Strange to say this - Michael Jackson never came up in all the time I was posting random ten lists - not that I have a lot of his stuff on iTunes, but I have some - some of it pretty well rated. You'd have thought, somewhere in there, Don't Stop Til you get Enough would have come up - that is a hell of a song. The guitars at the end - damn... Skimming through all the posts about his death - most of the talk is about Thriller - but, while I admit, Thriller is a good record, full of handsome, well crafted pop songs - it's the beginning of his decline, I think. It's so slick, so professional - produced within an inch of its life. It's packaging first, music (good music, yes) second. But not Off The Wall - which remains everything he could be and was. Great songs, slick, but still alive, human - it's one of those records (quite a few of them) I liked more than I would ever have admitted at the time, and in retrospect, without the pressures of being a teenager with a reputation to maintain, I can love the hell out of now...
So let's use that as a departure point - start with Michael, and see where we are led...
0. Jacko - Don't Stop til you Get Enough
1. Jefferson Airplane - How do you Feel - I own this, and I don't think I have ever heard it before...
2. Sonic Youth - Thunderclap for Bobby Pyn - I haven't heard this before either, but at least I have a better reason, having just bought the new Sonic Youth record and loaded it in this week... first impressions, I have to say, are very positive -
3. Wilco - Shot in the Arm (Live) -
4. Gist - Love At First Sight - god only knows what this is - from one of those Mojo compilations...
5. Devendra Banhart - Water May Walk - nice song
6. Brian Eno - Some of them are Old - lovely, odd tune, but that's Eno in a nutshell
7. Tortoise - Tin Cans and Twine - cool, bass driven post-rock, though it kind of sounds like Boston in the 80s - Morphine or one of those groups...
8. The Soft Machine - Pataphysical Introduction Part II - uh oh - guilt! I post twice on Jacko, and let Hugh Hopper's demise go unmarked? I've listened to a lot more Soft Machine in the last few years than Jacko - certainly listened to them on purpose, which I can't say for Michael all that much... Oh well - we can't pretend we don't live in the World....
9. Big Mama Thornton - Hound Dog - an Elvis tie in!
10. Soft Machine - Pig - yeah! my computer is making up for my neglectfulness! with a great little song, too...
Well? Leave you with another Jackson song - from Thriller, Wanna Be Starting Something - but a live video, the Bad tour (oh god, look at the hair! the clothes! oh god!) - and pretty sharp, the raw, human quality that disappeared with the Thriller record....
And for good measure - Soft Machine, 71, with Hopper getting some nice moments....
Friday, June 26, 2009
Claude Chabrol
It's already Friday, but.... I seem to have expended whatever blogathon energy I have on last week's Japanese cinema blogathon, but I need to note that there is another very good series going on now - Flickhead is hosting a Claude Chabrol blogathon. This runs through the 30th - it has already produced a nice body of postings... I've barely seen any Chabrol - 3-4 films maybe - so I'm of no use to this, and don't really know enough to follow what's being written very well... but this looks like one of those sites I'll bookmark and come back to every time I do see one.... Good stuff.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Farrah and Michael
Strange news - two celebrity deaths... Farrah Fawcett (here eulogized by Nancy Nall) - I was a bit too young, I guess, to really care about Farrah Fawcett when she was really famous.... But now - Michael Jackson, the king of pop, is found dead. Jackson took a lot of abuse through the years - he certainly went very strange somewhere by the 90s - though given his life story, it's not exactly surprising. He deserved better - it's hard not to see his weirdness as a result of some seriously twisting experiences...
His was not my favorite type of music, but in his prime, he was so good that things like that don't matter. He could transcend taste completely. Though that's not putting it right - he mixed styles consistently, doing rock, funk, straight pop, ballads, all pretty convincingly. The longer he went, the more conservative he sounded - the more overproduced and precious his music became... But when he was good, he was about as good as you can get.
And he knew how to move...
His was not my favorite type of music, but in his prime, he was so good that things like that don't matter. He could transcend taste completely. Though that's not putting it right - he mixed styles consistently, doing rock, funk, straight pop, ballads, all pretty convincingly. The longer he went, the more conservative he sounded - the more overproduced and precious his music became... But when he was good, he was about as good as you can get.
And he knew how to move...
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Late, Strange, Ozu
(This is yet another post inspired by and intended for the Japanese Cinema blogathon at Wildgrounds. I've been looking for an excuse to dive into Ozu deep and seem to have found it.)
I want to write about 2 of Ozu's most unusual films, Early Spring and Tokyo Twilight. They tend to be neglected, though they have been released in the states, part of Eclipse's Late Ozu set; they tend to be treated as lesser Ozu, when they are considered. Even David Bordwell can't quite get behind Tokyo Twilight... I suppose it's true - they are lesser Ozu - but compared to almost anyone else, they are extraordinary.
The main case against them is that they are more definitively melodramatic than most of Ozu's films. Early Spring tells the story of a salariman and his wife (Sugiyama, and Masako) - he is restless at work, they are unhappy together, they have lost a child some years back, a common enough cause for marital angst, for Ozu and for everyone else. The salariman has an affair with a woman from work (Goldfish); the rest of their circleof friends and coworkers gossip and make trouble; his wife finds out and leaves him; he is transferred to the provinces. It is unusual for the focus on a young, childless couple; the workplace (though this is a throwback to Ozu in the 30s); the sex - as well as its tone, which combines a certain urban coldness with its melodrama.
Tokyo Twilight is a more convoluted affair - it returns to the family, but this is a very melodramatic family. Chishu Ryu plays the patriarch, with two daughters, Takako and Akiko; he's a miserable, passive bully; Takako (played by Setsuko Hara), has left her drunkard college professor husband; Akiko has fallen for a cad, dropped out of school to learn English shorthand, and now finds herself in a family way. Meanwhile - dad's misery stems from being abandoned by his wife (played by Isuzu Yamada - who is luminous) - she has now turned up running a cheap mahjong parlor where some of Akiko's friends hang out. Soon, Akiko meets her mother - but things don't get better afterwards. Abortion and death follow, as they usually do (though not so much in Ozu's films) - someone goes to Hokkaido, somewhat more common for Ozu, though perhaps no less horrible than death and abortion. All this is played for the melodrama, and looks as grim as it sounds - most of the action occurring at night, and all of it in the dead of winter. And all of it in Tokyo's streets and bars and seedy noodle shops and mahjong parlors, plus a couple middle class houses that come off as forbidding and cruel as the rest.
