October's Auteur - Yasujiro Ozu

It is time for October's Director of the Month - and the end of my little countdown of favorite Japanese filmmakers. We have reached the top - Yasujiro Ozu. For most of these, I have written up an essay - but the truth is, I've written so much about Ozu here, it might be easier just to point. Particularly to this one, summing up my love of Ozu - I can't really add much to that. He is, I say, the greatest filmmaker of all - an almost endless source of awe and beauty.



Maybe in place of a top 10 films I could list the top 10 reasons he is the best - or my favorite:

1. His formal brilliance



2. His Humanism
3. Space - the way he slices it up and recombines it
4. Every screen is impeccable
5. His editing - which is where his formal brilliance lies, I think - no one puts a film together like he did. The cuts on motion, the matches, on motion, on actions, or just on the images, the graphic match. And his disregard for the usual rules of editing - or more properly, his disruption of the normal rules of editing - he quite deliberately disorients the viewer, while teaching us to put an Ozu film together.
6. His range - I mean, to extend on those remarks about editing - the fact that all the things Ozu does, formally, can be done for emotional resonance, for a pure formal effect - or (and this happens a lot) as a gag.
7. His humor - the way his comic skills (of all kinds, physical humor, verbal jokes, character humor, formal gags with cuts and set design and what have you) are always there, worked into the fabric of the film, even when it's not a comedy. Though most of them are, at least partially, comedies. And some of them - Good Morning maybe most of all - are absolute comic masterpieces. The old lady and the knife gag....



8. His subtle, but unmistakeable and unmissable once you notice it, attention to economic and social issues. Really - attention to how people live, and how people live within their specific economic circumstances, is everywhere in his films.



9. Death - I have read that people don't usually die in Ozu films - but that is not right. His films are full of death. Seldom on screen (though there are a few - you can find just about anything in an Ozu film somewhere) but it is always there, offscreen - people are haunted in film after film by the people who have died - sons in the war; mothers, wives, children, young and old - there is no getting around it.



10. The way he runs changes on situations - the way he explores a theme, by circling it in a series of films. Take the obvious question of marriage in Japan - and all the different possibilities - arranged marriages, love marriages, sad marriages, happy marriages... Or running through parent child relationships: mother and son, father and son, father and daughter, mother and daughter....



And I could probably add this - that I can almost follow the dialogue in a lot of them.

So - that is that. As for the films - up to now, I've stuck to top 10s, but for Ozu, I am going whole hog - all the complete features I have seen, in order. That leaves out A Mother Should be Loved - I have seen it, but it is missing at least the first and last reels. It would come in near the bottom - it's a nice enough film, but a bit of an over the top tear-jerker. Still - there's nothing here that isn't a very well made piece of work...

1. Early Summer
2. Late Spring
3. Tokyo Story
4. I Was Born But...
5. The Only Son
6. Good Morning
7. Passing Fancy
8. An Inn in Tokyo
9. Tokyo Chorus
10. Autumn Afternoon
11. What did the Lady Forget?
12. Early Spring
13. Story of Floating Weeds
14. Woman of Tokyo
15. Tokyo Twilight
16. That Night's Wife
17. Floating Weeds
18. Record of a Tenement Gentleman
19. Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice
20. There Was A Father
21. Equinox Flower
22. Days of Youth
23. Brother and Sisters of the Today Clan
24. Late Autumn
25. Where Now are the Dreams of Youth
26. Hen in the Wind
27. Walk Cheerfully
28. Dragnet Girl
29. I Flunked But...
30. The Lady and the Beard
31. End of Summer
32. Munekata Sisters

August Director - Kenji Mizoguchi

We are getting to the end of this particular theme for the Director of the Month. I have been using it to count down my favorite Japanese directors, which since I started with Oshima, means counting down 6 to 1. (With bumps.) We are almost there - we are at Number 2.

I can't imagine there's any suspense here - anyone who's read this blog regularly ought to be able to figure out who's number one. And once I put my other obvious favorite at number 3, that pretty much leaves Mizoguchi. I can't claim any kind of originality obviously - I don't really depart much from the consensus, other than elevating Imamura over Kurosawa - I imagine Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa are the standard Big Three. So I doubt I have to make much of a defense of this choice, except maybe to myself.

I haven't written about Mizoguchi all that much here - I noticed that I don't have a Label for him yet (well, I do now, but I didn't before I hit publish.) I have labels for all the others on this list, and a few who aren't on the list (yet - if I go down from 7 to 10, say, I will surely hit Suzuki and Kiyoshi Kurosawa soon - they have labels!) Are there reasons for that? accidents of what I happen to have seen in the last 9 years? Is Mizoguchi maybe somewhat out of fashion, making his films less likely to be revived, less likely to be reissued that some of the others? There might be something to that - there aren't that many Mizoguchi DVDs available in the states, not that I've found. I don't remember any big retrospectives of his work in the past decade or so - unlike Ichikawa, Ozu, Naruse, Oshima... I don't know. I saw the bulk of the Mizoguchi's I have seen in the late 90s - it has been harder to add to what I have seen than it has to add to the others.

And some of it might be me. I took longer to warm to his films than I did to most of the directors I've written about - the first time I saw them, I liked his early, contemporary films better than his later, period films - however impressive all of them were formally. That division did not survive repeated viewings - every film I saw made me love him more, and every time I see them again, I am inclined to love them anew... (Though again, that's true of almost all my favorite directors of any sort - it's certainly as true of Ozu or Mizoguchi, or even Kurosawa, whose films are shown enough that you can become used to them, as it is of Mizoguchi.) But then again - I use the word "love" there - and I don't know if that is quite right. "Love" is the word for Ozu - it's the word for most of the Imamuras, and a few of the Kurosawas (Kurosawa or Kurosawa), and some Suzukis.... Is it the word for Mizoguchi? Or is the word more like "Awe"? When I'm watching them, I can't say that's a very meaningful distinction. But still - I've put Mizoguchi ahead of Imamura here, but that's a bit deceptive. That's not true if this is a "favorite directors" list - it might be true if this is a "best directors" list. Fortunately, the whole list concept here is just a conceit to pick an order to write these essays, so we can forget it!

And talk instead about what these films have. There's not much debating the question of beauty - there might not ever be a filmmaker more capable of taking your breath away, shot after shot, moment by moment in a film. Start with that. And then, of course, note that there aren't a lot of directors with a more distinct and powerful individual style. (And most of the directors with a more individual style are on this list; or will be in a month.) His camera work, the constant movement, the deep spaces, the sculpting of light and dark, creates a world that is incredibly complex. He expands space in his films, creates a world that is too big for the film, that seems to be waiting in the wings to destroy the characters. There are filmmakers who disorient you, who break the sense of spatial continuity in a film, who make you feel the difference between real world space and screen space - there are other filmmakers who work to create a cinematic world that feels as deep and encompassing as the real world. Mizoguchi is their master. He has good company - Murnau, Renoir, Welles, Dreyer - but he is probably the greatest of them. I remember when I was first reading about film, being confused about why the French loved Mizoguchi so much, at Kurosawa's expense - I think this is a big part of it. Mizoguchi fits in with the people Bazin and his followers valued - Renoir, Dreyer, Murnau, Welles, Rosselini - their use of long takes, deep spaces, the sense of continuity, of keeping back from the action, letting the viewer sort things out, make sense of the imagery - is all present in Mizoguchi, probably to an even greater extent. Those critics were not inclined to value what Kurosawa offered - the much more America and Russian style editing, the more direct creation of "meaningful" shots, and so on. That isn't to say Mizoguchi is not "meaningful" - in fact, it might be one of the points against him, that his films feel very self-enclosed (for all their expansiveness) - their style builds to a complete and inescapable world, in ways that, certainly, Imamura's films don't. Or Ozu - whose style seems much more disorienting, constructed, never letting you forget this is a thing that has been made.

