Karina on SpoutBlog

Thanks in part to the ever-impressive professionalism of Delta Airlines, I didn’t arrive in Cannes until after Martin Scorsese’s big announcement that his World Cinema Foundation (newly executive directed by Kent Jones, who collaborated with Scorsese on Val Lewton — The Man in the Shadows) would team up with Criterion, B-Side and The Auteurs to align the cause of film restoration with emerging models of online film distribution and discussion. And not having much time to read press releases while overseas, I didn’t realize until I returned to New York a couple of days ago that fruits of the collaboration are already tangible: there are currently four WCF films streaming for free on The Auteurs. And not knowing anything about any of the four films, I decided to watch 1964 Berlin Film Festival Winner Dry Summer last night. Trying to sum up the experience of spontaneously watching that film on my laptop, completely blindly without any real knowledge as to what I was in for, two words immediately come to mind: Holy. Shit.

The black-and-white Summer tells the story of Osman, a mustachioed farmer who builds a dam to keep the water supply on his hilltop land from flowing down to the villagers below; and Hassan, his younger, studlier brother, who marries the beautiful Bahar. Osman, a widower, is sexually frustrated to the point of psychosis; by night he sheepishly spies on his brother in marital bliss, by day he struts around shirtless, clearly wielding the dam as a surrogate for his dick. Eventually, the brothers’ conflict with the villagers over the water becomes violent, and Hassan ends up in jail. Osman manipulates his brother’s absence to get closer to Bahar, enslaving her with her own longing for Hassan. In one memorable scene, Osman asks his brother’s wife to climb a ladder while he stands below, looking up her skirt at her giant bloomers whilst lasciviously slurping yogurt; in another, Osman saves the woman’s life by sucking the venom out of a snake bite in her leg … and then keeps on sucking.

I can’t imagine a better argument for the relevancy of this project than a film like Dry Summer, which turns any and all notions as to the stodginess of old, foreign, lost cinema on their head with good old fashioned sleaze. Yes, as the first Turkish film to earn acclaim in Europe, it’s unquestionably “important,” and with its surprisingly agile cinematography and brilliant traditional guitar-meets-freakout free jazz score, it looks and sounds like art. And yet, the film was originally released in England under the title I Had My Brother’s Wife for a reason: for large swaths of its 88 minute running time, Dry Summer’s anti-greed parable seems like nothing but an excuse on which to hang the kind of over-the-top sexploitation that marked the American B films of the same era.

If the twin shining strengths of the Internet are its unmatched function as an archive, and its ability to cater to any prurient whim quietly, privately and efficiently, then what better way to launch the merger of museum work with Internet consumption, than with a film that’s simulataneously undeniably worthy of archival efforts and also totally, thrillingly base?