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:
The Unspeakable Act (Dan Sallitt)
Anyone familiar with the critic Dan Sallitt (and especially his deeply idiosyncratic, running list of favorite films by year) could likely imagine what his films might be like even without seeing them. The Unspeakable Act does not try to hide the clear importance the artist ascribes to Éric Rohmer, using its aesthetically restrained but thoughtful composition to ground a muted romantic comedy. Though the romance is complicated by the fact that it occurs between a smitten teenage girl and her protesting brother, the film’s humor is driven by neither farce nor cynicism but droll observation. In the process, it proves that “literary” is a term best applied to cinema not for grandiose, stretched-out narratives but for quiet communication that can be traced in posture and glance as much as speech.
The Last Bolshevik (Chris Marker)
Marker’s wry cinematic collages provided a glimpse into what Soviet cinema might have looked like had Stalinism not neutered its early aesthetic ambition. Fittingly, his documentaries often examined the failure of communism to live up to its ideals, and maybe the best of these films was The Last Bolshevik, nominally centered on suppressed filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin but more broadly about the tragedy and betrayal of an entire generation of enthusiastically political filmmakers being hung out to dry by a regime that decided to bury their zeal rather than risk it inciting people to resist their new controllers. Filled with sly jokes at the expense of the censors’ innate absurdities, this story can nonetheless only be a tragedy, and only the director’s haunting sci-fi photoplay, La jétée, exceeds it for emotional heft.
A Spell to Ward off the Darkness (Ben Rivers and Ben Russell)
This loose triptych of abstract stories is linked by a protagonist (Robert Lowe) who peripatetically searches for a place to belong. Broken down to its basics, the journey is simple, moving from a small commune of free-loving, open people to total solitude, and finally to a heavy metal show in a small Norwegian dive bar. But it is in the minute pillow shots and inquisitive camerawork that the film transfixes, be it in the childlike energy of bobbing shots of the hippies frolicking in the nude or in the extreme close-ups in high-definition of snow crystals forming and being crushed as the man wanders the Scandinavian alone. The highlight is the finale, which may be the only depiction of live music ever made that truly makes the viewer feel like they are there, the camera eye lolling in agony and ecstasy with the distorted noise bleeding out of speakers and obliterating nuance into one electric scream. Watch it with the best audio setup you can.
Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (Fritz Lang)
Feuillade may have invented the modern crime film with his Fantomas series, but Fritz Lang perfected it with the first blockbuster, a swollen yet propulsive behemoth that displayed all of the German director’s silent innovations. Expressionist art direction turns the world into a manifestation of crime lord Mabuse’s psychological (and just psychic) machinations, while breathless editing makes four and a half hours seem like two. Superimpositions and juxtaposition craft meaning, while Lang readily proves himself the all-time best director of throngs, mobs comprising undulating, reaching arms gesturing together in hive-mind desire. As added incentive, note that Fandor’s version runs a full half-hour longer than the existing Kino DVD.
Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas)
Those only familiar with Olivier Assayas’s elegiac middle period may find the pure energy of Irma Vep surprising, but then again that love for post-punk didn’t come from nowhere. A metatextual New-New Wave treatise on acting, the film revisits the foundational French epic Les vampires but recasts the crime caper into a ghost story, a flicker show of its own past self as a new age of action cinema renders such things obsolete. Maggie Cheung manages to bridge the two worlds with her alternately befuddled and sultrily confident performance, slipping between the tedious post-neorealism of everyday drama and the freed, post-sync sound, black-and-white universe into which Cheung slips when she gets into her avatar’s character. The film itself struggles to reconcile her transdimensional voyage (check the moment where the frame erupts into scratches, doodles and white noise), but Assayas believes in the flexibility and tradition of acting to unlock otherwise long-sealed realms.
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!