And so. I admit that I will keep harping on these formal qualities in the notes below - I suppose that is part of what makes Mizoguchi sometimes a bit hard to place - he is so formally astonishing, so beautiful, that sometimes, the story might seem to become secondary. (There are many ironies there: I find Ozu much more formally disruptive - but I find his work much more emotionally cohesive. I'm not sure how that works.) But that's really just an impression - the simpler fact is that I find Mizoguchi's films to be incredibly beautiful, brilliantly composed and staged, always featuring strong stories, with a consistent and complex point of view, and - notwithstanding what I was just saying - very humanistic. He is a master in every sense.

1. Ugetsu Monogatari - Ghost story. A potter leaves his wife to pursue a mysterious woman, who proves to be a ghost; another man leaves HIS family to pursue military glory thus plunging his wife into prostitution. Features one or two of the single most magnificent shots in the history of cinema. There is probably not much need to explain why this is such a masterpiece - an utterly gorgeous film on Mizoguchi's usual subject, how women suffer to make men worth their suffering. For good measure, he works in anti-militarism (the samurai are all scum, cowards, fools - the foot soldiers are bullies, rapists, murderers, thieves) and a tract on the evils of greed as well. It is one of the high points of filmmaking - its mix of dynamicism and lyricism - the way people move in and out of the frame, the camera movement, the perfect compositions, the effects, even the use of sound.

The scenes with lady Wasaka make a particularly dazzling high point. From the beginning - Genjuro comes in, passing through the ruins; the sequence starts in ruins, but as he moves into the castle, things become more animated - lights, other ghosts and so on appear - until he is brought to Lady Wasaka herself. It is all very theatrical, especially the moment of truth - references to traditional Japanese theater in particular. The lone pine on the stage, for instance... Then Lady Wakasa dances - again, theater, the way she moves, the staging - and as she sings we hear another kind of music start, then hear her father's ghost singing... That might be a first - a ghost appearing inside a ghost story... The voices blend and Mizoguchi moves the camera to the empty armor.... I lose it every time I see that; who wouldn't?

The film as a whole becomes more moving every time I see it, as do most of these films. There is the emotional punch of the ending, but also the ending for Lady Wakasa, who Genjuro betrays as surely as he betrays his wife. She is almost as sympathetic as Miyagi. And all through there is so much to be in awe of - take the shot of Miyagi's death - a long crane shot, three starving men fighting, one stabs her, she dies in long shot and the others die in very long shot... devastating.

2. Osaka Elegy - Story of a woman who becomes her boss's mistress to pay off her useless father and brother's debts. Murky in every print I have seen, but beautifully composed and shot. Notice the use of light - the dark foregrounds, the bright backgrounds, the frequent high contrast lighting that picks objects out in the background, bright shining objects. These great Japanese directors found their styles fairly early - this is 1936, but Mizoguchi is in command of the style completely - the perfectly composed shots, the long, elaborate tracks, the cranes, the long takes, the sophisticated mise en scene. Shooting through screens - literal screens, also people, windows, shelves, laundry. Like Sternberg - also like Sirk. It is a very strong lineage, that is probably real - certainly Sternberg influenced Mizoguchi, and probably Sirk (who was making his own expressionistic masterpieces in Germany about this time). Sculpting and shaping the world in light and dark, composition, set decoration, all three of them, at a level not really matched by anyone else. (Except maybe Murnau, who helped beget the lot of them...) For Mizoguchi, especially, space is the key - he shapes it, shapes the story out of what is seen and not seen. He is a master of what we don't see as much as we see - using offscreen sounds along with the camera and actor movements, the light and dark, entrances and exits, to establish a sense of continuous space, a whole world around what we see. You feel as if every shot could go on forever, in time or space - that the world extends infinitely in all directions. And what you see, the flow of things you see, and how you see them, creates the narrative and reveals the emotional story. These things are constant in Mizoguchi's work, and they are all here, in 1936, in 71 minutes...

3. Sansho the Bailiff - Story in medieval Japan, of a boy and girl, children of a ruined noble, enslaved by Sansho, who forces their mother into prostitution. The girl sacrifices herself to let the boy escape, and he does, and gets vengeance, though he gives it up to find his mother. Another rather unbelievably beautiful film, though as usual with Mizoguchi, thematically complex as well. Here, the two fathers, good and bad - the ways the sons, Taro and Zushio - betray and redeem their fathers, and so on. And of course, the way Mizoguchi develops themes and tells stories through the formal elements of the film - the play of space, of light and dark, of movement through landscapes, the circles, the routes traced by Zushio (and his mother and sister), the sounds and images, and the ravishing shots... Images that develop themes - consider the way the characters move, where they go - men, whatever happens to them, can move; women cannot. Women sacrifice themselves because that is all they have, in these worlds - men can be stars or heroes or artists; women are lucky not to get their tendons cut.

4. Sisters of the Gion - Another mid-30s film, tracing 2 sisters who are Geisha's - one remains loyal to her lover, even when he is ruined and moves in with her; the other schemes and connives several men, but is almost killed in the end by one of them... while the loyal, good geisha, loses her man when his wife gets him a job. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, though I suppose they are all better off rid of the bastards. As such, for all it's misery, it plays a bit closer to Naruse than some of the other Mizoguchi's - the women are abandoned and suffer, but for no one's sake but their own.

5. 47 Ronin - Classic piece of Japanese drama about 46 ronin who avenge the death of their lord, and are allowed to kill themselves. This was made in 1941, and shows some propaganda elements, but great lord, what a stunning looking film. Maybe the government's interest in the film meant that Mizoguchi had all the resources he could possibly ask - this is far more extravagant looking than his other early films that I have seen. Long elaborate crane shots - overhead angles moving into low angles, all smooth and magisterial. Mizoguchi here moves the camera to get between shots - what might be a conventional shot/reverse shot, he achieves by moving the camera - moving from long to medium shots and so on... Slow going - 4 hours of it, much of it samurai sitting around pretending to vacillate - but it has such weight in the pictures that it feels full, constantly engaging. Amazing film.

6. Chikamatsu Monogatari (The Crucified Lovers) - Another theatrical adaptation, this from Chikamatsu, one of Japan's great dramatists. A complicated story of a printer's wife, whose useless brother needs money that she can't borrow from her husband. So she mentions it to Mohei, her husband's best employee - he agrees to help, but is caught in the act of trying to sneak some money away - when he tries to confess and apologize, the husband turns on him. Why? Well - the old rake had been trying to molest a maid, so the maid said she was engaged to Mohei. Well - as everyone tries to explain everything to everyone else - Mohei and the wife are caught together in the maid's room... Uh oh! They run away, and as they travel together, they fall genuinely in love - to the point that when they are caught, they go together to the gallows, hand in hand, happier than they have ever been.

The tragedy is familiar enough, but beyond that, it is a very dense, complex film - gorgeous and bitter. Money is everywhere - Ishun, the printer, has made a fortune from the great nobles, who all owe him money, and are itching for a chance to break him. He has a rival aiming to get the position back; faithless employees, stealing under his nose. The wife's brother is a useless playboy, taking singing lessons and letting his mother and sister suffer in his place. The class issues - between the printer and the court nobles in his debt, between the poor samurai like the wife's family and the printer, between the printer, his wife, and his employees - are ubiquitous as well. And sexual power - the husband causes a lot of the trouble by seducing a maid; no one (except his wife, and maybe Mohei) pauses for a second to think about the hypocrisy of it - but she does, and Mohei does, and they are ruined for it. All this is lovely as usual, dense and beautiful. Bitter, funny, cruel, tragic, as complicated and modern as Shakespeare (might be more modern that Shakespeare, though only a half century later than Shakespeare) - great film, geat story, everything.



7. Story of the Last Chrysanthemum - Late 30s Mizoguchi, about an actor in the 1880s who runs off with a servant. He had been a hack actor - she makes him a star and an artist, but only after she sacrifices herself for his good. Quintessential version of the Mizoguchi theme, probably - and as always, a masterful piece of work.

8. Life of Oharu - Another gorgeous film, this one about a samurai's daughter who is ruined by loving a servant, and then descends through the ranks of society as misfortune dogs her every step. There might be just a tad too much of it here - the parade of woe starts to seem almost comical, though that is hardly fair. As always with Mizoguchi, the style is impeccable, and this has a fantastic performance by Kinuyo Tanaka as well.

