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Showing posts with label Kon Ichikawa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kon Ichikawa. Show all posts

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Japanese cinema spotlight

Overdue comments on a Japanese cinema spotlight that kicked off back in the summer and contained 9 features and one short:

The Only Son (1936, Yasujirô Ozu)
There was a Father (1942, Yasujirô Ozu)
Tales of Ugetsu (1953, Kenji Mizoguchi)
Bakumatsu Taiyoden (1957, Yuzo Kawashima)
Good Morning (1959, Yasujirô Ozu)
Tokyo Olympiad (1965, Kon Ichikawa)
Patriotism (1966, Yukio Mishima)
Samurai Rebellion (1967, Masaki Kobayashi)
Cure (1997, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Fish Story (2009, Yoshihiro Nakamura)

Ozu x 3: Emotions & Limited Communication

Ozu's The Only Son and There was a Father may be rooted in Japanese culture but the sentiments depicted in both films are equally Indian. Every Indian child learns very early on about Karma and the importance of doing one's work and not worrying about the end result. Such work often involves sacrifices but the sacrifices are meant to be minor bumps in the overall scheme. Sometimes the biggest challenge in performing the work is attempting to subdue one's emotional attachments. Both The Only Son and There was a Father show that the parent and son are trying their best to get through life by working diligently yet hiding their true feelings. It is clear in There was a Father that both the father and son want to live together in the same city but the father continues to bury his true emotions and asks his son to continue working hard. In The Only Son, it is the mother who breaks her back working in a factory so as to provide a better future for her son. The son then lives his life apart from the mother and does not even inform her of his marriage and child because he does not want his mother to feel her sacrifice was wasted. The son feels he did not achieve what his mother wanted him to so he feels better not to invite her to see him.

Parent-Children relationships should not be complicated but they become so over time. Job, work, careers muddle the waters but at the end of the day a simple honest conversations should clear any doubts. Yet, adults hold back honest communication with each other either because of fear or duty. If improper communication is not healthy, then no communication is worse. Good Morning takes a humorous approach to show that if children do not talk at all with their parents, then confusion and misunderstandings can lead to more damage. In the film, the two young boys go on a silent strike in order to protest their father's refusal to buy a tv. Yet, the silence amusingly unearths some insecurities in the neighbours, leading to awkward admissions and confessions.

A different kind of duty

Masaki Kobayashi's complex and powerful Samurai Rebellion carefully chooses its moments of wisdom, political games and sword fights. A samurai is told early on in the film to keep his emotions in check lest they get the better of him. He is reminded of the difficulty in getting along with his superiors and fellow vassals so if the samurai gets angry every time, then he won't last. That patience is especially required of a samurai in moments of peace when there is no enemy to fight. So a samurai is reduced to testing his sword on straw dummies. Slashing straw men is frustrating and humiliating but that is nothing compared to an arranged marriage proposal which tests the principles and honor of a samurai family, leading to the film's main conflict points.

A Serial infection

Multiple gruesome murders are committed in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure but it is not a single killer that performs the acts. Instead, loved ones or people close to the victims do the killing. Yet, the killers are not aware of their crimes as they are remotely driven by an unknown man.

The topography of Cure feels like that of a serial killer investigation film cut from the same cloth of Memories of Murder (Joon-ho Bong) and Zodiac (David Fincher) yet Kurosawa's film immediately stands apart because of the hands off approach of the instigator who never really gets his own hands bloody. Yet, if one could open his brain, then one would see the images of blood that are being projected onto innocent would be killers. Also, the other interesting layer added to the film is the weakening health of the lead police officer's wife, resulting in the killer exploiting the officer's mental state. Reality is toyed with especially in a case when the killer never has to kill a victim himself.

A truly remarkably film which creates a dark unsettling atmosphere.

