Quickies, Vol. XXXI

The Double Life of Véronique (1991, dir. Krzysztof Kieslowski) – A film that continues to challenge and provoke. Struck this time around by the very immanent nature of Kieslowski’s transcendence. Zizek thinks Kieslowski finds “God” a cosmic sadist (to use C.S. Lewis’ term), a rather mean child who toys with his creation for his own entertainment. Then Zizek goes on to perform neo-Lacanian analysis of Kieslowski’s own life (not his person, mind you; his life history), which renders his film theory very theoretical indeed. To boil down this film to something so dismissively simple seems quite unfair. The filmmaker here certainly toys with the notion that the Divine may not be purely gracious, but Kieslowski seems rather to suggest that it’s humanity’s idols that are vacant of grace and sovereignty, not the Great Other Himself. So the film constructs false gods in order to tear them down. On the other hand, the film also ends on a distinctly terrestrial note. For being so transcendent in nature, Kieslowski is a man of the earth.

12 Monkeys (1995, dir. Terry Gilliam) – A wild ride, and one that deserves more than it typically gets. Having not seen a ton of feature-length adaptations of short films by different filmmakers, it’s probably not worth much to say that this is one of the best of that variety. Here, though, the colors, the lenses, the sets, the shots, and the music create something superbly surreal. What the film says about reality and sanity hearkens back to Gillian’s earlier Brazil, this time tapping into something more quintessentially “Nineties” in all of its end-of-the-millennium paranoia. Just when you think you’ve honed in on who the truly “insane” are, you’re thrown a curve ball. The crazy revolutionaries are too crazy really to be crazy. It may be the scientists, the professors, the intellectuals that are truly mad. Undoubtedly.

Somewhere (2010, dir. Sofia Coppola) – The grand prize at Venice? Unanimously voted? What else was showing at Venice? As Wife observed, this film reminds one of Maeby’s classic line in Arrested Development when it’s inadvertently suggested that she end a film with two characters walking across the ocean: “No, deep is good. People are going to say, ‘What the hell just happened? I better say I like it,’ because nobody wants to seem stupid.” Being one of those who appreciated Lost In Translation and even Marie Antoinette, perhaps we can state with some degree of credit that Somewhere seems to go out of its way to be “arthouse,” begging even lovers of Terrence Malick and Wes Anderson to use the big “P” word (pretentious) in describing Sofia’s latest. Yes, it’s wandering, fluid, elusive, exploratory; and not explanatory, straightforward, or all that structured. The point being made is not a difficult one, but the film presents it as difficult. This is essentially the definition of the “P” word.

Akira (1988, dir. Katsuhiro Otomo) – Animated dystopia at its best, probably, but who watches much of it? Seems like such a time warp into the 80s, not to mention a space warp into Japan. Put those two together and you get something so huge and ideologically influential (not to mention aesthetically) that there are probably countless dissertations out there on the subject. The myth at the narrative’s center is easily the most interesting aspect of the film. After years of waiting for their god to resurrect, they stumble into the definitively postmodern fact that god is dead and guys with money have just been perpetuating the image of his existence for all this time.

Fanboys (2009, dir. Kyle Newman) – By geeks, for geeks, via geeks. A flatly objective satire on Star Wars followers would have equated them, ultimately, with Star Trek nerds. Instead, Fanboys, despite utilizing William Shatner himself, shamelessly betrays its preference for all things Lucas. This makes the project all the more endearing, and is probably exactly what led Shatner to agree to it (recall his infamous SNL rant). Those behind and in front of the camera are perfectly tuned into the confused sexuality of these tools, which not only disarms the films critics but gives the film’s social awkwardness that special ingredient of self-consciousness.

Galaxy Quest (1999, dir. Dean Parisot) – Actually watched this one the night before the aforementioned. As a former Trekker/Trekkie/whatever-they-want-to-be-called-these-days, Galaxy Quest really is the Star Trek equivalent of Fanboys. It is the equivalent in the sense that Trek people really are a more social crowd: gathering at conventions and submerging themselves in team heroism, too busy to flip their noses at Star Wars people. (Arguably, they know that Roddenberry could no more take down Lucas than the Gorn could take down Kirk.) Made for an older crowd than Fanboys, Galaxy Quest is a bit more laid back and takes even its satire less seriously than the former.

