Kiju Yoshida's Kaigenrei(Coup d'Etat) begins with an assassination. After the title and director's credit we enter the landscape of the film. The grabs below give a proper sense of the unusual camera angles that Yoshida employs in the opening scene and throughout the film. Unusual both in its expressiveness and its stark beauty. What it doesn't obviously provide is the sense of movement, the rhythm of the cutting from one fixed camera set-up to another which is part of the power of the film. The left-hand side of the opening shot is obscured by the roof of a house angling forwards. In the far distance we see two people greet and bow to each other and then walk in opposite direction. The old man(who we learn is Zenjiro Yasuda, the head of a corporation) walks forward into the background while the woman moves down the frame, to the position of the camera.
The very first cut of the film serves as a reverse shot to this long-shot. In the far left top corner we see a figure standing against the bare wall.
Another cut gives us a look at the character.
Asahi Heiho(Tsuji Kazunaga) embodies the serene majesty of the assassin. We see him and are positioned with him rather than his would-be victim, Yasuda. But Yoshida's framing dwarves him beneath or embeds him inside the structures around him. Yoshida's mise-en-scene is conceptually precise to maintain this even with the first close-up shot of the film.
After Asahi finishes his count-to-ten, he slips off his sandals and moves barefoot calmly at first and then with a war cry he rushes forwards towards his target. What little we see of the assassination is obscured by the roofs of the houses behind the wall. What we don't see is the fact that Asahi commits suicide after killing the old man. A suicide which he planned ritually and for which his sister is interrogated by the police. The film begins in effect with a prologue of the end of one story. The story of a radical who becomes an assassin and segues to the next story, that of his ideologue Kita Ikki.
We first see Kita Ikki (Rentaro Mikuni) in silhouette, his voice intoning prayers to the shrine which is the focus of his attention and concentration. The shrine is one of the visual tropes of the film. When we first see Kita in contemplation, we see him perfectly assured as the patriarch of his house. His voice sounds throughout the long corridor as his wife enters the room to inform him of his guests. As the film advances, Kita implodes or loses conrol of his role in the house and his own sense of identity. In one scene that reminds one of Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, he decides to educate his son Daiki(who is in fact the son from his wife's prior marriage) about his family history and the necessity of being a revolutionary after he relates to his wife a dream he had about the emperor.
Although the film touches on in some detail about a famous failed coup d'etat in 30s Japan, a coup for which Kita served as an ideological influence, much of what we would expect in a film that attempts a dialogue with this kind of history is absent. There is little in the way of a grand narrative summation and exploration of the events leading towards it. (This is further hampered on account of the fact that I did not see this film with the most effective of english subtitles.) This is also not by any means a biopic of Kita Ikki, who just like the figures in the opening scene is often dwarved by the yawning surroundings.
In so far as there is a plot, it revolves around the preparations of the coup d'etat to which Kita is shown as an ambiguous and ambivalent influence. He comes across a soldier (Yazue Miyake) who gushes to him whether he is in fact Professor Kita Ikki and Ikki in turn takes him under his wing as a pupil. In Chris Fujiwara's interview with Yoshida, the director states that his initial idea was to tell Kita Ikki's story through the viewpoint of this figure entirely. In the final film, the young soldier serves as a character who surrogates for Kita's contradictory idea of rebellion and reforming the state to liberate the Emperor who is in fact the head of state. In some scenes he confesses to being a spy which Kita regards as guilt for his inability to following through with the sabotage mission given to him or the desperation of being a young man trying to impress his mentor.
When Kita is arrested in the end, he is led to a room where he finds his young protegee staring at him. We cut to a camera angle creating a series of semi-circles framing the exchange of gazes. Was the young soldier in fact a spy? Or did he lose his nerve in the face of the crackdown? Or perhaps did he assume the identity that Kita subconsciously expect him to take on. The irreconcilable idea of rebellion embodied by Kita is tied to what one character calls his masochism.
