Brandon's movie memory

“The change from a human being with dignity to a helpless worm takes but a second.”

Completely unexpected movie from Sternberg, his final film as writer/producer/director (and now narrator and credited cinematographer). Made in Kyoto with a Japanese cast and crew, speaking their own language. Instead of dubbing or subtitling their dialogue, Sternberg adds voiceover (returning to the flowery poetic style of his earliest film The Salvation Hunters) to explain and comment on the action, removing dialogue from the list of things that may distract viewers from his lighting and camerawork, which here seems less extreme and artificial than in some of the Dietrich pictures.

But he still loves to use shadow-patterns from nets and leaves:

P. Demonsablon in Cahiers: “He wrote the commentary and it is his own voice that speaks to us for an hour and a half over the images, not in order to clarify the dialogue, but to comment on the actions, thus introducing a shift between the spectacle and the reflection on it.”

Near the end of WWII, an army ship is bombed and the survivors wash up on the abandoned island of Anatahan, “halfway between Japan and New Guinea”. They set to figuring out survival tactics and soon meet the island’s two inhabitants: Keiko (the “queen bee” in the titles) and the man they think to be her husband, Kusakabe.

I liked Kusakabe best:

After military order breaks down, the ship’s captain mans their single machine gun alone, but after a U.S. warship passes by, announcing the war’s end and looking for island inhabitants to surrender, the men smell a trap and hire their captain back to lead them. He stays behind during the final rescue, “I will never go back to a defeated Japan.”

Years go by, WWII ends, and no enemy or rescue comes. It’s all based on a true story – the single woman on the island causing jealous murders, the survivors fighting over homemade coconut wine, the final rescue accomplished when the government contacted the survivors’ families and had them write letters to their men, insisting that the war had ended and they should surrender and come home.

balding Kuroda has no family, so Keiko wrote his letter:

“How could we know that we had brought the enemy with us in our own bodies, an enemy that would attack without notice?” There’s often an anthropological tone to the voiceover, but it’s never racially condescending, all about human behavior and the results of organized, military society being gradually replaced by instinct and greed.

Yananuma and Nishio, first to find the guns:

Kusakabe’s killer, Yoshiri:

A couple years into their stay on the island some men come across a crashed plane containing two guns and a pile of bullets. From then on, whoever held the guns held the power. Meanwhile Keiko, who was never actually married to Kusakabe, “goes into circulation.” A few men are killed over her, as power continues to change hands, until Kusakabe is dispatched by a guy with a sailor hat and neptune fork. Keiko has had enough, shoots the neptune fellow herself then throws the guns into the ocean. She eventually flags down a passing ship and escapes before the others.

Near the start, arms raised in celebration:

Near the end, arms raised in surrender:

Amazing ending – Keiko secretly watches at the airport as the men return, seeing them walk down the runway one by one, the living followed by the ghosts of the dead.

Producer Kazuo Takimura would follow up with the Samurai trilogy, and Keiko was Akemi Negishi, later of Kurosawa’s Lower Depths and Red Beard.

Sternberg:

My best film – and my most unsuccessful one… it is most probably an error to assume that human beings will pay admission to inspect their own mistakes rather than the mistakes of others.
…
Two interpreters were needed, one to translate into Japanese what I had said, and the other to translate back into English what the first translator was saying so that I could check whether my meaning had been correctly transmitted… To make certain that my ideas were being transferred correctly, I engaged an artist to draw pictures of each scene as we proceeded. I also made a graphic chart of the emotional involvements of each player, so that all of them could clearly see the kind of emotion required and the degree to which it was to be used.
…
Half of my crew had been trained as kamikazes, and the other half had been guerrilla fighters in the Philippines, though this had not prepared them for the ordeal of working with me.

This is another one like Death By Hanging where Oshima seems to be making broad artistic statements using archetype characters rather than creating any sort of realistic drama. But this one is more sensual, less intellectual than Death By Hanging, and possibly my favorite Oshima movie so far.

A wandering sex-obsessed streaky-haired misfit meets a slow-moving, angsty suicidal army deserter (Kei Sato, male lead in Onibaba). They walk off together when they come across gangsters digging up a cache of guns – so they follow, or possibly are taken prisoner (but she never stops acting like she’s in charge). Soon added to the mix are a gun-crazy boy and two killers: a double-knife-wielding psycho killer and a calm older man with a pistol (Taiji Tonoyama, armor merchant in Onibaba).