They are quite a bit different from the films around them - one of the reasons I think they are somewhat discounted is that they don't fit the standard narrative about Ozu. These two films were released in 1956 and 1957 - they are the two films he made directly after Tokyo Story. The story goes - he turned more and more to the Japanese family; he turned to more affluent characters; he told ever more oblique and plotless stories. All of which is a reasonable generalization to make about his films in the 50s - except that right in the middle, here are these two. At the same time - they are not unprecedented for Ozu. His early college comedies, workplace films like Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth?, or the office parts of Tokyo Chorus and I Was Born, But... anticipate the milieu, and some of the story, of Early Spring. Tokyo Twilight picks up themes from several of his older films - the lost parent returning, that is the plot of both Floating Weeds films; the rebellious spoiled child from A Mother Must be Loved; the bad marriage from the Munekata Sisters, maybe. Perhaps more importantly, both films adopt the tone and themes of older films - the social commentary and satire of Early Spring referring back to those early bittersweet college and salariman films; the unabashed melodrama, played for at least some shock value, in Tokyo Twilight, as in The Munekata Sisters, or A Mother Must be Loved, or Women of Tokyo. They both move from the settings of many of the 50s films to a seedier Tokyo, or to the blank modernity of the office sections of the city - again, harking back to the settings of the older films.
I mentioned in the comments below that the more Ozu films you see, the more you see in them. These films are an illustration of that, I think. I saw Tokyo Twilight 8-10 years ago - at the time, I had seen most of the post-war films, and a handful of the prewar films - basically the ones that are available on DVD now (Floating Weeds, and the Eclipse Silent Comedy set.) At the time - it seemed utterly anomalous - a handsome and austere, but rather sloppy attempt at - something... But between then and seeing it again, I saw the full Ozu retrospective - seeing all those older films, seeing the range of films he made, changed how I saw his later films. And watching Tokyo Twilight now, it seems much more comprehensible. And impressive.
The truth is - it seems to me that in these two films, as well as some of the other films Ozu made in the late 50s (Good Morning, notably), Ozu is looking for new ways to make films. He had, by this time, settled on a pretty narrow range of devices and styles - the low camera, the lack of camera movements, the elliptical narration, the understated tone, the oblique transitions, etc. - but within that set of devices, he constantly looked for new ways to use them. What surprised me, watching these films again this month, was just that - the ways he fit these quite different stories, settings, characters, into his customary forms. Or used his forms to create different effects. They do things differently - take his famous "pillow shots" - in Early Spring, these are often shots of buildings - there isn't a lot of nature in this film. The shots even include a bit of an editorializing - zombie salarimen, who could have come from Pulse or Tokyo Sonata:
Tokyo Twilight offers an even odder version of these transitions: here, Ozu often uses shots of minor characters as a kind of pillow shot - along with the usual shots of streets and bars that introduce locations in his late films, he often includes several shots of the people in these places. The hangers on in the Etoile bar; the poor devils at the police station:
Some of these shots go nowhere - they are purely transitional. Some of them develop quite a ways - there are some fairly elaborate conversations among some of the completely incidental denizens of some of the bars. And even when the main characters are on hand, and plot is being advanced - this film is quite consistent in putting off the revelation of the plot point of the scene. It starts from the very beginning - Ryu's character goes into a bar, has a conversation with the woman proprietor and a man drinking at the bar, mostly about oysters and pearls - then, after a few monutes of that, Ryu asks about "Professor Numata", who has been here drinking with his students, it turns out. This is a double delay, of course - since Ozu doesn't tell us who Numata is, or why Ryu's character cares. We find that out in the next scene - though again, after Ryu and Hara have been on screen a while, making small talk. Numata, it turns out, is her husband - a drunkard, possibly violent - she has left him. But we don't get that until the end of the scene. Ozu does this - tucking plot information into the end of a scene - constantly in this film. It is almost an organizing principal. At the same time, the story is a lot more explicit than usual for 50s Ozu - we see the big confrontations and turning points. It is almost as if he needed to compensate for the melodrama of the plot by spending a lot more time on digressions and odd side details.
Though it's also true that he uses those diversions to make points. He spends a lot of time with secondary characters in both films. Some of these are used to create parallels to the main story line, especially in Early Spring. He shows us the couple next door to the main characters - a couple who have also been through adulteries and troubles and come out - together, at least. He also shows us the travails of another salariman - whose wife is having a baby, to their distress. But again, they work through it, and create a counterpoint to the main couple and their lost child. There are also several men who represent different attitudes toward office work: one has risen to power; one exiled to the provinces; one has dropped out and opened a coffee shop; one (getting drunk at the shop) is about to retire without anything to live on; the one who loved his work, is dying of a lung disease; and two of the main character's old army buddies bring in a working class perspective - one makes pots; one fixes things.
The other, nastier function the minor characters fill is to - for lack of a better word - judge the main characters. In Early Spring, we are privy to the office gossip against Goldfish and Sugiyama (who are having the affair) - they even confront her, causing her to confront him, and his wife to find out about the business. This sort of thing is even harsher in Tokyo Twilight. Akiko is judged by everyone - bartenders, noodle shop owners, her boyfriend's cronies - all abuse her behind her back. It's harsh - especially since Ozu never presents her as anything but sympathetic (except with her parents, significantly - though he makes sure we understand that.) He shoots her with sympathy throughout:
In fact, it is notable that in this film (and in Early Spring, really), everyone - almost everyone - comes off well: sympathetically, at least. Everyone has their reasons - the mother who left her family, the father who stayed, the two daughters - everyone is sympathetic, but trapped by their circumstances... It is, after all, a classic melodrama, and Ozu plays up the melodrama as much as he ever did. But - undercut it, at the same time. Most notably in a scene at the mahjongg parlor - as usual, Ozu is delaying the point of the scene (which is really the confrontation between Akiko and her mother) - here, though, he does it by having one of the players tell the sordid tale of Akiko and Kenji. He - and the others - turn it into a joke - they do it in funny voices, turning it into a cliché, a soap opera, with stock characters and situations. This scene parodies the plot, and it is probably not the only place Ozu does so in Tokyo Twilight. But emphasizing the hackneyed plot creates a strange tension between it and the people in the story - Ozu spends a lot more time establishing them as sympathetic, rich characters than with the plot. Though this too is interesting in comparison to his other films - he develops this kind of depth of character more than he usually did at this point in his career. That’s ironic in itself - he makes these denizens of an over the top pot-boiler more conventionally rounded than he does the people in his more characteristic films. (Where what characterization we get, we get through indirection and implication - more than here, where things are often stated and acted and reacted to directly.)
