The Seventh Art

June 15, 2012

Mimetic Desires

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Japan, Cinema of Sweden | Tags: Ghost In The Shell, Mamoru Oshii, Persona |
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June 3, 2012

Haikus Of Violence

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Japan | Tags: Beat Takeshi, Fireworks, Hanabi, Takeshi Kitano |
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May 19, 2012

Ellipsis #61

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Japan, Ellipsis | Tags: Pâfekuto Burû, Perfect Blue, Satoshi Kon |
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Pâfekuto Burû (1997) (Perfect Blue)
Satoshi Kon
Japanese

Satoshi Kon’s remarkable debut feature Perfect Blue (1997) begins with an action scene from a television episode of Power Rangers, revealed only shortly later to be a live performance by the actors in a public auditorium. As the resoundingly unsuccessful show winds down, we hear some young audience members sourly point out that it was nothing like the television version. This idea of the virtual, the illusionary coming across as more real than the real drives the central conflict of Perfect Blue, in which an erstwhile pop idol, Mima, finds herself becoming the prisoner of her own fabricated personality. A good ten years ahead of its time, Satoshi Kon’s film frighteningly presages the progressive virtualization and publicization of our personalities. Mima loses out to one of her fans who does a better job of impersonating her than herself and develops a persona for Mima that’s truer than reality. Perfect Blue doesn’t merely subordinate reality to illusion and personality to identity, but thoroughly undermines the possibility of constructing such dichotomies, as reality and illusion bleed so thoroughly into each other that it is not just impossible, but also immaterial that they be separated. Even with its deceptively assuring closure, a la Shutter Island (2010), the film pulls the rug of reality from under our feet and leaves us hanging like Scottie Ferguson. Very much like Mima, the audience struggles with the instability of the movie’s construction and attempts (perhaps in vain) to hold on to a solid ground from which to view things, to secure its own sanity. Directed with an extremist’s taste for visceral shock and a modernist’s eye for reflective surfaces, Perfect Blue challenges the psychological seriousness of many similar live-action features, while benefiting from its choice of the medium.

April 28, 2012

Forms And Designs

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Japan | Tags: Hiroshi Teshigahara, Suna no onna, Woman of the Dunes |
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April 22, 2012

Black Coat, White Coat

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of the UK | Tags: Alec Guinness, Alexander Mackendrick, The Man in the White Suit |
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“And, of course, there’s the question of dyeing” —Sidney Stratton

Few candidates could be more obvious for this column than Alexander Mackendrick’s The Man in the White Suit (1951), for the film’s narrative itself is a record of the eponymous material object in time. When wacko scientist Sidney Stratton (Alec Guinness) invents a super-fabric that could be neither tarnished nor torn, he brings home the wrath of both the board of directors and the laborers of the company he is working for. Taking Stratton’s brainchild to the market would mean people will not buy new clothing for the rest of their lives. For the executives this implies a stock price collapse and for the workers, no more livelihood. So they pursue the only logical course of action: chase Sidney down London streets at night before he gets to the press. As all these folks dressed in black—the laborers and the executives—go after the scientist in glowing white, the film starts literally, and comically, staging a twisted philosophy of science. The Man in the White Suit is partly a misguided lament about the purity of science being corrupt by politics, but it is also a deliriously realized reminder that what we get as science, in itself, is inflected by and obligated to the politics surrounding it.

[First published at the Mubi Notebook]

April 15, 2012

Ellipsis #60

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Japan, Ellipsis | Tags: Funeral Parade of Roses, Toshio Matsumoto |
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Bara No Sôretsu (1968) (Funeral Parade Of Roses)
Toshio Matsumoto
Japanese

Toshio Matsumoto’s flamboyant, shape shifting, subversive Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) is perhaps the ideal poster boy for what is known as the Japanese New Wave. If this loosely defined group associated with the cinema of filmmakers such as Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura attacked the traditional notion of “the Japanese Identity”, exposing the blind spots in its attempts at constructing a seamless racial, political and cultural identity for the nation and upsetting any stable ground hitherto held on to, Matsumoto’s film questions the idea of identity itself. Centering on a group of transvestites working at a bar in Tokyo’s Shinjuku District, Funeral Parade of Roses is a potpourri of fictional passages, interviews and found footage that weaves together various modes of representation/exposition and simulates the theme of amorphousness of identity that is at the heart of the film. This idea of identity-as-performance is set in motion by a tape recording that plays throughout the film and talks about humans wearing multiple masks one over the other and is fortified by the film’s perpetual self-reflexivity, which keeps revealing whatever we witness as staged. This reflexivity also keeps the film from being exploitative towards its transvestite subjects, who are instead made active participants in the creative process. Matsumoto does nothing that could undermine the dignity of his actor-characters and portrays them in all their richness: jealous, scheming, funny, carefree, tormented, self-deprecating and proud. (Not that the film takes all the right steps – it still seems to buy into the troubled childhood cliché.) Full of baffling shifts in tone, attitude, pace and narrative modes, Funeral Parade of Roses is the kind of film Almodóvar would really dig: perverse, intense, loving and dead serious.

April 9, 2012

Ellipsis #59

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Japan, Ellipsis | Tags: Death By Hanging, Do-yun Yu, Nagisa Oshima |
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Kôshikei (1968) (Death By Hanging)
Nagisa Oshima
Japanese

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, which 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.

March 31, 2012

Ellipsis #58

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Japan, Ellipsis | Tags: Kon Ichikawa, Olympics in film, Tôkyô Orimpikku, Tokyo Olympiad |
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Tôkyô Orimpikku (1965) (Tokyo Olympiad)
Kon Ichikawa
Japanese

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.

March 20, 2012

Wrestling With Widescreen

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Japan | Tags: An Actor's Revenge, Kon Ichikawa, Setsuo Kobayashi, Yukinojô henge |
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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.