Yoshida's Kaigenrei is ultimately a film that is filled with a pervasive enigma, comparable to Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad though his film is all the more enigmatic on account of being set in a tangible socio-political reality dealing with real historic figures. The film doesn't look or feel like a period film despite the high degree of versimilitude in its handling of period detail and location. It's expressive black-and-white framings and geometrically inclined camera angles creates a landscape of the past every bit as fragmented and mysterious as the dystopian next milennium-Paris imagined by Godard in Alphaville.
"Perhaps his best movie is Run of the Arrow (1957): a story of longing, epic scenery and romantic music. Desire and violence are incarnated in some of the most beautiful erotic male nudes since the Renaissance – Indians, savage, strong and free. It starts “April 9, 1865” with the South’s surrender at Appomattox."
First we have a cheap, ugly RKO logo in colour(this is a 50s RKO film, post-Howard Hughes' rape of the most creative of the big 5 Hollywood studios). Then before anything else, we are inside the world of the film. Like all Fuller films, it does not begin it starts. The credits will come soon of course. The film begins in a long take. The camera pans slowly and deliberately from right to left, showing the remnants of a battlefield, one by one we come across small details. We come across a fallen corpse, his bag says C. S. A.
Titles form on the screen slowly in synch with the rhythm of the tracking shot...telling us inch by inch...
...the day...
...the date... ...the place... ..and then we are told the significance of this day. We got the hint from the the C. S. A. mark stitched into the bag. But the shot's not over. As slowly as it pans left, a horse moves in parallel across the trail of corpses and beneath the legend of the titles.
And right before the cut, we see the horse and its rider in side-profile. From the C. S. A. stitched on the dead soldier's bag to the U. S. branded on the black stallion's rear end. In between we have red-lettered legends that tell the audience the significance of this day. Significance imposed on the reality of the morning of the last day of the Great Civil War by layers of posterity. For the men who died on that morning, all latter-day significance was irrelevant, what mattered was their survival. The same is true for the exhausted Yankee soldier who droops on his saddle. The atmosphere around the opening scene is stark and primal. The legends on the screen specify the event but the landscape could be set on the Trojan plains of antiquity for all we know, save for the markers on the bag and the horse and the costumes.
After the credits, we see the surrender of General Lee to General Grant. We see it from the point of view of O'Meara(Rod Steiger). O'Meara is the Confederate soldier who shot the last bullet in the Civil War. His target was the drooping Yankee soldier on the black horse(Ralph Meerker who returns later on in the film). His bullet hit but not fatally and he brings the wounded soldier to a CSA medic tent wherein he observes the histroic surrender. As he witnesses the surrender, he takes aim with his rifle towards General Grant only to be held back by the medic in the tent where he's placed. It's a scene that is quintessential Fuller, whom Serge Daney perfectly described as "war correspondent and mad educator". Run of the Arrow explores one the most perplexing of all questions - What is America? and by extension What is an American? and of course "What makes a man wander?/What makes a man roam?/What makes a man leave bed and board/and turn his back on home?"
Fuller disliked most Westerns and his four films in that genre attack and deconstruct the genre from the ground-up. He had nothing but loathing for Jesse James and the myth-making and aggrandizing piled up by decades of pulp writers, so he made the best Jesse James film, I Shot Jesse James wherein the "dirty little coward" Robert Ford is elevated into a tragic hero worthy of Brutus and Judas; The Baron of Arizona concerns the manner in which a brazen conman converts a democractically governed state into a private feudal kingdom through the creation and manipulation of false documents. Forty Guns explores the twisted sexual politics of gunplay and cattle-ownership in black-and-white 'Scope. Run of the Arrow, the only one in colour(Technicolor to be precise), is both the most traditional and the most modern of the four films.
