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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31187561045081123822018-03-18T04:15:02.019-07:00SPORADIC SCINTILLATIONSworld cinema off the beaten email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-56053559326933355592011-12-28T16:01:00.000-08:002011-12-28T16:01:31.287-08:00Jim Jarmusch – Mystery Train (1989)

Mystery Train is not the best entry in Jim Jarmusch's oeuvre but it is an interesting one in the context of the director's artistic evolution. Thematically, Jarmusch doesn't offer anything new, again taking on themes of loss, alienation, and the decay of U.S. American culture which are all motives in his previous films Stranger Than Paradise and Down By Law. Stylistically, he expands on his more sophisticated frames in Law and adds a lot of camera movement. The one-shot-one-take approach of Stranger Than Paradise is not totally forgotten, but his camera fledges. Maybe the most notable development in Mystery Train is the director's approach to structure. The three episodes comprising the film all take place in Memphis at the same time in the same neighborhood and overlap sometimes. It is here that we can consider how the director progressed as a storyteller during the early years of his career.

The first episode, entitled "Far From Yokohama", follows Jun and Mitzuko, a young Japanese couple who, on a train trip through America on the tracks (no pun intended) of their idols Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins, stop in Memphis to visit Sun Studios and Graceland. It is a well-observed character piece full of little surprises and irony but it also lays a solid foundation for the story and provides us with a few first pieces of the puzzle we're meant to put together by the end of the film. We get a glimpse of Steve Buscemi's character Charlie we will meet later on in the film, there is a very real sense of decay and emptiness symbolized by an abandoned movie theater and gas station (sitting at the train station, Jun observes "I like Yokohama station better. It has a more modern atmosphere"), there are a diner, an empty lot and a hotel that will serve as visual signifiers, the antics of Screamin' Jay Hawkins and Cinque Lee who man the reception desk at the hotel, there is a picture of Elvis in the couple's hotel room, the monologue of Tom Wait's DJ announcing the King's song "Blue Moon", and a gun shot in the morning.

"A Ghost", the second episode, fills in a few more pieces of the puzzle. We open at the airport where Luisa repatriates her husband who died during their honeymoon. We follow her with lateral tracking shots as she walks through destitute streets (like we did in the previous segment). At one point, she passes Rick Aviles' character Will who works on the engine of his pick-up truck. We will meet him later together with Charlie. She reads a book at the diner Jun and Mitzuko passed by. She glances at the empty lot where the Japanese couple lingered earlier. She decides to spend the night at the same hotel the love birds occupy. There, she meets Dee-Dee who doesn't have enough money to afford a room for the night and shares a room with her. They both hear Jun and Mitzuko have sex. Dee-Dee talks about her ex-boyfriend Johnny who everyone calls Elvis and who is a crucial character in the next segment. They hear the Tom Waits DJ routine and "Blue Moon". There is a picture of Elvis on the wall and the King's ghost even appears to Luisa. A gunshot in the morning.

The third and last segment "Lost In Space" (easily the most contrived and disappointing part of an otherwise charming film) finally puts all the pieces into place. Buscemi's character Charlie is Johnny's brother-in-law and has to pick him up at a bar together with Will where Johnny is wielding around a gun. They go to a liquor store where Johnny shoots the clerk. They flee, pass the ruins of the theater, hear Tom Waits and "Blue Moon" on the radio, and seek refuge at the hotel where Screamin' Jay Hawkins owes Will a favor. They spend the night in the shabbiest room available where Johnny instantly complains about the Elvis picture. They drink more and talk about cult TV shows. In the morning, Charlie accidentally shoots Johnny in the leg. They have to flee again. The last shot of the movie shows us the train with Jun and Mitzuko on board leaving town alongside the truck with Willie, Johnny and Charlie taking off in the same direction. I was waiting for Luisa's plane to pass by in the distance as well but that might have been too much synchronicity for Jarmusch.

Now the puzzle is solved. To be sure, Jarmusch doesn't use any revolutionary screenwriting tricks. But he hones his storytelling. Consider Stranger Than Paradise, a film told in three separate segments, and Down By Law, also in three segments taking place in distinctly different locales – both films are less episodic and feature a continuing story, but laid the groundwork for Jarmusch's more fractured approach to storytelling. Some might argue that the two earlier films follow the traditional three-act screenplay structure more closely and are thus divided into three different parts, but even if that were accurate (and I don't think it's a compelling argument) Jarmusch dispenses with it in Mystery Train and doesn't even think about it in Night on Earth which expands even further on the episodic narration that would culminate in the feature length version of Coffee & Cigarettes.

Linking the three segments in Mystery Train superficially is, of course, a shtick but Jarmusch does try to put the major characters on an even thematic playing field. Jun, Mitzuko, Luisa and Johnny are all concerned with relationship issues mostly having to do with loss. The Japanese couple might be the happiest duo in the film but Jun is distant and Mitzuko craves more raw emotionality from her beau. Luisa just lost her freshly wedded husband and doesn't even mention him to Dee-Dee when they talk about male-female relationships. Johnny and Dee-Dee just broke up and try to deal with it as well as they can. The fact that all of the characters spend most of their time in closed spaces (hotel room, bar, diner, car, train, airport) and seem adrift when they walk or drive around suggests that they are fundamentally trapped in those relationships and that leaving Memphis at the end of the film is an however ill-fated attempt at breaking free.

As fun as it is to play "spot similarities" in Mystery Train, Jarmusch makes a much more convincing case for his episodic storytelling in Night on Earth where he uses theme to link unrelated plot events instead of the opposite. The five episodes of that film reference each other constantly but the film is not meant as a plot puzzle the same way Mystery Train is. It may sound vague and lofty, but when two lonesome taxi drivers (who express their loneliness in fundamentally opposed ways) circle a monument in different cities the same night for similar but different reasons, Jarmusch tries to say something about a transcendent humanity that links us all. In Mystery Train the gun shot in the morning is meant as a puzzle piece and a sort of inside joke between the writer/director and his audience who both know more than the characters and can thus smile at their ignorance or puzzlement (pun intended).

The problem with this approach is that Jarmusch sets up plot incidences in the first two segments and has to use almost the entire third segment to pay it off. Where "Far from Yokohama" and "A Ghost" were both intimate character pieces, "Lost in Space" is purely plot driven and as a result feels oddly out of place. The director wants to explain the gun shot, wants to show us why Dee-Dee is ambivalent about Johnny and why Buscemi and Aviles were seen earlier in the film. It is this quest for explanation that gives the last segment a different feel. Arguably, Jarmusch encounters the same problem in Down By Law where the first half hour goes through a lot of unimportant plot to justify why the three main characters end up in the same jail where the film switches to a more intimate character study, but I would submit that Mystery Train's ending is more problematic than Down By Law's opening. The latter film's first 30 minutes at least provides context, whereas Train's last 35 minutes don't offer much more than explanations to seemingly random plot signifiers without giving them any deeper meaning.

On the other hand, using the gunshot as a big reveal at the end of the film keeps us interested to a certain extent in the proceedings in "Lost in Place". The characters are rather bland and the narrative is oftentimes unconvincing (also see Rosenbaum for how Jarmusch misread social interactions in the South) but by offering a sort of reverse "Chekov's gun" introducing the gun shot in the first act and revealing the actual gun in the third act, we want to know what happens with it. At the moment the gun goes off, we connect the dots of what is happening in the two other rooms of the hotel we have seen and for a short moment Jarmusch's narrative trickery seems to work. But ultimately, the director's minimalism in the first two thirds of the movie works against him - finding out what makes Johnny, Charlie and Willie tick would have been much more satisfying than seeing the machinations of why there is a gunshot that vaguely ties together three otherwise unrelated stories. Less story, more character is Jim Jarmusch's strength. Mystery Train might be the most compelling case for that.
firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-70268602452737097162011-12-22T13:44:00.000-08:002011-12-22T13:44:28.574-08:00Jim Jarmusch – Down By Law (1986)

The esteemed Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote something interesting about Jim Jarmusch in an article discussing the director's singularity within the American film landscape: "It's an enduring and endearing paradox of Jim Jarmusch's art as a writer-director that even though it may initially come across as a triumph of style over content, it arguably turns out to be a victory of content over style. The humanism of this mannerist winds up counting for more than all his stylistic tics, thus implying that his manner may simply be the shortest distance between two points." In Rosenbaum's opinion, especially the early films - Permanent Vacation, Stranger Than Paradise, Down By Law - "(…) often [took] a backseat to the behavioral comedy."

It's an interesting observation for me personally, being that I found quite a bit of content in Stranger Than Paradise. In my mind, even though every shot was carefully conceived and staged, style took a backseat to the message in that film. By contrast, I found the content of Down By Law to be much more of the "behavioral comedy" variety and the style to be often admirable but ultimately uneven. It was a strange viewing experience seeing this film for the first time again after years. When I was just starting getting interested in "independent" film as a teenager, Down By Law was one of the first films that presented me with depths I never imagined cinema to have. Tarantino's Pulp Fiction first made me realize that there was more to film than Mission: Impossible and Dangerous Minds. But Down By Law opened the door for me to a cinema where I could linger instead of race through.

Down By Law also made me realize that content doesn't necessarily matter much in the context of film. What initially drew me in was the strange off-kilter atmosphere of the flick and the great performances by Benigni, Wates and Lurie. It also offset a long phase in which I was obsessed with virtually plotless movies, films I couldn't discern the meaning of, and obscure directors none of my friends had ever heard of. It is ironic to me that now, after years of watching a lot of movies, I find myself more impressed with the content in Down By Law than the style.

I have always found Jarmusch's minimalistic style fascinating because it doesn't advertise it's complexity. In Down By Law, it was the lighting of the shots that impressed me the most, the play with light and shadow, Jarmusch's uncanny mastery of the black-and-white format. But if one doesn't pay much attention to it, the director will never show it off. It is for us to discover the director's work, not for him to force-feed it to us. The same is true for the film's content. There are issues of male/female relationships, broken masculinity and cross-cultural communication but what convinced me the most on an emotional level was the way Jarmusch found warmth and hope for the characters even in the most dire circumstances.

A theme that he would develop further in Night On Earth is that confronted with someone's humanity, it is a lot harder for us to dismiss or reject them. Zach and Jack are two wannabe big shot alpha males, belittled by their girlfriends, losers by all accounts, but masters of the world in their own mind. Playing cards together in a jail cell, escaping prison, eating an unseasoned rabbit over a fire, and witnessing the burgeoning love of two indecipherable people inevitably made them see something in each other. It's not just the typical hollywoodian going-through-the-adventure-brought-them-closer-together trope Jarmusch is interested in here, it's the idea that recognizing who someone is on a human level most often makes one realize something about oneself. At the end of the film, Jack and Zach, although wandering off in opposite directions, finally embark on a life journey that is more their own than the badass posturing they were engaging in at the beginning of the film.

The fact that shadows and contrasted white/black compositions make up the bulk of Jarmusch's frames in this film almost has me tempted to say that the characters' journeys could be seen as starting in the dark and possibly going towards some form of enlightenment at the end of the film. At the very least, they are closer to embrace their own humanity when they head out into the woods. In reality, I had more of an impression that Down By Law was a sort of formal and contentual experiment. For some reason, Stranger Than Paradise seems to me like a more accomplished offering, even though Down By Law exhibits more signs of the director's early maturity.

The jail sequence, as well-crafted it is from a story standpoint, poses the biggest stylistic problems for me. The flatness of the decor and the strange lack of inspired frames result in something that is not particularly pretty to look at, which is strange because everything that comes before and after is beautifully photographed. Jarmusch's methodical medium-shot/reverse-medium-shot set-ups force him to distill his pictorial impulses until he gets to something simple but refined. That's why his interior scenes always strike me as more successful visually than his exteriors. In Down By Law, large chunks of the action take place outside. I wouldn't say that it's the reason why he plays around a lot with different light sources (street lights, car lights, moonlight, fire, etc.) but there is a tangible experimental approach to these shots. They are less systematically staged, less Spartan in their decors. The jail scenes, by contrast, have little texture.

It is also worth noticing that Down By Law is much more plot-driven than Stranger Than Paradise and Night on Earth. If Stranger dispensed with plot instead focusing on meaningful character moments and Night only showed us the moments between plot points and character moments, Down By Law attempts to explore how plot can change characters. Both Jack and Zach are wrongfully jailed and we see both the set-up and the arrest. They are pure story moments, something rather unusual for Jarmusch until then. But following these plot twists, we get a long stretch of the characters sitting around, fighting, screaming (for ice cream!) and trying to come to terms with themselves. Another burst of plot advancement is the escape from jail that propels the characters into a new state of mind that is resolved when Benigni's character finds love and gives Zach and Jack hope for a better tomorrow. Seen in that light, Down By Law is a film about consequences. Not situational consequences, but mental ones.
firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-41809800139888715862011-12-13T18:38:00.000-08:002011-12-13T18:38:01.006-08:00Jim Jarmusch – Stranger Than Paradise (1984)

If memory serves, Roger Ebert wrote about Stranger Than Paradise that it makes a mountain out of a molehill. He is certainly right about that. Jarmusch's debut feature that won a Camera D'Or for Best Film at the Cannes Film Festival is as low-key and nonchalant as it gets. In a few long shots the director captures glimpses from the lives of people who are waiting for something to happen or who have given up all hope. However, short of dishing up world-class drama, Jarmusch gives us a poignant parable on immigration and assimilation in the United States.

Every shot, every timid plot movement and non-event is carefully planned. From the very first image on, Jarmusch builds the theme of the U.S. as a symbol, as a magnet for fortune-seekers and lost souls, as an idea more than a place. Eva, a 16-year old Hungarian, just arrived in New York and walks to her cousin's house on the Lower East Side. Screamin' Jay Hawkins' I Put A Spell On You plays on the soundtrack. The idea of the U.S. as promised land for a crowd of hopefuls following the spell of the American Dream of fame and fortune in the "New World", as the first segment of the film is entited, is immediately counterbalanced by a graffito on a garage door that reads "US out of everywhere, go home yankee!"