9. Loves of Sumiko the Actress - Film about the the theatrical world of late 19th century Japan - starts with a man trying to put on new, European plays - he wants to stage A Doll's House, and needs an actress - he meets and casts Sumiko, who has left her husband to act - she is a hit. It isn't long before they are lovers, and runs off with him - they become famous, revolutionizing drama in Japan, but they work themselves to death doing it. A fine film, though perhaps a bit flat, and the storytelling merely adequate - but Kinuyo Tanaka's performance carries it. She is radiant - maybe never so radiant as she is here. Radiant and spiky at once - a masterful performance.

10. A Geisha - An older geisha adopts a 16 year old girl, puts her through training, they go to work--the girl has an admirer, and so does the older woman--they go to Tokyo where the two swains try their hands with them--the girl bites her man, the other woman just turns hers down. They are blacklisted. As it happens, of course, the older woman's lover is the problem--he controls some business deal. Everyone--the other man, the teahouse owner, the geishas of course owe everyone else--and when they refuse to cooperate they are blackballed. This lasts a while--then Miyohara goes with the man. Miyoe is unhappy, but that's how it ends. Gorgeous photography as usual.

July director of the Month - Shohei Imamura

Well, it is not July anymore, but that isn't going to stop me: it's time for another Director of the Month. (And it's going up as July's director - August's will come at the end of the month.) This month, we are back on track with my countdown of the greatest Japanese directors (as I see it) - we are up to #3 - Shohei Imamura.

Imamura is one of my favorites, in the sense that favorites sometimes get separated from the best. He just makes me happy. I saw Pigs and Batteships as part of a series of classic Japanese films, and it was revelatory. Even then, before I was all that committed a Japanophile, I had an idea about Japanese films - as either gorgeous, serious art works, or lively, exciting genre works, that also worked as art - Kurosawa and Kobayashi, say. Or as perfectly rowdy genre works, sword fighters, gangsters and anime, that kind of thing. Imamura was none of those things. Pigs & Battleships is sort of a yakuza film, but it had none of the usual tropes of a Yakuza film, none of that sentimental manliness you get in so much Japanese genre work (even the highbrow ones). Imamura was certainly not making melodrama, like you saw in Mizoguchi. He was transgressive and funny, but it didn't come off as someone trying to freak the squares. (I'd seen a couple Oshima films, and I got that impression - of trying to be "transgressive" or something of the sort.) It was different. Funny, direct, unapologetically contemptuous of gangsters and Americans, while being more sympathetic to the low lives trying to be gangsters without every letting them off the hook (just look at how the hero ends up in that film). And saving its real respect and affection for the women, and especially the women who decided to get jobs and earn their keep. (A factor you see more of in his other films of the period, but it's there in Pigs and Battleships too.) And finally - fucking hell, what a spectacular looking film! all those cranes and angles and camera moves, the deep focus, the complicated, detailed sets and framings, the staging and composition and lighting - I was floored, and am now, every time I look at one of his films. Imamura came out of nowhere - someone I hadn't just not seen, but never heard of, knew nothing about, and found to be better than almost anything I had ever seen, so much better I could barely make sense of it.



A couple years later I saw the rest of his films, one of the first complete retrospectives I saw, and I got the full measure of his thematic interests. His cool tough women, his political edge, and, I suppose most of all, the full measure of just what magnificently baroque frames and sequences he could put on a screen. The full measure of his artistry - his willingness to use everything he has: composition, editing, tricks - freeze frames and shock cuts and breaking the fourth wall, intertextual references and jokes, all the resources of the 60s, the new wave (as an international phenomenon, all the filmmaking devices it added to world cinema) - which reach a kind of giddy apotheosis in The Pornographers and A Man Vanishes. But all his 60s films take fullest advantage of the new ways of working in films. He is awe inspiring. He is almost as thrilling as Ozu sometimes, for the sheer formal brilliance of it all.

He is. And I suppose, for all my adoration of Ozu, Imamura almost comes closer to my heart because I did discover him almost blind - I was told by all the literature what a great filmmaker Ozu was before I had seen any of his films. Ditto Mizoguchi, ditto Kurosawa, ditto even Oshima or Naruse or what have you. Imamura, I heard, was someone who was supposed to be an important Japanese new wave director, like Teshigahara and Oshima - but who, when I saw him, knocked me over on the spot. He was mine... that's what I wanted films to look like. I still do.

All right. Here then, let me rank the 10 best of his works. I have written a fair amount about these in the past on this blog. I will try not to be too redundant...

1. The Pornographers - A small time pornographer and procuror with a lover whose dead husband has become a fish and a daughter with a scar and a son with a mother fixation. Plus Yakuza and faithless friends and some delicious parodies of Euro art films, and the most astonishing cinematography ever. Every angle, every composition, every cut is startling and thrilling, and usually funny as hell...



2. The Insect Woman - Story of a poor girl surviving after WWII, going through jobs, drifting into prostitution, where she proceeds to take over the business, find a patron, lose both, but keep going. Her daughter meanwhile becomes a farmer, just as tough as mom. This is probably the quintessential Imamura, the one that presents his main themes in their clearest form - tough women, whose suffering and misery is never in the service of weaker, but somehow more important men; they exist for themselves, and win or lose through perseverance and work, nothing else; and through it all, the value of work, endurance, and - well - work. All this is told in episodic fashion, handsomely shot, experimentally editing. Told in self-contained sequences that usually end in freeze frames, jump ahead years at a time, without making transitions clear. Tends to be organized around parallels - repetitive, rather than dialectic: she sleeps with her father - her daughter does; she works for Midori, then Midori works for her; she steals from the madame, then becomes the madame, just as cruel and selfish, and suffers the same fate; her daughter, like her, gets taken in by Karasawa, an old rake - though the kid escapes. Scenes as well as situations are repeated, like the madame/Tome meeting in a police station, then Tome/her maid meeting in the same place. A very great film.



3. Pigs and Battleships - Yakuza, whores, and sailors, pigs and battleships. A boy wants to be a big gangster; his girl has an abortion then tries to convince him to leave and get a job. He pulls one last heist and dies of course. She calls him a fool, runs out on the American who wants to buy her, and gets a job in Kawasaki. The story itself is dense and complicated, though - the main plot line follows Kinta, or Kinta and Haruko (complicated already since it is about both of them, his chance to leave, her chance to leave, which aren't the same), but with strong subplots - Tetsu, the sick gangster; the disposition of the hogs - all of it with a host of characters coming and going, scheming among one another. Not quite a "network narrative" but almost complicated enough, with all the plot lines runnning more or less simultaneously, and all interconnected. And the look - the deep focus, the complex, articulated spaces that run through all of Imamura's films, give a kind of visual equivalent to this kind of plotting.

4. Intentions of Murder - A sickly musician rapes a pudgy mousy woman, who after thinking of suicide, spends most of the movie moping about her misfortunes without (apparently) acting. In the end the musician tries to get her to run away, she thinks about poisoning him, but instead he just dies; though there are photos of the two of them together, she simply denies the affair to her husband, and gets what she wants. That's not quite doing it justice. The family life is complicated - she's married to a librarian, who hasn't managed to get around to registering her as his wife, or their son as her son, so she has almost no rights. She's bullied by him and his family, though in fact, for all her passivity and supposed weakness, she is smarter than the lot of them. (We get it early: she corrects her husband's math, while doing the books; during the film she starts giving lessons in weaving, and by the end is making more money than the rest of them.) It ends up with one of Imamura's best jokes: having eluded the musician and a blackmailing librarian, she sues to have her son registered in her name, and wins - the family huffing and puffing about how stupid she is to sue them, she protesting that she never thought it would reach the courts - a great joke, as she has just gotten exactly what she wanted, and tops it off by moving to their silk farm, where she knits and raises the worms... It's the happiest ending in any Imamura film, by far. As for style - it's as magnificent as the rest of Imamura's work; for some reason too, it's always struck me as providing an excellent illustration of the definition of metaphor and metonymy - it uses Trains symbolically, in both ways: metaphorically as a figure of Sex; metonymically as a figure of Escape. Not sure why that seems to important, but there it is...