Steiger's O'Meara is from the Deep South but after the Civil War, he is too full of hatred to conform to the Union into which his people are being reluctantly accomadated into. So he goes West, to the land that has not yet become part of the Union. Along the way he comes across Walking Coyote(Jay C. Flippen, excellent). Walking Coyote is like O'Meara, a renegade who walked away from his land, his people, his tribe. He could have become chief of his Sioux clan except for the fact that - "I can't stomach politics!"
The key scene is when Walking Coyote and O'Meara rest under the night skies. It's a single take, a two-shot held for 2 and a half minutes.
In this exchange, a Christian White Confederate finds a common bond with a Sioux wanderer who became a Scout for the Union. They discuss music, love-songs, the possibilities of female companionship and then O'Meara asks Walking Coyote, "What does Sioux mean in your language?"/"It's a French word, means cutthroat". Coyote tells him that the Sioux which have many tribes used to be called Lakota until the Chippewas described them as "Sioux", cut-throat, to the French on account of their practise of cutting throats of their fallen enemies before scalping came into fashion. In Fuller's film, this historical evolution of ethnic identity becomes a moment where two renegades from their own tribes become comrades.
He rhymes this scene with a later exchange between Captain Clark(Brian Keith) and O'Meara. This starts as a medium shot before resting to where Clark and O'Meara are seated on a wooden table. This take extends to four minutes and 30seconds.
In his exchange with Captain Clark, who represents to him and the audience, the tolerance and virtues of the Union career soldier he lets forth his bitterness and angst at being a sore loser. Clark calls him out of his attempt of becoming a Sioux to vent his feelings for defeat :"You're not the only Johnny Red fighting a one-man war against the United States, you know? Some of them went down to South America."(John Ford of course made a film about one such figure in 1956, one year prior to Fuller's film)
It is in these two conversations which rhyme dialectically with each other that one finds the essence of the film and the essence of Fuller. The first one is about O'Meara's fascination with the romanticism of finding a new people, a new community and becoming one of them and the second one is the pragmatic consideration of the new reality of Post-Civil War America, where Lincoln's Union is fit for all. America is a land where people come to create new identities and find their own home. O'Meara fights the Civil War because of what he sees as Yankee tyranny of telling the South how to live their lives(the issue of slavery doesn't enter into his mind at all) whereas Captain Clark sees the United States' promise as being refreshed with Lee's surrender. With Walking Coyote, a fellow-renegade-from-his-own-people he shares the dream of being an individual, of charting out one's own course.
In Fuller's pessimistic examination of tribal identity, both of O'Meara's spiritual comrades die. Walking Coyote dies with nobility. When cornered by a gang of angry wild Sioux hunters, he initiates the Run of the Arrow; a ritual where condemned men may retain their lives if they can outrun, barefoot across the wild plains, their chasers armed with arrows. Old and overweight, Walking Coyote borrows some time for O'Meara to run ahead until he dies from exhaustion, his corpse catered over by a Sioux who wears Coyote's Union hat.
There's no heroism in Captain Clark's death. It happens suddenly without warning and with no immediate outcry from his unit until he falls off his horse with an arrow in his chest. In the wake of his death, Lt. Driscoll(Ralph Meeker) takes control of the unit. Driscoll, when he is introduced to us, turns out to be, logically enough in Fuller's dialectical use of rhymes and repititions, the Union soldier on the black horse in the pre-credits scene. In that scene, O'Meara shoots him with what turns out to be the last bullet of the Civil War inflicting what is a non-fatal wound which he then brings to the medic thereby saving Driscoll's life. Driscoll is a "frustrated Custer" as per Captain Clark's opinion. While the Army wants to negotiate with the Sioux so that they can make a Fort in a reasonably alloted plot of land, Driscoll wants to charge on and plunder the field and give the "injuns" a piece of his mind. Upon Clark's death, he does just that. (If this turn in the story seems overly familiar it's because James Cameron stretched the plot of the third section of Fuller's 85 minute epic to the entirety of a 3hour 3D science fiction film currently playing in theatres). The death of Clark, the ascension of Driscoll allows for a bloodbath-in-the-making.