At her cousin's house who arrived in New York about a decade earlier and who changed his name to Willie, she is prompted to not speak Hungarian anymore, only English. Willie spent too much time perfecting his American persona to let it be undone by a 16-year old brat he doesn't want to see in the first place because she reminds him of the past he is trying suppress. Willie dresses like a 1950's wiseguy but couldn't be farther removed from it. He is a deadbeat who spends his days in front of the TV, plays card games from time to time and is suspicious of the world outside his apartment ("south of Clinton Street in dangerous!", he advises Eva). He represents a certain type of American lifestyle that is empty of any intellectual stimuli, that is content with cheap and mindless entertainment and that is fearful of the "other" in best cold-war manner. It is a life out of touch with our natural environment (when Willie eats a TV dinner, Eva asks him where the meat comes from. "What do you mean?", he asks in puzzlement. "It doesn't look like meat" she remarks) and is not even interested in penetrating the most popular spectacles (when they watch a football game, Willie is unable to explain the rules to Eva. "Just watch the game!" he blurts out).

Eva is curious but disaffected with what she sees of the "new world". Assimilation, too, is a rocky road. When Willie's friend Eddie picks him up to go to a poker game, he wants to take Eva with them. But Willie is categorically opposed to it. "Just stay here and stay out of trouble" he advises his cousin. Jarmusch's way to dramatize an American society open enough to welcome newcomers in its midst but too peculiar to include them fully? Later, Willie finds that Eva should "dress like people dress here." He gives her a dress that looks truly horrible and she tells him that much. But in the end, she still wears it for his pleasure, even though she looks totally foreign in it. Willie's attempt to assume a new "American" identity leads him to read the signs all wrong. Ultimately, he remains empty and in search for identity even if he fancies himself a true "American". Eva is less ready to forget where she comes from. She might make the effort of talking a new language and trying to fit in but that doesn't mean that she is out to efface her past.

Jarmusch lets one year elapse and we pick up the story when Willie and Eddie have to lay low for a while after they got in trouble over a poker game. They hop into a car and drive to Cleveland where Eva has found employment at a hot-dog shop. From the emptiness of their pretend-bohemian/gangster chic life, the two are propelled to the cold, hard industrial environment of working-class America. "Could you imagine working in a factory?", Willie asks Eddie. "No I can't!" Right before, Eddie finds out that Willie is not of American nationality, to which Willie offers "I'm just as American as you are!"

Not only is it a powerful statement that America as a symbol (and that's certainly all Jarmusch is interested in with this film) is exactly the kind of place where people can come, shed their past and reinvent themselves, becoming just as "American" as they can, need or want to be. But both of these statements show a clear lack of understanding on Willie's part of what the American symbol really represents. He puts on airs of being a nonchalant rapscallion but that's all just posturing he probably picked up in movies. It has nothing to do with how reality works. His empty days attest to that. A willingness to work, a strong industry was exactly one of the core elements of the U.S.'s unparalleled rise to undeniable world power after World War II (although it is also purely treated as a symbol in the film). Willie can't see that because he is interested in appearances. Eva, on the other hand, follows a different path.

She says that Cleveland is "kind of a drag", she only speaks English with her Hungarian aunt she shares a roof with, she says things like "you come to some place new and everything looks the same". It's as if her pursuit of her own American Dream is at the same time corrupting her bit by bit. Blue collar middle-class America isn't exactly what American dreamers dream of either. And the erosion of the blue-collar middle-class doesn't help to make it more glamorous. It's beginning to wear down Eva. So the trio hops in the car and drives to Florida. If New York City represents the mystery and the verve of a new beginning and Cleveland represents the downfall of the middle-class worker, then Florida really does represent the dream, the glossy image of careless materialism and unencumbered prosperity. In a way, this is exactly where all of these characters need to be. Eva for the postcard dream, Willie for the postcard facade and Eddie because he seems co-dependent.

Once there, Willie and Eddie exhibit a certain type of caricatural American make-it-or-break-it entrepreneurship. They want to go to the dog races and make it big. "I got a feeling we're gonna make a lot of money!", says Eddie. "One of those feelings." It's a spirit of enterprise, a faith in one's own luck that is typical for a society of libertarians like the United States. But contrasted with Eva's more pensive approach (to the point where she's almost aloof) it's as if Jarmusch opposes an American American Dream with an Immigrant American dream. Willie and Eddie loose all their money at the dog races but score big the next day at the horses. You go big, you might go broke, but you also never give up - and in the end it might pay off. That's also part of the American American Dream. Eva, too, makes it big, but it's an instant of pure luck. She writes both men a note in Hungarian and gets on a plane back to Europe, in my mind to reclaim her identity. What does this say about the Immigrant American Dream? Is the assimilation to America just a means to an end? Is the American promise just a passage, and not a destination as it is often made out to be? In Eva's case, that seems to be the case. The U.S. might have put a spell on her at the beginning of her journey, but with a bit of luck she undid that spell.

And what about Willie and Eddie? They too acquired a fortune simply by chance. The difference is they didn't really seek anything. Back in New York, they were adrift. In Cleveland, they were just killing time. In Florida they went to the betting range simply on a whim. Now they have wealth but what will they do with it? Can the money be of any meaning at all? In Eva's case, the money seems like a catalyst to something else. For Willie and Eddie the buck seems to stop there. It's emptiness that Jarmusch seems to criticize most in Stranger Than Paradise. America has plenty of that to offer. And the fact that Willie boards the plane back to Europe with Eva doesn't give his actions any more meaning.
email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-28792355606690609632011-12-10T17:31:00.000-08:002011-12-10T17:31:21.653-08:00Jim Jarmusch – Night On Earth (1991)

In his 2007 book on Jim Jarmusch, author Juan Antonio Suarez remarks that the director's films "are centrally concerned with situations, actions, and locales that rarely find their way into conventional texts because they lack clear signification or obvious dramatic value. But in this lack of explicit value lies their interest: since they are neglected by dominant regimes of spectacle and narrative, they contain registers of behavior and affect that remain to be explored." While Suarez is certainly right in assessing Jarmusch's knack for marginal characters and unexplored behavior, I find it a little intellectually facile to simply oppose Jarmush's doubtlessly singular oeuvre to "high-concept, action-packed" Hollywood fare, as Suarez describes it. In my mind, Jarmusch operates well within the boundaries of classical Hollywood storytelling, but uses its devices in a different way.

Night on Earth, the collection of five shorts chronicling different cab rides in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and Helsinki the same night, is a perfect example. From the first sequence on, Jarmusch seems wholly uninterested in presenting us events serving as plot signifiers, instead, as he has said before, capturing the moments between events. The obvious example is the scene at the very beginning of the film where Jarmusch cuts between Gena Rowland's Victoria and Winona Ryder's Corky who are both having a conversation on the phone. What we get to hear from that conversation are nothing but hellos, byes and platitudes. When one character is about to say something substantial we cut to the other one caught between statements that would mean something in a traditional plot sense. But by highlighting those "in-between" moments, Jarmusch finds his characters and draws them incredibly precisely.

And yet, all the characters in Night On Earth are simple archetypes and remain mysteries of sorts. The script gives us enough information (and the performances are subtle enough) that we can interpret their actions and find meaning in what we see but we can never really penetrate them. Why is Helmut in New York? Why does he work as a cabbie when he is a horrible driver, has no sense of direction and is fresh off the boat in the big city? Why is it so important to him to keep YoYo's fare? Most of these questions can be answered one way or another, but that's when we find ourselves in the realm of interpretation.

And that's precisely where Jarmusch wants us to be. He can dispense with traditional plot in Night On Earth because the film relies one hundred percent on character work. At the same time, the characters are never made transparent to us. The script gives us just enough to get us hooked, but no question is ever answered. Paradoxically, that's what makes this film such an intimate play. We form a bond with the characters precisely because we are trying to figure them out, because we have to interpret them, and because they are unmistakably human. Consider Helmut and YoYo. Before they happen on Maria, the unlikely pair banter back and forth and take an uneasy liking to each other. Maria can't understand what's going on in the cab because Helmut and YoYo share a bond together, but not with her. It's precisely the moment when Maria asks "what the fuck is going on" and the two men laugh knowingly without answering her that this sequence becomes powerful. Suddenly, we are in on the joke with them. We still have no idea who these people are beyond their apparent personae but we understand them as humans.

That's what Jarmusch is after in Night On Earth. If in a traditional sense, movie audiences have to figure out the plot by making sense of a sequence of events that drive the story, Jarmusch presents us a series of glimpses into his characters' soul, and it is by interpreting them that we can make sense of the larger text. In this sense, I would argue that Jarmusch doesn't operate so much outside of Hollywood conventions, but rather uses traditional storytelling techniques in an idiosyncratic way. When Roberto Benigni's driver blabbers away about his various sexual misadventures, it is not to give the audience any real information about who he is. The content, as funny as it is, is almost of no importance. The details are what matters: the sunglasses he forgot he was wearing; his reaction to picking up a clergyman; his obliviousness to his customer's distress; the way he disposes of the body. These are all signifiers who bring us closer to who the driver is as a character, just as the sequence placing explosives + activating time detonator + time running out = explosion leads us to exactly understand what the advancement of the story is.

All of the characters in Night On Earth deviate largely from the "typical" Hollywood characters. That's where Jarmusch's world is the most different from movie conventions. As Kartina Richardson recently wrote on her blog, the overwhelming majority of Hollywood films are written from a "white-male default viewpoint" and thus all rely on the same values, philosophies and signifiers. It is this homogenized worldview that Jarmusch escapes. Just as he is primarily interested in capturing moments when the plot stands still, he is interested in and curious about honestly showing characters that usually don't have a voice in the mainstream entertainment machine. This means social misfits (Benigni's driver or YoYo) but also borderline racist African diplomats, blind women, white immigrants, and miserable middle-class guys. What links all these characters is that they are frequently ignored in social and cultural discourse. It is, of course, never addressed by the characters themselves, but it is here that Jarmusch's editorial voice shines through the most. This obsession with outsiders and shunned characters is a common thread in all the director's movies.

The sequence that articulates one of the film's central themes the clearest is the Paris episode where the Ivorian driver picks up a resolute blind young woman who won't take any shit. Jarmusch loves to subvert appearances – a lot of the humor in his films springs from that. Here, the surprise is not only to find that the woman, who we naturally assume to be vulnerable is in fact one of the strongest characters in the film. What is really interesting is the driver's curiosity in how she perceives the world. What is her experience like eating when she can't even tell what color the carrots are? How can she have pleasure during sex if she can't see her lover? Her answers, revealing a worldview that is totally foreign to anyone who can see, fascinates and repulses the driver at the same time. In the end, it's the blind woman who resolutely goes on with her life while the driver gets in an accident.

The question of wether or not the characters can see correctly is raised in almost every episode of the film. In the Los Angeles sequence, Victoria tells Corky that she has night blindness. In the Rome episode, Roberto Benigni can't see the road because he wears his sunglasses at night. In New York, Helmut can't tell right from left. And ultimately, it's wholly unimportant. It's not what's going on outside that counts, it's what's going on inside the characters. And the parisian woman is the embodiment of that idea.

Night On Earth can also be read as a grand parable on the randomness of life. The film starts with a view of the Earth from space - a sort of God's point-of-view. When we zoom in on the Earth's surface and survey its continents and countries, finally arriving at our first destination Los Angeles, it is as if God had spun a globe and stopped it blindly to let life begin. In the first episode of the movie, Corky tells Victoria about her desire to have a family and how difficult it is to find the right man to be the father of her children. Immediately, Jarmusch builds the theme of the unborn child as hope. In the film's last episode, Mika, the driver, tells the story of how he lost his newborn child at the hospital, effectively burying the film's life theme. At this point, Night On Earth has come full circle.

The taxi, as opposed to the desolate and vast outside world that Jarmusch presents us in beautiful but depressing shots at the beginning of each episode, is a a shelter of sorts for these characters. They are all on the search for something. Corky wants a family, Victoria doubts the seriousness of her relationship with a man, Helmut is fresh off the boat and just finding his bearings, YoYo is obsessed with what's "cool" and "fresh" and "hype" suggesting a character who hides an inner emptiness by focussing on appearances, the Parisian driver is obviously longing for emotional honesty and a way to truly experience life, Begnini's driver can't have "normal" sexual intercourse, and Mika has lost his faith in life. By pairing up these characters who have all been somehow disappointed by life, Jarmusch finds new hope for them.

Maybe that's what it all comes down to. We're all on a quest for meaning and for a true connection with someone. But most of the time, all life gives us is randomness and absurdity (In the L.A. episode, we get a close-up of a poster for the Rocky and Bullwinkel Show; in New York, Maria at one point blurts out "what is this? The fucking Rocky and Bullwinkel show?" Begnini's driver circles a monument trying to pick up the priest; in Helsinki, Mika circles a monument waiting to pick up a fare). The only time we experience something truly meaningful is when we have an honest one-on-one with someone else. The taxi in Night On Earth forces the characters to be exactly that: honest. And that's why the movie is such a beautiful ode to email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-62423428827451455162011-11-30T18:37:00.000-08:002011-11-30T18:37:08.564-08:00Kinski Watch XX: Neues vom Hexer (1965, Alfred Vohrer)

Neues vow Hexer is certainly one of the better Edgar Wallace krimis. All things considered, and a few drinks in, it is even a rather entertaining affair, with an early death from Klaus Kinski's character, a bearded and relatively tame Eddi Arendt, some ridiculous (and in one case, cringe worthy racist) high-jinks with the Hexer duping the police by wearing masks, and enthusiastic direction by Wallace veteran Alfred Vohrer. It is pure camp, it is oftentimes silly but Neues vom Hexer has a lot going for itself.