5. A Man Vanishes - A documentary of sorts about a man who disappears (a rather common occurance in 1960s Japan, I think). Imamura investigates and soon hooks up with the man's fiancé, who searches (along with an actor) for traces of the missing man, though she also starts falling in love with the actor.... Imamura films, often with hidden cameras, but also stages scenes, reenacts scenes, and so on. I wrote it up a few years back - it really is a remarkable film.

6. Vengeance is Mine - Ken Ogata as a killer; he kills a professor, takes on her identity, then kills a lawyer, an inn-keeper and her mother, as well as a co-worker. All this flips back and forth in time, starting with his arrest, moving to his killings, then his childhood and background, wife and father, then the recent past, the inn, the lawyers, his frauds, and so on. Though this film (like most of Imamura's later films) stays closer to the male lead, he is surrounded by tough women: the wife, who falls for his dad; mom, who for all her religion refuses to die; the lusty inn-keeper, and even more than her, her old mother, just out of jail for murder herself. All this quite wonderful looking, and handled with Imamura;s customary panache, which might hit its peak in the scenes where he jumps between time frames in the same shot...

7. Black Rain - A somewhat restrained film for Imamura, telling the story of a family living in the aftermath of Hiroshima. Starts with the bomb - the uncle was on a train, the aunt in her house - their niece was out of town, saw the bomb, went back through the rain, then crossed the town with the others.... 5 years later - they live in the country (they have money), but the niece can't get a husband, her uncle is ill, her grandmother thinks she's her daughter... The uncle is sick, but survives - while everyone around them dies. A friend dies, two more friends die, right after each other (funerals marked by a wipe), then the aunt, finally the girl. The plot is driven by the girl's search for a husband, which is complicated by her war experience - one man turns her down, despite a doctor's certificate; another says he doesn't care about her health, but his family is not so casual; there is also a war vet, who carves Buddhas and attacks cars as if they were American tanks, likes her and might have married her if she didn't die.... Over all, this is much more classical than anything else Imamura did - slower paced, with spare composition and staging, though as always, composed carefully in depth. This increased classicism is accompanied by a few Imamura touches - the knockabout comedy with the veteran; a couple bursts of anti-naturalism: the vet acting out his experiences; and the end... Uncle and girl are at a pond: she sees visions of jumping fish - he says, 5 minutes to go, we have to get back to the house - sure, he means, before they announce the time on the radio (clocks are a motif, ticking off the hours until everyone dies), but it's the end of the film as well...

8 Eijenaika - Set at the end of the Tokogawa regime, and as the government crumbles, all hell breaks loose among the froth and scum. It is another brilliant film - full of mixed motives, complicated relationships, complex shots - windows giving onto deep focus worlds, glimpses of things, of whole worlds, going on in the background, and sometimes the foreground, of a shot, unrelated tot he story. Of his later, color films, it's probably the closest in tone to the 60s films, especially Pigs and Battleships - comic, chaotic, another network narrative - with politics and history running through it all the way...

9. Endless Desire - Imamura's first completely characteristic film, a black comic neo-noir about 4 war buddies convening, 10 years later, to dig up buried treasure (a drum of morphine.) 4 were supposed to meet - 5 show up - one of them no one remembers, another says she is the sister of the leader of the group. They are a typical comically diverse crew - a businessman, a teacher that everyone bullies, a thug, a pharmacist, and the woman. They go to the slums of Osaka, rent a place where they can start their tunnel, but have to take a local kid into their confidence. They agree to reconvene in a month, but all of them show up early to start digging on their own. From there, things unravel in the usual way; they all start killing one another, dying absurdly, and so on - the woman manipulates one and all, but ends up falling in the river.... It's very funny, dark and bitter, an excellent entry into this kind of film, and already starting to take on the cinematographic brilliance that would be Imamura's trademark in the 60s.

10. Profound Desire of the Gods - Imamura's last film in the 1960s, his first color film, this is Imamura at his most mythic. It is set on a remote island in the Ryukyus, and mostly follows a family, the Futoris. They are inbred and brutal, but mythical: they were always the head of the religions of the island, and sometimes take the legends of brother and sister gods founding islands a bit too literally. Myth abounds - the nature photography, the brother digging a pit to make a boulder fall over, the retarded girl, the priestess, the old man... The film starts with the Futoris as outcasts, since Nekichi (the older brother) dynamited fish and (maybe) banged his sister - he's digging the pit, trying to keep the women under control... An engineer arrives on the island and hires the younger brother, they look for water, they start mowing down a sacred forest, but here Nekichi and the women (and the island headman) start sabotaging the engineer's work... The engineer, as one would expect in an Imamura film, gets pulled into the Futoris' doings, being seduced by the women (he resists the mother, but not the daughter), and even helping Nekichi dig his pit; while the younger brother is pulled into the modern world. Well - it all ends in Myth, with brother and sister sailing away to found a new race and all, though that doesn't quite go to plan. All told - it's a gorgeous film, and sometimes very highly praised, though I have to admit that I don't quite buy it. There's a bit of a shift here - it's full of Imamura's usual obsessions, his usual tough women - but it's changed a bit. He starts to mythologize his characters, those tough, earth women. The earlier ones are tough, independent, characters, and always protagonists in their stories - in control or fighting like hell to be in control. Here, they are transformed into a retarded sex fiend and a plot device: Nekichi's sister/lover, Ryugen's priestess/lover. They become symbols, not characters. For me, it turns a bit sour - it seems misogynist in ways, as it takes character types who had been fully characters, agents, and makes them symbols, only there as a foil to the men. It's a tendency that pops up a bit more in his later films - in general his later films follow men more than women... Fortunately, in the better ones (the ones listed above), the women remain interesting and independent characters - but it's not such a given anymore.

I don't want to end on a down note, though. Because Profound Desire of the Gods is, mythology or not, still a great film - and there are still a lot of damned fine movies to go in Imamura's career. Second Brother, Stolen Desire, The Eel, Dr. Akagi are all outstanding - there's plenty to admire in all of them. And finally - he was an extraordinary documentarian. The box set of A Man Vanishes contains several of his television documentaries, along with that masterpiece - an important body of work.

June Director - Kon Ichikawa

I missed last month's installment of the Director of the Month through a mix of travel, car trouble and monitor trouble. It's a risk in the summer - I spend a lot more time on the wander, and things can drop for a while, especially things that require me to sit in front of a computer for some length of time. We sometimes get nice weather here! This month, though, I am ready (maybe because it rained for half the month, so it was easy to sit in front of the computer), well before the end of the month.

This month, I am going to reverse myself a bit - instead of continuing to count down my favorite Japanese directors, I am going to drop back a bit, to #7 - Kon Ichikawa. He's fairly well known in the states, but doesn't quite seem to have the cachet of the really highly regarded Japanese directors, nor the narrower, but usually more passionate following of people like Oshima and Imamura. But he's not far from any of them. If he stays below the best - it might be because he doesn't seem to commit to things. He is an great aesthete, and a fascinating experimenter, but he has less of the strong identity of the other great Japanese directors. Though it's easy to overstate that - I mentioned before that his eclecticism reminds me of Oshima - and that he shares with Oshima a kind of consistent tone, cool irony in everything. He reminds me, also, of Stanley Kubrick - his irony, distance, analytical, almost clinical style; they share a sense of cruelty, that never quite abandons the characters, an undercurrent of disgust and sympathy.

Though how much of that is Ichikawa and how much was Natto Wada? She was his wife, and his screenwriter, almost from the beginning up through the mid-60s - which is roughly when his films started to lose their way. (At least that is the conventional story - in fact, he still made a fair number of quite solid films after this). Their collaborations, in any case, have the strongest taste of his most characteristic - or most effective - style, that tone I mean. However those collaborations worked, his films are marked throughout the period by that sharp ironic style, and his utter mastery of composition and construction. He was, over all, a master.

