Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (1963) displays a love-hate relationship – a morbid fascination, why not – with the widescreen. Ichikawa seems to be engaged in a wresting match with the widescreen as the ludicrous plot of the film plods on without shame or scruple. The film opens with an expansive shot of an artificial landscape which is revealed to be a stage after the camera pulls out, as though acknowledging its miscalculation that the 2.35:1 ratio will be wide enough to contain the stage. Of course, the stage we see is too big to be contained by anything, leave alone a letterboxed perspective, because, in An Actor’s Revenge, the world itself is an extension of theatre, where roles have to be played, spaces have to be negotiated and a narrative has to be taken to a tragic yet gratifying closure. Ichikawa points not only at this theatricality of the film’s world with double framing and bracketed compositions – a bizarre ploy that nearly makes it seem like a film shot in Academy Ratio is playing within the Scope film we are watching – but also to the inability to take the play of life to a conclusion, to get off the stage, by consistently revealing its unsurpassable edge, wherein a part of the screen just becomes an inaccessible, immobile wasteland. What is startling about An Actor’s Revenge is that, unlike most widescreen pictures, it does not adopt a single, streamlined aesthetic strategy towards the format. Ichikawa and regular DOP Setsuo Kobayashi tussle with the ratio here, being at times charitable towards it, at times critical and, at times, plain indifferent. At times Ichikawa makes judicious use of the screen space, providing a lot of visual data to process, and at times he just disregards this abundance of space, to the point of blacking it out as if trying to get rid of it. During one moment he is in awe of its generosity and during the other he is mocking its inadequacy. As he indulges himself with the dramatic quality of strong horizontals and verticals, he ends up emulating a lot of aspect ratios, wider and smaller. Sometimes he is excited by the visceral effect of a diagonal across an elongated rectangle, sometimes by the pensiveness of a slanted construction in deep space. Sometimes, he is simply being eccentric.
Widescreen as a stage, Wide screen as a storage space, Widescreen as a notice board, Widescreen as an annexe, Widescreen as a scroll, Widescreen as a ruler, Widescreen as a Swiss army knife, Widescreen as insufficient, Widescreen as excess, Widescreen as useless.
The Seventh Art 
March 31, 2012 at 10:18 am
Hi JAFB,
I was wondering if this bracketing presages the eccentric almost unbearably harsh compositions of the new wave , specifically Yoshishige Yoshida.
Cheers,
Richie
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March 31, 2012 at 11:21 am
Hi Richie,
I’m not sure if I can say that this one presages Yoshida’s style, because he was making films that way even before this one was made. I’m only thinking of THE AFFAIR, will have to see more of Yoshida before I can form an opinion on this.
Cheers!
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April 20, 2012 at 8:26 pm
Hi JAFB
I must apologise for not keeping up to speed with your explorations of film art and I’m excited that you are taking on ‘Scope in Japan. Early 60s Japanese ‘Scope films, usually in B+W are my favourite form of cinema so it was good to see you offering a screengrab essay on Kuroneko.
However, I’m a little baffled by your take on Ichikawa and An Actor’s Revenge. Where does your idea that the director is ‘battling’ with the format come from? It seems to me that Ichikawa revels in the new cinematic space he is being offered. As I understand it he was certainly annoyed by the decision of the studio to assign him to a ‘remake’, but he then thoroughly enjoyed himself. It’s only a suggestion, but wouldn’t it be good to relate your analysis to the stage designs in kabuki theatres and to consider how Ichikawa is doing something radical in respect of the traditions of Japanese visual art? He had been an animator and graphic designer and was a great admirer of Disney – which made him I think one of the great innovators in thinking about the presentation of action using the new screen shape (which became available to Japanese filmmakers much later than elsewhere, so they had other filmmakers’ attempts to learn from).
Sorry for this rambling commentary – I’ve probably misunderstood your project.
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April 20, 2012 at 8:41 pm
Hello there, Roy. Been a long time since we spoke! Thanks for the detailed comment really. I appreciate it very much.
I guess I used the word “battling” to suggest the way the use of widescreen in the film keeps changing shape – sometimes to indicate theatricality, sometimes to contain a larger space, sometimes to just flaunt the extremeties. I think I didn’t want to merely point out that he uses the widescreen well, that what he’s doing comes across more like experiments – some of which pay off, some which don’t – and dabbling more than a pre-ordained strategy.
The connection with Kabuki and Japanese visual art certainly needs an exploration, in fact, taking the whle New Wave into mind. The way they attack the stability, symmetry, self-styled majesty and gravitas of traditional aesthetic. And AN ACTOR’S REVENGE could very well be included in such a project. I’m not even acquainted with Kabuki/Noh or the visual/plastic art forms of Japan, so I guess this is where I stop!
That’s a lot of information about Ichikawa that I did not know, Roy. Thanks a dozen for that.
Cheers!
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April 20, 2012 at 8:50 pm
OK, just to pique your interest then, I could argue that kabuki is perhaps the single biggest influence on the development of Japanese Cinema.
Cheers
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April 20, 2012 at 8:51 pm
Then I just have to dig into this! Thnks Roy!
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