Tag: Region: Japan

Lumphini 2552

Dir. by Tomonari Nishikawa

Tomonari Nishikawa’s Lumphini 2552 is constructed from still black-and-white photos (2,552 of them?) of dense growths of plants and trees. The images fly by quickly — 12 per second, I’d guess — which turns them into high-contrast abstraction and allows Nishikawa to carefully modulate the rhythms of the film. In the opening seconds, he cuts repeatedly from long shots to close-ups, mimicking the effect of time-lapse photography. Later, he alternates between compositions of vertical and horizontal lines, which, like Muybridge’s horses, creates the tense illusion of movement. Shots of shaded stems are a palette of blacks; low-angle views into the treetops are whites. And the whole thing resolves perfectly into darkness, like a breath. It’s a sublime kaleidoscope, I’ll tell you, and a damn fine way to spend three minutes.

My tendency when describing a film like Lumphini 2552 is to fall back on Modernist rallying cries like that old Ezra Pound chestnut, “Make it new!” Maybe a useful way to think of Nishikawa’s film is as a beautifully defamiliarized — and uniquely cinematic — landscape. In that sense it reminds me of the few Brackhage collages I’ve seen — films like The Garden of Earthly Delights and Mothlight.

August 27, 2009
Late Spring (1949)

Dir. by Yasujiro Ozu

Ozu’s name came up often last week at TIFF, most frequently in regard to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s domestic drama, Still Walking, and Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum, which was directly inspired by Late Spring. I watched Late Spring for the first time last night (yeah, I know) and had a grand time spotting the details that echo throughout Denis’s film. Mostly, though, I was struck by just how strange a filmmaker Ozu really is, particularly in his cutting. It made me realize that I’m not so sure, exactly, what we mean when we call a film “Ozu-like.” (See Girish’s “Received Ideas in Cinema” post.)

Scene 1: Depth of Field

Ozu constantly breaks the rules of traditional continuity editing, often by moving his camera along the z-axis and taking full advantage of the depth of his location. The breaks in continuity aren’t quite as jarring as one might expect because he cuts to what could be (but aren’t quite) point-of-view shots. In this scene from the beginning of the film, for example, Ozu moves in only three cuts from one side of the room to the other, swinging the camera 180 degrees with each cut.

Scene 2: Cutting at a Right Angle

Only two physical cuts here, though I’ve included two stills from the first shot because Ozu’s movement of the actors from one side of the window to the other functions as a kind of match-on-action edit. Again, the 90-degree cut feels relatively natural because, in this case, the characters have stepped aside to make room for the camera. We’ve essentially adopted their former p.o.v. I can’t resist mentioning that this chance encounter is an important “turning point” in the film.

Scene 3: Mirror Images

The wedding day. As in scene 1, Ozu again works his way from one side of a room to the other, swinging his camera 180 degrees with nearly every cut. But this time there’s an added wrinkle: the bride (Setsuko Hara) is kneeling before a mirror, which allows Ozu to cut between full-face shots of her and her father (Chishu Ryu), despite their being positioned at a right angle to one another (see shots 3 and 4). It’s a beautiful and touching scene, but its power, I think, is generated by the montage, which is syncopated and defamiliarizing and forces viewers to constantly reorient themselves to what is, otherwise, a commonplace tragedy of domestic life.

September 18, 2008
2007 TIFF Day 3

Naomi Kawase’s Mourning Forest could be used as a template for the kind of film I love. A slow, moving camera that captures images of nature, with an almost fetishistic fascination with wind blowing through trees and tall grass. Nearly wordless characters, whose desires and pain are expressed instead by their faces, which we’re allowed to watch closely and intimately. A curiosity about essential things like faith and love and loss. Oh, and the desire for transcendence, of course. It’s a ready-made Long Pauses kind of film. Except that it isn’t. Girish and I have been trying to understand why we’re the only people among our group of like-minded friends here who were disappointed by Mourning Forest. (And, for the record, to say that I was disappointed is not to say it isn’t an interesting film.) The story concerns a young woman and elderly man, both of whom have suffered a great loss. For the first half of the film, we watch them going about the routines of daily life at the retirement home where she works and he lives. I was quite liking the film until they began their journey through the forest, at which point I was instantly reminded of other similar, more compelling movies. I think Kawase’s handheld photography was part of the problem for me. It seemed at odds with the tone of the film. But mostly I was frustratingly unmoved by the two leads, and the last image of the film — that inevitable grasp at transcendence — was too calculated and a little clumsy. But don’t listen to me. Everyone else loves it.