Vengeance Is Mine: New Wave of Blood

Between

Shohei Imamura undoubtedly constructed the film Vengeance Is Mine precisely so that many critics would take a variety of readings on it. The Freudian reading is easy enough, and the social commentary, too. One thing that stands out about the film is its consistency between form and content. The film is very much about its main character, Iwao Enokizu, a sociopath based on a real person in Japan’s recent history who goes around murdering people for rather arbitrary reasons. Just as Enokizu is dispassionate in his killings, so is the film, from the camera to the lighting to the narrative structure. (The narrative structure is so choppy, for lack of a better term, that the above use of the term “constructed” really does seem to apply to Imamura’s making of the film. It’s as if he pieced it together.) Shots of Enokizu killing people with a hammer or knife or his bare hands aren’t distinguished from the shots that precede his brutal actions. The film rejects any sense of causality in its own form and, in this way, cooperates with Enokizu’s random acts of violence. Whereas Kurosawa’s earlier Sanjuro climaxed with the infamous spray of blood when Mifune’s character begrudgingly defeats his nemesis, sprays of blood take place at very anticlimactic moments in Vengeance Is Mine. That the film is considered part of the Japanese New Wave is fitting, and reminiscent of the dispassionate acts of violence in the French New Wave (think Shoot the Piano Player or Pierrot Le Fou). Enokizu has only contempt and disdain for his own past, which stands simultaneously for order and hypocrisy. His father’s association with the Catholic church and his tryst with his daughter-in-law have none of the respect for the previous generation one might find in an Ozu film. On the contrary, just as the rules of cinema are ignored here, so is patriarchal order in general.

Disgraced

Vengeance Is Mine sutures the viewer to the loner Enokizu, not to elicit sympathy for him but rather to force the viewer into an uncomfortable realm in which s/he doesn’t care what happens in the film any more than the film’s character cares about what he is doing. The film’s closing shots of Enokizu’s flying bones, hurled by his excommunicated father and dishonored wife over a cliff, do suggest a kind of terrestrial transcendence or Ozu-like return of things from whence they came. While Imamura seems to have done all he could to expose the harshness of the world from one man’s narrow experience, it’s the film’s own form, again, via freeze-frame, that grabs the viewer’s attention but this time from a different point of view. Enokizu is gone but not gone, become part of the landscape and the horizon, both rejected by his family and bid an affectionate adieu by his family. Much of the film had previously been inscribed with subtitles (original to the Japanese film – not English words) contextualizing the Enokizu’s steps from the vantage point of a police dragnet. Thus Enokizu’s life is cheapened as a manhunt (he is described as an animal by other characters) as he cheapens it by his own actions. Rather than verbal inscription, the finale frames a motionless image that suggests something ineffable and almost nirvana-like about Enokizu’s end.

Inscribed

Dispassionate

Modernized Ozu?

Family

Sadistic

Closet problems

Circle of life?

When pigs fly

I Live in Fear, or, Record of a Living Being

Family counsel(ing)

It had been too long since a Kurosawa viewing, and certainly too long since a first-time viewing. Hadn’t seen the alternately titled I Live In Fear or Record of a Living Being on account of its exclusion from Criterion’s standard-disc collection and subsequent inclusion in the Eclipse set “Postwar Kurosawa.” Ultimately, this is probably more fitting, as the film is distinctly “postwar”; it’s not only situated in that era, but its narrative revolves around psychological fallout from wartime trauma. One forgets how tight, cohesive, and technically flawless are most of Kurosawa’s films, and this one is no exception. The director believed that a good film should be interesting and easy to understand. Kurosawa had a remarkable ability to make films that fit those terms without being simplistic. I Live In Fear is, in one sense, Kurosawa’s most Ozu-like film; the camera work is static and the spatial settings are contemporary and largely restricted to the domestic sphere. Unlike many Ozu films, however, the family patriarch is not well-respected, although here the question of whether he should be respected is central. (Ozu tends to take it more for granted that the older generation is getting the shaft from their kids.)

Beyond invididual identity

Other postwar Kurosawa films  interact with similar themes as I Live In Fear, but they do so much less overtly. The threat of nuclear annihilation and its accompanying myopia is confronted head-on in this film. The question essentially is whether it’s insane to worry about it or insanely ignorant not to worry about it. The film begins and (basically) ends with the viewer sutured to Takashi Shimura’s character, an everyman, a dentist, a typical but upstanding citizen who does his community a service by working in a judicial role on a family court. In the film’s background is his son, a fellow dentist working at his father’s practice who embodies the film’s worry that the younger generation lives for the moment and doesn’t take responsibility beyond the individual level. This is a major Kurosawa theme, one that he visits directly in films like Stray Dog and High and Low. Individual moral responsibility is critical; however, part and parcel to it is collective, national responsibility, a characteristic that the Japanese people arguably neglected or lost following (and arguably as a result of) the postwar US occupation. At one point the son of Shimura’s character explicitly verbalizes his rejection of community responsibility. He stands opposed to his father, whose willing participation on a family council sets him apart as something of a quiet postwar hero of Japan. Kurosawa maintains a strikingly consistent balance in his films of this period (and perhaps beyond) between individual moral responsibility and greater social ethics.