An event from a few hundred camera angles

It is remarkable to think that Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad was shot back in 1964, at a time when camera equipment was expensive. Yet, Kon Ichikawa had about 150 cameras at his disposal to record the historic Tokyo Olympics. But Kon Ichikawa does not make a conventional news footage documentary which shows all the winners of the main events. Instead, his almost three hour documentary is a work of art that displays the human element of the sporting event. We get to see both the triumphs and low points, winners and losers, and the camera lovingly holds onto certain poetic moments for a few extra minutes. The end result is mesmerizing and presents a radically different perspective of the Olympics.

The following words by George Plimpton perfectly describe the effect of the film:

I remember Ernest Hemingway telling me once that the unnoticed things in the hands of a good writer had an effect, and a powerful one, of making readers conscious of what they had been aware of only subconsciously. A parallel adage suggests that a great photographer can take a picture of a familiar street and tell you something about it you never knew before. After watching the 1964 Tokyo Olympiad, one can surely say that Ichikawa is of that tradition.

The Power of 5: a very fishy story

2012: A comet is on course to destroy earth. Who or what can save the world?

A Punk song, ofcourse!

Fish Story is a mind spinning tale about an unlikely superhero and an even more unlikely heroic song with the following lyrics:

The story of my solitude
If my solitude were a fish
It’d be so enormous, so militant
A whale would get out of there
.....
The story of my failure
If my failure were a fish
It’d be so tragically comic I’d have no place in the sea to be
Don’t you know you’re a liar! Don’t you know you’re a deceiver!
Music stacked up like wooden blocks Is the champion of justice!
If my justice really were a fish It’d be so greedy and arrogant


The film jumps across three decades with the only connecting element being the punk song. But thankfully by the end of an entertaining film, all the elements come together.

and the others...

Kenji Mizoguchi's haunting Ugetsu is a tale of how two men's selfish journey brings suffering to both men & their families. When the two men finally wake up from their self imposed trance, they find their life in ruins. Phillip Lapote's essay unravels the film's beauty:

One might say that Mizoguchi’s detached, accepting eye also resembles that of a ghost, looking down on mortal confusions, ambitions, vanities, and regrets. While all appearances are transitory and unstable in his world, there is also a powerfully anchoring stillness at its core, a spiritual strength no less than a virtuoso artistic focus. The periodic chants of the monks, the droning and the bells, the Buddhist sutras on Genjuro’s back, the landscapes surrounding human need, allude to this unchanging reality side by side with, or underneath, the restlessly mutable. Rooted in historical particulars, Ugetsu is a timeless masterpiece.

Yukio Mishima's Patriotism (Yûkoku, 1966) shockingly foreshadows the author's own suicide in 1970. Tony Rayns Criterion essay is essential reading about the film.

I was quite excited to see Bakumatsu Taiyoden, a title helmed by a director I had never heard. However, the discovery turned out to be anticlimatic as my DVD had no English subtitles thereby forcing me to follow the Japanese film without any assistance. All I could enjoy were some moments of humor injected in a samurai tale but the visual language was not enough to make a worthy impression.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Snapshots of War

Stage One: Man to Man Combat

In ancient times war was an accepted part of life. Be it over a matter of land or a girl, a man gathered his group to avenge and fight for his cause. While the weapons were not as lethal as those in modern warfare, the savagery was not any less. Chopping and hacking was aplenty ensuring maximum blood. The one thing that made the ancient form of warfare stand out was that everyone fighting on both sides knew the reason for their war and in most cases knew their opponents.

Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol shows an example of the persistent state of war in ancient times. While the film is about the rise of Genghis Khan and his conquests in ancient Mongolia, many of the elements of war could apply to other nations in ancient times like the Nordic or Moghul India. In Mongol love and war keep equal pace at times and when the blood letting starts, the family and loved ones have to be left behind until the next battle, which is always around the corner.