Though I have to add - this is more of a staple of melodrama than is sometimes acknowledged. Melodrama at its best is very self-conscious - however ironic or stylized or sincere - it is shameless - it plays its extreme stories straight, while highlighting all the exaggeration and excess. Melodrama is highly presentationalist, I think - the idea of someone in the story parodying the story, as the mahjong players do, is almost as necessary as the shock cut from Akiko’s abortion to the child, or Hara’s ferocious bawling at the end.
Though even in this film - the shot that precedes that one, of Hara sitting along, in the hallway, with the bundle of flowers her mother has just given her, is much more typical of Ozu's approach. It isn't that it is any less melodramatic - it's restrained, but the restraint is calculated and precise, and expresses her pain and regret and everything else, as powerfully as the more extreme moments. Melodrama comes from the highlighting of emotions: it builds strong emotions, and it expresses them - usually hyperbolically - but it doesn't have to. Ozu did this as well as anyone: getting across an intense emotional moment in the most precise, minimal way. In this scene: her mother has come to pay her farewells to Akiko; Hara sits in the hall and listens, but never speaks. Her mother leaves - and Hara moves her right hand from her hip to where it is in this shot, cradling the flowers her mother gave her for Akiko. It's all there, and it's breathtaking.
I want to write about 2 of Ozu's most unusual films, Early Spring and Tokyo Twilight. They tend to be neglected, though they have been released in the states, part of Eclipse's Late Ozu set; they tend to be treated as lesser Ozu, when they are considered. Even David Bordwell can't quite get behind Tokyo Twilight... I suppose it's true - they are lesser Ozu - but compared to almost anyone else, they are extraordinary.
The main case against them is that they are more definitively melodramatic than most of Ozu's films. Early Spring tells the story of a salariman and his wife (Sugiyama, and Masako) - he is restless at work, they are unhappy together, they have lost a child some years back, a common enough cause for marital angst, for Ozu and for everyone else. The salariman has an affair with a woman from work (Goldfish); the rest of their circleof friends and coworkers gossip and make trouble; his wife finds out and leaves him; he is transferred to the provinces. It is unusual for the focus on a young, childless couple; the workplace (though this is a throwback to Ozu in the 30s); the sex - as well as its tone, which combines a certain urban coldness with its melodrama.
Tokyo Twilight is a more convoluted affair - it returns to the family, but this is a very melodramatic family. Chishu Ryu plays the patriarch, with two daughters, Takako and Akiko; he's a miserable, passive bully; Takako (played by Setsuko Hara), has left her drunkard college professor husband; Akiko has fallen for a cad, dropped out of school to learn English shorthand, and now finds herself in a family way. Meanwhile - dad's misery stems from being abandoned by his wife (played by Isuzu Yamada - who is luminous) - she has now turned up running a cheap mahjong parlor where some of Akiko's friends hang out. Soon, Akiko meets her mother - but things don't get better afterwards. Abortion and death follow, as they usually do (though not so much in Ozu's films) - someone goes to Hokkaido, somewhat more common for Ozu, though perhaps no less horrible than death and abortion. All this is played for the melodrama, and looks as grim as it sounds - most of the action occurring at night, and all of it in the dead of winter. And all of it in Tokyo's streets and bars and seedy noodle shops and mahjong parlors, plus a couple middle class houses that come off as forbidding and cruel as the rest.
They are quite a bit different from the films around them - one of the reasons I think they are somewhat discounted is that they don't fit the standard narrative about Ozu. These two films were released in 1956 and 1957 - they are the two films he made directly after Tokyo Story. The story goes - he turned more and more to the Japanese family; he turned to more affluent characters; he told ever more oblique and plotless stories. All of which is a reasonable generalization to make about his films in the 50s - except that right in the middle, here are these two. At the same time - they are not unprecedented for Ozu. His early college comedies, workplace films like Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth?, or the office parts of Tokyo Chorus and I Was Born, But... anticipate the milieu, and some of the story, of Early Spring. Tokyo Twilight picks up themes from several of his older films - the lost parent returning, that is the plot of both Floating Weeds films; the rebellious spoiled child from A Mother Must be Loved; the bad marriage from the Munekata Sisters, maybe. Perhaps more importantly, both films adopt the tone and themes of older films - the social commentary and satire of Early Spring referring back to those early bittersweet college and salariman films; the unabashed melodrama, played for at least some shock value, in Tokyo Twilight, as in The Munekata Sisters, or A Mother Must be Loved, or Women of Tokyo. They both move from the settings of many of the 50s films to a seedier Tokyo, or to the blank modernity of the office sections of the city - again, harking back to the settings of the older films.
I mentioned in the comments below that the more Ozu films you see, the more you see in them. These films are an illustration of that, I think. I saw Tokyo Twilight 8-10 years ago - at the time, I had seen most of the post-war films, and a handful of the prewar films - basically the ones that are available on DVD now (Floating Weeds, and the Eclipse Silent Comedy set.) At the time - it seemed utterly anomalous - a handsome and austere, but rather sloppy attempt at - something... But between then and seeing it again, I saw the full Ozu retrospective - seeing all those older films, seeing the range of films he made, changed how I saw his later films. And watching Tokyo Twilight now, it seems much more comprehensible. And impressive.