The Everyman

There’s no heroic figure in this film, though, although Shimura’s character comes closest. His ultimate questioning as to what to do and how to live puts him in rather neutral territory. While we are witness to the family’s despicable treatment and disrespect of their father, he is certainly no saint. Aside from his obsession with the threat of the bomb, he openly has children with three mistresses, two of whom remain part of his life. He even insists on bringing his illegitimate families with him to Brazil, an arbitrary destination that, he is convinced, is safe from the bomb threat. While not a primary focus of the film, this aspect of the father’s life openly and clearly keeps the viewer from pitying him too much or viewing him as an essentially good person. The unwanted kindness that he forces upon his family seems ultimately self-centered. He is more concerned with how he is perceived and with maintaining his status as a successful patriarch than he is of what is reasonable or best for his family. This ranges from his marital infidelities to his refusal to listen to his sons and daughters. Moreover, the fact that most of his children do not respect him suggests that his parenting hasn’t commanded respect from them. Lest we get the wrong idea, Kurosawa doesn’t romanticize the past. It’s not as if prewar Japan is an Eden to regain. As for the future, it’s left open and uncertain. Concerns are raised, but no actions are taken. On the contrary, inaction itself seems to drive the family patriarch literally insane. Would they only have heeded his original fears, whether legitimate or not, the family may have retained its integrity. The role of well-meaning citizens acting as judges in family courts may be inept, as some of them are willing to admit. Still, this doesn’t answer the lingering question of what to do in response to this numinous threat. The film ends by turning the question toward the audience, and expanding it past the mere question of the bomb. Even more overarching questions of individual social and moral responsibility become central, in classic Kurosawa fashion.

Bomb's-Eye View

Family paperwork

Heated strife

Guilty til proven insane

Ominous

Pater familias

Lost it

Out of the silent planet

Quickies, Vol. XVIII

An Education (2008, dir. Lone Scherfig) – Everyone seemed to love this one when it came out, and not without good reason. The positioning is what’s interesting about this one: the film offers the viewer a rather unique vantage point. The narrative doesn’t so much unfold as play out, more or less exactly the way you think it will. But this is part of the “education” of it all. The film is less concerned with surprising its audience with plot twists or wowing them with impressive cinematic elements than it is with putting its story forward in an unpretentious way. It’s an anti-fairly tale, one that everyone has heard, but one that many keep falling for. Remarkably didactic for a contemporary film, it’s as much directed at the protagonist’s parents and her fiancée as it is at the protagonist herself; maybe more.

Tampopo (1985, dir. Juzo Itami) – Just so good. But man, so very sexual; you realize it more and more. Sexuality and food are collapsed together along with cinephilia, as perhaps the most licentious, gratuitous loves of humanity. The film may not be wrong about this. The three work together quite well in the film, which is structured as a tongue-in-cheek French New Wave work (Godard meets Melville?). Film assumes you’re a man watching, who loves to eat and loves to watch movies…but then what movie doesn’t, at some level.

What About Bob? (1991, Frank Oz) – It’s one of those that can’t be objectively considered here, along with The Sandlot and others that accompanied the formative years of youth. It’s just funny, that’s all. It is what it is and doesn’t pretend to be more; this is very much okay, since it does what it does so well. Richard Dreyfuss always seemed on the verge of losing it, and the curveball of Bill Murray, usually a sarcastic know-it-all, finally pushing him over the edge, is wonderful. What makes this one so enjoyable and Bringing Up Baby so difficult? Will have to look into it. “Is this corn hand-shucked?”

Yojimbo: An Itchy and Scratchy Show

Mountainous

Saw this one the other week at the Stanford Theatre during the wonderful Kurosawa run (which is not yet over). First time to have seen it in 35mm, which was pure joy. This may be the best thing I’ve ever seen on the big screen. (Contrary to today’s commonplace, it’s camerawork, not the appearance of camerawork that sells you; sorry, Avatar.) More than ever the film feels like a parable for film itself; particularly for Kurosawa as a filmmaker. Yoshimoto suggests this in his chapter on the film, but the fact becomes plainer and plainer upon each viewing. Sanjuro (Mifune) is a ronin, competent, fierce, but also playful – how does this not also describe Kurosawa? At this point in his career Kurosawa had more freedom than he knew what to do with, such that he could practically pick up a stick, toss it up in the air, and follow the left fork in the road since the stick pointed that way. Sanjuro arrives in a town where there are two feuding clans, not unlike Toho and Daiei studios in Japan, between which Kurosawa moved more than once. Sanjuro’s ascent to the top of the tower to watch the two clans duke it out for his own amusement ends up as a sort of self-effacement on Kurosawa’s part. He ends up showing the vacuity of such childishness.