Yet as he has always has done all his life, Fuller surprises us. It's not as we would expect, a denouement where the evil Driscoll leads a massacre charge against the persecuted Sioux who have a right to defend themselves and we are allowed to identify with the persecuted people in their battle against the bad guys. It's Driscoll and his fort that is attacked. And it takes the point of view of the bad guy. After a montage showing the construction of the Fort over land not alloted in the negotations, O'Meara enters the Fort under a white flag and urges Driscoll to see reason and leave the Fort. Driscoll doesn't, he knocks out O'Meara but before anything else, the Fort is attacked. For the final battle, the ostensible hero of the film is unconscious lying beneath a heap of corpses. The violence that ensues is in its intensity and rhythm with few parallels in Westerns.
Even if the Sioux are right and the army is wrong, the sheer chaos and insanity of the battlefield is what registers over and above the ethnic and group conflicts. When the film cuts to O'Meara's point of view through his bleary eyes, we see shaky images that we understand reminds O'Meara of the earlier war he had fought. The film comes full circle when after the slaughter, Driscoll is tied around a pole and for his insults to the Sioux people he has to be skinned alive before everybody else.
The Sioux warrior bearing the knife intones to Driscoll, "I saved your life for this ceremony!" But as the cross-cutting with O'Meara turning his eyes away from the screams of Driscoll indicate, he's speaking for O'Meara.
O'Meara shot Driscoll with the last bullet of the Civil War only to take him to a medic and save his life. The bullet which was gifted to him as a souvenir is tied around his neck.
In the exquisite cutting of the scene, we watch O'Meara slowly loading his rifle as Driscoll continues screaming. Chief Blue Buffallo(Charles Bronson) watches this but does not stop him perhaps because he understands that this action performed by O'Meara is the key ritual of the entire film, the one where he truly defines his identity.
He fires and kills Driscoll out of mercy, the bullet-which-missed at last entering Driscoll's thick skull.
By performing this action, O'Meara has cast himself out of his new community, the Sioux. Once again, O'Meara has to leave his new family and his new identity behind, he leaves with his Sioux wife, Yellow Mocassin(Sarita Montiel, dubbed by Angie Dickinson) and their adopted son Silent Tongue(Billy Miller). But he parts ways with the Sioux in friendship and accompanies the survivors of the massacre back to their army camp. A better way of parting than he recieved at the end of the Civil War. That's the small hope that Fuller finds in this otherwise brutally violent and pessimistic film. One doesn't walk away with all the answers but one leaves without asking the wrong questions and think about the troubling unanswerable ones.
*This piece was written as part of the online Film Preservation Blog-A-Thon which began on the 14th of February and ends today. The Self-Styled Siren is one of the hosts of this event and if you wish to help in the restoration of rare, neglected films such as this one(which was released on DVD in the UK, though now out-of print) or others just like it, then...proceed here... I had contributed earlier to the event with a piece on two of Walsh's best films. Among the films which I would like to see restored and re-issued(it's presently available on TCM channel's broadcasts) is Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb, on which I wrote about last year.
Which movies do people mean when they say, "they don't make 'em like they used to"? Among the old films, that is to say the classical Hollywood films, there are some film-makers whose works have retained a vogue. Their films have a certain feeling for modern life that touches audiences as directly as they did in their first runs. One thinks of Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, Elia Kazan and Howard Hawks. Then there are those film-makers whose works have a cult appeal like the westerns of Anthony Mann, the crime films of Otto Preminger, Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray, the RKO horror films of Val Lewton, Vincente Minnelli's musicals or Sirk's 50s colour melodramas. Then of course there are international treasures such as John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock.
Where does this leave a film-maker by the name of Raoul Walsh?