Stage Two: Trench warfare

As the weapons used to kill other men got more sophisticated and advanced, the distance between the fighting soldiers also increased. The hand to hand combats were replaced by the trench warfare, where opposing armies lay in hiding before firing bullets over to the other side. In such cases, a solider never really knew if he managed to kill someone or not and even if he did kill someone, didn’t find out the identity of his enemy. In Kon Ichikawa’s masterpiece Fires on the Plain one of the Japanese soldiers utters this very relevant truth when he hears the American soldiers in the distance. He peeks to get a look at a passing group of American soldiers in trucks and comments that was his first look at the enemy despite being in combat for months. It is hard to imagine that men fought other men with neither side speaking the same language. In fact, they didn’t need to communicate as they let the bullets do all their talking. Fires on the Plain takes place in Philippines between the American and Japanese soldiers and also highlights another changing aspect of warfare in that two nations would fight in a third nation’s turf, a much more common aspect of war starting from WWII onwards.

War is a savage thing no matter how much one tries to defend its reasons. Kon Ichikawa captures this animal nature of war perfectly in his film while also accomplishing the rare feat of objectively showing the war from the perspective of the soldiers, the everyday men forced into combat. There is no jingoism in the film with none of the soldiers ever talking about the “good of the nation” as each person is only trying to survive and do what they believe is right, even if that means eating another man’s flesh.

Stage Three: Remote warfare, espionage and propaganda

World War II combined both past and even futuristic aspects of war. On one hand, trench warfare was still common but so was the use of aerial bombing, with the two atomic bombs signaling the future nature of combat. But World War II also ushered in a new stage of espionage and its spy game routines led directly to the cold war. Information became just as important as weapons and the cat-mouse game certainly ensured that the war was a complicated affair.

In ancient times, there was no need to sell war to ones citizens. But in the modern civilized world, war had to be sold to its citizens as men and women had to be given a reason why war was necessary. So propaganda became a very common currency during WWII, on both sides of the fighting.

Valkyrie combines the espionage and propaganda elements that took place during WWII. The film shows a true story about an assassination attempt of Hitler. Even though one knows that the characters attempt will end in failure, the film is still a gripping watch.

Stage Four: The inner war and path to recovery

Ok, the war is over. Now what? Can the horror be erased from the soldiers minds? Can the warring leaders actually enjoy the peace and listen to soothing music? Unfortunately, history has shown that peace can never be achieved with war. It never was and it never will. But this does not stop nations from trying to achieve peace with wars. After the war is over, the soldiers are left to fend on their own. In some cases, the men are fine and integrate into society. In other cases, the men can’t shut off the inner demons and look for a new war. Gran Torino can add its name to the list of movies where the men are never really free from their war. Even though the main character Walt (Clint Eastwood) appears to be at peace with his killings in the Korean war, when things get ugly he does reveal that he is still haunted by his demons and heads towards a very un-Hollywood like resolution in hopes of achieving peace for himself and his neighborhood.

Stage Five: Filming the war

Ever since Apocalypse Now, there have been directors who have aimed to film the most realistic war movie by ensuring their audience gets the grim details of war and feels the blood for themselves. Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder tries to parody such a director who aims to make the most realistic war film ever! In his quest for perfection, the director (Steve Coogan) take his cast to a jungle far away from the comforts of a studio set. But things don’t go as per plan and the cast hilariously find themselves in a real war. While the film does a very good job of assembling some excellent characters such as the sleazy film executive (Tom Cruise), the shallow agent (Matthew McConaughey), the fake war writer (Nick Nolte) and the actors aching to dive into their characters (Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr.), it comes across as a missed opportunity for something greater.

Ratings out of 10 for films seen in this series:

Fires on the Plain (1959, Japan, Kon Ichikawa): 10
Mongol (2007, Russia/Mongolia/co-prod, Sergie Bodrov): 8.5
Gran Torino (2008, USA, Clint Eastwood): 8
Valkyrie (2008, USA, Bryan Singer): 7.5
Tropic Thunder (2008, USA, Ben Stiller): 5