For those (most) of you who don't know, the Hexer (literally "sorcerer" in English) was a clever murderer in Der Hexer, a previous hugely popular Edgar Wallace krimi. He escaped to Australia at the end of the film. In this sequel, the wealthy Lord Curtain is murdered by his nephew and his butler (Kinski). They use the Hexer's modus operandi and leave his business card at the crime scene. Which brings back to mind that before there were omnipresent surveillance cameras, DNA traces and "mentalists" who can unmask killers by simple mind games, there used to be a time when criminals in movies would leave a card at the crime scene to brand their mischief. I remember distinctly several films from the 1950's and 60's I watched with my mother, who loves krimis, as a young kid where this was the case. It obviously left a strong impression on me because this simple detail brought back a lot of film watching memories from my childhood. In Neues vow Hexer, the titular character decides to fly back to London with his wife and Butler in order to prove his innocence.

What ensues are Edgar Wallace histrionics at their best. Heinz Drache plays his Inspector Wesby with all the arrogance, phony wittiness and misogyny he can possibly muster and Rene Deltgen as the Hexer is asked to make a fool of himself repeatedly but does so with a gleeful insouciance. Vohrer, who's oftentimes childish visuals have already been the highlight of many previous Wallace entries, does his job well and gives us several striking shots that mystify but ultimately stay with us (a room filled with men sleeping with a newspaper unfolded over their faces anyone?). During shooting, the director fell ill and had to be replaced by Will Temper who apparently quickly lost interest and was ousted by assistant director Eva Ebner and cinematographer Karl Loeb. As far as I could tell, the film didn't suffer from it significantly. I kept trying to spot sequences that seemed less lively than Vohrer's signature style but couldn't make out any.

Kinski, donning scruffy facial hair for this film, phones in his performance and is done with it by the halftime mark, when he is shot to death by Inspector Wesby. But we get one fabulously ludicrous scene at the very beginning, when the camera slowly pushes in on a coffin that magically opens to reveal Kinski lying in it. A man approaches him and Kinski sits up, smiles and utters: "It fits!" It's quintessential Edgar Wallace: it goes for the shock factor that grabs one instantly, it doesn't make any sense, it's vaguely poetic, and it never figures into the final denouement. Edgar Wallace krimis are a lot like American Horror Story at the moment: it's a collection of attention grabbing moments without a core. But in both cases, that can be enough for an entertaining viewing email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-3610929207450253932011-11-28T18:30:00.000-08:002011-11-28T18:30:01.885-08:00Kinski Watch XIX: The Pleasure Girls (1965, Gerry O'Hara)

1965 was not a good year for Klaus Kinski as far as the quality of the films he appeared in is concerned. The Pleasure Girls, a watery "Swinging London" film that tries to simultaneously explore the familiar country-girl-seeks-fortune-in-big-city theme while also dabbling in some darker film noir stuff, marks no exception. It might not be his worst movie that year but it might be the dullest.

Who knows what the film might have become if either director or producers had had full creative control. O'Hara had initially planned to work with producer Raymond Stross on the project but finally landed at Compton Films for which he had previously shot That Kind of Girl in 1963. Compton Films was interested in the film as a prospect for a wild exploitation movie that would drive audiences to the theaters for sex and violence. O'Hara, of course, had never intended his movie that way. Constantly pressuring for more nudity and sex, the production house finally took the final cut rights from O'Hara and inserted the orgy scenes they wanted themselves. The director alarmed the British Board of Film Censors and those scenes were ultimately cut from the film.

As it is, The Pleasure Girls remains a fairly well shot indie flick (especially considering it was shot in 20 days for a mere 30,000 Pounds) with performances from Klaus Kinski and a young Ian McShane that seem phoned in at best. The story follows three young women who live the 60's "Swinging London" lifestyle of parties parties parties, and their romantic entanglements. Klaus Kinski plays a shady landlord who houses the girls. There is a storyline involving some crime elements and one of the girls arrives in the big city to pursue a modeling career while experiencing some inklings of frustration with the London lifestyle, but the film never explores any potentially interesting story avenues.

Kinski's landlord was modeled on the real life Peter Rachman, a notorious landlord in West London who drove out white tenants from his properties, offered them to African immigrants struggling to find housing under racial segregation and overcharged them immensely. With a character like that it would have been the perfect opportunity to show the underbelly of the "Swinging London" era – something of more interest than Ian McShane courting an aspiring model with no personality. We get a lot of scenes set in a gambling parlor and one of the girl's boyfriends sells off some of her jewelry to pay off some debt and wants her to get an abortion when he learns she's pregnant (another theme that would have been interesting to explore in the "Swinging London" context) but the film ultimately has not much else in mind than to show some well-off people dancing in apartments and racing around in cars.

Whether that's the writer/director's fault who couldn't craft a significant story, or the result of producers pushing for less story and more smut is up for debate, I guess. One thing is for sure, however: it doesn't make for a stimulating viewing email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-76335747027579095642011-11-27T09:09:00.000-08:002011-11-27T09:10:01.049-08:00Kinski Watch XVIII - Das Verrätertor (1964, Freddie Francis)

It is interesting to survey the critical response to Das Verrätertor, the first installment of the Edgar Wallace series directed by a british director and shot entirely on location in London. Some laud the film as a zany and fast-paced thriller, while other characterize it as boring and by-the-numbers Edgar Wallace fare. Both sides are right to some extent. While something like actual suspense is never achieved in Das Verrätertor, it is a rather well-structured film (which can't be said about a lot of Wallace adaptations) and has some impressive sequences. It's pure camp, of course, and most characters are cartoonish beyond belief but that's to be expected from the Edgar Wallace movies.

Das Verrätertor is not a typical murder mystery and that might be one reason why it didn't really caught on with audiences at the box office. The film follows a bunch of criminals, lead by the greedy businessman Trayne, who prepare and execute a nifty plan to steal the crown jewels from the impenetrable London Tower. The plot, while rather pedestrian by today's caper movie standards, breezes by rather nicely, and Francis, a horror and suspense veteran, knows his way around a camera. Kinski assumes his usual role as a deranged killer and brings an impressive physicality to his otherwise unremarkable role.

There is one memorable scene in which Kinski's shooting someone is intercut with a surprisingly explicit striptease. The editing is crisp and Kinski's deadpan performance brings just the right amount of menace and mystery to the table. In another scene, the crooks rehearse the robbery in a room that has been built out just like the London Tower - in true Ocean's 11 form. The script emphasizes process more than anything else, which gets us a lot of scenes of the bandits observing and studying their target but unfortunately not a lot of suspense.

In another instance of world cinema name calling bloopers, Trayne calls Kinski's character "Kinski!" instead of "Kane", which is odd because the film was shot in English and later dubbed in German. Did he call him Kinski in the original or was the mistake made in the voice-over studios? In any event, it's one of those weird moments when one is instantaneously taken out of the movie and the grand illusion that is created when suspension of disbelief and film craft meet is firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-84416012480998620192011-11-26T08:18:00.000-08:002011-11-27T08:25:29.855-08:00Kinski Watch XVII - Last Of The Renegades (1964, Harald Reinl)

After Der Schatz im Silbersee and Winnetou, 1. Teil, producer Horst Wendlandt, who also played a major part in concocting the Edgar Wallace series, went immediately to work on the Winnetou sequel. Last Of The Renegades (Winnetou, 2. Teil in German), based on the popular Karl May novel, was a huge box office success as well and marks the high point of the Winnetou craze in postwar Germany.

I didn't enjoy a single second of it.

I don't know if it's the mild racism, the labored dialogue, the by-the-numbers love story, Eddi Arendt's tired slapstick routine, or that horrible bear dress in the film's first scene, but it was a real struggle to get through Renegade. When the film was released, the Allgemeine Zeitung Mainz wrote that Klaus Kinski is the only artful performer in the film, and that is certainly true. Pierre Brice as Winnetou and Lex Barker as Old Shatterhand might have attained cult status in Germany due to their dignified performances in the Winnetou films, but Kinski is the only one who brings life and excitement to his acting. All the other members of the ensemble resort to cliches or are just bland.

The script takes some episodes of Karl May's Winnetou novels but is essentially designed to allow for as much location shooting and action set pieces as possible. In one memorable sequence, an oil field is set on fire during the night which allows for some neat visuals. And of course the Yugoslavian scenery is breathtaking. The producers knew that people would flock to theaters to see the newest Winnetou and banked on the fact that the audience would already know the characters and their world. Thusly, showmanship was the only thing they concerned themselves with and dispensed with character work and interesting plot development entirely. That's why the film opens on a bear attacking a helpless young woman, and a drinking game could be played every time senseless gun fire erupts.

The story is not really worth mentioning, suffice it to say that it centers on Winnetou's love to a girl from another tribe who has to be married off to a white officer and that the delicate peace brokered between the Indian tribes and the white settlers is threatened by a bunch of wild criminals. Guess what side Kinski's character belonged to?

As much as I enjoyed the scenes involving Kinski (it is a oddly intense performance from the young actor who, at that time, was mainly known from his work in theater and his appearances in the Edgar Wallace films) Last Of The Renegades is still not worth plowing through. Der Schatz im Silbersee, employing much of the same tropes, is a vastly superior entertainment if you're a Karl May aficionado or simply looking for some fun, light adventure firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-56189437417285646202011-11-19T15:41:00.000-08:002011-11-19T15:41:52.221-08:00Kinski Watch XVI: Die Gruft mit dem Rätselschloss (Franz Josef Gottlieb, 1964)

My quest to see every Klaus Kinski movie continues. Unfortunately, a lot of the movies he appeared in during the sixties are not available through the channels I usually get my movies from. Die Gruft mit dem Rätselschloss (in the off chance that there are German spelling fanatics among my readers I might note that the word "Rätselschloss", which translates to mystery castle, is spelled with a double s in the credits and on the movie posters, which, at the time, would have been a spelling error. The right spelling would have been "Rätselschloß". Notice the difference? Nowadays, the "ß" used instead of a double s has mostly disappeared), another entry in the seemingly endless Edgar Wallace series, is a rather labored affair that's not worth losing a lot of thought about. Audiences apparently had the same reaction at the time of the release. Die Gruft mit dem Rätselschloss is one of the few flops of the Edgar Wallace series.

The story could have been interesting but is treated with pure inaptitude. Real, the owner of a casino, betrayed and deceived his customers with fishy practices in his establishment, basically extorting money from them and living large. Did the 99%ers kill him in a fit of rage? No, he simply dies of old age but regrets his deeds just in time and sends his daughter to distribute his considerable wealth hidden in an booby-trapped vault among the ones he wronged. But before she can do so she is kidnapped by a gang of ruffians who also feel betrayed by Real and want to force her to give up the riches to them. As you might imagine, wackiness and deaths ensue.

But the film has no atmosphere, no suspense, no real humor. Die Gruft mit dem Rätselschloss gets off to a good start though. It begins with a riveting shootout between cops and gangsters. Just when the obligatory helpless girl-caught-in-the-crossfire is saved, "The End" is superimposed over the screen. The camera pulls back and we realize that we are in a movie theater where, as it turns out, one of the patrons has been murdered. In the opening twenty or so minutes, we also get a lot of cool (for a lack of better term) shots, using steep camera angles and medium shots. But it's almost as if the film was shot chronologically and Gottlieb lost interest as filming went on. By the end, the direction is plain dull. And Kinski? He is mostly reduced to staring at the action from afar.

Not recommended viewing at all.
firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-57043669786382094332011-11-03T16:07:00.000-07:002011-11-03T16:07:48.309-07:00Hiroshi Inagaki - Samurai Banners (1969)

By all accounts, Samurai Banners, a sweeping three-hour history lesson/war film/samurai epic, was director Hiroshi Inagaki's passion project. It is said that only this one and Samurai Trilogy were regarded upon favorably by the director at the end of his career. Much as with Kurosawa and Red Beard, it took Inagaki years to set up the project. At the time of shooting, it was the biggest Japanese production ever mounted. And, like Kurosawa's film, it is both a challenging viewing experience and an instance in which the director distilled his style to its purest form, thus offering what I would be inclined to call the definitive entry in his filmography.

If I ventured to arbitrarily categorize Inagaki's movies, I would group Samurai Trilogy and The Rickshaw Man into the character study category and leave Incident At Blood Pass in the plot-oriented/caricature category. Samurai Banners falls somewhere in between. The characters are all pretty simple archetypes and the focus is clearly on dominant and conquering masculinity; the plot machinations are laid out in great, sometimes tedious details; the movie, however, still finds a few moments in which characters can be characters without having to advance the unrelenting plot-steamroller. Especially the scenes between the main character Yamamoto Kansuke (Toshiro Mifune) and Princess Yu, a woman he secretly loves but is a concubine of Kansuke's employer Takeda, serve to make Mifune's character, a ruthless, calculating and brutal individual, a little more likable and tragic.

But most of the time, Kansuke, a real historical figure, is a monstrous and cold-blooded bastard. Not that it's a bad thing for a film character. It would be too much to recap the details of the plot, so let it suffice to say that Samurai Banners chronicles the expansion efforts of Takeda Shingen, ruler of Kai Province, who, during the 16th century, sought to control neighboring provinces and eventually possess coastal land. The climatic battle of the movie is fought with Uesugi Kenshin of Echigo Province who would give Takeda access to the Western coast of Japan (for those of you more knowledgeable than I am in the intricacies of this war, feel free to correct me if I got anything of this wrong).

But while Inagaki stages the battle sequences with all the confidence of a master director, shows us meetings in which Kansuke and Takeda discuss strategy, and even gives us title cards detailing the year of the respective battles, the exact location of the battle and the names of the parties involved (at one point we can marvel at Takeda's imperial venture on a map that highlights the shifting power dynamics in medieval Japan), the movie's true aim is to spotlight the relationship between Kansuke and Takeda. If the sheer mass of historical details wouldn't distract from it, Inagaki would have delivered a convincing intimate play of two people invested in an informal tug and pull over who has real power and calls the shots.

For Kansuke murders his way into the court of Takeda Shingen by staging a robbery of a vassal from Takeda clan with another ronin, then killing off his partner to shine in front of the emperor. Thankful for his heroic services, Takeda offers him a job and Kansuke quickly becomes the emperor's chief advisor. His bold stratagems are not always met with approval but they all work in the clan's favor and we get a sense that Mifune's character might be manipulating Takeda and having a private agenda that doesn't necessarily benefit the clan. When he is asked what his motivations are, Kansuke replies that he simply wants to acquire "more and more land!" and that he dreams of a unified Japan under one single ruler. Earlier, while musing about the neighboring provinces, he soon has a vision of the ocean, thus convincing himself and then the emperor that Takeda clan needs to get land access to the coast - something that can only be achieved by wars of aggression.