The general consensus at the festival is that The Man from London is minor Tarr. I’ve been ambivalent about the other two films of his that I’ve seen, Damnation and Satantango. As the latter film proved, I will gladly sit for hours and hours and hours in front of his films. (Question of the day: Has any director in the history of cinema had a more distinct style?) The camera moves slowly, the actors speak slowly, the music churns slowly, and as a result “real” time is compressed. I couldn’t believe, when The Man from London ended, that 135 minutes had passed. My qualms with Tarr have always concerned his view of the world, which is too misanthropic for my tastes. Which is probably why his latest film is my favorite of the three. I keep calling it a film noir that was left to simmer over low heat, reducing the genre to its fundamentals: man is trapped, man finds money, man attempts to escape fate. Friends look at me funny when I tell them how much I liked the protagonist, who in typical Tarr fashion has little to say. But in his own way, he’s actually quite tender at times. (That I managed to use the word “tender” here is probably another reason for disappointment from the Tarr loyalists.) As usual, The Man from London is a joy to look at. His camera is still tracking for minutes at a time, and he’s thrown in a couple new tricks. The 12-minute opener is a doozy. Also, Tarr stuck around for a Q&A and didn’t bite off a single head. He was charming, actually, and really funny.

Jia Zhang-ke’s latest, Useless, is an odd one. Like last year’s documentary, Dong, Useless is a portrait of an artist, though in this case Jia is less concerned with fashion designer Ma Ke, specifically, than with what she represents to China’s leap into consumerism. In a recent interview, Wang Bing (see yesterday’s post on Wang’s latest) mentions that one reason he is not making narrative films right now is because “in China, social changes have come so fast and been so massive, that the opportunities for documentaries are considerable.” I suspect that Jia feels the same way. Useless, the title, comes from the name of Ma Ke’s haute couture line fashioned from traditionally hand-made fabrics. The middle third of Jia’s film documents the line’s impressive debut at Paris’s Fashion Week and includes interviews with Ma in which she waxes nostalgic about the human touch and artistry that is missing from mass-produced clothing. As we’ve learned in the first act of the film, though, Ma is only able to concentrate her efforts on Useless because of the fortune she made with Exception, which seems to be the Chinese equivalent of Banana Republic. Jia opens the film with a tour of the facility where hundreds of workers hunch over sewing machines, manufacturing garments for the chain of Exception store fronts. The shots are mirrored in the second act, when Jia shows two Chinese women hunching over weaving machines to produce the “hand-made” fabrics for Useless. The film ends in a rural mining town, where Jia follows several locals, including two tailors and a former tailor who was forced by the low cost of manufactured clothes to take a job at the mine. This quick summary lays out the macro-structure of Useless, but its the finer points — the visual echoes that reverberate throughout the film, the ironies and ambivalences — that make the film so fascinating. I like it better the more I think about it.

John Gianvito’s Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind recovers the lost history of class struggle in America by filming, in simple, static shots, the monuments left behind: commemorative plaques, statues, and, most often, cemetery headstones. Gianvito structures the film chronologically and breaks the sequence of shots only on occasion to show images of wind blowing through leaves and grass (shades of Whitman and the Transcendentalists) and to interject jarring hand-drawn animations that represent the impersonal, amoral transactions of capitalism. The relative simplicity of the form allows the film to function pedagogically (I came away with a list of names and events I want to explore), but it also leaves room for the viewer to create connections and find new contexts. We can chart, for example, the movement of civil rights from New England to the South, and, likewise, the movement of manufacturing from the South to the Midwest. Or, in my favorite cut of the film, we learn that the founder of America’s first labor organization lays in an unmarked grave, while, at the same time, Sojourner Truth was being buried under an oversized headstone. In 1883, apparently, an African-American woman could be commemorated with greater honor than a white male labor organizer. Fascinating.

Ute Aurand and Maria Lang’s The Butterfly in Winter is a 30-minute silent portrait of Lang’s life at home, where she tends to her 96-year-old mother. Each day begins with the opening of her mother’s bedroom window, a glass of water, breakfast, a wash and massage, and ends with a whisper in her hear and the closing of the window. Aurand assembles their life in jump cuts and closeups, revealing the slight variations amid the routine. I like Andrea Picard’s description: “Every day is the same and every day is different.” There’s such beauty and sweetness in the film.

September 12, 2007
Un Couple parfait (2005)

Dir. by Nobuhiro Suwa

Look closely at the image above. It’s Un Couple parfait in miniature — a story told in body language. The husband (Bruno Todeschini) is an arm’s length from the table, his shoulders turned perpendicular to his wife. His cup sits untouched, reminding us, even moreso than the expression on his face, just how unwelcome these daily rituals of marriage have become. The wife (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) has a Mona Lisa smile. At first glance, she appears perfectly content — a woman deeply in love and endlessly curious, perhaps? But look at her eyes. They’re staring past her husband, lost in thought, wandering. There’s something absolutely beautiful to me about the way her right arm rests against her leg. And the way her body leans forward, gesturing toward him despite the growing distance.