Up until now, I don’t think the characters had any names, but the internet tells me she is Nejiko and her death-obsessed man is Otoko. Along comes head honcho Television (Rokko Toura, the doctor in Death By Hanging), bringing news that a white sniper is on the loose, and that the gang fight they’ve been preparing for is cancelled because the bosses were caught by police at the airport.

What’s a bunch of battle-hungry armed criminals to do? The gun-nut kid wanders away and kills a couple people, but that’s not enough. So Television drives them out to the city (stopping to murder the knife guy) where they cautiously approach the sniper, then join him shooting at cops.

Recurring person-shaped indentations, water spots and stains strangely remind me of Pulse. Criterion calls this a “devilish, absurdist portrait of what [Oshima] deemed the death drive in Japanese youth culture.” Glad I watched this the same month as Black Sun, another movie featuring a murderous American teaming with death-defying youth.

Oshima:

Otoko definitely does not want to die. He wants to live, and that is precisely why he has premonitions of death. In other words, in instances where Otoko appears at a glance to want to die, he actually wants to live, and that is beautiful -more so than Nekijo’s straightforward desire to live. In this way, the two embrace two things that have something basic in common, and they are attracted to each other because it is manifested in polar opposite forms. It is absolutely incorrect to judge this work as a diagram that reads: Nekijo = Life, Otoko = Death.

Buy from Amazon:
Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties (Eclipse DVD set)

Another quiet movie with gangsters in it and quick bursts of excitement which ends up at the sea. The missing link (for me) between Fireworks and Dolls.

Young Masao ditches his gramma (Kazuko Yoshiyuki, star of Empire of Passion) and hits the road with a few bucks looking for his mother. A neighbor sees what’s happening and sends her ex-yakuza husband (Kitano) to look after him. Kitano/Kikujiro (for some reason, his name is withheld until the final minute) is generally bad-tempered, but still protective. He drags the kid to a racetrack and blows all their money, then spends the rest of the movie hitching rides.

Once they find Masao’s mother (she’s started another family), Kikujiro changes his tune, decides he needs to provide the kid with a pleasantly memorable adventure instead of letting it end in bitterness. So he recruits a hippie with a van and two bikers (Baldy and Fatso) for a camp-out weekend of games and costumes. It has a similar tone to what I remember of Fireworks, but more fun and without all the killing.

Senses of Cinema:

The narrative rambles along through a series of chapters, all laid out in advance with the key words featuring in a picture postcard opening. We wait for the moment to see just what is to occur that has produced the sometimes bizarre, sometimes banal images that eventually form a series of childhood memories.

Kitano:

What I find most congenial is the idea of a bad guy who does something good pretty much by accident, so that’s what I went with. It became the basic rule of the film’s game: good results accidentally coming from bad actions.

Buy from Amazon:
Kikujiro DVD

A kid called Akira (Tamio Kawaji of Tokyo Drifter, Youth of the Beast) buys a Max Roach record called Black Sun, bumps into a woman outside who smashes the record by accident, so he steals their car and sells it. Gets “home” to the crumbling church tower he illegally occupies with his dog Thelonious Monk and finds the cops are searching it for a murderous American GI.

It’s a reasonable setup – we learn a little about Akira (a carefree criminal who loves jazz) and are prepped for a meeting between Akira and the GI. Good jazzy score, and high-energy filmmaking (plus a weird fisheye effect when the camera moves). But it soon gets much crazier than expected.

Turns out Gill, the shell-shocked American (Chico Roland, who I just saw as a disgraced pastor in Gate of Flesh), doesn’t care for jazz – or dogs. Akira is honored beyond belief to have an actual black man at his place, but Gill trashes it and kills the dog. They go back and forth with the machine gun threatening each other, then Akira steals an idea from a jazz record sleeve so they can go out in public – puts himself in blackface and Gill in clownface.

Gill is badly hurt from a bullet he caught before we met him, starts raving that he wants to visit the sea. Akira’s tower gets torn down, all his remaining jazz records and paraphenalia destroyed, so with nothing to lose, he helps Gill (who has never been nice to him, really) get to the shore. And if you’d have told me a few minutes into this movie that it would end with Gill floating away over the ocean tied to a giant balloon while Akira holds off the cops with a machine gun, I wouldn’t have believed you.

