly compelling to listen to jazz while gazing upon an abstract painting, but it’s a wholly other experience when the images move and dance free-form to compulsory jazzy infections. Thus it is cinema which is this piece’s life; compositions serving as composers, images birthing music. And this cinematic jazz is so alive that it is almost aware of its own self being pulled through the reel, reacting to the life-giving light passing through it. The effect is a deeply resonating joy. It is spiritual, Trinitariarian art: the Father Cinema; the Son the painted, incarnate image; and the Spirit the jazzy ecstasy. Rejoice, O Viewer!

Hub City (1997) | Directed by Bill Brown

Ask me what good has ever come out of Mississippi, and a deeply engrained list of idols will proudly flow out upon the waves of my Southern drawl: Oprah, Brett Favre, Elvis, William Faulkner, B.B. King, Jim Henson, Sam Cooke. With communal pride, we small-town Southerners hold dearly to those of us who make it big, thus the devastating grief when one of our famous is lost. Bill Brown’s 1997 student short film Hub City is a young man’s elegy. Reflecting on life’s brevity, he memorializes his hometown of Lubbock, TX through its idol Buddy Holly. The tragic death of this American musician by plane crash forces Brown to look to the sky as the vehicle for his lament. In its sparse stillness – frames gazing upon Texas landscapes – the film questions how humanity’s short-lived trajectories via a seeming cosmic fatalism can barrel in upon a place and change the memory and identity of a town. The film’s posture is most affectively visualized when, as Brown retells a destructive tornado hit upon the town, a medium shot of a state fair cowboy twirling a lasso invades the screen: God sending tragedy’s whirlwind upon Lubbock. Hub City subtly swept over me, turning that Texas sky which follows me home every day into a canvas saturated by the tragic colors of souls lost to the void.

As of today we are pleased to offer Movie Mezzanine readers a 30% discount on a Fandor account. Go here to receive the deal, sign up, and try two weeks free on us.