Not the right way

The most overt parallel, perhaps, is in the departure of the resident samurai (instructor) upon Sanjuro’s arrival. (Can’t remember, but I think Stephen Prince pointed this out.) The old instructor old stuff now, past his prime and in need of replacement. The actor who plays him is Susumu Fujita, Kurosawa’s protagonist in his old samurai films Sanshiro Sugata and the sequel to it. Fujita, who also starred in No Regrets for Our Youth and The Men Who Tread on Tiger’s Tail back in the 40s, makes an appearance in The Hidden Fortress and is soundly defeated in a duel by Mifune’s character. Here in Yojimbo Kurosawa is cementing Mifune’s status not only as his actor of choice, but as his new kind of samurai. Who better, then, to jump the fence and run away before the battle begins than Fujita? The kindly farewell wave shared between the old samurai/actor and the new is as overt a nod we’re going to get. Unkempt, itchy, and always with a hankering for some sake and rice, Sanjuro is the new image of the updated samurai.

Sayonara

One thing Sanjuro serves to illustrate is that stupid in-fighting is a thing of the past, along with taking oneself too seriously. How better to teach these amateurs than to use their own weapon (violence) against them by means of their tool of choice (ignorance). In so doing, Kurosawa illustrates the failure of traditional jidai-geki films to depict violence with honesty. In those films, violence was rendered harmless in the long run: no blood, no severed limbs, no flesh-slicing sound effects. In Yojimbo Kurosawa begins a new tradition (one he would grow to regret trailblazing) of realistic violence. The irony, of course, is that Kurosawa’s goal was to repel viewers, not attract them to such acts. Kurosawa is always called a humanist, and not without good reason. An early shot in Yojimbo has a stray dog (little nod there) with a human hand in its mouth trotting casually through town, as if to welcome Sanjuro with a sampling of what he’ll get to experience after spending some time there. And Sanjuro adapts effectively: the first thing he does with his sword is amputate an arm.

The famous and overwhelmingly innovative photography of this film is quite consistent with the main ideas of the film, along with its historical context. We’re now very post-war, indeed, and Japan’s problems now have to do with modernization and Westernization at a whole new level. The Japanese as a people were defined by problems that got them involved in WWII, and they were subsequently humiliated and rebuilt as a nation afterward. Now, Japan as a nation was going head-first into the modern era – about to host the World’s Fair in Tokyo in a couple years – again blindly submitting to the idea of what “Japan” was supposed to be. Kurosawa’s concerns had to do with the lack of the individual in Japanese society, the absence of the single voice (and single voices!) who would challenge the status quo, think independently and creatively, and challenge the notion(s) prevalent of where Japan was headed. Sanjuro is just that character, though an imperfect one. He’s not idealized, though as “humanist” it might have been a temptation for Kurosawa to idealize his hero. Rather, we have a man who survived the previous age (little mentions are made about the era preceding this film’s diegetic timeline) and, masterless, wandered the land finding patches of inept and ignorant people to teach and toy with.

Deep focus

Swaggering

Secrets

Modernized

A fistful of inspiration

Cowards

Castrated

Sanjuro

So good, and, as old faithful Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto insists, not simply a sequel to Yojimbo! Rather, a totally different film in tone and style; different in kind and not just in degree – sorry, Stephen Prince. And David Desser, dang it, this is so not a “remake” of Shane! Am thoroughly inclined to take Yoshimoto’s word for it (not that he doesn’t supply evidence) that Sanjuro adheres to genre conventions of the samurai film in a way unlike any of Kurosawa’s other works. This isn’t a “Western” like Yojimbo arguably is. As if to signify that at the get-go, Sanjuro’s first scene is staged at a shrine. Spiritual elements were more or less totally absent from Yojimbo, and though they aren’t prominent in Sanjuro either, this is an interesting early appearance.