Buy from Amazon:
The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahara (Eclipse DVD)

Terayama worked with the same cinematographer and musician as the shorts plus old-school Renoir and French New Wave producer Pierre Braunberger, who included this along with shorts by Just Jaeckin and Walerian Borowczyk in a sleazy anthology, accounting for its odd 40-minute runtime.

Akira combs deserts and towns searching for the lyrics to a children’s song. He recalls life with his single mother – how she protected him from the nymphomaniac next door by writing Kwaidan-like spells on his body, how the mother tormented and attracted him and may have died with her lover before he was born. It’s a dreamlike film, then. The Internet says it’s a companion piece to his feature Pastoral.

Nice color treatment – one pan starts in full color and turns to sepia-tinted monochrome by its finish. The movie starts to get nuts in the second half, with costumes, drawings and mysterious symbolism, tons of nudity, colorful theatrical performance and imaginary ball-bouncing. On his quest, Akira meets Juzo Itami of Sweet Home, but finds no answers, or at least none that he shares with us.

I haven’t seen much writing on Terayama – here is a good piece by Tony Rayns for Sight and Sound:

Two experiences in Terayama’s childhood and adolescence were formative. He was born … in the foothills of Mount Osore – a ‘haunted’ mountain which has attracted ghosts and shamanists for centuries. He soaked up local myths and legends throughout his boyhood. And then he spent what should have been his student years confined to a hospital bed in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, struck down by the nephritis which eventually killed him in 1983. Outside the window of his ward the alleys of Shinjuku were increasingly alive with student protests, street theatre and art happenings, plus the odd yakuza skirmish. (Shinjuku became the epicentre of Japanese counter-culture in the mid-1960s: see Oshima’s 1968 movie Diary of a Shinjuku Thief for details.) Stuck in the hospital, Terayama conceived a parallel between the ghost traffic on Mount Osore and the street-life of Shinjuku. This perception gave him a vein of imagery which fed into much of his later work.

Overlong, not particularly good, comics-influenced live-action movie. It manages some pretty cool monochrome images, but holds them for ages, static frames as the actors deliver dialogue like captions. It tries to be an art film with its patience and imaginative camera, but counteracted by fight scenes, poop jokes and silly-ass sound effects. I watched this (and kept watching after it put me to sleep every night) because I read somewhere that it was inspired by La Jetee. An IMDB plot summary also reminds me of the text in Mishima’s Patriotism: “about a man who can not let go of his past not matter how painful and dangerous it was because he never felt more alive that when he was facing death.” But when the big ending finally rolled around, I couldn’t be bothered to give it my full attention. I think maybe he dreamed the whole thing before/while taking a bullet to the head.

A glum Koichi, being forced at gunpoint to watch this movie:

This is part of a trilogy including Stray Dog and Jin-Roh – I have no memory of watching Jin-Roh but IMDB says I rated it a 6. I also don’t much remember watching Oshii’s CG-blur Avalon, which also is supposed to have Chris Marker references.

The most La Jetee-like image I could find:

In a prologue, Koichi (the lead actors are all best known for voice acting in cartoon series – Koichi is a 22-year vet of Dragonball) and his red-spectacled elite government “Kerberos” soldiers Midori and Ao/Soichiroh have gone rogue. K escapes, promising to return for the others. Either three or six years later, he’s back, trying to find his friends and figure out who’s still on his side, but mostly bumbling it. There’s some long-winded business about fast-food noodle joints being banned because too many spies used them as meeting spots. Toilet humor follows. An army of mimes is slain. And Koichi is put on the trail of his former comrades.

He’s captured by some pudgy government fellow, escapes, is captured again, escapes. He meets Ao, then Midori, finds out they’ve sold out and turned against him, but then they save his life, but then they turn on him again, etc. The final scene implies that the armor and weapons Koichi escaped with were more important than his own life – a smiling Midori slowly regains her color saturation, so I guess she’s got the weapons. Co-written with the guy who wrote the 1990′s Gamera trilogy

“I failed to die again, and now I’m alone.”

