Reviews

"Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) and "Profound Desires of the Gods" (1968) are epic, immense films in size and scope. So is Gance's "Napoléon" (1927). And still, Kobayashi's "The Human Condition", released in three parts from 1959 to 1961, tends to stand out. Three films, each three hours or longer, and still a singular journey, "one of the most monumental acts of personal expiation in all cinematic history."[1] The quote is from Philip Kemp, and it is good to know a few things about Kobayashi the director. Critical of the war and shipped to Manchuria, living as a POW under the Americans, he's not that unlike to Kaji the protagonist. This is a film made by someone who had seen war, and knew firsthand what its criticism meant. I believe this to be an important point to remember as one discusses Kaji's character, and his perceived flaws.

It's easy enough to brush the first film aside as a mere introduction to a story that unfolds and ripens in its due course. This interpretation is enhanced by Kaji's character, whose personality and actions are seen as naive and altogether misinformed and stubborn. When one sees the trilogy as a kind of developing progression of his philosophy and ethics, it is easy to overlook the virtues of this film and disregard it as elementary.

Yet this is no lesser work. In visual terms, the deserted space of the mining complex, inhabited by so small people against such an infinite backdrop, anticipates the visually contrapuntal existential alienation of the sixties Teshigahara and Antonioni.

Kaji, played to perfection by Nakadai Tatsyua, is no saint. I think it would be too easy to attribute to him only naive and pure intentions, as he's actually a rather ruthless individual from the beginning. He's an idealist, sure; often naive, certainly; but far from blameless, and what often seems like his naiveté might actually betray stubbornness rooted in self-righteousness. In the very first scene where he discusses marriage and sex with Michiko he certainly seems to me as holier-than-thou and standing on a pedestal in how he proves a point by playing a trick on her.

Indeed, while it might be eloquent to describe the three films as his downward spiral, his fall from grace, I think this is amiss. What is irritating about Kaji is not that he's always in the right but that he persistently thinks he's in the right. He's so devoted to his cause that nothing else matters. This is his strength and weakness, something which some viewers too easily tend to attribute to be the film's weakness. Much of the film's greatest drama comes from his stubbornness, bordering on and often transcending the inane and annoying, especially his utter lack of subtlety.

Yet he needs to be this way. Not only so that what follows will hit harder, but his figure is not tragic simply because he's a man of ideals and stands up for them, it's because in some ways he's just as ruthless as those he criticizes.

A key to this interpretation is found in his marriage and relationship with Michio. For me it's the central tragedy in the film, not only because of what Kaji and Michiko end up losing because of Kaji's plight but also because of Kaji himself. He's a man who feels deeply, yet is so blinded by his mission that he helps to destroy his marriage, and Michiko to an extent, even before the end of the first film. The title of the first film, "No Greater Love," not only refers to Jn 15:13 ("Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends") and in a way to Kaji's mission to help others, but also to the love Michiko has for Kaji, a love that he will find unparalleled and lost to him.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Philip Kemp, "The Human Condition: The Prisoner," retrieved 26 August 2015 from the Criterion Collection website.

I'd like to think of the hobby of watching films as a journey through a forest. The films are the trees, and the path takes us down and around all sorts of vistas. Some are worth our time, some not, and some we mark down on a map so we could find them later and return to marvel at them.

Film, for me, is just like the realities depicted in this film, where we wonder from one ghost world to another. We deceive ourselves; let ourselves be deceived. And what a marvellous poem is Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu monogatari" (1953), a film about twofold ambition: fame and money, and creating art. Art is always about risking everything, and continuing even if we might lose everything. As such, the film is a treasure trove of creativity, passion and genius.

Ugetsu is also one of the most lucid meditations on the "what if". It seems like the film were made of short segments, each then plunging into the "what if" in an alternate dimension, and deeper we go so that by the time we escape the illusion of the manor, we arrive fresh at the illusion of a happy family, until the reality kicks in.