Top ten:

1. Fires on the Plain - one of the greatest war movies of all time - I have written it up at length before. I'll add here that it makes a kind of perfect double bill with the Burmese Harp - that film is optimistic and sympathetic to everyone, a film about hope and redemption. This - is not.

2. The Burmese Harp - A lovely, moving film about soldiers going home. It is sometimes criticized for avoiding the Japanese responsibility for the war - but like Fires on the Plains, it is explicitly about the experience of the men on the ground. That is an important tradition - the war is hell on soldiers story, like All Quiet on the Western Front or the Red Badge of Courage. This tradition ignores culpability and portrays everyone as suffering. In this case the suffering is real - the problems are hinted at but not treated - the resolution, the assertion of human possibility is very powerful and convincing. And in any case, we have Fires on the Plains to tell the other side.

3. Kagi - Hitchcock style thriller from a Tanazaki book. An old man spies on his younger wife and a younger doctor who's engaged to their younger still daughter. Plots schemes and betrayals ending with the crowd of them poisoned by the maid, who the cops release, thinking she is trying to protect the mistress from accusations of suicide. The story is nasty piece of work, perverse and strange and observed with an odd mix of distance and ironic identification, a trademark of both Tanizaki and Ichikawa. There's no wonder he kept returning to Tanizaki. As is also common through most of his career, Ichikawa uses cinema to full advantage - the screen is all chopped up, divided, full of blank spaces and odd relationships among the characters; the film generally is full of odd features - an opening monologue addressed to the audience, freeze frames of the main characters, like in a cop show showing the comings and goings of villains - ending with a voiceover by the dead Nakadai - "why? why was I poisoned? I didn't do anything." Great stuff.

4. Makioka Sisters - another Tanizaki adaptation, lavish and gorgeous - the point of which is made at the end. The film is about 4 sisters: one married to a banker, the next to a businessman, the third looking for a husband, the fourth a terror who runs off with a lover. At the end, sinter #2 visits her and says, in proper Japanese fashion, "the seasons come and go, but nothing really changes, does it?" - well,I don't know if she knows better, but the film, and I'd bet the book, is dedicated to refuting that bromide at every point. It is a film about the end of the world. Inside the film, everything is changed: the family is broken up, they all atomize to their individual desires, they accept the end of their dynasty - and outside the film, it ends in 1938, with the world is tottering on the edge of the end. The film itself is ravishingly beautiful, cool and distanced, funny, sharply, and sometimes disruptively edited. Ichikawa's style is on display - overwhelming graphicism, the symbolic and aesthetic use of color and composition, the tendency to favor a series of static compositions, with very little camera movement, and what there is is not used to create the kind of fluid temporalized space Mizoguchi specialized it. There are 180 degree cuts - there are lapses in and out of flashbacks, there is use of sound to link and dissociate images - there are graphic matches, there are games with black and white and color, there is clever use of text.... All of it is sharp and clear. It's a masterpiece, in the old fashioned sense of the word.

5. The Wanderers - 3 Toseinin, wandering thugs, in 1844, having adventures. Mostly they get involved in local feuds and serve as temporary muscle - resulting in wild fights where people try to look mean without hurting each other, though sometimes these get ugly. Ichikawa shows these fights in all their splendor - men hacking away at each other with swords and sticks and farm implements, slipping and sliding, falling into holes, the whole thing. The fight scenes are ridiculous, brutal, sometimes gruesome... Eventually the three of them get involved in a more coherent plot - one of them is compelled to kill his father, then disowned by the boss who made him do it; the three of them, plus a farmgirl the patricide “seduced” then convinced to run away with him head out for home, though things go about as one could expect. They sell the girl to an inn (though promising to redeem her in three months); one gets tetanus; the other two fight over which of two gangsters they will betray, in the course of which one falls over a cliff. The end. It’s a harsh, funny, totally unsentimental film - you can, sort of, feel sorry for the poor devils, but you can’t forget they are in it because they are idiots, though it’s hard to see how anyone else around them isn’t also an idiot.

6. An Actors Revenge - A famous female impersonator exacts revenge on the men who ruined his family. Theatrical and extravagant, the kind of film that just explodes when you see it on a big screen. Gorgeous strange staging, odd structure, a weird perversity, a wildly unconventional and artificial way of depicting things - fights all flashes of swords, a dead person shown as a still photo.... One of the films where Ichikawa lets out all the stylistic stops - and since he was always something of a showoff - this one is pretty stunning to look at.

7. Mr. Pu - Sketch comedy that turns dark, adapted from a manga. Lots of Chaplin; also lots of its manga roots - episodic, built around isolated incidents and sketches. Broadly speaking, follows the ruin of a modest teacher. He's his by a politicians car; he's humiliated by his students; he's demoted - he's lured to a rally by some of the students, and when the rally turns violent, he's hit in the head, photographed, and everything goes to hell. It is very dark - another characteristic of Ichikawa's comedies, in particular. Here, everyone suffers - Mr. Pu's friend is fired, the politician is arrested, the students suffer, the girl Mr. Pu liked takes up with another man, but her mother forbids her from marrying him - they shout and insult both father and teacher. In the end, the girl tries to commit suicide, but fails (the cops fol her), and Mr. Pu gets a job and goes to work. It is a fascinating film, full of vignettes from early 50s Tokyo - unemployment, clinics, schools, intellectuals in all their absurdity - it's really quite extraordinary.

8. Tokyo Olympiad - Documentary about the 1964 games - starts with a shot of the sun filling the screen - cuts to a wrecking ball knocking down a wall - interesting. Focuses on the effort of sports - the athletes preparing, working, waiting - the spectators - the mechanics of the sport - tending to ignore the competition, except in a couple instances; the volleyball finals,say, which Japan won. Some great moments, reaching a kind of peak with the marathon - an Ethiopian running all alone at the front, an English runner kicking in to pass a Japanese at the finish line for 2nd - and the other runners struggling, suffering, creeping in or not making it. Fairly marvellous film - a bit disconcerting to see a film about the Olympics giving 2 seconds to basketball though.

9. I Am Two - Surprisingly wonderful little film, narrated from the POV of a 2 year old. Begins with the child's birth - narrated - shadows and shapes that only later made sense - accompanied by rather marvellous visuals, out fo focus colors and lights, filmed through gauze (out of focus and a kind of fuzz effect) - slowly taking form - the face of a woman, saying the baby is smiling - still ringed with the same fuzzy effect - and here we get the first of many little pricks at the sentimentality of the material - the narration says "I was trying out my muscles - I used some muscles on my face and she thought I was smiling." - it continues from there. The story is loose enough, but not entirely loose - part 1 establishes the household, the relationship between father and mother, their social standing and so on (with nods to Ozu along the way - I WAS BORN BUT... especially) - part ii has them move in with his mother - the grandmother and wife struggle over petty things, but come to understand and like one another - then the old woman dies, leaving the other 2 1/2 alone.... All this is nicely observed, handsomely shot - it is funny and sweet, sometimes delightfully whimsical (there are two or three wonderful bits of animation), but also full of the sharpness Ichikawa is known for. The premise of the child's narration is plenty cute, and there's plenty of cute in it - but it is also usually unsentimental, undercutting the pretensions or worries of the adults - and once in a while, Ichikawa uses the premise to great effect. A serious discussion of life and death, heaven and hell, is ended by the child saying he has to use the potty - that is perfectly characteristic of Ichikawa/Wada...

10. Kokero - Soseki novel - a young man befriends a professor who doesn't have a job - there are psychological quirks invoved - eventually the man tells how he stole his best friend's girl, causing the other man to kill himself - he has hated himself since. Ends with the old villain killing himself - right as the Meiji emporer dies. It's got political subtext, but I can't totally parse it - but the death of fathers, the sense of compromise and betrayal all seem aiemd at a comment on the end of the Maiji era, and perhaps its failure.

April Director - Mikio Naruse

Another month comes to a close, and so it's time for another director. I will continue in the direction I've been taking - counting down my favorite Japanese directors. If Oshima is 6 - and Kurosawa 5 - #4 is Mikio Naruse.