The image is also a capsule of Suwa’s cinematographic style. There are maybe thirty-five shots in the entire film, all but a few from the fixed, static perspective of a waist-high camera positioned some distance from the characters. Suwa has said that, while working as an assistant director, he came to distrust the artificiality of traditional blocking. He chooses, instead, to allow room for his actors to move freely, to breathe and embody emotions more complex than those expressed in their dialogue. Language is slippery in Un Couple parfait. Or, not slippery, but irrelevant, maybe. Suwa isn’t at all interested in offering some metacommentary on the entanglements of postmodern discourse. Rather, his style — allowing actors to improvise lines while the camera is running, for example, or admitting, even, that he often did not understand exactly what his French actors were saying — is more humanist and psychological. Like an analyst, he observes quietly and respectfully the unspoken, looking for clues in behavior and movement, ripples from the subconscious.

Notice also the door that separates the characters from the camera. When asked why he so often underlights his actors, losing their faces in shadow, he said, “There are two ways to watch. One is to open your eyes and look closely; the other is to close your eyes and imagine.” Unlike so many filmmakers, Suwa clearly values the latter as much as the former, and his film is, on some level at least, a pedagogical instrument. At more than one point in Un Couple parfait, the husband and wife sit in adjoining hotel rooms. After one or the other shuts the door between them, Suwa lets his camera run, trapping our vision for a time. These, he claims, are his favorite moments in the film, for as we sit suspended, staring at the closed door, we’re also allowed room to move, to empathize or judge or imagine freely.

What you can’t see in the image are all of the subtle touches that make Un Couple parfait such a satisfying film. The look of wonder on Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi’s face as she wanders through a museum. The brief interruption of “reality” when an actor sneezes, another says “God bless you,” and they continue on with the scene. The occasional hand-held close-ups that jar you back into close identification with the characters, preventing the film from becoming a formal, intellectual exercise. The late-night conversation between Bruno Todeschini and an old man he meets in a cafe. Or the final scene, which rediscovers a cinematic cliche by taking the “irrelevance of language” to its logical extreme. Un Couple parfait is a kind of collision between the visions of Ingmar Bergman and Hou Hsiao-hsien: brutally incisive but always fascinated and tender.

September 27, 2005
Haruki Murakami

I often get the feeling that things around me have lost their proper balance, though it could be that my perceptions are playing tricks on me. Some kind of balance inside me has broken down since the elephant affair, and maybe that causes external phenomena to strike my eye in a strange way. It’s probably something in me.

The fall semester of my ESL class kicked off last night, and we began with a discussion of Haruki Murakami’s “The Elephant Vanishes,” which is, quite frankly, one of the most beautiful stories I’ve ever read. This year I assigned The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories, edited by Daniel Halpern. My hope was that, by reading an occasional story from his or her home country, each student would have an opportunity to be the “expert” for a week, to provide us with the context or insider’s perspective we might lack. Our one Japanese student sat quietly last night, unfortunately, but the rest of the class was eager to discuss Murakami’s tale, which is a kind of urban, magical realist fable — the kind of story that Tsai Ming-liang might write if he wrote stories.

The narrator is obsessed by the recent disappearance of an elephant and its keeper, both of whom had come to live in his Tokyo suburb when the local zoo was bought out by a real estate devloper. He lives a life of mundane ritual — the alarm goes off at 6:13, he reads his paper front-to-back over two cups of coffee — and is a PR man for a manufacturer of kitchen appliances. His latest assignment is convincing retailers and consumers that the new line of stovetops and ovens brings perfect “unity” and “balance” to the modern kitchen. When pressed by a magazine writer on the ultimate importance of “unity,” he replies:

A kitchen probably does need a few things more than it needs unity. But those other elements are things you can’t sell. And in this pragmatic world of our, things you can’t sell don’t count for much.

“The Elephant Vanishes” never explains exactly what those “few things” are, but, by showing us the world through the narrator’s wonder-seeking eyes, they become obvious: nature, beauty, mystery, communion, all the things we ignore in our mad dash to purchase order for our lives. (We went with Jenn-Air products in our recent remodel, by the way.) The narrator has a bit of Binx Bolling in him. He’s also on “the search.” “The Elephant Vanishes” has a perfectly sad, perfectly satisfying ending. Great stuff.

Can anyone recommend other writing by Murakami?