The ghost story is central, too, but perhaps not so extensively as the reputation of the film might suggest. I'd consider it more as the matter through which Mizoguchi channels his meditations on art, death and lust, and I believe it actually benefits the first viewings of the film if it's not too strictly tied in the ghost story tradition, or at least keeping in mind that this is actually a mélange of three short stories, two from Ueda Akinari and one from Guy de Maupassant. Not that this isn't a powerful predecessor to "Onibaba" (1964), "Kaidan" (1964) and "Yabu no naka no kuroneko" (1968), it's always advisable to avoid generic categorization so as not to be led astray to see a film that doesn't really exist. As for the ghost story aspect, the Criterion DVD prints the stories it's based on, but I'd direct you to a wonderful collection of Chinese ghost stories similar in spirit, Pu Songling's "Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio," available through Penguin Classics. These stories unwrap the depth of the narrative at play in Ugetsu, too, and how the supernatural is like Lake Biwa through which the group travels in the spectral mist. I've written about this before, but I'd really love to know whether Mizoguchi knew Dreyer's "Vampyr" (1932), since that iconic Lake Biwa scene is so similar in atmosphere to a certain scene in Dreyer's phantasmagoria.

But the real ghost is in the visuals. Cinematographer Miyagawa Kazuo stated in 1992, as recorded by Phillip Lopate*, that they used a crane about 70 percent of the time. The camera, then, is the ghost, who sees everything and moves anyway it wants, joining the worlds together seamlessly as it hovers through the air in so many shots, so beautifully one wonders what superhuman skill it must have taken to make those things work. In Lopate's eloquent expression, "it is the movie's supreme balancing act to be able to move seamlessly between the realistic and the otherworldly."** The final homecoming, one of the most heart-rending of them all, is where all the worlds intertwine and become transparent planes atop each other.

It's staggeringly past belief how much quality cinema was created in Japan during the fifties, even the few years from 1950 to 1955. Kurosawa was deservedly taking the world by storm, but in the quiet corner Ozu, Naruse and Mizoguchi were making the films of their lives, "Ugetsu" is rightfully grouped in that class of unique films.

When Criterion released this on DVD in 2005, it was a one of a kind film event for me. It was the first Mizoguchi in the collection, and I already owned "Saikaku ichidai onna" (1952) on DVD, courtesy of Artificial Eye, and "Sanshô dayû" (1954) on videotape, courtesy of BFI. Having Mizoguchi on DVD was, at the time, almost as radical a thought as wishing now that one might find some Naruse on Blu-ray someday. But fans of Mizoguchi's art are well- catered to: not only do we have several DVDs, a large body of work is actually available on Blu-ray, as well: Criterion and Masters of Cinema have released "Sansho," the latter have also released Ugetsu and — let's count together — six (!) other Mizoguchi's on Blu (although it was a limited edition and somebody's getting rich by selling them nowadays), and Artificial Eye have released four earlier masterworks.

* Phillip Lopate, "From the Other Shore," 12. Printed in the DVD booklet of the Criterion Collection edition of Ugetsu Monogatari, released in 2005.

** ibid., 10.

I'm going to pull out all the stops as I'm trying to verbalize how mightily impressed I am with "Kaze tachinu" (2013), or "The Wind Rises". Miyazaki has now been at the top of his game for well over thirty years, and his latest and apparently last film is remarkable in all the usual modi operandi – luxuriant use and understanding of colour, extraordinary level of detail in even the most mundane-seeming particulars that make the scenes come to life, fantastical sense of the relationship between dreams and imagination and reality, and how the story stems from the images and extends to the world of the creator, and ours.

The film tells the story of Horikoshi Jiro, a genius whose enthusing search for perfection makes him descend the dream-path laid down in his youth. A story of determination, the film is also a profound meditation on the forces of nature: Tokyo destroyed in the earthquake and by fire, the aircraft in shreds and pieces. The influence and inspiration given to Jiro by what only he seems to be able to see around him makes him the visionary that he is.

Airplanes, trains, ships, radiators. The path to advance technology, first by exposure, then by imagination and invention. To be either Achilles, twenty years behind, or the tortoise.