But the ronin-turned-army-general is also constantly reminded that he is a far cry from being part of the ruling class. He has to accept that Princess Yu offers herself to the emperor. When she bears Takeda a son, Kansuke tries to place him as the emperor's heir but his aides torpedo the plan. And he messes up the strategy for the final climatic battle with Uesugi Kenshin. Kansuke is a man who dreams big, knows how to enroll people to work in his favor, but he also battles his origins and his emotions at all times. He is restless and always plots the next coup because pausing would mean reflecting, and reflecting would mean accepting his true nature. When Princess Yu confesses to him that she plans to murder Takeda, he finds himself in loose-loose situation and struggles to find a solution.

In the second half of the film, Takeda and Kansuke are both inducted as Buddhist monks, seemingly to acquire more ferocity in warfare. It is interesting that Kansuke's self-effacement in the light of his imperial ambitions goes so far as to offer himself to a sect that is supposed to bring out his worst impulses, and even manages to drag Takeda into it. Surprisingly, Inagaki's depiction of militant buddhism goes against the philosophy of his previous movies. If, as Isolde Standish argues in her New History of Japanese Cinema, "Buddhism tempers the violence of judo/bushido through compassion and self-abnegation through 'transience'" (2006: 281) in Samurai Trilogy and arguably in Incident At Blood Pass, Samurai Banners depicts the opposite. Kansuke is not out to attain a higher mental state, to be a more valiant warrior or to engage in any "transience" whatsoever. He is simply trying to fulfill geopolitical goals and, from what I was able to deduce, not for the sake of any form of enlightenment, but for wholly selfish reasons.

It is unfortunate, then, that we don't get to spend more time with the characters and delve deeper into their psychologies. Visually, Inagaki showcases once again a solid if mostly unagitated style. The battle sequences harbor many highlights, although the editing seems confusing at times. Frequently, Inagaki will use long POV shots with soldiers coming at the camera, as if they wanted to fight the audience. The camera shakes and tumbles, creating a disorienting and distressing effect that intensifies the dread of the battle scenes. One bravura shot, and I'm sure his most famous among connoisseurs, is a glorious image of an army of 22,000 advancing through the mountains. We get a wide areal shot that shows us the trail of soldiers marching through woods and the camera slowly, very slowly pulls back, gaining in height, revealing more and more soldiers until they are reduced to mere points on the landscape. It's the opening shot in Werner Herzog's Aguirre, only in email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-73407375884625925952011-10-23T11:04:00.000-07:002011-10-23T11:04:13.616-07:00Hiroshi Inagaki – Ambush: Incident At Blood Pass (1970)

As the legend goes, Toshiro Mifune and Shintaro Katsu swore at some point to appear together in a film. Both were gigantic film stars, Mifune thanks to his iconic roles in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, Katsu thanks to his Zatoichi films, and a concerted appearance in a movie would almost certainly result in a giant box office success.

That was undoubtedly the reasoning behind Inagaki's casting of the two superstars in Incident At Blood Pass, together with the female lead Ruriko Asaoka who was a major film star at the time as well (she appeared in a staggering 121 films between 1955 and 1967). Inagaki's career was already flailing, securing financing for his jidaigeki movies was tuff, and the Japanese film industry in general was feeling the box office competition from imported Hollywood fare. Shochiku, Toho and Nikkatsu had to deal with increasing financial woes. In the mid-1970's, the share of ticket sales for domestic movies fell under 50%. The once glorious Japanese film industry was in a deep crisis.

Assembling a star ensemble and getting Mifune to reprise his role as Yojimbo for one last time, then, seemed like a good strategy to get Incident At Blood Pass greenlit by the studio. The resulting film has somewhat of a bad rep because it is billed as a swordplay film and has next to no sword play to offer. Fans of Yojimbo and Zatoichi hoping for a sort of super sword fighting adventure may not find a lot to like here, but Incident At Blood Pass is a very interesting film in which Inagaki varied some tropes of his former work and constructs a carefully balanced script that should be studied by everyone interested in the craft.

Where Inagaki built his characters with a lot of intricacy in Samurai Trilogy and The Rickshaw Man, the characters in Incident At Blood Pass are nothing more than basic types, simple caricatures. Yojimbo doesn't get any new coloring, we have the archetype of the husband who beats his wife, the woman who submits herself to the hero, the old man who owns an inn, the rogue who tries to stay in the shadows, the hysterical police officer, the good-hearted crook, and the asshole villain. We get a little bit of backstory for some of the characters, most importantly Gentetsu the villain played by Katsu, but it is ultimately of no real importance to the movie.

What Inagaki does do with great precision, however, is to construct the situation in which all of the characters find themselves in. Just what is the titular "incident at blood pass"? We don't know until late in the film. And by that time the fate of every single character depends on the actions of someone else so that no one is in full control of their own life anymore. The movie is divided into two uneven sections: a longer one in which we don't know what is going to happen and in which the characters only make allusions to their past or what their intentions are, and a shorter more action packed section in which we finally learn what is going on and in which the focus shifts from the character's past to the immediate future.

In the first part, Inagaki leaves the audience in the dark about almost everything that's happening. Yojimbo gets an order to travel to Sanshun pass where something will happen at some point. His employer never reveals the nature of that "something". Along the way, Yojimbo picks up a woman who is beaten by her husband. Here, we don't know why or how long it has been going on. At an inn not far from Sanshun pass, where most of the film's action takes place, we meet the old owner and his daughter, as well Gentetsu who claims to be a doctor. We don't know what his relationship is with the owner and why he is living there in a shed behind the inn. Later, an officer appears with a crook he just apprehended. But we never know what the arrestee did. There is also Yataro, a gambler who teams up with Yojimbo at several occasions, but his motivations are kept in the dark for most of the time as well.

It is this first section of the movie that is most commonly criticized, as not much happens. Inagaki patiently moves the pieces on the chessboard until he has everyone where he needs them to be. The director is not known to be a superior visual auteur, but his compositions here complement beautifully the fractured nature of the character's interactions. In wide shots expertly employing depth of field, he arranges the characters on two or more different planes, thus slicing up the screen horizontally. When two characters have a hushed conversation or have a more intimate exchange, he captures it in a prolonged medium shot. Cuts on action are prevalent but not always used, as Inagaki delicately stages his shots. In one instance, the officer squats down next to the crook and tries to get a confession out of him. The camera films them both in profile, then slowly travels around them on a half circle. At the 90 degree mark, the officer stands up and squats down on the other side of the crook, so that, when the camera completes its 180 degree traveling, the characters remain in the same position as they were in the beginning of the shot, now simply mirrored. This is not an innovative technique, of course, but it shows that Inagaki is a commanding director and employs visual language that enhances or complements the plot.

Once we know what the "incident" is, the uncertainty shifts from the character's past to the future. As it turns out, Gentetsu has a plan to rob gold from a convoy posing as simple travelers. And Yojimbo was sent there to work with Gentetsu. Having formed some bonds with the people at the inn who are now held captive by Gentetsu, he is asked to work with the enemy and kill everyone at the inn. There is a certain element of unpredictability in the air because Mifune's character is so ill-defined that there was a part of me who thought that he really could kill the individuals he just spend half of the film protecting. But in the end, the denouement is both more confusing and more bland than the film lets on. But by that point, it was just a joy to observe how Inagaki's story chess moves finally paid off, even if the climax isn't very firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-83079992120524547882011-10-16T14:17:00.000-07:002011-10-16T14:17:12.950-07:00Hiroshi Inagaki - The Rickshaw Man (1958)

With The Rickshaw Man, Hiroshi Inagaki and Toshiro Mifune turn in a surprisingly nuanced film. Both men are championed for and excelled in broad strokes cinema, for lack of a better term, but this tale of a poor rickshaw man who sees himself confronted with social boundaries, the advent of the industrial age and his own image as a masculine swank is an exercise in sensitive observation. Inagaki uses cinemascope to its full extent (both in scenes with large crowds and in scenes in which he showcases his superior understanding of negative space and deep focus), and Mifune turns in what is probably one of his most memorable performances. Commanding, vulnerable, crass, funny, smart, charming and touching, Matsugoro the Rickshaw Man, as performed by Mifune, is undoubtly one of the more memorable characters of 1950's Japanese cinema.

Inagaki, who co-wrote the script with Mansaku Itami based on a novel by Shunsaku Iwashita, takes great care in crafting a well-rounded main character. Which also means being honest with the audience about Matsugoro's weaknesses and failings. We first meet the titular rickshaw man as he is sought out by law enforcement because he got into a fight with a swordsman. Later, he tells the story of that fight to a group of people at an inn and we realize that his performance in the "fight" was pitiable at best, that he acted a big shot but was defeated after only one blow on the head. Matsugoro first appears to be hot-headed, oblivious but also weirdly endearing.

Later, he fights a bunch of people at a theater after he threw garlic on an open fire which greatly offended his fellow theater enthusiasts (most of which are of higher social standing) because of the stench. Instead of getting the garlic out of the fire and enjoy the show, Matsugoro stubbornly decides to challenge some of the men to a fight. Here, he somehow keeps the upper-hand, defeats his opponents and is stopped only by a mediator who finally gets an apology out of him and screws his head back onto his shoulders. These two scenes alone make for fascinating character development. Matsugoro might be a bully at times and can act obnoxiously, but he can also see where he went wrong and learn from his mistakes. In addition, we never know which version of the rickshaw man we'll get. It's put to great use in a scene where he goes to an athletics competition. He decides to participate in a race that's open for the public. At first, it seems like he will be left behind very quickly by his competitors who seem more athletic and don't goof around as much as he does. But by the end, Matsugoro outlasts them all because he kept a steady pace and didn't overdo it in the first few rounds. He wins the race.

That particular scene is also a great showcase for the actor Mifune. The way he carries himself physically in the scene is remarkable. Matsugoro has a physicality unlike any other Mifune character that I have seen so far. His lanky running style is hilarious at first but turns out to be a competent way of winning a race. While Mifune carries his body the same way throughout the scene, he subtly transforms before our very eyes from good-natured goof to competitive candidate for the win. All throughout the film he appears physically intimidating when needed, vulnerable when confronted with an impossible love he has for a woman he can't have and goofy when his temperament gets him into a predicament. It's a remarkable performance from Mifune who's histrionics could sometimes get the best of him and who's iconic performances in Seven Samurai and Yojimbo are excellent but broad.

Yet, his nuanced performance in The Rickshaw Man doesn't mean that he loses his trademark intensity. However, he channels it differently. The film's story kicks in when Matsugoro is hired by a couple to transport their boy Toshio to and from doctor's appointments. Both Matsugoro and the family grow close. When Toshio's father dies, the rickshaw man becomes a sort of surrogate father figure and develops feelings for Yoshioko, the boy's mother. It is here that Mifune does truly exceptional work full of tenderness and emotion. Being a man's man, Mifune has no problems playing the scenes in which Matsugoro tries to teach Toshio what it means to be a worthy male. But he is equally heart breaking in scenes in which he tries to be close to Yoshioko but knows he will never be able to be with her because she belongs to a higher class.

The Rickshaw Man, then, is not only a finely observed character study of a simple worker who takes the boy of a wealthier man under his wing, but also a subtle critique of debilitating social conventions and a study of what it means to be a man in different social milieus. For Matsugoro has a different approach to masculinity than the boy's parents. When Yoshioko is worried that Toshio might get into a fight, Matsugoro simply retorts that fights are a normal rite of passage for young men. Where intellectual ability and academic achievement might be of fundamental importance to Toshio's parents, Matsugoro values physical prowess and a certain subdued macho attitude. Both worldviews clash in Toshio's education but the script doesn't raise a fuss about it. We are simply presented with some observations and are left to make up our own mind.

The Rickshaw Man is a deep text that warrants many more viewings before I could make a final assessment but there is no doubt that while The Samurai Trilogy is an excellent and very entertaining spectacle, Rickshaw Man is a superior film that shows that when Inagaki paints in shades of grey the result is sublime. From the intimate story over the superb compositions and bravura camera movements to the performances, Inagaki and company get everything right. It is unfortunate, then, that the film is not available on DVD in the United States as of email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-13237642978907863452011-10-09T10:50:00.000-07:002011-10-09T10:50:25.644-07:00Hiroshi Inagaki - Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (1954), Samurai II: Duel At Ichijoji Temple (1955) and Samurai III: Duel At Ganryu Island (1956)

It is always difficult to find an appropriate entry point into the work of such an iconic cinematic figure as Hiroshi Inagaki (1905 - 1980). Consider this: he started out as a child actor during the 1920's, the very inception of Japanese cinema, was promoted to director at the young age of 22, helped revive the jidaigeki films during the 1930's as a member of the Narutaki group alongside Sadao Yamanaka for whom he wrote several scripts, helped re-revive the jidaigeki genre after the war by directing historical films of epic proportions, found international claim an won an Academy Award, but, like his peer Akira Kurosawa, had an increasingly difficult time securing financing beginning in the 1970's despite his pedigree as master director, became bitter, took on alcohol and died a lonely death.

The Samurai Trilogy, much like Kurosawa's Rashomon, is certainly his most well-known work in the West (Inagaki won the Academy Award for best foreign film for Samurai I) and presents a good way to start to inspect his oeuvre. The trilogy was also produced at an interesting historical time when discourse in jidaigeki films shifted from the nationalistic overtones of the 1930's to the nihilistic violence of the 1960's films. Certainly, The Samurai Trilogy exhibits a rather conservative ideology but also stands as a definite manifesto of a certain breed of ronin genre fare that would become increasingly rare in the following decades.