The truth is - it seems to me that in these two films, as well as some of the other films Ozu made in the late 50s (Good Morning, notably), Ozu is looking for new ways to make films. He had, by this time, settled on a pretty narrow range of devices and styles - the low camera, the lack of camera movements, the elliptical narration, the understated tone, the oblique transitions, etc. - but within that set of devices, he constantly looked for new ways to use them. What surprised me, watching these films again this month, was just that - the ways he fit these quite different stories, settings, characters, into his customary forms. Or used his forms to create different effects. They do things differently - take his famous "pillow shots" - in Early Spring, these are often shots of buildings - there isn't a lot of nature in this film. The shots even include a bit of an editorializing - zombie salarimen, who could have come from Pulse or Tokyo Sonata:
Tokyo Twilight offers an even odder version of these transitions: here, Ozu often uses shots of minor characters as a kind of pillow shot - along with the usual shots of streets and bars that introduce locations in his late films, he often includes several shots of the people in these places. The hangers on in the Etoile bar; the poor devils at the police station:
Some of these shots go nowhere - they are purely transitional. Some of them develop quite a ways - there are some fairly elaborate conversations among some of the completely incidental denizens of some of the bars. And even when the main characters are on hand, and plot is being advanced - this film is quite consistent in putting off the revelation of the plot point of the scene. It starts from the very beginning - Ryu's character goes into a bar, has a conversation with the woman proprietor and a man drinking at the bar, mostly about oysters and pearls - then, after a few monutes of that, Ryu asks about "Professor Numata", who has been here drinking with his students, it turns out. This is a double delay, of course - since Ozu doesn't tell us who Numata is, or why Ryu's character cares. We find that out in the next scene - though again, after Ryu and Hara have been on screen a while, making small talk. Numata, it turns out, is her husband - a drunkard, possibly violent - she has left him. But we don't get that until the end of the scene. Ozu does this - tucking plot information into the end of a scene - constantly in this film. It is almost an organizing principal. At the same time, the story is a lot more explicit than usual for 50s Ozu - we see the big confrontations and turning points. It is almost as if he needed to compensate for the melodrama of the plot by spending a lot more time on digressions and odd side details.
Though it's also true that he uses those diversions to make points. He spends a lot of time with secondary characters in both films. Some of these are used to create parallels to the main story line, especially in Early Spring. He shows us the couple next door to the main characters - a couple who have also been through adulteries and troubles and come out - together, at least. He also shows us the travails of another salariman - whose wife is having a baby, to their distress. But again, they work through it, and create a counterpoint to the main couple and their lost child. There are also several men who represent different attitudes toward office work: one has risen to power; one exiled to the provinces; one has dropped out and opened a coffee shop; one (getting drunk at the shop) is about to retire without anything to live on; the one who loved his work, is dying of a lung disease; and two of the main character's old army buddies bring in a working class perspective - one makes pots; one fixes things.
The other, nastier function the minor characters fill is to - for lack of a better word - judge the main characters. In Early Spring, we are privy to the office gossip against Goldfish and Sugiyama (who are having the affair) - they even confront her, causing her to confront him, and his wife to find out about the business. This sort of thing is even harsher in Tokyo Twilight. Akiko is judged by everyone - bartenders, noodle shop owners, her boyfriend's cronies - all abuse her behind her back. It's harsh - especially since Ozu never presents her as anything but sympathetic (except with her parents, significantly - though he makes sure we understand that.) He shoots her with sympathy throughout:
In fact, it is notable that in this film (and in Early Spring, really), everyone - almost everyone - comes off well: sympathetically, at least. Everyone has their reasons - the mother who left her family, the father who stayed, the two daughters - everyone is sympathetic, but trapped by their circumstances... It is, after all, a classic melodrama, and Ozu plays up the melodrama as much as he ever did. But - undercut it, at the same time. Most notably in a scene at the mahjongg parlor - as usual, Ozu is delaying the point of the scene (which is really the confrontation between Akiko and her mother) - here, though, he does it by having one of the players tell the sordid tale of Akiko and Kenji. He - and the others - turn it into a joke - they do it in funny voices, turning it into a cliché, a soap opera, with stock characters and situations. This scene parodies the plot, and it is probably not the only place Ozu does so in Tokyo Twilight. But emphasizing the hackneyed plot creates a strange tension between it and the people in the story - Ozu spends a lot more time establishing them as sympathetic, rich characters than with the plot. Though this too is interesting in comparison to his other films - he develops this kind of depth of character more than he usually did at this point in his career. That’s ironic in itself - he makes these denizens of an over the top pot-boiler more conventionally rounded than he does the people in his more characteristic films. (Where what characterization we get, we get through indirection and implication - more than here, where things are often stated and acted and reacted to directly.)
Though I have to add - this is more of a staple of melodrama than is sometimes acknowledged. Melodrama at its best is very self-conscious - however ironic or stylized or sincere - it is shameless - it plays its extreme stories straight, while highlighting all the exaggeration and excess. Melodrama is highly presentationalist, I think - the idea of someone in the story parodying the story, as the mahjong players do, is almost as necessary as the shock cut from Akiko’s abortion to the child, or Hara’s ferocious bawling at the end.
Though even in this film - the shot that precedes that one, of Hara sitting along, in the hallway, with the bundle of flowers her mother has just given her, is much more typical of Ozu's approach. It isn't that it is any less melodramatic - it's restrained, but the restraint is calculated and precise, and expresses her pain and regret and everything else, as powerfully as the more extreme moments. Melodrama comes from the highlighting of emotions: it builds strong emotions, and it expresses them - usually hyperbolically - but it doesn't have to. Ozu did this as well as anyone: getting across an intense emotional moment in the most precise, minimal way. In this scene: her mother has come to pay her farewells to Akiko; Hara sits in the hall and listens, but never speaks. Her mother leaves - and Hara moves her right hand from her hip to where it is in this shot, cradling the flowers her mother gave her for Akiko. It's all there, and it's breathtaking.
Kurosawa Imagery
Just a quick little follow up to my previous Japanese cinematography post - this time, devoted completely to the "other" Kurosawa.
Who can give you those showy compositions and angles:
Neat depth of field:
And adds some fun editing tricks as well:
And meaning through images:
And doing it all in deliberately difficult circumstances - action scenes shot through obstacles, in the rain and dark - depth of focus in the dark, take your pick:
Who can give you those showy compositions and angles:
Neat depth of field:
And adds some fun editing tricks as well:
And meaning through images:
And doing it all in deliberately difficult circumstances - action scenes shot through obstacles, in the rain and dark - depth of focus in the dark, take your pick:
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Why I Love Ozu
This is not the great big Ozu screed I alluded to last night - that involves some unloved Ozu films that, well, I love... but it has occurred to me that I have never, here or (really) anywhere else, quite written a simple statement of Why I Love Ozu. Allusions here and there, and some reasonably precise comments on the Film Walrus blog - but nothing definitive. But a blogathon is perfect excuse for this sort of thing, so off we go.