Naruse is probably the least discussed of these, of my favorites, if not of the acknowledged greats of Japanese cinema. He's not very well represented on DVD. Things were much worse in the past - when I started tracking down Japanese films, in the late 90s, it was possible to see a decent selection of Ozu or Mizoguchi - 6 or 8 films anyway - Kurosawa was very well represented, as always... Oshima and Imamura were not so easy to find - but Oshima stuff was around, and Imamura was alive and active, and his new films were being distributed, and he got (in 1998 or so) a full retrospective that toured the states... Naruse did not get that treatment for another decade or so, and even now, is the least available of these filmmakers on DVD, at least region 1. But - there was that retrospective a few years back - and seeing a sweeping selection of his work, in a short time, was, for me, as overwhelming as one could expect. I wrote up most of it at the time - so in place of the capsules here, I will point you to what I wrote then. Part 1 and part 2, and some overflow, here.

You will find most of my general thoughts about him scattered among those reviews - I could offer some generalities. Compared to his most canonical contemporaries - I think where Ozu works with simple setups, and uses editing to put together his stories, and subtly disrupt the surface (which he does - I think he is one of the most radical mainstream filmmakers imaginable), and Mizoguchi moves his camera to shape and exploit space (something Ozu does with editing), Naruse works with composition. That is - Ozu combines shots to create space and meaning; Mizoguchi moves the camer to do it; Naruse builds in in shots on screen. He uses depth, layers, symmetries, positioning characters in the middle of complicated backgrounds, complicated spatial arrangements caught in single shots, single set ups, etc. He uses static compositions to create complex images - a style that I think turns up in a few later directors, sometimes more than the moving camera or montage heavy styles of Ozu or Mizoguchi. Imamura, Ichikawa do this a lot as well - I don't know if they got it from Naruse, it's not exactly unique - but he is a master. Probably not THE master - check out that fish atop this blog! - but he'll do.

That'll do. And so? a more or less straight list - though you can find more, sometimes quite a bit more, at the links above. Finally - is there a filmmaker ever who paid closer attention to money?

1. Late Chrysanthemums
2. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs - worth noting that Hideko Takemine might well be the most beautiful woman ever put on screen, especially in front of Naruse's camera.
3. Wife! Be Like a Rose! - comedy! and masterfully handled, at that...
4. Mother
5. Floating Clouds - an interesting film, because, despite his reputation as a melodramatist, maybe something of a miserablist - this is one of the few films that don't end on at least a stubborn note - I have to quote myself: For good bad or indifferent, Naruse's heroines usually have to keep going at the end - their stories don't really end - some episode ends, the film can end, but they have to get up in the morning and go back to whatever it is they do.... His films usually end with the woman ascending the stairs... This is an exception.
6. Every Night's Dream
7. The Sound of the Mountain
8. Repast
9. Summer Clouds
10. Lightning - almost a comedy!

March Director of the Month - Akira Kurosawa

Here today is the third installment in my Director of the Month series. Or would be if I had posted something about an actual director last month. But last month's Donald Ritchie post does help a bit - I wasn't sure what criteria to use for this feature - who to include when? in what order? all that. Well - let's accept the signs - Oshima, Japanese films - and Kurosawa, who's 103rd birthday got a lot of attention this month - I shall take it as a sign, and count down the best Japanese directors. 6 to 1 (unless I decided to go up as well as down).... There you go.

I have written about Kurosawa before - and about the place he has in film history, and in my history with film. This post in particular from a blogathon 5 1/2 years ago lays out a lot of my doubts, but then again, it has always seemed as if I have to explain my reservations about him. He is, you see, a towering figure - a crucial figure in film history. I mentioned it in the Ritchie post last month - the ways Japanese film changed the criticism of films; and in a very real sense, it is Kurosawa that did it. Now - given that importance, given the quality of his films, ranking him 5th among Japanese directors might need some explanation.... Well - maybe the best explanation is that I'd put at least 6 Japanese directors in the top 20 - 3 definitely in the top 10 and 2 more who move in and out depending on my mood.... I am, that is, a fan.

And so? I will turn to the films:

1. Seven Samurai - This is one of the Great Ones. A big sprawling spic that never flags, with a host of clear and distinct characters, with spectacular action scenes that are, themselves, always completely coherent and clear. Technically, dramatically, politically, a magnificent achievement. After all.



2. High and Low - A medical students kidnaps the son of shoe magnate, but gets a chauffeur's son instead. What will the executive do? This becomes many things - a first rate police procedural; a first rate character study, of 2 superbly wrought characters - the student is pathetic and cruel and desperate... But Gondo, Mifune's character, is something truly other than else. He goes from the ruthless businessman of the early scenes to a kind of reluctant hero, until in the end he becomes godlike. Kurosawa's contemporary films were always tightly bound to their places - he used city streets and locations to great effect throughout his career, and this one has some of the best examples of it. But he could also use a set - the scenes in Gondo's house start stagy, but become increasingly deft - the whole film is structured that way - from the claustrophobia of Gondo's house, the the different claustrophobia of the train, to the scenes in the city, on the train, to the streets of Yokohama, the bars and hangouts. One of the most Langian of films - Kurosawa someone who could do credit to Lang...

3. Rashomon - A film that has become the symbol for unreliable point of view and multiple perspectives. (As well as being the strange example of a crime story where all three protagonists confess to the actual crime, in order to exonerate themselves.) Though also a thrilling piece of filmmaking. It is great looking, dynamic and exciting, and Kurosawa here, as in most of his films, uses pacing - the delay/gratification cycle - to great effect. It was the first Japanese film to make a sensation abroad - obviously successful, and a useful introduction, as it brings together a few tendencies in Japanese films. Chambara, women's melodrama, heroic samurai melodrama (for lack of a better term) - and a kind of realistic undercutting of those genres, all in one film.

4. Stray Dog - A cop loses his pistol on the bus - he tries to track it but it is used by a thief, who is a kind of double to the cop, to hurt other people. An extraordinary film, making great use of its setting - the location shooting, the heat, the themes of doubles and pursuit and the poisonous horror of the Gun. Even this early in his career, Kurosawa was a very self-conscious filmmaker - it feels like a precursor to new wave practices, with its documentary sections, its text and divided images, and so on. It prefigures High and Low, with its police procedural story, its urban settings, its dopplegangers - but it;s fully formed more than a decade before.



5. Ikiru - An old bureaucrat learns he is going to die. He does not know how to die, his son is a jerk, hetries partying but isn't very good at it, he takes a shine to a girl, but that is unwise - but she guides him to the idea of making a park, and he grows obsessed and dies happy. It moves slowly, but Kurosawa's style - his use of delay and indirect release - requires space to work correctly, and it does. This is Kurosawa's most Capraesque film, and seems very clearly modelled on some of Capra's works. The theme of the individual vs the system; the structure of the film - (voiceover, flashbacks, the bifurcated structure even), even things like the epiphany in the snow - that conjure up ideas and moments from Capra's films. Though maybe you're getting to Kurosawa's limits, here - he is not quite up to Capra. There is an element of caricature in Kurosawa that isn't quite there in Capra, and things in this film are almost always what they are - good, bad, weak, small. Watanabe's family, say, is not the ambiguous force it is in Capra's films - there is none of the way families or societies sustain and destroy, the doubleness of everything in Capra. (That's the rhealm of Ozu more than any Japanese director of that age). But none of that takes it from being a great film...

6. Yojimbo - Kurosawa may not have admitted it, but it's a transparent Red Harvest adaptation, and a damned fine one. Even more than Seven Samurai, it's a Japanese western (that of course immediately turned into an Italian western...) And as formalized and aestheticized as the Leone's to come - widescreen, dusty streets (or pouring rain) fire and death; people moving in strange dancelike ways - more noticeable than usual, even, for Kurosawa (who likes dancelike movement). With that hard-boiled twist on the western mythos, the stranger coming to clean up the town....

7. Ran - Kurosawa does Lear. Story - a great lord retires, leaving son #1 in charge - son #3 makes a fuss and is banished. However it does not take long for #1 to start bullying dad (egged on by his wife), and not not long after that before the sons are at one another's throats and everything goes to hell. All stunning to look at and maybe even better to listen to. Everyone dies, except a blind boy, perched atop the walls of his family's ruined castle.