These thoughts will try to avoid simply contrasting Sanjuro with Yojimbo, but some of the differences are noteworthy. Consider the first shots of Yojimbo: a mountainous landscape, arid and unpopulated, is quickly overcome with the fierce outline of Toshiro Mifune’s shoulders. The music kicks in immediately as Sanjuro walks to a fork in the road, then throws a stick into the air to see which way it will direct him to go when it lands. In Sanjuro, on the other hand, the first shot looks indoors. The first part of the sequence observes eight samurai (but certainly less than “seven”) in the shrine waiting for the provincial superintendent to arrive as they discuss the crisis of corruption in the region. Eventually, out comes Sanjuro from the shadows of an inner room. He grunts and groans, then crawls like a snarling beast coming out of the cage that was foolishly left open. The character may be the same, but in Sanjuro the viewer already knows who he is. Instead of the film introducing him to us, we watch the film introduce him to new characters.

Also worthy of note in this film is the role of women. Kurosawa has been accused of misogyny, in so many words. This has been leveled against him by those who observe that only one of his films features a woman as the front-and-center main character. True enough, Kazuo Hara in No Regrets for Our Youth is the only main female protagonist in Kurosawa’s films. Sanjuro is a nice example, though, of a film that gives women a voice that the male protagonist heeds. After Sanjuro helps the other samurai rescue the kidnapped chamberlain’s wife and daughter, he sits nearby in the barn and listens bemusedly to the women talk about how comfortable it is to lie down in the hay. A short time later, the group is escaping over a rock wall and the chamberlain’s wife refuses to climb over on account of the breach in propriety that it would constitute. Sanjuro eventually gets down on all fours and orders her to use him as a step to climb over the wall. She gives in and submits, apologizing while stepping on the ronin’s back. Later still, Sanjuro and the samurai are trying to find a way to signal one another to invade the superintendent’s house. Sanjuro says dismissively that he will set it on fire. The chamberlain’s wife and daughter come up with an alternative plan that isn’t so destructive: sending camellias down the stream from one property into another. Sanjuro again acquiesces to the demands of the women.

Aside from the content of the women’s words, however, is their composure and attitude during the crises. They’re quick to forget about the dire situation and talk about lying down in hay, allow decorum to inform their actions rather than survival, and design an aesthetically pleasing strategy for action that avoids unnecessary violence. All the while, the chamberlain’s wife describes Sanjuro as an “unsheathed sword.” She says that a good sword remains in its sheath, but he is too hasty to unsheathe himself and kill others. (Think back to Yojimbo and one must concede some truth to this accusation. In that film, Sanjuro played the townspeople as pawns in a game for his own enjoyment, despite the begging of the bartender not to let more people die.)

Yoshimoto points out the significance of Sanjuro’s answer to the women when they ask Sanjuro his age. In Yojimbo he had answered that question with “Thirty year-old mulberry field” (Kuwabatake Sanjuro). In this film, he replies, “Thirty year-old camellia” (Tsubaki Sanjuro), but, he says, he’s really almost forty years old. The women, then, work together to draw out a sort of confession from Sanjuro: he’s not quite acting his age. Yoshimoto also draws attention to a phrase used twice in the film, once uttered by Sanjuro and once later to him: “Yes, you listen to me well – a good boy.” Despite Sanjuro’s leadership over the incompetent samurai, it’s Sanjuro who needs to emerge from his own lingering youth. The women here are the voice of reason and maturity. They’re not trigger-happy or overly worried about death. They will endure their circumstances with dignity and not sacrificing their scruples, but they will remain strategically savvy at the same time.

The film’s last scene is the most infamous, of course. Sanjuro and Hanbei face off in a duel at Hanbei’s insistence. Sanjuro has attempted to leave the town for good without even confronting the chamberlain whose freedom he restored. Not only is Sanjuro a wandering ronin, but presumably at this point he has plenty of food for thought and is considering the prospect of wizening up. Still, Hanbei feels insulted and demands a duel. After arguing for awhile, Sanjuro finally gives in and kills Hanbei with a geyser blast of blood spraying out of him. Apparently this effect was initially accidental thanks to one of the production crew kinking the blood hose. Kurosawa’s decision to keep the scene in the film, however, sends the message twice as powerfully that violence is an undesirable avenue to reconcile disputes. Sanjuro attempts to remain in his sheathe before this bloody end. His decision to fight creates an ambiguous conclusion to the film. Has Sanjuro learned? Will he go on living as an unsheathed youth or will he grow up?