Samurai tells the sweeping story of Musashi Miyamoto (Toshiro Mifune) who traverses a 17th century torn apart by civil war, as he tries to attain the wisdom of a true samurai. We first meet him as a hot-headed whippersnapper and see him change until he finally finds the enlightenment and the mental tools of a true swordsman. In between, we witness several obstacles and tests he has to endure in order to learn life lessons, as well as his various romantic liaisons that define his masculinity. Oftentimes referred to as Japan's Gone With The Wind, the film is based on Eiji Yoshikawa's epic novel Musashi Miyamoto and was already adapted once before by Inagaki during the war as a three-part film. Unfortunately, that version is now lost. When the director tackled the material again in 1954 for Toho, a rival production was on the way, called Musashi Miyamoto and directed by Yasuo Kohata, not based on the identically titled book but covering the same events, for Tohei studios. A few years later, in 1960, Tomu Uchida adapted the same material again, as a six-part film called Zen and Sword. All of these productions were immense popular successes in Japan, but only Inagaki's 1954 version was similarly applauded by Western audiences. Like with Kurosawa's Rashomon, the Academy Award for Samurai I paved the way for the anglophone West's discovery of Japan's cinematic treasures.

Since the film's reason of existence is to trace our main character's journey from rogue to sage, the plot concentrates almost exclusively on Musashi and his development as a character. The focus is on process. We ruffly know at all times where Musashi's journey is leading him mentally and emotionally, the question is how we get there. The three different parts, then, correspond to three very specific stages in his development. Ruffly speaking, the first part follows Musashi's growth from thug to warrior, the second part traces his evolution from samurai student to real swordsman and part three finds him accepting the duties of a samurai. At the beginning of every of the three installments, a clear objective is formulated for Musashi. His objective for the first film is to obtain fame on the battlefield. In the second film he seeks wisdom and a way to refine his skills. In the last film he has to do the last steps to finally become a real samurai.

Having announced these objectives, Musashi is immediately faced with failure. In Samurai I, Musashi, at first, is kept from participating in the Sekigahara battle, and when he finally does, realizes that the Ashikaga forces he is part of, were already defeated. In Samurai II, he wins a fight against a samurai armed with a chain and sickle and kills him, but, as a priest tells him, "lost as a samurai". Samurai III nicely inverses this dynamic as Musashi is challenged to a duel even though he doesn't want to fight out of spiritual reasons. His attempt to withdraw himself from the battle fails and he is attacked and has to defend himself. Every film then traces Musashi's trajectory from failure to finally achieving his goal. This structure unifies the trilogy while maintaining a certain independence for each part. Even though each one of the parts is one piece to the larger puzzle, the Samurai trilogy is more than a sum of its parts. Every film can be enjoyed as a single story and cinematic achievement.

There is a lot of emphasis on building Musashi's character in very definable traits. In Part I he is a loner without parents, who's distant relatives call him "lawless", obsessed with fame and glory, courageous but hot-headed and immature, loyal, demonized by others and, at times of solitude or intimacy, torn by guilt. The first installment of the trilogy is about him overcoming his worst first impulses and learning a lot of hard lessons. "You ignored wisdom and reason, you thought you could defeat the world", tells him the priest who takes him under his wing. Musashi has to learn that he can't defeat the world by himself and certainly can't ignore wisdom and reason.

The scene where the priest hangs Musashi from a tree and leaves him for several days, even through a snow storm, is pivotal. That's when he turns a mental page. Kicking and screaming and cursing at first, he decides against running off with his lover Otsuo when she secretly frees him after seeing him hanging there for days. There is, of course, an almost insane amount of pathos in this scenes but from the standpoint of plot these are all very important stepping stones for Musashi and for the audience's understanding of the character.

Samurai II shows us Musashi as a much more accomplished man but also much more humble. When he goes to a sword maker and asks him to repolish his sword, the artisan tells him "I polish the souls of samurai. Not murderous weapons." Musashi's reply: "would you kindly repolish my crude soul?" This is in tune with the first scene of the movie where Musashi wins the battle against the chain and sickle warrior and a priest tells him "You're not yet a real samurai!" This informs the entire film. Where fame and glory were his main combustibles in the first part, here he tries to acquire a higher mental state, a wisdom that will enable him to live the real life of a samurai. But that comes at the price of female suffering. Otsuo and Akemi are not only rivals in their courtship of Musashi but they can't compete with his calling: "I love my sword more than I love you", he tells Otsuo at one point.

The second film of the series, with a main character more interested in his intellect than in battling competitors, is, consequently, much less erratic than the first one, although it ultimately boasts a much higher body count. There is always a lot of tension in the air because Musashi literally has to face life and death stakes constantly, but Samurai II is much quieter and introspective where Samurai I was a wild rollercoaster ride filled with action and battle sequences. Musashi moved around a lot, traveled, had to flee, he led the life of a vagabond and thus had no real points of orientation in his life. In Part II, he travels to one location and stays there for most of the time, sharpening his intellectual tools and anticipating the final climax that forces him again to leave.

Said final climax, epic in its scope as he affronts 80 men out to kill him, also underlines just how much Toshiro Mifune represented the masculine ideal of the time. Brave, fearless, passionate, thoughtful and aware of his physicality, not only the samurai Mifune but the man Mifune was made into a symbol of what Japanese manliness was all about. And certainly, portraying such a torn and heroic character contributed to that image. In the end, when he is dueling with Kojiro, Masushi is about to strike the last blow but his conscience prevents him from doing so. He is not a rogue anymore, a mental page was turned again. Which also adds to the archetype of the manly man with a twisted past that taught him important life lessons.

In the third and final Samurai, Masushi announces: "I want to fight without regrets". And it is the film that sees him struggling the most with his chosen profession of samurai. For a while, he even abandons the idea altogether and lives as a farmer. An antagonist is introduced very early on in his eternal rival Kojiro and we anticipate a confrontation for nearly one hour and a half. There is no doubt that Masushi, no matter how competent and powerful Kojiro is made out to be during the film, is going to defeat him. The film becomes about what lessons he will learn that help him complete his skill set to do so.

We open the film with yet another duel that simultaneously showcases his extraordinary faculties as a swordsman and charts his mental state. In Samurai III the situation is exceptional. He is the best warrior in Japan, or approaching that, yet he doesn't want to fight. There are several confrontations during the film in which Masushi doesn't draw his sword to defeat his opponent but hints at his capabilities otherwise. In one memorable instance he uses his chopsticks to pick flies out of the air. A man that precise, focused and quick? Better not get testy with him.

Masushi's character arc in Samurai III is, I think, the most interesting of the trilogy because his refusal to use his skills is nicely pitted against Kojiro's desire to showcase that he is the best swordsman of the country by defeating Masushi. Though Kojiro is clearly driven by fame it is not a vane ego-driven undertaking as Masushi attempted himself in the first film. Nonetheless, making a name for himself is important to him. Meanwhile, Masushi is on the quest for the exact opposite: self-realization and bliss. He doesn't need Kojiro to attain glory, battling "without regrets" is what Masushi is after. But he needs time on his own, far away from any swordsmanship, before he can do that. Kojiro is anxious to finally confront him. It is a simple and compelling way to chart just how far Masushi has come as a character. Where he would have charged Kojiro in Samurai I without any second thought, he actually goes to live with peasants and works the fields for a while in Samurai III and lets Kojiro stew in his own grease.

As Isolde Standish remarks in her excellent book A New History of Japanese Cinema, the Samurai Trilogy is rather conservative in its depiction of samurai values and masculinity. Jidaigeki movies were revived during the 1950's after the occupation authorities had banned them immediately following the war. In later decades, the genre would become increasingly violent and cruel. While Miyamoto Musashi can be seen as a positive role model and valiant warrior, a figure like Tsukue Ryunosuke in The Great Bhodisatta Pass is a much more ambiguous and morally corrupt character, although both Pass and Samurai treat similar themes. Standish: "While Miyamoto Musashi travels the land seeking knowledge and enlightenment, Tsukue Ryunosuke traverses the land indiscriminately killing. Located within violent periods of civil strife, both characters are symbolic of the clash of the postmodern and modern civil order. Ryunosuke is a relic from an age (…) that will soon cease to exist while Miyamoto Musashi (…) undergoes a lengthy period of training that allows him to maintain a legitimate position in the new order." (280)

Musashi is an outsider and social misfit who seeks knowledge in order to attain a certain social standing of his own choosing. Again Standish: "Within the more conservative discourse of [Samurai], Buddhism tempers the violence of judo/bushido through compassion and self-abnegation through transience (mujo)." (281). But such a discourse was rejected by later generations of filmmakers who also took Akira Kurosawa, among others, to task for having an outdated and ultimately romantic view of humanity. Both Kurosawa and Inagaki, who both won an Academy Award during the 1950's and were hyped by Western critics, had increasingly difficulties securing financing for their films in the later years of their careers, prompting Kurosawa to attempt suicide and Inagaki to revert to alcohol. Certainly, the fact that their filmic discourse seemed out of date had to account for a lot of their troubles. Movie giants they were both. But they didn't seem fit to say something substantial about contemporary issues. And while the Samurai trilogy is sweeping filmmaking at its best, one can see how a younger, wilder and overambitious generation could have perceived it as stale, square and, for lack of a better word, Biedermeier.

firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-43200092582071152082011-09-14T17:21:00.000-07:002011-09-14T17:21:48.321-07:00Sadao Yamanaka – Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937)

Judging solely on our three-film sample of Sadao Yamanaka's work, Humanity and Paper Balloons, the last film he directed before passing away, is undoubtedly his masterpiece. Simple in its presentation at first but with an intricate and complex narration, the film shows Yamanaka as a true master of his craft, an irreverent storyteller who was not afraid to take an unpopular political stance. A lot of the actors cast in the movie hailed from the far-left theater group Zenshin-za and we know now that Yamanaka's flirtations with communist groups and left-wing thinking ultimately caused his draft to the front that resulted in his premature death. The portrayal of samurais in Humanity and Paper Balloons is unglamorous and free from any self-aggrandizing nationalistic revisionism. Political authorities are represented as corrupt and insensitive towards the needs of the poorer population, whereas community and empathy are presented as keys to happiness – a viewpoint not necessarily shared by the militaristic Showa government at the time of the film's release.

The film is bookended by two suicides. We open with the suicide of an impoverished ronin who had to sell his sword and swap it for a bamboo sword. There is quite an uproar over his death in the small community we are introduced to over the course of the film but the hara-kiri is not subject to a grand remembrance in honor of the respected samurai. Rather, it is an opportunity to pocket five bottles of sake from the landlord and come together to dance and drink. The other ronin significant to the story is Matajuro Unno who's father recently died and who relies on his wife to provide for the family by selling paper balloons. He approaches Mori, a local political figure and "urban" samurai with ties to the yakuza who knew his father, in the hopes that he would point him towards gainful employment. But Mori doesn't want to be reminded of his ties to Matajuro's father.

As payback, the ronin helps hiding Okoma, a young woman who is to be married to the higher samurai class and who is abducted by Shinya, a barber and gambler who organizes unauthorized gambling games in his own home, attracting the wrath of the yakuza. Shinya and Matajuro's kidnapping scheme finally backfires and the ronin's wife kills him in his sleep and subsequently commits suicide. End of film.

Far from heartwarming Heimatfilm tropes and a vision of the ronin as an honorable and wise warrior, Yamanaka presents feudal Japan as an unjust class society, weighed down by punishing social conventions and unfair social conditions. Class relations are the main motive here, as we jump back and forth between the poor community of peasants, merchants and down-on-their-luck samurais, and the removed class of arrogant gangsters, political rascals and merciless upper-echelon samurais. There is a heartfelt black-and-white representation of both stratums of society and Yamanaka is never ambiguous about which side he's on. The poor, as carefree and optimistic as some of them might be, never catch a break, while the rich always maintain the upper-hand.

There is a subtle gender commentary to be found as well. All of our main protagonists are male. Women are either pawns in a larger game played by the men, like Okoma, or wives who look upon their husband's actions with disdain but with little power to change them. After it is revealed that Matajuro was involved in Shinya's kidnapping scheme we get a brief scene in which various women chat with each other about how all men are scoundrels since even the samurai, who should be a respectable role model, participated in such an ill-conceived venture. Matajuro's wife overhears them talking like that – and ultimately chooses death as her and her husband's only way out. The message here is twofold: not only are the men's actions irresponsible and oftentimes plain dumb, but women, just like the poor on the larger scale of society, have to suffer the consequences of actions they are not responsible for. More than an advocate for the "lower" classes of society, Yamanaka, it seems, was a feminist.

The story, though virtually void of plot, is fascinatingly constructed. A little confusing at the beginning because we are introduces to a wide array of characters and conflicts, the script builds and builds by mostly just observing the characters and their day-to-day transactions and sponging details. Relationships are forged slowly until the characters abruptly, it seems, face compelling moral conundrums that finally grab us emotionally. By the end of Humanity and Paper Balloons, we are totally immersed in this world Yamanaka delineated very clearly and aggregated with intricate detail. The film never keeps us at arm's length rather inviting us to visit it again and again, as one single viewing doesn't do the film justice, doesn't allow us to fully register all the themes, character details and visual motives.

Humanity and Paper Balloons was certainly a singular viewing experience for me personally. I have read elsewhere that the film is bleak and pessimistic and there is certainly something to that. But I was struck by the poetic nature of the movie, by the deliberate pace that allows us to reflect as we are presented with an array of ideas and themes, by its intimacy and the almost introspective atmosphere. Where The Pot Worth a Million Ryo and Koshiyama Soshun where carried along mostly by plot intricacies, Humanity and Paper Balloons sets out to portray exactly that: humanity. In his excellent essay on Sadao Yamanaka, Chris Fujiwara explains: "In the title of Yamanaka's final film, the word that is translated as "humanity," ninjo, means not the human race (for which the language has another word, jinrui) but human feeling. In the title of the film, it indicates no precise direction for the plot but opens up the chaotic and unpredictable space of impulses." It is this more observational narrative method that elevates Yamanaka's work from superior genre fare to full-blown cinema mastery for email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-48265430211024271832011-09-06T18:17:00.000-07:002011-09-06T18:17:49.811-07:00Sadao Yamanaka – Kochiyama Soshun (1936)

Sadao Yamanaka once said, "I do the reverse of what Pudovkin taught." Regular readers of this blog, if such exist, will recall that I discussed Pudovkin's editing technique a few weeks back. The soviet director regarded editing as "the foundation of film art." In this context, content is defined by how the shots are arranged in relation to each other. For Yamanaka, as was the case for a lot of Japanese directors in the 1930's, the shots themselves created meaning. Editing equated assembling the final product. Little esthetic work was done in the editing room. This was one of the reasons why Japanese directors were able to churn out staggering amounts of films. Post-production time was cut down by carefully planning out shots and sequences beforehand. There was a specific reason for each new shot. But mostly, careful blocking and shot compositions enabled the directors to let scenes play out in a small number of takes.