September 23, 2005
The Great Films, Part 1

In a deliberate effort to beef up my cinephile cred, lately I’ve been loading my GreenCine queue with selections from the list of 1,000 Greatest Films compiled by the folks at They Shoot Pictures. With 30 or 40 films now in my queue, I’ve stopped prioritizing or shuffling the list and just watch whatever happens to show up on my door. It’s probably not the best strategy — perhaps I should instead queue up ten films of a particular genre or, say, all of the John Ford or Japanese films I’ve never seen — but I’m enjoying the variety. It’s been a fun, summer-time distraction from the brain-wearying work of dissertating. Next up are Some Like It Hot and My Darling Clementine.

Some quick thoughts on recent viewings. (I’m afraid that none were overwhelmingly positive, so any feedback would be much appreciated.)

The Blue Angel (1930, dir. Josef von Sternberg) — My first Marlene Dietrich film. Also, my second Emil Jannings film (after The Last Laugh). Both are fun to watch here, though I find it almost impossible to imagine how they would have been received by an audience in 1930. Jannings is the subject of our ridicule and sympathy, and von Sternberg’s balancing of the two is tricky. Dietrich is likewise a complicated character — a femme fatale, a seducer, and a betrayer, whose charm is irresistible. Two weeks later, what I most admire about the film are its images of the creative world behind the stage curtain, which bring to mind the magic of Bergman’s films.

Jules and Jim (1962, dir. Francois Truffaut) — Jules and Jim was my first New Wave film. I remember checking it out from the Wilmington public library eight or nine years ago, when I was first dipping my toes into world cinema. What little lasting impression it left was mostly negative. I recall being annoyed with all of the main characters and confused by their behavior. A decade later, I now recognize some of its precedents — writers like Flaubert and, to a lesser degree, James, both of whom saddle their characters with particular flaws then watch (as if casual observers rather than authors) as those flaws become manifest in the inevitable and messy consequences.

I appreciate Flaubert and James, but I don’t read them for pleasure, just as I seldom watch Truffaut for pleasure. To be fair, I’ve seen far too few of his films (five or six, maybe) to make any blanket statements, but, aside from The 400 Blows, I don’t recall ever being pestered by one of his films. By “pestered” I just mean that mixture of confusion and curiosity that follows (sometimes days later) an encounter with great art — or, if not great art, then interesting or daring or insightful art. I don’t mean to imply that Jules and Jim is lacking here on all counts; only that, the morning after, I wasn’t the least bit curious to know more about Jules, Jim, or Catherine. Perhaps I’ll give it another go in ten years.

The Life of Oharu (1952, dir. Kenji Mizoguchi) — Much to my embarrassment, it’s time that I own up to the fact that, on a number of occasions now, I have found myself surprisingly unmoved by the great Japanese filmmakers. There’s something so thoroughly alien (other-worldly, even) about the customs, politics, music, and rituals of, in this case, 17th century Japan. But I feel excluded, also, by the film style. The long takes, which I so admire in many other filmmakers, try my patience in Mizoguchi. His actors’ movements, which are so graceful and balletic, are impossibly strange to me. I can’t seem to penetrate through to the emotional core of the characters and, so, remain uninvested in their tragedies.

About 40 minutes into our screening of The Life of Oharu, I leaned over to a friend and joked that I felt like I was watching a Thomas Hardy novel. He chuckled, then a few seconds later added, “Hey, you’re right. You’re absolutely right.” Mizoguchi’s film is, with one notable exception, textbook Naturalism. Oharu, like Tess, Maggie, and Carrie before her, is abused by a patriarchal system, to be sure, but the depths and the ironies of her suffering suggest that a vast and indifferent universe is conspiring against her. The Life of Oharu is like an anti-picaresque novel, a compilation of vignettes in which our heroine, rather than outsmarting her abusers, is instead toyed with, degraded, and openly mocked by them. I love Mizoguchi’s camerawork in this regard. He often looks down upon her from a high angle, forcing the horizon line above the edge of the frame so that we, like Oharu, seldom catch a glimpse of the sky.

The one exception to this Oharu-as-Naturalism theory is the final, enigmatic shot, in which Oharu, now old and alone, looks up with reverence at a tower in the distance. I say “enigmatic” because I simply lack the context and understanding to read the image. Is the tower the home of her son, now a powerful lord? Is it a temple, and, if so, what does it represent to her? In an earlier scene, she has found some consolation in religious ceremony, but it’s an earthy, human consolation — the smiling face of Buddha becomes a talisman of her one moment of perfect happiness, the love she once felt for a young man. Regardless, Hardy, Crane, Dreiser, and the other literary Naturalists tended to leave their heroines in the grave, so the finale of Oharu felt hopeful to me. I’m not sure if that hope is justified, however.

