Welcome to The Penny-Pinching Cinephile, a weekly spotlight of the best free flicks on the web. ‘Cuz sometimes you gotta eat.
This past Sunday, the international film community lost a giant, Alain Resnais. Over an eight-decade(!) career, the French filmmaker gave us exquisite masterpieces like Last Year at Marienbad, Hiroshima mon amour, Night and Fog and Je t’aime, je t’aime. Toute la memoire du monde (All The Memory in the World) is a documentary from 1956, profiling Paris’ Bibliotheque nationale and examining issues of memory, knowledge and the futility but necessity of humanity’s impulse towards cataloging and archiving all recorded history. Like the previous year’s Night and Fog, in Toute la memoire, Resnais employs incredible facility with mobile camera movement: the documentary is a testament to the thrilling visual power of the dolly track. Resnais’ camera glides and darts between book shelves, flies over sky-high stacks of newspapers and magazines, peering over every periodical in the Bibliotheque’s vast archives. This fluid camera work is coupled with playful off-screen narration that describes the library as a ‘fortress’ and the works within as its ‘prisoners.’ The Dewey Decimal System becomes metaphor for human neural pathways; the Bibliotheque nationale becomes the collective brain of all French knowledge, history, thought, endeavor, etc. Resnais’ film suggests that to attain true happiness, all one must do is file through a few library cards–if only!
When legendary Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz died in 2011, he had just completed his masterpiece, a four and a half hour epic of Portuguese history called Mysteries of Lisbon. Ruiz’s film is adapted from the sprawling 19th century novel by Camilo Castelo Branco, which traces the life of João, the bastard child of two ill-fated aristocrats, and his journey to find the real story behind his parentage. Along the way, we encounter madmen, pirates, bounty hunters, chivalrous pistol duals, long sea voyages and the Portuguese Civil War. Full of murky intrigue, delicious melodrama and, well, mysteries, Ruiz’s film is hypnotic and totally spell-binding, even at a bladder-busting 4.5 hours. Untethered from the confines of the theatrical experience, I encourage you to take a day–or even a weekend–and luxuriate in the rich and fascinating world of Mysteries of Lisbon. It is certainly one of the greatest films of the past five years, and destined to join the ranks of unmissable cinematic experiences.
3) Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
Jean-Michel Basquiat went from street graffiti artist to toast of the NYC art world, became best friends with Andy Warhol, worked with Blondie and David Bowie and created some of the most important and original neo-Expressionist paintings of the latter half of the 20th century. Then, in 1988, at the height of his popularity, Basquiat died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27. Already a rock star in the art world, joining the so-called ’27 Club’ cemented Basquiat’s reputation as eternal wunderkind and tragic genius. Director Tamra Davis met Basquiat in 1985 and most of the footage from 2010’s The Radiant Child is taken from home movies made during this period. Davis also features interviews with the people who knew the artist best, including Basquiat’s NYC art scene contemporary painter-turned-filmmaker Julian Schnabel, whose 1996 feature biopic Basquiat cast Jeffrey Wright in the title role. The doc is prefaced by Langston Hughes’ poem “Genius Child,” an apt description of Basquiat’s preternatural talents and meteoric rise to fame. The poem’s final lines seem to presage the young artist’s fate: “Nobody loves a genius child. Kill him–and let his soul run wild.”
Nicholas Ray’s 1950 film noir In A Lonely Place is a savage evisceration of Hollywood in which Humphrey Bogart (giving his best ever performance) plays Dix Steele (great name!), a hard-bitten screenwriter accused of the murder of a hatcheck girl he brings home one night. Like Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd from the same year, In A Lonely Place probes the intersection between art/films and murder via their shared space in the realm of “celebrity.” Gloria Grahame plays the aspiring actress who falls for Bogie, reinvigorating his creative mojo but also inciting his volatile temper, which invites plenty of speculation: did Dix do it? Meanwhile, the stress of the murder investigation slowly drives Bogie and Grahame apart. Ray’s refusal to give In A Lonely Place a typical Hollywood ending makes the film one of the most cynical (and therefore, eminently modern) films of the studio era. Featuring priceless vintage photography of post-war Los Angeles, Ray’s film is as beautiful as it is dark, as well as a high point in the careers of Ray, Grahame and Bogart and one of the gems of post-war American cinema.
If Alain Resnais represents the epitome of French cinema longevity, Jean Vigo is his antithesis. Vigo only directed four films in a span of five years before succuming to tuberculosis at the age of 29 in 1934. Zero de conduite, Vigo’s third film, made in 1933, is an anarchic middle finger to the stifling educational system which features a dizzying array of surreal rebellion in a French boy’s school. The powers-that-be in France flipped out, afraid Vigo’s free-wheeling schoolyard disorder would incite riots across the country’s classrooms and generally lead to the toppling of all French good sense; the film was banned until 1946. Although only forty minutes long, Vigo’s bracing visual style and unruly, independent-minded approach to controversial subject matter was a major inspiration for Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), as well as Lindsay Anderson’s public school insurrection/radical counterculture film If… (1968). Zero de conduite is also notable for canonizing the wonderful school-set movie tradition of giddy, chaotic pillow fights and cafeteria food-slinging.
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