8. Kagemusha - A thief is made the double of Lord Shingen during the wars between Shingen (Takeda), Ieyasu (Tokagawa) and Nobanaga (Oda). Shingen is killed not long after and the thief becomes his double. He fools the old man's grandson and concubines, as well as spies and his own men, but he is discovered from trying to ride a horse. He is injured and banished and mocked, while Lord Shingen's son goes to war and is defeated easily. (Guns again.) This is interesting historically, being much closer to actual events than most of Kurosawa's period films - set in the 1570s, the rise of Oda and Tokugawa - ending with the battle of Nagoshino, when 3000 riflemen destroyed the Takeda army, in something like a precursor to Cold Harbor or the Somme.

9. Throne of Blood - MacBeth on Mt Fuji - which Satyajit Ray singled out as one of the things that made Japanese cinema great - those real places... It is a handsome and haunting film, a horror film, as much as anything, with its ghosts and murders and madness and its strange smoky spaces....

10. Sanjuro - sequel to Yojimbo, not quite as tight and clean, but still very entertaining. Here, Mifune is a ronin who joins up with 9 idealists who are trying to undo a villainous superintendent. Tatsuya Nakadai plays the superintendent's right hand man. Very harsh parody of Japanese manners, samurai ethos and the rest, as Mifune constantly outsmarts and outfights everyone as if he's already read the script. And an old woman - who seems silly and weak and caught up in the web of politeness, but who proves consistently to be the only one as smart as he is...

Donald Richie Appreciation

I am sorry to say that a month into my resolution to write Favorite Director post every month, I am already off track. I don't have any good reasons - at least I can come up with a decent substitute though. Donald Richie's death is important to note. He was a giant, obviously, in the process of bringing Japanese films to the United States - opening for this country what I have to consider one of the three truly consistently great film cultures (along with the US and France.) He championed Japanese films, he wrote about them, providing excellent introductions to a number of the most important filmmakers - in the age of DVDs, providing the voice for many commentaries on Japanese films. I am fairly certain that he would have been the first writer I read on Japanese films, and always there as a guide. He was not, I have to admit, the most important critic of Japanese films I read - I was much more influenced by reading Audie Bock and Noel Burch - but he was still very important to me, as well as crucial to the world of film.

My favorite of Richie's books was, in fact, The Japanese Film - I found a used copy of the 1959 edition, and read it with delight. It's a great book, well researched, well written, comprehensive, covering film as art as well as the history of the industry, which was very useful information. It reminded me of Andrew Sarris - sharing Sarris' auteurism, and willing to do the work, seeing the films, tracking down the industrial information (something Sarris did less of, but is a big part of this one.) A very useful reference. And a fascinating document, especially that 1959 edition - that puts it right on the cusp of something. It's right on the edge of the new wave revolution, well into the critical part of the change - by then, the French had established a lot of the premises of the new wave: championing directors, genre films, pictorialism, realism, trash (all at the same time) - elements that seem to be just outside Richie and Anderson's book. You can see too that the critical divisions that would form over Japanese films were appearing. The French had formed opinions by then, based, I fear, on a very scant exposure to Japanese films - they had already taken sides for Mizoguchi and against Kurosawa. Not so Richie and Anderson. They did not share the French passion for taking sides - they praised Mizoguchi and Kurosawa - and of course they had seen more than just the festival films, and knew, for example, that Ozu was in their class as well. But they were also pretty clearly in awe of Kurosawa.

Though what is even stranger to read now, after the fact, is the way they characterize the Japanese film industry in 1959. They lament that no new talents have emerged since Kurosawa and Kinoshita (and their treatment in Kinoshita is interesting itself; he has been somewhat forgotten, surpassed in reputation - certainly availability in the states - by the old guard (even Naruse), by Kobayashi and Ichikawa, by their successors - Oshima and Imamura, even Shinoda, Tesugahara, and Suzuki, are all far more available.) They lament that the system does not seem likely to produce any new talent soon - that it is stagnating - that there have been no more movements lately. All this is in 1959 - and 1960 saw 3 revolutionary Oshima films, a couple Yoshida films, Pigs and Battleships came out in 61, etc. The 60s were a burst of energy - the Ofuna new wave - Imamura, the revitalization of some of the older directors in response to this - an increased sense of command by some of the directors they mention (Ichikawa and Kobayashi especially) - they said things in 1959 that by 1961 would sound insane.

But thinking about this - another superb book on Japanese film, Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto's Kurosawa book, suggests that the discovery of Japanese film in Europe and America begat film studies as a discipline. It showed a mature industry/art that existed outside western culture - that could not be studied along with Welles or Godard without positing a different way of studying film than through culture. This was, you could say, the time when film had to be taken seriously as an art - treated, in fact, as an independent art, the way music or literature or theater were. Japanese film was a surprise - it showed a different way of doing things, though not unrecognizable - it certainly fit the theories of people at the time - Mizoguchi was tailor made for auteurists. So was Ozu, when they found him. But maybe even more than this - the attention given to Japanese films in the west was reciprocated by attention to western films (and theorists) in Japan. These things indicated an exchange of information between Japan and the rest of the world - an exchange going both ways. So while in 1959 the Japanese filmmaking system seemed increasingly static - bureaucratic, commercial, slow to change, with no way out of the cycle it was in - the mere presence of Americans writing about Japan indicates contact with the rest of the world - and Japanese were reading Americans. And while it is true that Ofuna new wave came out of itself, without a lot of push from the west (Oshima and Imamura and others were independent and tough and had their own ideas) - but they were able to piggy back what they did on the French new wave (they stole the word!); they did what the French did - they started theorizing their work. They connected what they were doing to the rest of the world.

And that brings us back to where we started - because Donald Richie was as important as one man could possibly be in making that connection.

And now? in his honor - and since this is, in fact, meant as a kind of series of lists - here is a list - the 10 Best Japanese films... sort of. I limited myself to one per director, to get past Ozu, which is always a challenge....

1. Early Summer - Ozu
2. Seven Samurai - Kurosawa Akira
3. The Pornographers - Imamura
4. Ugetsu Monagatari - Mizoguchi
5. Late Chrysanthemums - Naruse
6. Fires on the Plain - Ichikawa
7. Ceremony - Oshima
8. The Emperor's Naked Army Marches on - Hara
9. Charisma - Kurosawa Kiyoshi
10. Fighting Elegy - Suzuki

January Director of the Month - Nagisa Oshima

I am going to begin a new series - taking off from this one: A Favorite Directors Blogathon, started at Loren Rosson III's The Busybody, then picked up by others. I can't claim any direct connection, except that I've seen his posts (and some others, like Carson Lund's), and figure it is a good idea. I have been thinking about a way to write about directors - or maybe make some kind of ranking. I did that once, a long time ago - it's not a list that changes all that often, but it would be nice to revisit it...

And so - let us begin. I will start with Nagisa Oshima, partly to celebrate his career on the occasion of his death, though also because he makes a good starting point. To the extend that this is a countdown, he would make sense - he probably lands around 20 or so all time - though it isn't that much of a countdown. I prefer Andrew Sarris' method of lumping them - pantheon, far side of paradise, etc. (Though I've never quite managed to figure out how to make them fit his categories; but the general principal obtains.) Now - this series is obviously devoted to the pantheon - though even in the pantheon, there might be some striation. Up there at the top, there are the greater gods, the inner circle, the holy trinity - Ozu, with Capra and Godard and Mizoguchi right there at his side; then - oh - Hawks and Altman, Imamura, Rivette, Fritz Lang... and so on. I am not going to commit to anything like a list at this point - but I want to sketch in the parameters of what I want to write about....

