Kanopy is a streaming service
whose offerings overlap the Criterion Channel, and it’s free with a
participating library card. Here are a
number of titles that I found on Kanopy before anywhere else, starting with two
documentaries of highly-local interest.
Museum Town (2019, MC-57, website, trailer) is a well-made
portrait of MassMoCA in North Adams MA - a 19th-century factory
complex turned immense museum of contemporary art - with which I have been
peripherally involved since it was just an idea in the head of my Williams
classmate Tom Krens. I recommend the
film, but I recommend a visit to the museum even more.
The title of Hello,
Bookstore (2022, MC-74), website,
trailer) references
the way owner Matt Tannenbaum has been answering the phone at The Bookstore in
Lenox MA for forty years or more, becoming a community institution. There’s a reason he keeps his desk in the
display window of the store, since he’s the show, the draw that has kept the
enterprise going for all that time, and generated an enormous GoFundMe success
to survive the Covid shutdown. Back in
my day, there were three personal purveyors of new books in Berkshire County,
including yours truly -- and Matt is the character who survived, though after
Either/Or I’ve kept my hand in at the Clark, and Eric Wilska sold the Bookloft
but retains Shaker Mill Books, a wonderful used and rare store.
I happened upon one
documentary I’d never heard of, Look Away, Look Away (2021, IMDB), that proved to be well
worth watching. It covers the long
campaign to remove the Confederate insignia from the state flag of Mississippi Charleston
Kanopy has a lot more than
documentaries, and is worth checking for hard-to-find titles. Inspired by The Last Movie Stars documentary
series about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, I went in search of a Tennessee
Williams adaptation that I’d never seen, The Fugitive Kind (1960,
Wiki). Sidney Lumet’s film was certainly not
unmissable, but held my interest, largely for Joanne without Paul, paired instead
with Marlon Brando, as the guitar-playing drifter Snakeskin for whom the party
girl sets her cap, in competition with shop owner Anna Magnani.
There are even recent films
that can be found on Kanopy before commercial streaming channels. Benediction (MC-81) is a good
example, in which Terence Davies follows one quasi-autobiographical portrait of
a poet with another: formerly Emily Dickinson (played by Cynthia Nixon) in A
Quiet Passion, and here Siegfried Sassoon, played by Jack Lowden as a poet
of WWI and a bright gay thing of the interwar years, and by Peter Capaldi as a
cranky older man. Rich with visual
poetry and wit, the film is more overstuffed than trenchant, or even
comprehensible, but well worth watching.
A very notable find is Hit
the Road (MC-90),
a debut feature by Panah Panahi, who joins his father Jafar Panahi and mentor
Abbas Kiarostami in a distinguished line of Iranian neorealism, predicated on
patient, attentive looking in constrained circumstances. (Jafar now in prison,
Kiarostami in exile). So most of the “action”
takes place in a car with a family of four: gruff bearded father with his leg in a cast,
soulful white-haired mother, introverted twentyish son driving, hilarious six-year-old
son babbling nonstop, dog dying in back of SUV.
Traveling through painted desert landscapes to greener elevations near
the Turkish border, for reasons we learn only indirectly, just as we watch a
key scene transpire from more than a hundred yards away. Impeccably filmed in close quarters and in wide
vistas, enigmatic and comic by turns, warm and acerbic, tragic and joyful, this
will be hard for the director’s father to top with No Bears, when it
comes to streaming.
Kanopy also has a nice
collection of restored Buster Keaton shorts and features, amidst so much else,
and is definitely worth looking into if your library subscribes.
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