Quickies, Vol. IX

Gilda (dir. Charles Vidor, 1946): The tagline read, “Was there ever a woman like Gilda?” Indeed. Upon a more recent viewing of this long-been favorite, it appears much less textbook Mulvey than previously alleged. Gilda’s sort of the pawn, the tennis ball; but she’s also got more power than the two men/players combined. Would make sense to consider her the substitute for the phallic (or is it?) sword-cane that Ballin wields before Gilda’s arrival and once she’s given him up for Johnny. So the instrument only makes appearances when Ballin is sine-Gilda. She has her breakdown(s), of course, but so do the men, losing their cool in a dual of male compensation. The previously commented-upon facets remain strong and interesting, but this film as a whole stands out for defying simple genre categorization and containing what are easily some of the sauciest and sassiest scenes from 1940s American film. The above clip constitutes perhaps the best female entrance ever in cinema.

Andrei Rublev (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966): Second viewing of this one, and words continue to fall flat next to such images and the ideas, feelings, and thoughts they represent and suggest. After all, the narrative concerns an icon painter whose doubts about what lies on the other side of the images paralyze him from creating said images. How a film, above all other forms of art, could do justice to such a theme seems impossible. Something about the animals in this film, too. Horses, cows, birds – majestic, transcendent, beautiful; bruised, injured, set aflame. 205 minutes, but not a superfluous moment.

Côte d’Azur or Crustacés et Coquillages (dir. Olivier Ducastel & Jacques Martineau, 2005): In many ways this is Feast of Love but in France and done by the French; certainly superior to the U.S. film by its relative lack of pretense. Summer vacation on the Riviera with a Parisian family who is anything but repressed in the broadly moral sense but each of them keeping and suspecting the others of keeping some illicit secrets, a number of them homosexual in nature. Has some very fun moments that seem to be inspired by Bollywood style song-and-dance routines showing up a couple times without warning. Despite the amoral element, a familial cohesion and ultimate optimism reigns that isn’t particularly true to “reality,” but in this little world the film has created, it works okay.

Rhapsody in August (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1991): Would prefer to devote extensive length to this, but alas, time again forbids. Kurosawa is back in classic form here following a string of tragedies (especially Kagemusha and Ran) and then the exquisite Dreams. Rhapsody in August has moments of The Lower Depths and Red Beard that is as “Ozu” as Kurosawa ever gets, and some aesthetic insertions that recall both Dodes’ka-den and Dreams. The outcry that this film was “blaming” the U.S. for dropping the bomb is exceedingly naive and uninformed. Of course, we did drop the bomb, twice, on hundreds of thousands of civilians. But also, this film isn’t wrestling with anything very “American,” per se, but rather with (as is very customary in Kurosawa’s oeuvre) what it is to be Japanese at this particular time in history. Being the late-2oth century, that now means dealing with the post-industrial, postwar, Westernized Japan and the ramifications of having so may of one’s progeny living in the U.S. and mixing blood with Americans. The fact that it isn’t simply “the U.S.” here but Hawaii in particular pointedly alludes to Pearl Harbor, for all those who think Kurosawa was negating any Japanese culpability in the war. Kurosawa highlights the horrific and the heavenly, the ugly and the beautiful, with an amplified and otherworldly palette of textures and colors.

Sleeper (dir. Woody allen, 1973): Still funny, still biting, still smart.

Tampopo

Insert drool here

My introduction to the “noodle Western” genre was a most satisfying one. Tampopo is especially rewarding to the viewer who’s been blessed enough to watch John Ford films, then Kurosawa’s take on them, then Sergio Leone’s take on Kurosawa’s, before finally returning back to Japan to watch a semi-truck driver with saddle burn sashay into a ramen joint and really shown them how it’s done. This cross-cultural back and forth finally settles into the comedy act that it is in the hands of Juzo Itami. In this world, food is literally everything. It is the most life-giving, morbid, romantic, sexual, gratuitous, hedonistic, criminal, and otherwise indispensable element of human existence. Nothing is taken more seriously than food, and if there isn’t a part of everyone that feels that way, then they’ve never had truly excellent cuisine. This is Ratatouille based in Japan, replacing its didactic ideology with a wonderfully ridiculous culinary phenomenology.

Howdy

Yeah. That's an egg yolk.

The obligatory cowboy bath

Then some really weird/funny stuff

A Fistful of Dollars

For being based on (and according to Akira Kurosawa, the same movie as) Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars contrasts with Kurosawa’s film in important ways. It is no The Magnificent Seven, thankfully. Fistful can be lauded for at least “doing its own thing” in a respectable way instead of simply catering to the Hollywood formula as The Magnificent Seven did, obliterating Seven Samurai in the process. The samurai banded together cohesively and fought for honor, while the cowboys begrudgingly fought together to build up their egos – especially those of the actors playing them. What goes around comes around, presumably, as John Ford’s American Western traversed the Pacific to Japan where Kurosawa reinvented it, and before it could be called a “noodle Western,” Sergio Leone snatched it away to Italy, stuck Clint Eastwood in it, Anglicized the names of all the Italians involved (including himself), and somehow walked away with a new genre: the “spaghetti Western.” This is both fair and unfair: “fair” in that Leone’s film is not Kurosawa’s and needs to be differentiated; “unfair” in that it had appeared to be Leone’s invention, and no one would have suspected that an Italian film set in the American West could have a Japanese samurai movie as its main source. Perhaps no one would have, had Kurosawa not sued Leone. What goes around comes around.

