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:
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan)
Despite its grueling pace and sparse ornamentation, Ceylan’s anti-mystery demands, and invites, multiple viewings. The first rewatch helps clarify the seeming gaps in its spaced-out narrative, but after that you can just wallow in the exceptional beauty of the compositions. Ceylan and cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki do not overstuff frames, typically providing a clear point of focus surrounded by copious amounts of unobtrusive background, yet they nonetheless block and angle so precisely it feels as if they are balancing innumerable objects in any given image. Ceylan would make up for the many silences of this film with the exceedingly talky Winter Sleep, but it is the vacant chill of Anatolia that best establishes him as a major contemporary filmmaker.
Cléo from 5 to 7 (Agnès Varda)
Varda has placed her warm, witty personality front and center in many of her documentaries, but her charm bubbles to the surface even in this fictive tragedy, charting a few hours in the life of a woman faced suddenly with the certainty of her death. Varda introduces Cléo the way leering men might see her: cut up into fetishized features and cat-called on her way to receive her cancer diagnosis. Soon, though, Cléo is scrutinizing and criticizing herself so much that even the most invasive stares of others do not penetrate her own tortured self-regard. The film does not wallow in misery, however; though it tries on New Wave introspection, the film regularly diverts into elegant, almost musical moments of dazzling camera movement and sprightly music in reveries that bask in the brighter side of dwelling on one’s thoughts. As a bonus, a divertissement in the form of a fake silent starring Godard and then-wife Anna Karina is the best, gentlest work of criticism that director ever received.
Waxworks (Leo Birinsky)
This anthology film brings three mystical-horror shorts together in an Expressionist frenzy that is unfairly overlooked when discussing classic films of that movement. The first segment, starring Emil Jannings as a corrupt sultan, is more amusing than anything, especially with Jannings mugging shamelessly. The final segment, devoted to Jack the Ripper, is classic silent horror, using the jerking motion of 16fps to excellent and unnerving effect. But the most affecting of the shorts is the one with Conrad Veidt as Ivan the Terrible. Veidt is no less manic as the other two stars, but he channels his energy into self-consuming paranoia, and despite all the frightening imagery of the film, nothing unsettles as much as shots of Ivan frantically, superstitiously resetting an hourglass to stave off a death by poisoning, eventually working himself into such a mechanical state that he just rotates the air around him.
Poison (Todd Haynes)
Haynes turns gay stereotypes and social stigmas against themselves in Poison, exaggerating the hyperbole and willful ignorance of the response to the AIDS crisis. Divided into a triptych, the film takes on wildly differing aesthetic approaches in each section. The second uses b-movie kitsch to illustrate the public perception of AIDS, using putty makeup to craft gruesome disfigurations related to sexual diseases, while the first unfurls as a social issue documentary, delivered in the drained, lecturing tone of a public-service announcement. Haynes would return to this method of filmmaking nearly two decades later, when he adopted that fragmented, aesthetically variable approach for his superb non-biopic, the prismatic Dylan feature I’m Not There, but the freeform experimentation seen here underpins even his most straight-laced features.
Computer Chess (Andrew Bujalski)
Bujalski’s recent feature, Results, trod audience-friendly territory but also sported a vaguely off-kilter edge that can be traced back to the outright alienating energy of this strange, sui generis film. Using old tube video cameras to replicate the feel of early public access television, Computer Chess uses esoteric yet foundational modern technology to film the same. The decidedly analog birth of digital possibilities permits the director to explore, aesthetically and thematically, the no man’s land between two opposing poles, and the nebulous feature that follows mines great comedy from the sheer discomfort of every second of footage. Yet it is, at heart, a portrait of a myopic, passionate group of professionals, and in that sense, the doughy and undersexed programmers of this film adequately set the stage for the toned and horny fitness trainers of Bujalski’s latest.
If you’re interesting in watching this week’s top picks on Fandor, use your Movie Mezzanine coupon for an exclusive discount and access to a breathtaking library of cinema!