In Kochiyama Soshun, Yamanaka's second surviving film, there is one scene in which two characters bid on a small knife at an auction. They are both filmed in a medium shot showing only the two. We don't see or hear anyone else attending the auction. Yamanaka's confidence as a visual artist and the performances of both actors enable the director to hold the shot until the scene's resolution.

Kochiyama Soshun, even more than The Pot Worth A Million Ryo, is an extraordinary stylistic achievement. We miss all the flamboyance of a Mizoguchi or Kurosawa, but it's in his restraint, much like his colleague and friend Yasujiro Ozu, that Yamanaka shines bright. He predominantly uses wide angle shots employing all the depth of field. The narrow alleyways and claustrophobic interiors where the action takes place provide the perfect setting for this. Yamanaka activates the space on a vertical line. Characters frequently enter a scene from the background and make their way to the center of the frame where the action takes place and is captured in long shots. There are no reverse-angle shots in conversation that I could recall.

There is a tranquil rhythm that carries us along, a smoothness of the plot that is enhanced by the seamless succession of shots. Yamanaka also uses a lot of repetition to underline how the characters change and how they are trapped at the same time. When the plot calls for it, Yamanaka ups the ante without losing his clarity of vision. The climax of the movie involves an escape from ruthless henchmen. Characters chase each other through narrow streets and back alleys, and Yamanaka increases the suspense by accelerating the pace of the editing. The last shot of a monk trying to hold back a horde of sword swinging badasses while a stream of water erupts in the foreground of the frame is among the most poetic and most violent of the film.

Based on a famous Kabuki play by Kawatake Mokuami, Kochiyama Soshun is a genre film unlike you have ever seen one. Naojiro, a young knucklehead, steals a small but invaluable knife from a samurai and with that offsets a chain of events that eventually leads to his sister having to sell herself into prostitution, the samurai almost having to commit harakiri, his girlfriend jumping to her death and a lot of people getting killed in the climatic battle. Like in The Pot Worth A Million Ryo, an object is at the center of the narrative and structures the multiple plotlines that intertwine and add to a narrative web that gains in complexity with each new scene.

And again, the fabric of reality is put into question. Reality, which is pieced together through knowledge, is constantly negotiated between the characters as they exchange knowledge and broaden or narrow down their intellectual spectrum. When the samurai contemplates the possibility of committing harakiri if his master ever finds out that the small knife was stolen from him, the two men who bought that knife at the auction quarrel over its worth: "who could pay 10 ryos for such a trivial small knife?" asks one. "It's such a waste of money!" By showing us these two extremes, Yamanaka emphasizes once more the complexity of life. One man's trash is another man's treasure.

Yamanaka also seems interested in the malleability of reality. Time and time again, characters speak about the same things without realizing it and misunderstand each other or getting to the wrong conclusions. If the same thing can have different meanings for different persons, how can one perspective be superior to another? At one point, the samurai, contemplating his supposed harakiri, reveals that he is 53 years old. His counterpart nonchalantly tells him: "with 50, a man has already lived his life." Such is the beauty of Yamanaka's work. In one amusing one-liner he expresses several complex ideas.

Whoever said that thoughtful films can't be email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-63944022232075400422011-09-04T13:37:00.000-07:002011-09-05T15:30:46.317-07:00Sadao Yamanaka – The Pot Worth A Million Ryo (1935)

As mentioned in my last post, the tragedy of Sadao Yamanaka's fate has often been deplored by cinephiles interested in early Japanese cinema. Drafted to the front in 1938 at the age of 28 as punishment for his political activism, the director, hailed as one of the most promising cinematic talents by his contemporaries, died from a disease contracted on the battle field, leaving behind 12 finished films of which only three have survived today. All three films, The Pot Worth A Million Ryo, Koshiyama Soshun and Humanity And Paper Balloons are generally hailed as masterpieces, and rumors float around that his other films, which we will most likely never see, were even better.

No one can really say if there is any veracity to this claim, but we can appreciate the fact that Yamanaka, along with a small group of other directors and screenwriters such as Hiroshi Inagaki, revitalized the Japanese period film in the 1930's by updating it in terms of dialogue and themes, but also by ablating some of its gravitas and imbuing it with a healthy dose of humor and adding romantic subplots, which was often criticized as "too American". For our contemporary tastes, however, Yamanaka's films stand as oddities as well as strokes of genius, a singular and peculiar auteur vision that leaves us wanting for more.

The Pot Worth A Million Ryo, the earliest of Yamanaka's surviving films, is part caper movie, part comedy, part drama, part jidaigeki. The story concerns, as you might have guessed, a pot that ostensibly is worth a million ryo, although its value is never explained or questioned. Believing it to be worthless, a powerful Lord offered it to his brother Genzaburo as a wedding present. Genzaburo, insulted by the present (the pot does not look particularly valuable), sells it to ragpickers who themselves give it to a little boy who uses it as a container for his goldfish. When the boy's father, a rice merchant, is murdered, Tangekazen, the one-eyed ronin, takes him under his wing, much to his lover Okami's chagrin. One by one, the characters discover the pot's worth and set out to find it. Genzaburo seems to be the most intent on locating the pot, but he only uses it as an excuse to spend his time outside of the house and far away from his wife, flirting and hanging around a tea house which is run by Okami. When he finally realizes that Tangekazen and the boy have the pot, he doesn't hand it over to his wife but let's them keep it so that he can still spend his time at the tea house, pretending to be on the hunt for it.

Such a set-up leaves a lot of room for interpretation and analysis, of course. We can find themes of class distinction, male-female relationships, fate, the deep irony of life – the list goes on. One idea central to the film is that what we want most is oftentimes right in front us, but we ignore it. Obviously, the invaluable pot is the prime example of this leitmotiv. Another one is Tangekazen's inability to tell the boy that his father was murdered. Not only is the truth right in front of the boy without him being able to grasp it, but the ronin tries to establish an honest relationship with the boy, an undertaking tainted by the heavy secret.

In fact, most if not all characters have something to hide: the vassal of the Emperor who tries to get back the pot from Genzaburo first for free and then for a small amount of money; the rice vendor who tells everyone he has a big shop when in reality he lives in poverty; Genzaburo who pretends to search for the pot when in reality he spends his days flirting with Okami's assistant. There is a clear divide between what the characters make reality out to be, and what reality really is. Stylistically, Yamanaka expresses this with the transition-by-negation. When Tangekazen first brings the boy home, Okami refuses to feed him. The next shot shows the boy eating. Later, she refuses to buy him bamboo sticks. The next shot shows the boy walking on bamboo sticks. Instances like that can be found throughout the movie.

More than humorous transitions, these vignettes form meaning. The characters are constantly struggling to come to terms with the reality around them. Genzaburo makes himself out to be a better archer than he really is. Tangekazen exhibits a tuff shell but has a soft heart. The boy has to accept the sudden change of his living environment, and then runs away when Okami and the ronin fight about him. Consequently, the characters discover most truths by proxy. Everyone is told about the pot's worth. They don't discover it themselves. Genzaburo's wife discovers his mischief only after one of her employees point out where he is. Genzaburo shoots an exaggerated amount of arrows at a target but it is Okami's employee who has to reveal to him how many hit the spot: a single one.

In my mind, The Pot Worth A Million Ryo is more concerned with the way we try to make sense of our environment than an oblique meditation on class relations or the irony of life. As humans, we can only grasp but one tiny portion of what life entails. We have to rely on third parties, institutions and art to make sense of it all. One joke, told by the boy, expresses this perfectly: "why do humans have two eyes? Because otherwise the second eyeglass lens would be a waste." We all make sense of our world differently. And sometimes, the most obvious is right in front us without us realizing it. email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-86312142371417472442011-09-01T17:20:00.000-07:002011-09-01T17:20:02.255-07:00Yasujiro Shimazu – The Trio's Engagement (1937)

In my last post I lamented the fact that so few of Shimazu's films have survived the trials of time and that even fewer are available to the English speaking public. Not only is our possible fandom squelched from the get go, but for people interested in studying the director's work in-depth it is very frustrating to have only such a small sample size at their disposal.

It is especially frustrating in this instance because The Trio's Engagement is so fundamentally different from Our Neighbor, Miss Yae and my reaction to it was so dissimilar from my first Shimazu experience that I am aching to see more in order to better assess his body of work. But as it is, I am stuck with two very different viewing experiences. Not to say that The Trio's Engagement is horrible. On the contrary, the plot is quite amusing. Three young men find work at a textile company at the same time. One is from the suburbs, one from the countryside, one from the city. All three fall for their boss' daughter and court her. In the end, their supervisor hands them an invitation to the boss' daughter's wedding to a baron.

This admittedly contrived story gives Shimazu the possibility to explore how the men's different social origins define their work ethic and, more importantly, their flirting prowess. The film is light-hearted at it's core and at times outright farcical. For it to be such an obvious construct to explore social differences, The Trio's Engagement is utterly uninterested in going deep into the issue, preferring to be straight up entertaining without indulging in some darker beats, as we have grown accustomed from the Japanese social realist dramas of the time.

This is not a complaint. My complaint lies in the fact that Our Neighbor, Miss Yae impressed me so much more upon my first viewing. I totally got what Shimazu was going for in The Trio's Engagement, but I found myself a lot less engaged in the proceedings than with the other film. Not only was I less interested in the story, but stylistically, Miss Yae wowed me more. The seamless storytelling paired with impeccable directing and editing were the clear imprint of a master filmmaker. But The Trio's Engagement has a lot less to offer visually, rendering it almost interchangeable with any other fare from that period.

And herein lies the problem. By all accounts, Shimazu was indeed a master of the medium. But in viewing only two of his films, I couldn't confirm or deny it. One film is a masterpiece, the other one more average if still enjoyable. Which level of quality is the norm here? Where is Shimazu's handwriting? It's impossible for me to say. It is even more frustrating than in, say, Sadao Yamanaka's case who was considered the best Japanese director of the 1930's. Only three of his films have survived and they are all incredible masterpieces. We know that we miss out on a lot of quality and it's a tragedy that Yamanaka's body of work has mostly vanished. But with Shimazu, I can't even assess what the threshold is. And, to me, that's even firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-45209652735606129162011-08-29T17:51:00.000-07:002011-08-29T17:51:27.915-07:00Yasujiro Shimazu - Our Neighbor, Miss Yae (1934)

As we all know, history is written by the winners. When we think of early Japanese cinema, we rightfully think of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and, to a lesser extent, Kurosawa. While a lot of Ozu's and Mizoguchi's early films are lost, they produced an impressive body of work after the war which enabled them to profit from the industry's postwar growth and its discovery by westeners. This is not the case for Yasujiro Shimazu who died in 1945. Considered the first real master of the shomin-geki genre, Shimazu directed well over 100 silent films, which are lost for the most part. And of the films that survived, only a tiny fraction is available with English subtitles.

One can't help but wonder what this "loser" of history has in fact contributed to Japan's early cinematic landscape as we perceive it today. Shimazu's films have a reputation to have been starting blocks for many Japanese film stars and it seems like the director was mainly interested in "slice-of-life" narration and outsider characters (his debut First Steps Ashore involves seamen and prostitutes - no pun intended). Stylistically, it seems like he was a major player in implementing the use of the long lens and, it might be argued, the seamless tracking shot. But one can't know for sure as our sampling size is simply too small to tell.

Which is frustrating. Just as I am terribly curious what an Ozu period film might look like (the lost The Sword of Penitence), delving deeper into Shimazu's filmography would surely prove to be fascinating and maybe shed a new light on pre-war Japanese cinema and beyond. I was able to source and see two Shimazu films and am very impressed. History might be written by winners, but exploring the niches is very rewarding.

Our Neighbor, Miss Yae opens with a masterful lateral tracking shot establishing the suburban lower middle-class setting of the film. The shot ends on a pair of brothers playing catch in the back yard. We get a meticulously mounted and edited sequence in which the brothers throw around the baseball, which culminates in the ball flying over to the neighbor's property and smashing one of their windows. I was struck by the amount of coverage Shimazu gets. The editing is less rigorous than Ozu's, but more systematic than Shimizu's. The shots follow each other very deliberately. There are, however, a lot of shots that are never repeated and simply stand as stylistic flourishes. There are also quite a few cut-aways that Ozu would later use systematically but are employed more casually, it seems, by Shimazu.

This opening sequence not only immediately establishes Shimazu as a very considered filmmaker but it also introduces one of the major themes of the movie: characters interactions depend on damage, spoilage, harm. Shortly after the baseball sequence, one of the brothers responsible for the breakage, Keitaro, goes over to the neighbor's house because he locked himself out. He is given something to eat and spills it on the pillow he is sitting on. At that moment, the neighbor's girl Yea-chan comes home with a friend, and Keitaro tries to hide his mischief. When she wants to offer the pillow to her friend, Keitaro has to admit to his clumsiness and the two girls make fun of him. Next, Yea-chan notices that Keitaro's socks have holes in them. She offers to mend them, but the student is clearly embarrassed. When he finally agrees and takes off his socks, Yea-chan comments on how dirty his feet are. Also, his socks stinks. That's why he didn't want to give them to Yea-chan in the first place.

