Troublemaker extraordinaire Nagisa Oshima’s Death by Hanging (1968) is a tar-black comedy in the vein of Dr. Strangelove (1964), straddling the polar realms of docu-drama and over-the-top absurdity, and begins with a documentary passage that tells us that about a recent survey which reveals that most Japanese are against the abolition of death penalty. Following this statistic, we are shown the process of execution of a prisoner step-by-step, with voiceover commentary that befits one of those state-sponsored awareness raisers, before being abruptly thrust into a world of Kafkaesque fiction. Authorities overlooking the execution discover that the hanged prisoner R (Do-yun Yu) is not dead yet and has lost his memory. Not having encountered this situation before, they scramble for law books and scriptures, before deciding that they would have to rekindle R’s memory and make him aware of his guilt so that he can be hanged again. What ensues is, as it were, a theatre of the absurd, with officials role-playing, reconstructing in great detail R’s past – right from his possibly troubled childhood – based on popular knowledge, their biases, neuroses and fantasies. “The Law is always prepared to lend you a spare brain in order to condemn you without remorse”, wrote Barthes. In Oshima’s film we witness that tendency in all its viciousness, as the officers channel their repressed racism and sexual frustration onto the ethnic outsider R, who becomes a Christ-like figure bearing the consequences of the prejudices of a whole nation. Oshima is unabashedly agenda-driven and uses a host of devices, that no doubt recall Godard, that distances the audience – who are explicitly implicated and grilled – from the central drama. With a moralist’s anger and a filmmaker’s flamboyance, he creates a cold, caustic work that presents a ruthless Japan that haunts its youth with the ghosts of an imperial, feudal, terrorizing past.

 

Commissioned by Japan’s national Olympic committee during the Summer Olympics of 1964, Tokyo Olympiad (1965) is a study in forms. Covering the event end-to-end – from the opening to the closing ceremony – Kon Ichikawa’s film is preoccupied with the filmic form as an end in itself, indifferent to if not independent of its ostensible subject. This stance is highly befitting of the project as well, for what are the Olympic Games if not the pure form of war, emptied of all its teleology and historico-political foundation? Each of the sport is filmed, edited and scored with a different style and rhythm, as though trying to develop an impressionistic portrait of the game. Ichikawa is excited by movement and by speed, by an athletic manoeuvre and by a show of sheer force, by the elegance of a gymnastic move and the animality of a shot put throw. His fascination is not with the perfection and beauty of the human body, as it might have been to Leni Riefenstahl, but with the grace of its movement and with the skill it’s capable of. Even when he is fixated on an isolated body part, as is the case with the oscillating derriere of an athlete in a walking event, the interest is less in the anatomical details than with the form of its motion through space and time. Ichikawa, as it were, is proposing why “Citius, Altius, Fortius” could well apply to the medium he is working with too. He also takes the spirit of the Olympics from the outside to the inside, from the frenzy of a mass sport to the simmering moods of an individual. He mystifies by distance, by covering the athletes from a distance and with a brooding voiceover which makes them come across like Zen monks (a stratagem that Chris Marker would employ in his film on Kurosawa). He captures their little quirks, their absurd superstitions and their emotional fragility in vivid detail which acts as the perfect foil to the extreme physicality of the rest of the film.

A war of pictures and sounds is replacing the war of objects (projectiles and missiles)

War can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to produce that spectacle: to fell the enemy is not so much to capture as to ‘captivate’ him, to instill the fear of death before he actually dies.

…the history of battle is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception.

“I still remember the effect I produced I produced on a small group of Galla tribesman massed around a man in black clothes,” reported Mussolini’s son during the Abyssinian war of 1935-36. “I dropped an aerial torpedo right in the centre, and the group opened up just like a flowering rose.”

Rudolph Arnheim once remarked that, after 1914, many film-actors became props and the props took the leading role. Similarly, women became the objective tragedy in the wars from which they were excluded.

The star system and the sex symbol were the result of that unforeseen perceptual logistics which developed intensively in every field during the First World War.

“World War One was the reason for Hollywood”.

Cinemas, too, were training camps which bonded people together in the face of death agony, teaching them to fear the death of what they did not know – or rather, as Hitchcock put it, of what did not exist.

…the Allies’ victory in the Second World War was at least partly due to their grasp of the real nature of Nazi Lebenstaum, and to their decision to attach the core of Hitler’s power by undermining his charismatic infallibility. They did this by making themselves the leading innovators of film technology.

Eyesight and direct vision have gradually given way to optical or opto-electronic processes, to the most sophisticated forms of ‘telescopic sight’.

Only serial photography was capable of changing troop positions or the impact of long range artillery, and hence the capacity of new weapons for serial destruction.

As Andre Malraux wrote: “Caesar could have conversed with Napoleon, but Napoleon has nothing to say to President Johnson”

Positional warfare, then, had had its day. The extreme mobility of mechanized armies impaired a new temporal unity that only cinema could apprehend.

Just as weapons and armour developed in unison throughout history, so invisibility and visibility now began to evolve together, eventually producing invisible weapons that make things visible.

The projectile’s image and the image’s projectile form a single composite. In its tasks of detection  and acquisition, pursuit and destruction, the projectile is an image of ‘signature’ on a screen, and the television picture is an ultrasonic projectile propagated at the speed of light.