It was watching this shot, roughly, when I realized Ozu was my favorite filmmaker:
That's from Late Spring - Chishu Ryu's character has been convinced that to get his daughter to marry, he has to convince her he is going to marry - so at a Noh performance, he nods and smiles at the pretty widow people have been whispering about. Setsuko Hara's character sees - and reacts, while her father sits beside her, impassive, absorbed (or pretending to be) in the performance. Late Spring always floors me - always surprises me, with how funny it is, then floors me, again, with how heart-breaking it is. The famous scene at the end, when Ryu tells Hara to go and be happy - is horrifying. The way it forces him to empty his soul, to lie to her, even more cruelly than in pretending to marry - but even more than that, the fact that what he says is almost certainly true. She will become happy - settle into her family, work through the disappointment... but it doesn't make this moment of parting any less terrible. And it doesn't change the way the film itself plays as a charting of her reduction from a free, exuberant, happy woman to a bride, dressed up like a doll. (Ozu's late films often play like a panagyric against the insanity of Japanese marriage customs - or they would, if you ignore the fact that all the films involving marriage treat it almost completely differently - in Late Spring, Hara is forced to marry; in Early Summer, she marries a man of her choice, against the will of her family (and indeed, against the values her Late Spring character had asserted - this Noriko has nothing against second marriages.) Equinox Flower has a girl choosing her husband over her father's resistance; Late Autumn has a girl stumbling into a love marriage completely by accident; and Autumn Afternoon has a girl in an arranged marriage, like in Late Spring, but significantly happier about it.)
It’s probably not an accident that this scene takes place in Kyoto, where they have been visiting Buddhist shrines - it's probably also not exactly an accident that Ryu's character has been reading Nietzsche. What he says - telling her how he was unhappy with her mother (and she with him), but they found happiness, grew into it - and how she will do the same, the pain now will not last, and her story is the same story everyone else lives - is not exactly what Nietzsche meant by the eternal return of the same, but it’s not far off. This is where Ozu comes closest to earning his reputation as a Buddhist, in these ideas of acceptance, and the natural cycles of life.... But it's also important that the film is resisting those recurring patterns here - there is a lot of weight brought to bear on the ways this wedding is a Very Bad Thing, people giving in to social expectations, abdicating responsibility for their lives, and letting their relatives and friends dictate how they will live - giving up their individuality to become types: a bride, a wife, a mother.... This too, I suppose, is not far from Nietzsche -the idea that your individual life is absolutely on you - it is too easy to be swept into what the world makes you - but that is defeat. Individuals are free - when they enter into roles, they become false - but they really can't live without taking a role: it is a dilemma...
I think this is, in fact, Ozu's greatest strength, at least as a humanist - and one of his great strengths as a filmmaker, in the way his themes resonate with his style. HIs films are about that contradiction, between people as individuals, and people as types - self as imposed from outside, and self as we enact it, and the ways anything we do is caught up into society. The style and structure of his films and stories emphasize this - the repeated use of actors, in similar roles, with the same names, the same problems, generalizes the characters, but also particularizes them - from Tatsuo Saito and Takeshi Sakamoto and Tomio Aoki to Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara and Shin Saburi - bring their own distinctiveness to their roles. And the roles change - everything he does works on the principal of repetition and variation. So five films about marriage work through half a dozen (maybe more) types of marriages (or not marriages, if you count Ryu in Late Spring, or Hara in Late Autumn). So three Noriko films offer one who is bullied into marriage, one who marries on her own against her family's will, one who does not remarry; one who condemns remarriage and one who marries a widow. And so on...
It's easy to get absorbed into Ozu's style - especially for me. But what makes him the flat out best director of them all, I think, is the way he combines total formal command with a profound humanism. Ozu and Capra (and Renoir, though I have seen fewer of his films), I say, do this better than anyone - they offer a truly sophisticated view of life and how to live it, along with complete mastery of the medium. In Ozu's case, the mastery goes further, and is as formally rigorous and challenging as Eisenstein or Dreyer or Godard - he challenges how films work, how they mean, while making them work and mean. And I say again, he has a sophisticated view of the world. What I admire in Ozu and Capra both is the way they give the appropriate weight to everything we are. They pose individuals against society - but they do it in ways that make us aware of just how important families and communities, marriages, friendships, are... and how constricting they can be, even at their best. Individuality and communities both have their values - and Ozu (and Capra) give all the relevant values weight. Society vs. individual, tradition vs. change, freedom vs. responsibility, justice vs. responsibility - Ozu never lets anyone off the hook. You don't get to choose one or the other - you don't get to have both all the time (sometimes they are real conflicts) - everything counts.
All right. I guess that sums it up, for now anyway. I'll leave you with a lovely picture of what happens when daughters (and wives) get their way - Shin Saburi pouts.... Though I can't deny that a lot of the reason I love Ozu is in the green squares and stripes (I mean, it's almost perfectly horizontal, across at least three planes!), the lamp, the red and black radio, and the way the bottles are arranged with the labels forming a perfect left to right descending diagonal.
It was watching this shot, roughly, when I realized Ozu was my favorite filmmaker:
That's from Late Spring - Chishu Ryu's character has been convinced that to get his daughter to marry, he has to convince her he is going to marry - so at a Noh performance, he nods and smiles at the pretty widow people have been whispering about. Setsuko Hara's character sees - and reacts, while her father sits beside her, impassive, absorbed (or pretending to be) in the performance. Late Spring always floors me - always surprises me, with how funny it is, then floors me, again, with how heart-breaking it is. The famous scene at the end, when Ryu tells Hara to go and be happy - is horrifying. The way it forces him to empty his soul, to lie to her, even more cruelly than in pretending to marry - but even more than that, the fact that what he says is almost certainly true. She will become happy - settle into her family, work through the disappointment... but it doesn't make this moment of parting any less terrible. And it doesn't change the way the film itself plays as a charting of her reduction from a free, exuberant, happy woman to a bride, dressed up like a doll. (Ozu's late films often play like a panagyric against the insanity of Japanese marriage customs - or they would, if you ignore the fact that all the films involving marriage treat it almost completely differently - in Late Spring, Hara is forced to marry; in Early Summer, she marries a man of her choice, against the will of her family (and indeed, against the values her Late Spring character had asserted - this Noriko has nothing against second marriages.) Equinox Flower has a girl choosing her husband over her father's resistance; Late Autumn has a girl stumbling into a love marriage completely by accident; and Autumn Afternoon has a girl in an arranged marriage, like in Late Spring, but significantly happier about it.)