The effect of this focus on imperfections is that the film feels very lived in. The relations between the characters are instantly believable because Shimazu shows them interacting in everyday situations that root the narrative in a very distinct sense of veracity. Everything in this movie rings true. This is especially valid for Keitaro and Yea-chan's timid courtship. Shimazu doesn't make a big fuss out of it and the two never really get to take their relationship to the next level but it is a delight to observe the two flirting gleefully and having a good time. There is an emotional honesty on display here that is rarely found when it comes to love and relationships in films.

Drama arises when Yea-chan's sister Kyouko comes home because she wants to divorce her husband who has been unfaithful. She and Keitaro are attracted to each other which, in turn, attracts Yea-chan's jealousy. But even here, where Shimazu would have had more than enough material to cook up simple minded melodrama, the director mostly exhibits restraint in the tear-jerker department and contents himself with showing how the character's actions change subtly from the point of Kyouko's appearance.

Yea-chan's father, for example, drinking buddy with Keitaro's father, grows increasingly frustrated and unhappy. In the end, the family moves to Korea. There is also a wonderful sequence in which Yea-chan and Kyouko go out on a double date with Keitaro and his brother, which, you guessed it, entails quite some instances of breakage, skin burns and other missteps that fuel the character interactions. Strictly speaking the night out sequence doesn't add a lot to the already meager plot, but it brings emotional heft to the table and what the actors do with simple looks, and what Shimazu accomplishes with shot composition to underline the characters' standing in relation to each other is remarkable.

A lot more could be said about Our Neighbor, Miss Yae. For instance, I haven't even delved into the film's thematic richness. But I found myself so thoroughly absorbed by the film's deliberate pacing and emotional honesty that I don't even want to get any more academic in discussing it. Our Neighbor, Miss Yae is a delightful and very entertaining film that proves that history's losers have plenty to say and that we would fare well to listen to them more often.
firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-4229619290469868132011-08-15T19:43:00.000-07:002011-08-15T19:43:32.014-07:00The Deleuzian Century V: Aleksandr Dovzhenko's Zvenigora (1928), Arsenal (1928) and Earth (1930)

An explosion on an empty field.

A woman stands immobile in a sparsely furnished room.

A title card: "There was a mother who had three sons."

Another explosion. Two dead soldiers on a rolling train. Empty, desolate trenches.

The same woman, still standing immobile in her comfortless room.

Smoke emerging from the trenches. Obscuring our view.

Another title card: "There was a war."

A woman stands on an empty field, next to a dilapidated hut.

A village street. Three women stand immobile in front of their poor houses. An amputee crosses the screen trailed by a small child.

Another street. A Young woman leans against a house. An old officer walks towards her. Stops. Examines her. Smiles. Touches her breasts. And then walks away.

A third title card: "The mother had three sons no more."

On a vast desolate field, an old woman throws seeds. Alone. And then falls to the ground.

If Alexander Dovzhenko is frequently called the poet among the Soviet formalists, it is precisely because of evocations like the one described above, found at the beginning of Arsenal. In a three minute sequence, the Ukrainian director manages to convey all the hopelessness, the senselessness, the dread, the bleakness, the horror of war without showing us a single gun shot or wound. Fragments are assembled, meaning is created. Dovzhenko is "obsessed with the relation between the parts, the unit and the whole" (Cinema 1, 58), writes Deleuze. Or as the French film critic Barthélemy Amengual puts it, Dovzhenko is capable of expressing himself "outside of time and space" thanks to fragmented montage.

Dovzhenko is out and out dialectician. The parts of his elliptical films are always expressions of the whole. Where the director doesn't create meaning within the scene, we creep towards a slow realization of a central idea, of a bigger meaning. In Zvenigora, a frequently hard to follow allegory, two stories run along each other, sometimes intersecting but remaining separate entities always. One is the story of a "Grandfather" who tries to protect a century old treasure, the other one is a confusing disquisition about war and industrialization. At the end, Dovzhenko joins both narratives in a sublime instance of a "qualitative bound" and we come to realize that what was at stake the whole time was Ukrainian national identity. The propagandist element is well there, except Dovzhenko takes a lot of detours to get there.

As Deleuze remarks, Dovzhenko, far more than Eisenstein, knows how to douse the parts and their unity into a new whole "that gives them incomparable depth and extensiveness within their own boundaries." (58) If Deleuze is interested in how the école soviétique combines the parts to express a new whole, Dovzhenko gives him a run for his money. Story is never narrated, it is constructed with disjointed elements. The whole is slowly assembled, the elements melt into the bigger picture. In short, there is a purpose, even if we don't always know what that purpose is.

Earth, on which the consensus seems to be that it's Dovzhenko's best although I found Arsenal to be oftentimes more engaging, pushes the "qualitative bound" to its limit, I would dare to say. If Eisenstein concocted his milk separator sequence to turn a narrative page, Dovzhenko builds and builds anticipation but subtracts narration. When the tractor arrives to the village, separating its inhabitants into two fractions (pro or contra modernization) we get a long sequence in which the appearance of the machine produces incredible exhalation among the population and seems to be integral to the village's survival. It is almost a slow build from hope to triumph like in Old And New. But that build-up is never resolved.

Similarily, the film begins with an old man announcing that he is dying. But he still converses a bit with some villagers and eats an apple. We build and build and build towards his death, but once his life really does extinguish, we haven't had a narrative eureka. Dovzhenko just doesn't operate on those terms. The "qualitative bound" occurs once we as an audience make sense of all these elements, once unity emerges and the whole begins to transpire. Montage here is not used so much on a micro scale as with Eisenstein, but applied to the whole film text. The parts always point to the whole. It is Dovzhenko's genius that he approaches montage on his own firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-84003527342713654402011-08-13T12:26:00.000-07:002011-08-13T14:33:19.842-07:00The Deleuzian Century IV: Vsevolod Pudovkin's Mother (1926), The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Storm Over Asia (1928)

We have seen the dialectical spiral, we have seen the section d'or, we have seen the qualitative bound - all expressions of Sergei Eisenstein's masterful command of "dialectic montage" as described by Gilles Deleuze. But, reminds us the french philosopher, "everyone knows that dialectics are characterized by several different laws". (Cinema 1, 57) "If we can talk about an école soviétique, it is not because its auteurs resemble each other, but because they are all different, every one having a different affinity to the dialectic conception they share". (57)

Eisenstein has a didactic approach to historic process and uses "opposition montage" to stage said process without having to rely on individuals too much to advance the narration (with exception, of course, of Ivan The Terrible). Vsevolod Pudovkin, even more of an overt and unambiguous propagandist than Eisenstein, is very much involved in the business of selling us history as approved by the socialist dominions as well, but uses individuals as symbols, although we are still miles away from a Hollywoodesque hero-driven narrative.

We find the qualitative bounds employed by Eisenstein, but in a different context. As history is symbolized by people in Pudovkin's work, the qualitative bounds in his films, argues Deleuze, are mainly changes in conscience. Through carefully edited POV shots, that serve as a sort of puzzle for the characters and the audience alike, Pudovkin builds to a realization, to a change in consciousness that gives the scene a new meaning, a new quality, and that calls for action from the protagonists.

In Mother, for example, we have an early scene in which the titular mother observes her drunk husband glaring at a wall clock. With every POV shot from the mother, intercut with close-ups of her face, we come closer to the realization that the husband is considering how he can sell the clock's parts in order to pay for more booze. As soon as the mother realizes it herself, she jumps to action and tries to prevent him from doing so. Through simple shots of one character observing another, the scene changes its meaning completely. Just as the mechanics of the milk separator in Old And New served as a narrative tool transforming hope into triumph, piecing the elements together in Mother means realizing what the scene really is about.

The End of St. Petersburg, in my mind a superior offering than Mother in many aspects, pushes this concept a little further. Looser and more sweeping in its narrative, the chronicle of St. Petersburg's fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks during the Russian revolution is not presented solely as a linear advancement of history. Rather, Pudovkin gives us many different pieces to the story, highlighting different social malaises. Piecing them together gives us not only the full story, but a new outlook on things. Just as individual scenes can flip once all the different elements taken together make sense, history can be fully appreciated once the different relevant points of view have been presented. The question becomes, of course, what is perceived as relevant.

The qualitative bounds in The End of St. Petersburg, are there on the micro scale as well, and we get recurring motives that offset changes in consciousness (the clock, the vast open skies that represent hope and death at the same time, the black smoke) but even more so than in Mother, Pudovkin tries to trigger changes in consciousness in the audience and not only the fictional characters on the screen.

In Storm Over Asia, in my opinion the best movie of the three, Pudovkin exhibits his most refined use of montage yet. A sort of Russian Lawrence of Arabia (there is even a desert scene in which a point on the horizon reveals itself to be a rider on a horse as he advances towards the camera, predating about 35 years the similar iconic scene in David Lean's classic) we get a lot of prolonged scenes that show Mongolian customs, Buddhist religious ceremonies, and explosive battle sequences. In order to render them fully, Pudovkin shows us a succession of close-ups that convey the atmosphere of each scene as experienced by the protagonists. He calls on all our senses. We see the faces of the people present, their clothes, sources of noise or music, fire, decors, the list goes on and on.

These signifiers are clearly meant for the audience. Pudovkin doesn't render one protagonist's point of view but gives us a god-like overview slowly revealed through intricate montage. With each new bit of visual information, our understanding of the scene is enhanced, altered, completed. The qualitative bound occurs in the audience's mind when the full extent of a scene is realized. Some associative montage is to be found in Storm Over Asia as well, but these sequences are stylistic flourishes and not a necessity to convey a certain plot point. In that regard, Pudovkin is decidedly uneisensteinian, so to speak.

Both are interested in awakening a certain state of consciousness in the audience. Both use montage to do so. But where Eisenstein combines point A with point B to create a heightened point C, Pudovkin slowly pushes his audience towards the realization of what point A, B and C are in the first place. It is also interesting to consider how chronologic narration is employed to wholly different ends. It's not like Pudovkin is less of a realist than Eisenstein. But where the director of Battleship Potemkin uses linear narration to show progress and consequences, Pudovkin combines disjointed elements to produce new meaning that, in turn, advances the firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-19166078507512264482011-08-07T07:47:00.000-07:002011-08-07T07:47:08.929-07:00The Deleuzian Century III: Sergei Eisenstein's Strike! (1925), October (1927) and Old and New (1929)

In Sergei Eisenstein's cinema, writes french philosopher Gilles Deleuze, we not only find "an organic link between two moments but a qualitative bound where the new moment gains additional power." (Cinema 1, 52). Where Griffith and the école américaine had two story points running along each other without really influencing each other, Eisenstein used point B as a result of point A, constructing narratives that explained as well as told stories. Story advancement wasn't a necessity but the logical result of specific plot points that set up new story movement, et cetera.

October and Old And New, both sometimes horribly overt propaganda films that certainly have to allow the question why Eisenstein is heralded a great stylistic innovator while Leni Riefenstahl, arguably not a lesser filmmaker, is shunned today, exemplify perfectly how this "organic link" between two plot points can be elevated to a "qualitatieve bound". What Deleuze means with "qualitative bound" is process. If point B results from point A, how do we get there? As in one of Louis C.K.'s stand-up routines where his daughter asks him what 6 plus 6 equals, and, upon receiving the correct answer, demands to know how because she has to show the work ("draw a picture of me telling you that it's 12!", C.K. exclaims), Deleuze wants to go deeper into the "organic link" between two moments and see how it works.

If one looks at films from the bird's eye view, almost all of them express a certain "process". In Hollywood tradition, the hero has to overcome or solve a problem and, in the process of doing so, changes in a fundamental way. Hollywood films process their protagonists, if you will. In Eisenstein's work, however, story results from process, as opposed to being the process. Consider the milk separator sequence in Old And New, given by Deleuze as the prime example: "we witness the passage from one moment to the other, from distrust and hope to triumph, from the empty pipe to the first drop, a passage that excellerates the more we approach this moment's new quality, the triumphant drop: it's a qualitative bound." (54)

It's a narrative device Eisenstein uses a lot. A new situation arises and the director finds visual means to show us how. If the milk separator represents hope (and resentment) for the milk cooperative in the film, its launch transforms the hope (point A) into triumph (point B). The intricate shots of the device's mechanics and how the farmers present at its first try-out bridge the gap between hope and triumph, providing visual proof of a change in nature of the situation. Eisenstein charges an otherwise inanimate object with a specific meaning. Bringing the machine into service changes the meaning - the story turns a page.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Eisenstein often discards personification for a more anonymous approach that enables him to represent historic movements more accurately. Historic movements are all about process. They don't just arise out of thin air, they are born through different machinations and are themselves a process of change. In that regard, Eisenstein's style clearly mirrors his narrative choices.

October, a stylistically brilliant but otherwise very uneven offering, is the perfect example. Almost everything here is process and we don't get to know any characters even obliquely, as we did in Battleship Potemkin. The famous uprising sequence at the beginning of the film that climaxes with a soldier opening fire on the protesters in a bold use of - literally - quick-fire cutting, uses the same method as in the milk-separator sequence. On a title card we learn that after 5 month of "bourgeoisie government" there is still "no bread, no peace, no land". Another title card announces the "people's wrath". They shout: "down with the provisional government!" Meetings are held, strategies discussed, people gather - again, it is hope that Eisenstein stages here. Hope for political change. It is not a drop of cream the "Bolsheviks" hope for but a new government. The soldier opening fire on the people crushes this hope but not after a good five minutes of building up to that ultimately anticlimactic moment. Again, it is not the story of individuals who brace themselves for political upheaval that matters here, but the mechanics of how the protests translate to a wholly new situation: a "qualitative bound".

But, again, Eisenstein uses this technique on a smaller scale as well. His "associative montage" combines two otherwise unrelated images to create a new meaning. Deleuze: "a qualitative change doesn't only mean a change in content on the screen, but also a formal change. The image has to acquire a new potency, attain a superior power" (54). Deleuze cites Eisenstein's use of close-ups that represent "absolute change" (54) and the visual passage in Old And New from milk flowing to water spurting (passage from slickness to sparkles) to fire works (introducing colors), each step elevating the image to a new quality.