When I have the time, I’d like to watch and enjoy more movies by Ozu and Naruse, by Kurosawa and Masumura, Shindo and Imamura. Oshima is the only one I feel I ought to study. The movies are fun to watch and enjoy like the others, but I feel like I immediately need to see them again and figure out what they are up to. This one was at least more of a story (like Empire of Passion) than a political abstraction (like Death By Hanging), but still crazy enough that I’m sure I missed a lot.

Shino:

Matsuko:

It took a while to figure this out, but here goes. Eisuke (Kei Sato, male lead in Onibaba but looking more brutal/evil here) is the “high-noon” rapist/killer terrorizing Japan. Two women are irrationally in love with him: his wife Matsuko (Oshima regular Akiko Koyama), a teacher, and a young girl named Shino. Eisuke had “rescued” Shino when she tried to die with her boyfriend Genji (Rokko Toura, “Television” in Japanese Summer: Double Suicide) who knows how long ago, and now feels free to rape her anytime. When he’s finally caught and sentenced, the two women go into the woods to die together by poison, but Shino awakens, still alive.

The High-Noon Killer:

Tragic Genji:

I guess it’s not that hard to figure out the story after all, but I was distracted by the ridiculously great/nuts camerawork and editing for at least the first half.

Buy from Amazon:
Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties (Eclipse DVD)

A straightforward rebellious-youth/romantic drama. Should’ve watched this with Katy, but I didn’t think Masumura would be her style. It’s one of Masumura’s earliest films, from the writer of Mizoguchi’s Story of the Last Chrysanthemums.

Hiroshi Kawaguchi and Hitomi Nozoe would also star together in Giants and Toys:

Moody Kinichi’s dad is accused of election fraud, will need 100k yen in fines. While visiting dad in jail, Kinichi runs across Akiko who’s also visiting her dad, also needs 100k. Their moms aren’t around – the boy’s wants nothing to do with the family anymore, is a jeweler or something, and the girl’s is in a sanatorium with TB. Akiko’s family friend, a famous painter, has a playboy son who sees his chance to buy her (even blatantly phrasing it that way) now that she’s in need.

Kinichi with mom: Aiko Mimasu, in Street of Shame the previous year

So it sounds like the movie could be a sordid drama about sad poor people, but it’s not that at all. Mostly it’s a light romance between the two heavy-hearted kids – at the racing track, the beach, a piano bar. Kinichi seems somewhat reckless at first, but he’s a good, responsible kid, finally gets the money from his mom, tracks down the girl (there’s extra drama when he loses her address) and gives it to her.

In smaller roles, the boy’s jailed dad (“Lawmakers are the crooks. Until the law changes, I’ll go to jail after every election”) is Eitaro Ozawa of Assassination and The Crucified Lovers, and the girl’s sad, sick mom is Sachiko Murase, star of Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August.

Super colorful and energetic movie – I probably liked this more than his acclaimed Branded To Kill. Very good music, all bendy strings and gunshot percussion.

Green Maya (the typecast Yumiko Nogawa of Story of a Prostitute and Pleasures of the Flesh) joins a group of color-coded prostitutes in postwar Japan – purple Mino (Kayo Matsuo of Tattooed Life), yellow Roku, and red leader Sen. Ofuku wears white so you know she’s not gonna last, then black Machiko is the next to go, each accused of the crime of giving it away for free.

Maya:

Sen:

Machiko with Jo:

The four have a good thing going, living together in a delapidated building and scaring away all competition – until puffy-cheeked fugitive Jo Shishido (returning from Youth of the Beast) arrives to shake things up, barging in and joining the group. He sleeps with Machiko, then Maya (causing discord and some whipping), but he also steals and slaughters a cow (providing much food and cash) and amuses them with his post-traumatic stress war anecdodes, so he’s allowed to stay.

Mino:

Roku:

Chico:

Maya seduces a priest (Chico Roland, the jazz-hating fugitive soldier in Black Sun) driving him mad. But ultimately she falls hard for Jo. “You’re the first man I’ve ever loved. For the first time, I’ve felt human, but now I’ll get kicked out of here. The moment I become a real woman, I’m an outcast.” But when they try to run away together, he’s killed and she’s left roaming.

Remade in ’77. The same writer did Story of a Prostitute, unsurprisingly.

When Maya is stripped of her green clothes and whipped, the whole image is shrouded in green:

Buy from Amazon:
Gate of Flesh (Criterion DVD)