It’s probably not an accident that this scene takes place in Kyoto, where they have been visiting Buddhist shrines - it's probably also not exactly an accident that Ryu's character has been reading Nietzsche. What he says - telling her how he was unhappy with her mother (and she with him), but they found happiness, grew into it - and how she will do the same, the pain now will not last, and her story is the same story everyone else lives - is not exactly what Nietzsche meant by the eternal return of the same, but it’s not far off. This is where Ozu comes closest to earning his reputation as a Buddhist, in these ideas of acceptance, and the natural cycles of life.... But it's also important that the film is resisting those recurring patterns here - there is a lot of weight brought to bear on the ways this wedding is a Very Bad Thing, people giving in to social expectations, abdicating responsibility for their lives, and letting their relatives and friends dictate how they will live - giving up their individuality to become types: a bride, a wife, a mother.... This too, I suppose, is not far from Nietzsche -the idea that your individual life is absolutely on you - it is too easy to be swept into what the world makes you - but that is defeat. Individuals are free - when they enter into roles, they become false - but they really can't live without taking a role: it is a dilemma...
I think this is, in fact, Ozu's greatest strength, at least as a humanist - and one of his great strengths as a filmmaker, in the way his themes resonate with his style. HIs films are about that contradiction, between people as individuals, and people as types - self as imposed from outside, and self as we enact it, and the ways anything we do is caught up into society. The style and structure of his films and stories emphasize this - the repeated use of actors, in similar roles, with the same names, the same problems, generalizes the characters, but also particularizes them - from Tatsuo Saito and Takeshi Sakamoto and Tomio Aoki to Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara and Shin Saburi - bring their own distinctiveness to their roles. And the roles change - everything he does works on the principal of repetition and variation. So five films about marriage work through half a dozen (maybe more) types of marriages (or not marriages, if you count Ryu in Late Spring, or Hara in Late Autumn). So three Noriko films offer one who is bullied into marriage, one who marries on her own against her family's will, one who does not remarry; one who condemns remarriage and one who marries a widow. And so on...
It's easy to get absorbed into Ozu's style - especially for me. But what makes him the flat out best director of them all, I think, is the way he combines total formal command with a profound humanism. Ozu and Capra (and Renoir, though I have seen fewer of his films), I say, do this better than anyone - they offer a truly sophisticated view of life and how to live it, along with complete mastery of the medium. In Ozu's case, the mastery goes further, and is as formally rigorous and challenging as Eisenstein or Dreyer or Godard - he challenges how films work, how they mean, while making them work and mean. And I say again, he has a sophisticated view of the world. What I admire in Ozu and Capra both is the way they give the appropriate weight to everything we are. They pose individuals against society - but they do it in ways that make us aware of just how important families and communities, marriages, friendships, are... and how constricting they can be, even at their best. Individuality and communities both have their values - and Ozu (and Capra) give all the relevant values weight. Society vs. individual, tradition vs. change, freedom vs. responsibility, justice vs. responsibility - Ozu never lets anyone off the hook. You don't get to choose one or the other - you don't get to have both all the time (sometimes they are real conflicts) - everything counts.
All right. I guess that sums it up, for now anyway. I'll leave you with a lovely picture of what happens when daughters (and wives) get their way - Shin Saburi pouts.... Though I can't deny that a lot of the reason I love Ozu is in the green squares and stripes (I mean, it's almost perfectly horizontal, across at least three planes!), the lamp, the red and black radio, and the way the bottles are arranged with the labels forming a perfect left to right descending diagonal.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Japanese Cinematography Sampler
I've been pointing to Wildgrounds' Japanese Cinema Blogathon for a while now - I suppose it's time to add something of my own. It should come as no surprise (just look at the top of the page) that this is a subject near and very dear to my heart. I've been working on a somewhat more - uh, what's the word? geeky? cerebral? wordy? - essay for a while - that's taking a while to get right... So let's jump in with something a bit simpler - a fairly quick celebration of one of the most wonderful aspects of Japanese film - their utterly unapologetic love for extravagant cinematography and compositions...
And where better to start than the director/DP combination that for my money created the most consistently astonishing images in cinema: Shohei Imamura and Shinsaku Himeda. I mean, look at that fish on the banner! look at the composition, the lighting, through water even! Damn... and look at these shots:
That last shot reminds me - contemporary Japanese filmmakers still know their way around the image - compare it to this shor from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's (and Akiko Ashizawa's) Retribution:
There's plenty more where that came from...
I can do this for pretty much any Japanese films I can put my hands on - I may before I'm done. (I haven't been collecting screenshots off my (Akira) Kurosawas, my Mizoguchis, my Suzukis - I may be back here with some more of this...) Right now, I'll leave you all with a hint of the essay to come - shot from a filmmaker perhaps not noted for his stylistic extravagance, this shot - it's almost worthy of Yoshida, or Oshima - it's the man you can see going down the stairs in the window that makes the shot...
And where better to start than the director/DP combination that for my money created the most consistently astonishing images in cinema: Shohei Imamura and Shinsaku Himeda. I mean, look at that fish on the banner! look at the composition, the lighting, through water even! Damn... and look at these shots:
That last shot reminds me - contemporary Japanese filmmakers still know their way around the image - compare it to this shor from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's (and Akiko Ashizawa's) Retribution:
There's plenty more where that came from...
I can do this for pretty much any Japanese films I can put my hands on - I may before I'm done. (I haven't been collecting screenshots off my (Akira) Kurosawas, my Mizoguchis, my Suzukis - I may be back here with some more of this...) Right now, I'll leave you all with a hint of the essay to come - shot from a filmmaker perhaps not noted for his stylistic extravagance, this shot - it's almost worthy of Yoshida, or Oshima - it's the man you can see going down the stairs in the window that makes the shot...