That is enough preamble. Oshima: it took me a while to warm to him (if "warm" is a word you could ever use for him) - took a while to see enough of his films, and to see them in a proper format - and it was hard to know what to make of him when I did see them. I found him hard to place - it wasn't until I'd seen most of his films that he started to make sense to me. Some of this is because of his characteristic style and subject matter - which is to say - the lack of a characteristic style and subject matter. He changes constantly, in every dimension - content, style, form, tone - think just about the three films he made in 1960: Cruel Story of Youth - a youth behaving badly film; The Sun's Burial, an ensemble piece about a slum; Night and Fog in Japan, another ensemble piece, this time among political types; they are all fairly gorgeous widescreen color films, but the way they are made varies - look at how theatrical, formal, artificial, Night and Fog in Japan is, compared to the others... And move forward - he made black and white films, color films; widescreen and low tech; he adapted books (The Catch) and comics (Band of Ninja), worked with theatrical groups (Diary of a Shinjuku Thief - which remains the one major Oshima I haven't been able to see, to my intense annoyance), made films within films (The Man Who Left His Will On Film); made historical films and contemporary films, made pornographic films, horror films, surrealist comedies, samurai films, made films in English and French as well as Japanese...

It's odd: his eclecticism reminds me of Ichikawa, a comparison that might not go over very well - Oshima did not like Ichikawa, I believe. But they both have an ability to move among many styles, radically different styles, and maintain their identities. They carry their tone, almost everywhere - and it's a similar tone - dark, cool, comic - usually given fairly direct political implications by Oshima, more indirectly so by Ichikawa.... They are also alike in moving among all these styles while maintaining a similar technical mastery - neither one is capable of a bad shot... Oshima distinguishes himself, I think, steps above Ichikawa, in his critical capacity - as a filmmaker, you can never quite forget that he is a critic. He moves among a number of different filmmaking modes, always interested, I think, in how these modes work - he's always exploring film as a form, as a way of making meaning. This is something that links him to Godard, I think - Godard is like that too, an essayist in film. Many of the French New Wave directors had that quality - Rivette, Moullet - of using their films as ways to explore the art form... Oshima shares that. He does, I think, parallel the European filmmakers of the time - affinities appear, especially for Godard, Antonioni, and Pasolini. Though in fact, I think he is more varied and experimental than any of them, other than Godard. He did try damned near everything.

Finally - when I wrote about Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence last year, I noted that he was one of the great political filmmakers - he is. The complexity of the power relations in that film - the hierarchies, class divisions, national divisions (Japanese and Korean, English and South African, and Dutch and so on), personal divisions - is common to his films. They all explore power and its distribution, how it works in real society. His interest in the place of Koreans in Japanese society is a recurring example.... I don't think it would be too far off to say that he is the most interesting political filmmaker in the world.

Okay - enough of that... on to the films! I am not going to drag these out, just name and move on, unless something seems like it needs to be said.

1. The Ceremony - A big family saga stretching from the end of WWII to the 1970s, full of Manchurians, war criminals, right wing loons, a token communist, and series of ceremonies - with other activities (baseball, sex, meals) presented as rituals themselves. It reminded me of some of the big epic Oliveira pictures, Doomed Love or Francesca - that kind of absurdity, theatricality, with the gorgeous look of the rest of Oshima's films.

2. The Sun's Burial - plays like a nihilistic version of Pigs and Battleships - nasty criminals in the slums. A woman is buying blood from beggars and threading her way through a variety of obstacles - rival gangs, political; agitators, her junk lord father, various weak men who try to love her. She is a monumental villain, but she is also more or less indestructible. (She might as well be a vampire - immortal, living off the blood of others...) It is a great looking film, though we'll get to say that a lot in this post - understated lighting, all browns and golds, wonderful widescreen compositions, long fluid takes - not as showy as some contemporaries (SUzuki, say), or as detailed as Imamura, but still brilliant.

3. Boy - Story of a family of con men, who work by staging car accidents - seen through the eyes of a boy.... Again - extraordinary looking - no shots less than amazing, and many among the classics: the 2 kids sitting in the snow talking about their snowman/alien; a brawl at an inn in black and white that goes to color at the end. The family at the northernmost tip of Japan in a blizzard. Full of gorgeous off center compositions, oddly balanced, things coming in and out of the frame - some disruptive editing, plenty of sound and color tricks. Japanese flags everywhere...

4. Death by Hanging - R (a Korean) is condemned to be hanged - he is hanged, but doesn't die. This poses a problem - the cops and officials set out to prove to him first that he is R, then, that he is a killer, and third, that he is guilty and should die. They do this by acting out his story - first comically, but then almost seriously (as R starts to get involved) then moving out into the streets. Oshima gets in a number of modes in this one film - hilarious at times, horrifying, politically pointed, finally strange and haunting, and moving.

5. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence - Well, I've said my piece on this before - it does not have the reputation some of his others have, but I think it probably should. It is hard to find anything approaching its political complexity in any other war films - especially as it applies its complex view of power to both sides. About seeing the other side from the other side, under pressure....

6. Ai No Corrida - Sada Abe story. She's a maid at an inn - she spies on the master and mistress making love, and soon enough he seduces her, and then it's off to the races. Famous for the sex, I guess, though it's a pretty convincing film - seeing the rest of his films reveals its place better. You can see how it builds on Ceremony or Boy. The satire is toned down, but it's still mordantly funny. And political - that famous scene, where he's passed by a column of soldiers, going the opposite way - they to their doom, he to his... though his seems a lot more admirable.

7. The Man Who Left His Will On Film - Begins with footage of a man with a camera who is immediately chased by someone else. The first man appears to kill himself while the chaser - Motoki - watches. From there it moves to a meeting by a group trying to make political films - then to scenes with Motoki and Yasuko (the dead man's lover? or Motoki's?) talking about film, these films, the other man - who may or may not exist - etc. You are down the rabbit hole in a hurry here. What emerges, though, is a film about Tokyo - documentary footage of riots, a film of landscapes they all argue about, the filmmakers going into the streets themselvesm to try to recreate the testament film - the most memorable, interesting element of the film is the view of the locations - the streets, the highways, the buildings, the neighborhoods. Which is an interesting twist...

8. Night and Fog in Japan - A wedding of a couple who met during the ANPO protests, a reporter and an activist; their friends gather, and old rivalries and such reemerge, mostly around a boy who disappeared during the protests. That, in turn,sets off flashbacks by the score - to 1950 when the groom's generation agitated against an earlier treaty andthe Korean war, as well as to the ANPO protests (which happened, one should note, in June 1960 - the film was released in October 1960 (though not for long...) Oshima uses every trick in the book - it looks like it's inpsired by La Chinoise at times, which is an impressive feat for 7 years earlier - black outs (and white outs), freeze frames, explicit theatrical lighting and other effects, automated camera movements (tracking around the room), hidden cuts, putting different times and places in the same shot, inserted texts (writing on the walls, like Ozu or Godard), books, inserted speeches, long arguments about politics, and very fractured narative. Though for all that, the story itself might not be so extreme - the wedding is a carvival site to bring all these people together - the airing of grievances follows. And while it is politically motivated, the basic story is mostly just a mystery story - how did the "spy" get away? who rang the buzzer? Still - it works - it makes the political factionalism vivid and interesting; individuates the characters to a remarkable extent - and generally retains the post-modern air of the whole thing.

9. Cruel Story of Youth - Story of student and a girl - he rescues her from a lecher, they hang around, he seduces her, they start shaking men down, using her for bait - these two disaffected youths are contrasted with her sister and the man she used to love - he was an idealist, but now he runs an abortion clinic.... In that, it anticipates the generational conflicts of Night and Fog in Japan, without the explicit politics. It skirts the political, though - released in June, 1960, it contains footage from some of the anti-ANPO demonstrations that spring.

10. Violence at Noon - Mostly about a rapist and murderer, with flashbacks to a love confusion at a kind of collective farm that was washed away by a flood. Marked by some very cool weird cuts. This one, like a couple of Oshima's films in the early 60s, feels at times like Imamura - oddly, Oshima tends to go for the shocks more....

There are plenty more worthwhile Oshimas - some of them, at least, on DVD in the states. They are worth seeing, though unless you want to see Charlotte Rampling having an affair with an chimp, you might want to steer around Max Mon Amour.