Various social, ethnic, and cultural identities set “the man with no name” apart from “Sanjuro.” (For the sake of clarity, Eastwood’s character will henceforth be named “Eastwood” and Mifune’s character “Mifune.”) Consider Mifune in Yojimbo. He is a ronin, a wandering, masterless samurai who happens to enter the warring town after tossing a stick into the air to decide which fork in the road he should take. This action immediately defines Mifune’s character as unafraid to submit himself to chance. The camera identifies him with the towering mountains behind him and his posture is likened to that of a ferocious cat; his playfulness comes out when he throws the stick into the air and follows its direction. As he enters the town, his status is that of a ronin. The townspeople know this and therefore know, at least generally, his abilities. Ethnically, there’s no difference. Even culturally, all Mifune need do is understand the context of this town, which he is able to do quickly, thanks to the man who feeds him rice and sake.

Eastwood, on the other hand, is not only the man with no name but with no identity other than the ethnic. He is an American in Mexico, a fact that demarcates him on more than a merely local level with the townspeople. Westerns have utilized a particular social identity many times over for its protagonists, one that gives them power and authority not unlike that of Mifune in Yojimbo. This identity is that of the retired sheriff, and the most famous example is probably Wyatt Earp. Leone sets up Eastwood with little discernible background. All we discover at one point is that Eastwood’s altruism toward an unfortunate woman is fueled by a woman in his past. Leone’s insistence at having an American star as the main character may have been motivated chiefly for financial gain, but the effect within the film is ethnic superiority as Eastwood becomes a new kind of figure: an American nomad, not a settler but unsettled, not at home in American territory (presumably because of a seedy past?) or in Mexico. His garb is hybrid, wearing many of the marks of an American Western character but with a poncho covering most of it. It’s as if he’s adopted a new non-American identity, albeit temporarily – the poncho is conveniently removable. On top of that, there’s the hair. While it may seem a trite point to make, the significance of hair in the cinema has finally been demonstrated relatively recently (see Travolta’s and Jackson’s characters in Pulp Fiction). In a land of black mustaches, Eastwood bears a half-beard, another neither-nor aspect of his person/a. At some point in many Westerns (even noir-Westerns such as Treasure of the Sierra Madre), main characters get a much-needed shave. Eastwood’s beard doesn’t seem to grow in this film, however, remaining at that in-between stage.

Eastwood isn’t the only character in Fistful with contempt for the past; his enemies demonstrate their own rejection of the ways of the classical warrior by taking target practice on an old suit of armor. In this regard, Fistful and Yojimbo are fundamentally similar. The antagonist in the latter film introduces a pistol for the first time, rejecting the traditional sword as weapon of choice. Mifune’s prowess with blades (samurai sword and throwing knives) overcomes the Modernism signified by the gun-wielding bad buy. Agility and skill defeat the much lazier though more technologically advanced weapon of the handgun. In Fistful, Eastwood is able to approach his enemy at a sashay pace, fearlessly demanding that his opponent aim for the chest with his more advanced and lethal Winchester rifle. Once out of bullets, Eastwood reveals a plate of iron under his poncho, identifying him with the classical knight in a suit of armor. Though not as agile as Mifune, both of these characters, heretofore having no past, embrace their heritage in order to triumph over their foes. Interestingly, however, Mifune utilizes traditional combat offensively while Eastwood uses it defensively. Watching both films next to each other renders Mifune’s victor impressive and Eastwood’s a bit of a cheat, though a resourceful one.

Rashomon

There are so many views as to the “point” of Rashomon or what stands out most about it that it nearly seems a pointless enterprise to discuss it. The camera work is remarkably novel; Kurosawa’s hiring of Kazuo Miyagawa worked oh so well, with these tracking and panning shots that baffle the mind. During certain shots, the camera seems to be moving in every direction at once. Rarely is movement confined to x, y, or z axes, especially in the forest scenes. Of course the interrogation scenes use the opposite technique: an Ozu-like stationary camera at tatami level. Only the horizontal seems to be emphasized in these shots, with multiple planes existing at any given time. It’s been noted that the camera’s refusal to give the viewer the reverse shot (of the judge/questioner) signifies that the audience stands in the place of the judge. However, the film gives an overall priority not to the “real story,” but both to the lack of a real story and the necessity for human goodness in a dark world.

