Fandor’s ever-increasing selection of well-curated films can be daunting for new and long-time subscribers alike, especially given the obscurity of most of the selections. With that in mind, we select five films every week available for streaming to promote for viewers who might be unfamiliar with the works in question, or unaware that movies they’ve had on watchlists are available for legal, high-quality viewing. Check out this week’s picks below.
Green Snake (Tsui Hark)
This punkish wuxia is a thrilling comic action showcase, with the kung fu cranked to such absurd levels that hardly anyone walks in favor of flying and fists tear the air with such force that they produce tidal waves. But beneath the sparring is a scathing indictment of religious sanctimony and the social repression it engenders. A kung fu master monk, the hero of any other film, is here the villain, indiscriminately hunting down animal spirits regardless of their intentions of joining humanity and hiding his sexual insecurity behind radical notions of purity. Meanwhile, two snakes become human women and react to the mortal world in different ways: one attempts to assimilate but has her humanity defined by regressive attributes like pregnancy and desirability. The other rejects this way of life so thoroughly that she can barely retain her human form for want of returning to her old life.
The Strange Little Cat (Ramon Zürcher)
At once the scariest and funniest film of its year despite being neither a horror film nor an outright comedy, The Strange Little Cat is a compressed formal experiment that boasts some of the most evocative use of off-screen sound space this side of Bresson or Kiarostami. Awkward camera angles leave most of any given body outside the frame, turning a family cooped up in a modern apartment into synecdochical segments in thrall to the industrial roar of the whirring comfort appliances around them. The title is misleading: the cat, who wanders around the home being absentmindedly tended to, or simply ignored, by the humans, is the least strange character in the film, but then that may be because we see and hear everything else through its perspective.
Dark Star (John Carpenter)
Future horror icons Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon get their start with a bizarre science-fiction comedy about a ship invaded by a sentient beach ball with fur on it. If anything, the crew, trapped on this decrepit vessel for a miserable sublight journey through deep space, is enlivened by the prospect of chasing after the thing. Soon, they find themselves locked in philosophical debates with sentient bombs, disarming them not with wire cutters but epistemology. The whole thing is ridiculous and low-rent, but you can see some of the odd charms of both its makers. Carpenter would parlay the economic filmmaking shown here into a spate of atmospheric classics, while O’Bannon would rework the premise of a working-class ship dealing with an extraterrestrial for his script for Alien.
Ornette: Made in America (Shirley Clarke)
America lost possibly its last remaining 20th-century musical genius when Ornette Coleman passed away last week, and Fandor is paying tribute with this excellent documentary on the man from underground filmmaker Shirley Clarke. Structured around Ornette’s belated Texas homecoming, the avant-garde prodigal son returned to a parade in his honor, the film attempts to reflect Ornette’s “harmolodic” approach to music by delving in and out of impressionistic visions and editing juxtapositions that clash initially but slowly reveal cohesive sense. By the time he died, the saxophonist had either won over or simply outlived his loudest critics, but to see him hear, humble, amiable but fiercely intelligent and observant, it’s impossible to take seriously ever again the notion that he was just a fraud squawking away on his horn.
Concerning Violence (Göran Olsson)
Olsson follows up his found-footage splice The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 with another salvaged documentary, this time trading domestic American racism for the complex aftershocks of Western imperialism in Africa. Narrated by Lauryn Hill, who reads passages from Frantz Fanon’s study The Wretched of the Earth, the film juxtaposes images of various struggles across Africa with footage of the last vestiges of white colonists, showing how the civil wars of the former were informed by the callous, controlling attitudes of the latter. Instead of portraying the violent outbreaks that resulted in the social upheavals of post-colonialism, the film uses Fanon’s radical text as the basis for an argument for the righteousness, even necessity, of violence in resistance.
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