Bloomsday
While I work on a couple posts for the Japanese Cinema Blogathon - let us honor the day - though how, how? It has been some years since I have read the book - making it hard to come up with a neat little commemorative quote. NOt that you're going to get too far trying to sum up Joyce in a sentence or two... but still... I know reading it, the first time, it was the newspaper section - "IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS" - that gave me the first jolt - the first indication that things were going to change. (Though I knew enough of the book to know they were going to change.) This is what they were talking about, I thought. But I think what used to stymie me (when I tried reading it, in my youth, in early college I suppose it must have been - I remember one summer out of school I determined I was going to read it) - came later. I made it, twice at least, well into the book - only to come a cropper somewhere in the middle - "Send us, bright one, light one, Herhorn, quickening and wombfruit." Somewhere after that. I ground along, but expired on the shores of that section (what do they call it? Oxen of the Sun?) - maybe in its depths, in later days. I tried it more than once, and that is where it ended - until it didn't: somewhere I learned to read it (could I blame Flann O'Brien? not impossible) - and now, it probably is my favorite part...
And so on, in increasingly wonderfully purpling prose.
Thank you, Mr. Joyce...
Our worth acquaintance, Mr Malachi Mulligan, now appeared in the doorway as the students were finishing their apologue accompanied with a friend whom he had just reencountered, a young gentleman, his name Alec Bannon, who had late come to town, it being his intention to buy a colour or a cornetcy in the fencibles and list for the wars. Mr Mulligan was civil enough to express some relish of it all the more as it jumped with a project of his own for the cure of the very evil that had been touched upon. Whareat he handed round to the company a set of pasteboard cards which he had had printed that day at Mr Quinnell's bearing a legend printed in fair italics: Mr Malachi Mulligan, Fertiliser and Incubator, Lambay Island. HIs project, he went on to expound, was to withdraw from the round of idle pleasures such as form the chief business of sir Fopling Popinjay and sir Milksop Quidnunc in town and devote himself to the noblest task for which our bodily organism has been framed. Well, let us hear of it, good friend, said Mr Dixon. I make no doubt it smacks of wenching.
And so on, in increasingly wonderfully purpling prose.
Thank you, Mr. Joyce...
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Links and Anticipation
Just stopping by - a few links on a Wednesday evening...
At the Film of the Month Club, a new film for June - ...no lies, by Mitchell Block - the film (16 minutes long) is embedded at the site, for the time being anyway - if possible, watch it before jumping into the conversation on the blog. Reasons will become clear when you've seen it, I think. Peter Rinaldi hosts this month - an interview with Mitchell Block, the director, will appear in the upcoming days....
Roger Ebert celebrates John Wayne on the 30th anniversary of his death.
The Nagisa Oshima retrospective is coming to Berkeley, and MIchael Guillen has details, and a long interview with James Quandt.
Pacze Moj has Oshima links, for those of us not in Berkeley.
And that's a reminder that Wildgrounds is hosting a Japanese Cinema Blogathon, starting Monday - I shall be diving into that...
At the Film of the Month Club, a new film for June - ...no lies, by Mitchell Block - the film (16 minutes long) is embedded at the site, for the time being anyway - if possible, watch it before jumping into the conversation on the blog. Reasons will become clear when you've seen it, I think. Peter Rinaldi hosts this month - an interview with Mitchell Block, the director, will appear in the upcoming days....
Roger Ebert celebrates John Wayne on the 30th anniversary of his death.
The Nagisa Oshima retrospective is coming to Berkeley, and MIchael Guillen has details, and a long interview with James Quandt.
Pacze Moj has Oshima links, for those of us not in Berkeley.
And that's a reminder that Wildgrounds is hosting a Japanese Cinema Blogathon, starting Monday - I shall be diving into that...
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Books - Very Lush and Full of Ostriches
First - goodbye to David Carradine - I can't say I watched a lot of Kung Fu as a kid, but it was one of those shows everyone seemed to breath - at least, everyone my age.... Every time I've seen him since he's held the screen... Keith probably means more to me, given my Altman worship, but David Carradine's presence in anything was reason to watch it.
Now - trying to keep from backsliding into the postaweek mode of this spring, I think I'll try my hand at one of the memes going around - the Reading the movies meme, courtesy of The Dancing Image... I don't know if I've been tagged, but it looks like everyone's diving in with enthusiasm, so me too. The twist is - I did this 2 1/2 years ago, during Andy Horbal's Film Criticism blogathon: two posts of it, in fact! But that's no reason not to do it again...
I'm not sure I can improve on the 10 books listed then (see below, or the posts linked above) - but I can add to them.
1. Noel Burch - To the Distant Observer - on Japanese films. Probably where I became a formalist. Not that I bought everything he said, especially his value judgments - but I loved that he dug into the formal elements of films, how they work, and how they relate form to meaning. My interest in the difference between representational and presentational art, between expressionism and formalism (and my ideas about what those things mean) come from reading Burch. I stilll find myself thinking in those terms, usually hearing Burch's claims in the back of my head....
2. Godard on Godard - probably not surprising how often this comes up in these lists - Ed Howard, Glenn Kenny, etc. - for good reasons, Godard is simply a superb essayist, a characteristic that carried over to his films. He's also, when pinned down, as clear and careful an analyst of his own work as any filmmmaker gets - his essay on Two or Three Things I Know About Her got me a paper once - about McCabe and Mrs. Miller...
3. Sergei Eisenstein - though Eisenstein was no slouch. I read a few of his books - Film form or Notes of a Film Director, maybe Lessons with Eisenstein, a long long time ago - I saw Ivan the Terrible on TV one night, out of the blue with no preparation, and decided I had to learn more... I read all of them, before I read anything else about film, or before I had seen much more than Ivan the Terrible of the films one might see as a cinephile... I was probably a film formalist before I'd seen an appreciable number of films, come to think of it...
4. Paul Schrader - Transcendental Style in Film - This is another book I don't quite believe, but I still admire it deeply. It's a fascinating attempt to put films in the context of the rest of the culture - philosophy, the arts, religion, and though I can't accept all his claims, the attempt is inspiring.
5. Rick Altman - any of several, but The American Film Musical is one that really set me going a few years ago. Though the truth is - the Busby Berkeley films touring a few years ago sent me to Altman, and Altman sent me on from there... I could list a couple other of his books - A Theory of Narrative, for instance, from last year, was a treat - I find myself thinking in his terms: single focus narratives, double, multiple...
6. More recently, by German Film Class put me onto a couple works that live up to any standards: Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler is a seminal work, and argument aside, is one of the most detailed broad scale works of criticism I know....
7. and Tom Gunning's The Films of Fritz Lang is, like the books on Ozu, Capra and Kurosawa noted below, a magisterial assessment of the career of one of the essential directors.