Filmmaking is very much the same: seeing the unseen, imagining that which has not been imagined. This is not compromise or pampering to the lowest common denominator, but art that goes all the way beyond our wildest dreams and is still able to describe the indescribable so lucidly we become enraptured and immediately converted.

All the Miyazakis I've seen have some incredulously indelible moments without compare. Here there are several, including the utterly beautiful dreams, especially the wind, the opening five minutes in full, the remarkable sound design during the dreams and the earthquake, the water, the rain, and the flight.

And speak of the wind! It has personality, it's brilliant and as powerful as in "Ran" (1985), "Zerkalo" (1975) or "The Wind" (1928), in some ways even more so because it's animated in ways impossible to achieve in live action.

And the love that uncharacteristically seems to evade and elude, as it does in Wong Kar-Wai's "Fa yeung nin wa" (2000). She paints, and the picturesque mise en scène and the atmosphere is comparable to "Van Gogh" (1991) and its languorous lushness. Then there's Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" used by Castorp as an allegory for forgetting, yet the novel becomes real through Nahoko's illness and not as a token of forgetting but instead of never forgetting.

And then there's the war. "It flies like a dream", the pilot says, thanking Jiro during the apparent climax of the film, and Miyazaki cuts to a scene of utter destruction, a cemetery of people, ideals, ideas and technology, a disaster not unlike the earthquake in the beginning, yet so tragically unlike.

The name of the film comes from a quotation from Paul Valéry, but refers to Ghibli: the name of the studio but also the engine of the aircraft in "Porco Rosso" (1992). It's a real engine used in an Italian aircraft during World War II, designed by the Caproni seen in the film. In a way, then, this is as natural a conclusion to Miyazaki's career as one could imagine: a flight of imagination, carried by the most powerful wind, and a shared dream of great minds that we are lucky to be invited in.

Ingeniously incorporating some Hamlet into the core of the film, the first Kurosawa made in the sixties returns to the urban surroundings he had not only done so expertly previously but would film with verve especially in "Tengoku to jigoku" ('High and Low', 1963), perhaps my favourite Kurosawa.

While his previous film, "Kumonosu-jô" (1958), was a period piece, "The Bad Sleep Well" incorporates the Shakespearen elements revenge, familial honor and defilement into a modern, contemporary setting. As much as I love his samurai epics, I've found his films set in contemporary Japan to be invigorating and hectic, bursting with the same creative energy and gusto as Imamura's explorations of the lower tiers of Japanese society. Some of this, I suppose, is an unconscious attempt to break away from the stereotypical perception of Kurosawa, who is, in the mainstream, seen as the "director of samurai epics". But these are great films, mind!

And so is this — and it has one of the most provocative, sublime and exhilarating opening scenes ever. What makes it even more fun is how he plays with "Hamlet", it's deliciously foggy as to who on earth Mifune is playing, since he's the one getting married! But that's a by-product, the most amazing thing in the way it all unfurls: we enter a wedding ceremony with a group of journalists, and watch them watch the action unfold, and watch them making conclusions for us, commenting on the action that takes place in the banquet. They obviously know something's not right, and we learn it quickly, too. And doesn't the name of the film, "The Bad Sleep Well", also tell us that everything is not as it seems?

And Kurosawa makes it all look so easy: cutting between the reception area and the ceremony, sometimes moving the camera from one impeccable mise en scène to reveal another. The whole film is like this, fireworks, utter entertainment visually that's not mere eye candy but serious art that's so effortless it's impossible to figure out how he was able to conceive gems like this. And considering he did it year in, year out, is remarkable.

Of course, the whole film is a revelation of interwoven scenes of highest mastery. It's 150 minutes of a tight pace and atmosphere, plotting, even retaliation and bits of comedy. And these urban films have something else going for them: they show the subtler Mifune, an actor capable of more than the extravagant animalism.

A wonderful film from a wonderful filmmaker, nay, a master filmmaker.