But we can go further and include Eisenstein's use of juxtaposition, of "associative montage". The iconic final sequence in Strike! is a perfect example of how Eisenstein creates new meaning and elevates a sequence to a new level by association. The workers who instigate the titular strike are being chased by the authorities and they run for their lives. Many are beaten to death, someone falls from a balcony to his death, and they finally try to escape over an open field, where fire is opened on them. Eisenstein intercuts this intense sequence with very graphic images of cows being slaughtered. The message is clear, and by combining two otherwise unrelated images, Eisenstein has created new meaning, has created a "qualitative bound".

email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-238087651105481932011-08-01T20:03:00.000-07:002011-08-07T07:49:01.027-07:00Tabloid/The Interrupters

For those of you so inclined you can read my review of the new Errol Morris documentary Tabloid here and my review of Steve James' excellent new documentary The Interrupters here. Both via Big Vision Empty Wallet.firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-45556253660345132652011-07-29T17:53:00.000-07:002011-07-29T17:53:18.109-07:00The Deleuzian Century II: Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925)

Let's start with a few more words about parallel montage and Eisenstein's reservations towards it, taken from the master director's book Film Form. First, an interesting deconstruction of Griffith's all-American idea of montage, seen from an ideological standpoint: "But montage thinking is inseparable from the general content of thinking as a whole. The structure that is reflected in the concept of Griffith montage is the structure of bourgeois society. And he actually resembles Dickens's 'side of streaky, well-cured bacon'; in actuality (…), he is woven of irreconcilably alternating layers of 'white' and 'red' - rich and poor. (…) and this society, perceived only as a contrast between the haves and the have-nots, is reflected in the consciousness of Griffith no deeper than the image of an intricate race between parallel lines." (Film Form, 234)

Eisenstein's viewpoint however: "For us, the microcosm of montage had to be understood as a unity, which in the inner stress of contradictions is halved, in order to be re-assembled in a new unity on a new plane, qualitatively higher, its imagery newly perceived." (236) What Deleuze calls une grande spirale (L'image-mouvement, 51) that expresses a genesis, a scientific progression "finds its internal logic in the section d'or (literally "golden section") which splits the lot into two unequal but opposable entities." (51) With section d'or, Deleuze means the mathematic Golden ratio. Incidentally, Section d'Or was also a group of French cubist painters active at the beginning of the 1910's, centered around the Duchamp brothers.

In Eisenstein's agreed upon masterpiece Battleship Potemkin the section d'or, of course, corresponds to the moment after the uprising on the ship when we leave the water for the land. At that point, writes Deleuze, the movement reverses, meaning that the prosecutors become the prosecuted, so to speak. If until then Battleship Potemkin told the story of the little people rising up against the powers that be, the Odessa Steps sequence inverts this movement and we get a full-blown representation of cruelty from the rulers against the oppressed.

Contemporary screenplay theoreticians would object that this section d'or is nothing more than what's commonly known in Hollywood as the "mid-point" of a screenplay. The moment when the story kicks into high-gear and gathers steam because a new information is revealed that changes the parameters of the plot. Hell, the entire Battleship story loosely follows the typical Hollywood three act structure: the workers' indignation over the rotten meat is the "inciting incident", the revolt aboard the Potemkin the "Act 2 break", Vakulinchuk's death the "mid-point", and the ship's getaway the "act 3 break".

The difference is that for most anglo-saxon cinema, forward-motion of a story is necessary because the hero is always on some sort of quest. Take James Bond for example. Strictly speaking, none of these movies make much sense from a plot point of view. Things happen because Bond acts on them, but logic or organic growth are two variables that almost never come into play. There is a lot of complacence, a lot of formula. Every James Bond movie has to have its under-water chase, it's thrilling skiing chase and its gadget-filled luxury cars. But there is no real need for that in terms of story.

Eisenstein, however, builds stories organically, lets the laws of cause and effect play out. If the recruits of the Potemkin revolt, it's because they are not treated with enough consideration by their superiors. If Valuchenko is killed, it is because of that revolt. If the people of Odessa rebel, it is because of Valuchenko's death. If the ruling power employs deathly force against the people of Odessa, it is because of their rebellion. If the Potemkin tries to flee, it is because of said deathly force. The difference is that we have no individual quest here, no specific goal, no pre-conceived journey. As described in last week's post, Eisenstein is interested in process, not ego.

But Deleuze doesn't stop at the big cesura that is the Potemkin's landing. Built into these two opposing sequences are a multitude of smaller sections d'or that constitute individual cells, symptoms of the greater condition of Eisenstein's montage. We are talking about one man standing up in front of the many (on a story level: the ship's captain raving against the recruits; on an editing level: the innumerable white caps of the recruits filmed from a bird's eyes view intercut with the plain uniform of the ship's captain), the dichotomy between light and shadow, forward against backward motion, rhythmic cutting against tranquil assemblage. Deleuze describes it in mathematical terms: if one starts from an origine O, element A is to B what element B is to C (52). Or in Eisenstein's own words, describing the Odessa steps sequence: "The final pull of tension is supplied by the transfer from the rhythm of the descending feet to another rhythm - a new kind of downward movement - the next intensity level of the same activity - the baby carriage rolling down the steps. The carriage functions as a directly progressing accelerator of the advancing feet. The stepping descent passes into a rolling descent." (74) More concisely, we're talking about "movement as change." (76) And that is, very ruffly, in accord with Deleuze's concept of the email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-87601668476896741252011-07-21T19:39:00.000-07:002011-07-29T17:55:36.856-07:00The Deleuzian Century I: Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible Part I and Part II

I am going through another Deleuze phase. And this time, I am trying to decipher his writings on film. The french philosopher, certainly one of the most important Western thinkers of the last century, has left us with two incredibly dense tomes: Cinema 1: Movement-Image (which I am currently reading) and Cinema 2: Time-Image. In the quite useful handbook Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, one can find this summary of his thinking on film: "For Deleuze, the cinematic apparatus functions as a translator of the movements of images and consciousness of perception within temporal modalities of worlds (real, imagined, past, present and future)." (144)

He describes movement as a "translation in space" (18, French edition) and defines cinema as a "system that reproduces movement appending it to arbitrary moments" (15). The most interesting passages in Cinema 1 are the ones where he directly applies his philosophical concepts to specific films. In the book's third chapter Montage, Deleuze identifies four different stylistic approaches to montage: the "organic approach" of the école américaine, the "dialectic approach" of the école soviétique, the "quantitative approach" of the école française d'avant guerre, and the "intensive approach" of the école expressioniste allemande (47).

So let's follow his train of thought and reconsider some classics of world cinema through the deleuzian lens using some of his concepts, starting with Sergei Eisenstein's two-parter Ivan The Terrible.

With Eisenstein, "the oppositional montage replaces the parallel montage under the dialectical law of one unity that splits to form a new elevated unity", writes Deleuze (52). In other words, Eisenstein, contrary to D.W. Griffith, recognizes that the different elements of a story are not given axioms but result from opposition. "Griffith ignores that the rich and the poor are not intrinsic individual phenomena but result from one common cause: social exploitation" (50). The forward momentum of Eisenstein's stories, according to Deleuze, depends on two opposing elements that add up to a new plot point. "Opposition defines the progression of the dialectical unity from its initial situation to its final situation" (52).

Story is spiraling from a beginning to an end, always propelled by opposition. That in itself is nothing new to people who study screenwriting theory, but Deleuze finds an interesting angle: this story spiral, undulating thanks to opposition, expresses "genesis, growth and development" (51) on a social level, not a personal one. Story jumps from one level to the next thanks to a social dialectic that combines two situations to express and explain a new setting. Such an approach is a pretty good way to represent history in cinematic terms, and it's certainly not a coincidence that Eisenstein's most successful films deal with historical movements that slowly transformed society over time.

In Ivan The Terrible Part I, a terrific film, maybe my favorite Eisenstein, one doesn't have to look any further than the very first scene to find a practical example of all this theoretical babble. Ivan crowns himself under the watchful eyes of his cousin who opposes the crowning because she wants to see her own son on the throne, and the parents of his fiance who favor his political ascension. Different dignitaries comment the proceedings: his ambition to unify Russia will never be accepted by the other European emperors. On the other hand, if he is strong enough, he can impose his will on all the doubters.

The dialectical spiral begins to spin when the boyars who feel bereft of the throne openly defy him, Karzan declares war on Moscow, and his closest ally betrays him when Ivan seemingly succumbs to a fatal illness. The main through-line here is Ivan's quest to unify Russia. The film is then divided in several elongated sequences that all result from what came before. Every sequence channels opposition so as to shape a new setting from which Eisenstein spins yet new conflict, etc. The plot advancement that traces Ivan's development from an overly confident and ambitious political leader to a man forced to exile and tormented by doubt, all of which is defined by his opposition to the boyars, never relies on personal conflict between the characters. It is social conflict that is at stake here, and Ivan goes from attempts at political compromise with his enemies in Part I to "their social and physical extermination" (53) in Part II.

Indeed, Ivan Part I and Part II can themselves be seen as dialectic entities that push forth the character Ivan's narrative. At the end of Part II, Ivan sits on the throne and proclaims that his "hands are free", meaning that the boyars have been defeated and with them any movement against his plan to unify Russia. Part I shows us how Ivan goes about it on a geopolitical and imperialist level. Part II focuses on spiritual and social issues. But to achieve his goal, Ivan must get all his ducks in a row - politically, as well as spiritually. In that, Part I and Part II are opposing forces that help the spiral turn further.

Even Sergei Prokofiev's edifying score plays along. Dramatic scenes are frequently accompanied by upbeat music, whereas lighter moments are burdened with solemn orchestration. Rather than go for the obvious, the underlying meaning of a scene emanates from the opposition of action as seen on screen and the accompanying score. Where both don't match in a traditional sense, there is tension. And tension means dramatic momentum.

Of course, Eisenstein's film is a lot more complex than this write-up makes it seem. It is interesting enough though that Deleuze finds philosophical terms to express what are essentially screenwriting techniques that use protagonist/antagonist tropes to stage conflict that must be overcome by the hero. Hollywood has, of course, vulgarized this storytelling device, and, for the most part, usurped any wider social and/or political considerations. The difference is mainly that Hollywood is obsessed with the potent hero who alone steers the fate of the narrative, while Eisenstein is less interested in individuals than in social movements that are anonymous and can't be grasped through individual destinies. Ivan The Terrible stands as an oddity in Eisenstein's filmography in that regard. Wholly focused on one man's deeds, the director abandoned the detached narration of October or Strike!. But more than characters, the individuals in Ivan are stand-ins for social movements, caricatures, tropes that express an idea, not a firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3118756104508112382.post-26464076296527854272011-07-20T20:03:00.000-07:002011-08-09T19:26:26.245-07:00Kinski Watch XV: The Black Abbot (Franz Josef Gottlieb, 1963)

By the time this fifteenth installment of the Edgar Wallace series rolled along, a significant change of priorities had taken place. The earlier films were straight-forward murder mysteries with a narrative driven by a strong central character, the lead detective (usually played by Joachim Fuchsberger) who was following a clear objective and had to face a few clearly identified antagonists (usually involving menacing stares from Klaus Kinski).

Over time, however, the Edgar Wallace films became increasingly preoccupied with quirky secondary characters that were supposed to aggregate the plots, but mostly revealed themselves to be pointless to the story or the denouement of the murder mysteries. All smoke and mirrors, the krimis lost the core of a driving main character, as the respective detectives in charge were relegated to the peanut seats.

The Black Abbot, finally might one say, discards any aspirations of being a straight murder mystery and concentrates on the connivery between the main characters. There is a murder, there is a crime plot, but the intrigues and double crossings between the characters take the forefront and the killings serve more as an atmospheric backdrop. Consequently, the Scotland Yard detectives present in the film play a marginal role at best.

The film opens with a murder committed in an abbey. The detectives in charge of the case inexplicably take quarters in a nearby manor of Lord Chelford who is convinced that a mysterious black abbot is responsible for the killing. The police, however, suspect that a treasure that is supposed to be hidden in the abbey might be the motive of the murder. And they might be right. The Lord's attorney Arthur, crushed by debts, arranges the marriage of his sister Leslie to the elderly Lord Chelford. But Leslie fancies Lord Chelford's cousin Richard. Arthur's associate Fabian also takes interest in Leslie and teams up with Lord Chelford's former secretary in order to find the legendary treasure that is supposedly guarded by the black abbot.

Klaus Kinski plays Lord Chelford's butler who, spoiler alert!, turns out to be the titular black abbot when, another spoiler alert!, he is killed later in the film. His creepy performance here is enhanced by the nasal voice pitch with which he delivers his lines. In the documentary My Best Fiend director Werner Herzog recounts how fanatically Kinski would rehearse speech patterns, sometimes 10 consecutive hours a day. And Kinski's astounding vocal versatility becomes evident listening to his poetry albums on which he performs virtually every piece in another vocal style. Although he despised the work on film sets, Kinski had enough professionalism and pride in his craft to never undercut a certain quality level. And sometimes a detail like the sound of his voice makes that evident.

Stylistically, The Black Abbot, directed by Franz Josef Gottlieb, is less frantic than the films helmed by Alfred Vohrer and more concerned with composition and evocative camera movement. Where Vohrer's first impulse is to go for the most shocking visual gag, Gottlieb relies more on camera blocking and deep focus, and lets the scenes play out in elongated yet cadenced takes. The editing is simple yet effective and the film overall abandons the pulpy B-Movie esthetic that the series had cultivated until then.

The German critics at the time, however, deplored exactly that. One main objection to the film at the point of its release was that it wasn't exciting and engaging enough. On the one hand, I can understand the critique, as The Black Abbot feels less like a visceral thriller, and more like a cerebral and detached anatomy of a murder, which is a sometimes jarring change in pace for the series. But I appreciate Gottlieb's craft and applaud his willingness to break free of the usual Edgar Wallace formula. In the end, I think, The Black Abbot has a certain undeniable charm that qualifies it as a superior guilty email@example.com