8. And the class reminded me what a great book the Herzog on Herzog volume is. Herzog is as good a talker as anyone alive, and Paul Cronin guides him through his career in a fine way. It's revealing and fascinating (though I doubt I'd take much of it as gospel truth) - though, as he might say, that's just the accountant's truth. What he says illuminates the films, the ideas behind the films, himself, and he is endlessly fascinating....
9. Speaking of filmmakers who are totally compelling speakers, and writers - Guy Maddin's From the Atelier Tovar is another wonder. Trtuth is, Maddin's commentaries might rival Herzog's - and this book is a marvellous read. I can always find a quote there (or a post title.)
10. Oh god - another dozen possibilities occur to me, from Christian Metz (Film Language) or Peter Wollen (Signs and Meaning) to Jane Feur on the American musical (again) to Bunuel's My Last Sigh to Robert Ray's ABCs of Classical Hollywood Cinema - but no - let's actually dial it back: to Halliwell's Film Guide - which one? I don't know - 1994, I think, is the one I bought, way back in, about, 1994. And used as just that in those dark days before the IMDB. I'm not sure I ever agreed with its judgments - it didn't matter, because it was where I could find information, about pretty much anything, as long as it had been released in the UK.....
So that's that! And for old times sake - here are the first 10, from 2006 - all of which I value as much as ever now...
1. David Bordwell on Ozu
2. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's Kurosawa book.
3. Stanley Cavell - Pursuits of Happiness
4. Ray Carney on Frank Capra
5. Pier Paolo Pasolini - Heretical Empiricism.
6. Sarris' American CInema
7. Audie Bock - Japanese Film Directors
8. Stephen Teo - Hong Kong Cinema
9. Truffaut/Hitchcock
10. James Sanders' Celluloid Skylines (on New York in the movies)
Now - trying to keep from backsliding into the postaweek mode of this spring, I think I'll try my hand at one of the memes going around - the Reading the movies meme, courtesy of The Dancing Image... I don't know if I've been tagged, but it looks like everyone's diving in with enthusiasm, so me too. The twist is - I did this 2 1/2 years ago, during Andy Horbal's Film Criticism blogathon: two posts of it, in fact! But that's no reason not to do it again...
I'm not sure I can improve on the 10 books listed then (see below, or the posts linked above) - but I can add to them.
1. Noel Burch - To the Distant Observer - on Japanese films. Probably where I became a formalist. Not that I bought everything he said, especially his value judgments - but I loved that he dug into the formal elements of films, how they work, and how they relate form to meaning. My interest in the difference between representational and presentational art, between expressionism and formalism (and my ideas about what those things mean) come from reading Burch. I stilll find myself thinking in those terms, usually hearing Burch's claims in the back of my head....
2. Godard on Godard - probably not surprising how often this comes up in these lists - Ed Howard, Glenn Kenny, etc. - for good reasons, Godard is simply a superb essayist, a characteristic that carried over to his films. He's also, when pinned down, as clear and careful an analyst of his own work as any filmmmaker gets - his essay on Two or Three Things I Know About Her got me a paper once - about McCabe and Mrs. Miller...
3. Sergei Eisenstein - though Eisenstein was no slouch. I read a few of his books - Film form or Notes of a Film Director, maybe Lessons with Eisenstein, a long long time ago - I saw Ivan the Terrible on TV one night, out of the blue with no preparation, and decided I had to learn more... I read all of them, before I read anything else about film, or before I had seen much more than Ivan the Terrible of the films one might see as a cinephile... I was probably a film formalist before I'd seen an appreciable number of films, come to think of it...
4. Paul Schrader - Transcendental Style in Film - This is another book I don't quite believe, but I still admire it deeply. It's a fascinating attempt to put films in the context of the rest of the culture - philosophy, the arts, religion, and though I can't accept all his claims, the attempt is inspiring.
5. Rick Altman - any of several, but The American Film Musical is one that really set me going a few years ago. Though the truth is - the Busby Berkeley films touring a few years ago sent me to Altman, and Altman sent me on from there... I could list a couple other of his books - A Theory of Narrative, for instance, from last year, was a treat - I find myself thinking in his terms: single focus narratives, double, multiple...
6. More recently, by German Film Class put me onto a couple works that live up to any standards: Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari to Hitler is a seminal work, and argument aside, is one of the most detailed broad scale works of criticism I know....
7. and Tom Gunning's The Films of Fritz Lang is, like the books on Ozu, Capra and Kurosawa noted below, a magisterial assessment of the career of one of the essential directors.
8. And the class reminded me what a great book the Herzog on Herzog volume is. Herzog is as good a talker as anyone alive, and Paul Cronin guides him through his career in a fine way. It's revealing and fascinating (though I doubt I'd take much of it as gospel truth) - though, as he might say, that's just the accountant's truth. What he says illuminates the films, the ideas behind the films, himself, and he is endlessly fascinating....
9. Speaking of filmmakers who are totally compelling speakers, and writers - Guy Maddin's From the Atelier Tovar is another wonder. Trtuth is, Maddin's commentaries might rival Herzog's - and this book is a marvellous read. I can always find a quote there (or a post title.)
10. Oh god - another dozen possibilities occur to me, from Christian Metz (Film Language) or Peter Wollen (Signs and Meaning) to Jane Feur on the American musical (again) to Bunuel's My Last Sigh to Robert Ray's ABCs of Classical Hollywood Cinema - but no - let's actually dial it back: to Halliwell's Film Guide - which one? I don't know - 1994, I think, is the one I bought, way back in, about, 1994. And used as just that in those dark days before the IMDB. I'm not sure I ever agreed with its judgments - it didn't matter, because it was where I could find information, about pretty much anything, as long as it had been released in the UK.....
So that's that! And for old times sake - here are the first 10, from 2006 - all of which I value as much as ever now...
1. David Bordwell on Ozu
2. Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's Kurosawa book.
3. Stanley Cavell - Pursuits of Happiness
4. Ray Carney on Frank Capra
5. Pier Paolo Pasolini - Heretical Empiricism.
6. Sarris' American CInema
7. Audie Bock - Japanese Film Directors
8. Stephen Teo - Hong Kong Cinema
9. Truffaut/Hitchcock
10. James Sanders' Celluloid Skylines (on New York in the movies)
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