Here is where the debate resides, though little time will be spent addressing it now. Despite the usefulness of Stephen Prince’s, Keiko McDonald’s, and Donald Richie’s studies of the film, it again seems to be Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto that offers the most reasonable and well-balanced understanding of it. He points out details of note without overemphasizing their weight. For example, there seems to be a theme of the number “3″ in the film: three physical locations (the gate, the forest, the court), three principal characters (the woodcutter, the priest, and the commoner at the gate; the bandit, the samurai, and the samurai’s wife in the forest), a three-day period of time between the court and gate scenes), and the three Chinese characters on the gate (transliterated as “Rashomon”). Also, Yoshimoto notes not only the use of horizontal and vertical space, but the juxtaposition between the two. Though the forest scenes contain horizontal movement, it is the vertical that is emphasized, with shots directly at the sun, shots from below the characters, and the verticality of the trees.

The film has been accused of sentimentality, and here seems to be Yoshimoto’s strongest point. The response to this allegation is a resounding admission, but with qualifications. Critics who have pointed out Kurosawa’s narrative nostalgia almost universally point to the film’s ending with the woodcutter adopting the abandoned child after the commoner has stolen the baby’s blanket. The melodramatic presence of a baby is amplified by its narrative location (at the film’s end) and its didactic purpose (countering the moral vacuum in which the film’s characters live). Yoshimoto adeptly observes, though, that exaggeration by the actors’ performances begins right at the film’s beginning. It’s with repetition, gravitas, and utmost sobriety that the woodcutter and the priest lament the state of the world and humanity when they repeatedly proclaim, “I can’t understand it…I have never heard anything as terrible as this before.” The viewer’s interest is arrested, most likely to be disappointed by what constitutes something so “terrible.” To be sure, in a better world, this narrative would be an awful thing to hear. Accustomed as we are to horrors on a daily basis, a few mistruths revolving around a murder have become commonplace. But this is beside the point. The sentimentality that closes the film is different in neither degree nor kind than that which opens the film and guides the diegetic narrative along its course. This makes the film coherent on its own, even if it presents a world of overreactions and overstatements. The woodcutter’s lost faith in humanity is well-founded, but his active steps toward goodness and compassion reject cynicism and embody a Kierkegaardian ethic. When the world seems devoid of truth and beauty, what else is there to do but create truth and beauty through promoting life? Sentiment conquers sentimentality.

Onibaba

Onibaba (Demon Woman) from Kaneto Shindo is uncannily similar to Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes, released in the same year. These are “art films,” as the saying goes, rich with long, abstract shots of claustrophobic natural surrounding: long and thick reeds that form a dense carpet with little bald spots of huts (Onibaba), and sand dunes with an almost organic quality that spill into a dungeon-like house-pit (Woman in the Dunes). In both films, the silent yet perpetually active landscape creeps in upon the physical space of the characters and into their psyches, causing an arousal of erotic desire, manifest in that inhuman tendency to copulate with anything – moving or otherwise. An eerie nightmare of subconscious surrealism results in each story. Onibaba is known as a horror film, but it only fits that genre in the sense that The Twilight Zone fits it. The mask seems to be a direct connection with Rod Serling’s show, with the same consequence when the character who selfishly donned the mask finally removes it. Shindo, if anything, is a master of activating the senses, using palpable and earthy sounds and images the way Hitchcock used camera movement and editing. The Japanese New Wave is evident here in 1964, as it becomes clearer why Kurosawa, in between such masterpieces as High and Low and Red Beard, started losing his popularity and his sense of how to make movies for the new Japan.

Branded to Kill

Donald Richie described Branded to Kill as something like an “anarchist” effort of yakuza cinema for its own sake. This may be fair. Seijun Suzuki is the avant-garde-ist to Hiroshi Teshigahara’s surrealist, particularly when putting Branded to Kill next to Woman in the Dunes. The former has some impressive shots, but its contempt (boredom, really) for traditional narrative and use of a jazz soundtrack with pseudo-Expressionistic angles and imagery make the film a departure from mainstream early-mid 1960s Japanese cinema. It also seems quite fair to assume that Suzuki was enthralled with Godard (particularly Breathless) and others in the French New Wave, wanting to work such rule-breaking techniques into the blossoming Japanese New Wave. What would have been an entertaining yakuza film became instead an art film for pretentious college students. It works, but probably better on multiple viewings with a positive prejudice.