Note: I didn’t rent this one from GreenCine. It is, however, available as a good-enough R2 DVD from Artificial Eye.

L’Age d’Or (1930, dir. Luis Bunuel) — L’Age d’Or‘s images aren’t as striking as those in Un Chien Andalou, but I found it a much more compelling film. I guess I prefer my surrealism to be grounded a bit more firmly in narrative, no matter how loosely the term “narrative” must be employed in this context. That Bunuel uses a love affair as a framework around which he builds his political and aesthetic critique gives the images (such as the one in my new title) a deeper resonance. There are humans in this film rather than simply a collection of subjects or symbols. L’Age d’Or seems to be more distinctly a Bunuel film as well — Un Chien Andalou has too many of Dali’s fingerprints on it, in my opinion — and, indeed, a pairing of it with The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie would feel perfectly natural, despite the 42 years that separate them.

July 4, 2005
Nobody Knows (2004)

Dir. by Hirokazu Kore-eda

After Life is one of my favorite films of the past five years, so for that reason alone, I was very much looking forward to Kore-eda’s latest, Nobody Knows, the story of four young siblings whose mother abandons them to find work in another city. Unfortunately, because of a few wrong turns and some confusion regarding the location of my tickets, I missed the first hour of the film and will, therefore, keep my comments brief.

I entered the theater just as the oldest child, Chunan (played by Yuya Yagira, winner of the best actor prize at Cannes), comes to realize that their mother will not be returning. We watch as they adapt to life alone: washing their clothes in the park, collecting day-old food from the back doors of neighborhood stores, searching for discarded change in pay phones and vending machines.

Kore-eda shoots the exteriors from a great distance, using long lenses that flatten the depth of field. Doing so allows his young actors to move naturally, freed from the close presence of camera and crew. There is nothing self-conscious or “actorly” in their performances, which lends added weight to the inevitable tragedy of their situation.

Nobody Knows ends, not surprisingly, in a freeze frame, the most obvious but certainly not only allusion to The 400 Blows. Like Truffaut’s film, Kore-eda’s demands that we sympathize with its young protagonist and judge the adults and the systems that have failed them. I have some problems with the film but will reserve judgment until after seeing it in its entirety. I would imagine that it will find relatively wide distribution.

September 11, 2004
The Eel (1998)

Dir. by Shohei Imamura

Images: Conforms, generally speaking, to standard Hollywood continuity editing. Rare exceptions include the brutal murder scene at the beginning of the film, when blood appears to splatter on the lens. Also, subjective dream sequences are borderline expressionistic, though no more unusual than those typically used in the west. Favorite image: Keiko lowering a boxed lunch from a bridge as Yamashita and a friend motor their small fishing boat past her.

• • •

“If my films are messy,” Imamura has said, “this is probably due to the fact that I don’t like too perfect a cinema.” He has also said, “I love all the characters in my films, even the loutish and frivolous ones. I want every one of my shots to express this love.” Strange to find this quote one day after reading a long interview with Wes Anderson, who has said very much the same thing. There’s a strange similarity between The Eel and Anderson’s work—”quirky” is the first (and admittedly meaningless) word that comes to mind.

Before the film’s opening titles we see Takuro Yamashita (played by Koji Yakusho) brutally murder his wife after learning of her affair. Imamura then cuts to Yamashita’s release from prison, where he has served an eight year sentence. Yamashita begins his new life by opening a barber shop a few blocks from his parole officer in a small town inhabited by the quirky (there’s that word again) characters we’ve come to expect from small films like this. There’s the widowed fisherman, the young man who is trying to attract the attention of extra-terrestrials, the nameless hanger-on who wears an air-filter mask while driving his convertible, the troubled woman who imagines herself a flamenco dancer, and the drunken ex-con who torments our hero with reminders of his past. And there’s Keiko, the beautiful woman who Yamashita discovers passed out in a field after she has attempted suicide because she “fell in love with the wrong man.” She comes to work in the barber shop, where, inevitably, the two must reconcile their feelings for each other with the ghosts of their past.

I find it nearly impossible to classify this film. Its murder and sex scenes are more graphic than anything we normally find in mainstream Western films, yet The Eel more often feels like a slightly off-kilter romantic comedy. It maintains a refreshingly slow pace, even while depicting moments of slapstick comedy—the film’s climax, for instance. Like Anderson’s films, The Eel is wonderfully entertaining, perhaps because of the filmmaker’s obvious fondness for his characters and because of the sincere respect he shows them.

August 13, 2001