Walsh is known and admired for his crime films - The Roaring Twenties, High Sierra and of course, White Heat. A masterpiece like The Strawberry Blonde, starring James Cagney, Olivia DeHavilland and a Rita Hayworth-before-she-became-Rita Hayworth; while still little known is at least available via the Warner Archive stable and its cast is sure to attract attention.Just last year, The Man I Love one of the greatest films about the immediate post-war American society was made available and the response to the film has been good. There are his silent films, like Regeneration - an early post-Musketeers of Pig Alley-pre-Scarface gangster film and then the first The Thief of Bagdad. Unfortunately many films are lost, including The Honor System which John Ford ranked as one of his favourite films.
Me and My Gal and The Bowery were made in the space of two years, 1932-1933, a significant period in American film history. The early sound pre-code period was not as we were led to believe by early historians a period where cinema stagnated due to the influx of theatrical-minded writers of the East Coast, it was also a period where film-makers jumped at the chance to let audiences hear how Americans actually talked and through that how they behaved and lives with one another. These films are all about the love of language, of saying things for the first time and this is reflected in the vitality of the rhythm of these two films. In Walsh's films one gets the feeling of invention, that he is making films like it was in the old American Biograph days. Walsh of course was there, he learnt it all from the "Old Man" himself.
In Me and My Gal, listen to the casual off-hand manner of Spencer Tracy's waterfront cop Danny Dolan in his conversation with a stevedore.
Frank talks about the new Pagliacci production at the Metropolitan Opera. Danny says that he was thinking of going to see a burlesque show(pronounced bur-le-cue show) himself. They then talk about the Depression as Frank reads about the latest left-opiniated writer's rant against the breakdown of the capitalist economy. Frank agrees. In the background of course we see a great crowd of people engaged in making the waterfront function. Walsh's film is arranged in a series of vignettes about Danny's interactions with the people in his beat. An Irish-American peasant, he approaches people without any pretentions of authority and interprets his position as a keeper-of-peace with devilish amusement. When a drunk approaches him, Danny regards him with the same amusement as Bogart and Co. do Walter Brennan in To Have and Have Not. Then we see kids play a game. One of them hits a ball straight into a glass window and there's a fight between them as to who did it. When Danny approaches them, he asks one of them, "You think you can take him out?" and lets the fighting continue as before.
Then of course Danny walks into a bar...
At the counter is Helen Riley(Joan Bennett). Danny again finds the same drunk he accosted earlier sitting at the table at the right edge of the frame. He then moves to the counter and buys some bread. He then turns to the register.
Danny - Hiya, red. Here's half a buck! Helen - Yeah, I know what it is. And my name's not red...and besides my hair is blonde. Danny - Well whatever you are, you have very beautiful hair!
The way the actors move in the frame, the way they interact and the delivery of the lines in a Walsh film is what creates his special magic. The same can be glimpsed in The Strawberry Blonde in the relationship between James Cagney and Olivia DeHavilland. That is the heart of Walsh's films. As Tag Gallagher notes, in a characteristically astute and intellectually passionate examination of Walsh, his cinema is interactive. The working class New York waterfront of this film becomes in the course of the film a place of which we retain memories. And Danny and Helen become in the course of the film a bunch of regular pals. And of course the film also finds time to invent the heist film genre along the way courtesy of the gangster ex-boyfriend(George Walsh, Raoul's younger brother) who raids a bank.
The Bowery was made in 1933, the same year as Sailor's Luck(which I haven't seen). It's protagonist is Chuck Connors(Wallace Beery), who runs his own bar in ''The Bowery'', a New York district known for ethnic strife. The film is set in the "Gay 90s" and the film after a dull title card plunges us straight into the days of old.
Needless to say, today's audiences won't appreciate The Bowery for what it is, a nostalgic reverie of Walsh's childhood in an Irish-American ghetto. It's hard for today's society of ethno-social correctness to share the film's fascination for a society as brazenly racist, sexist and violent as the one on display in this film. It's a work of urban folklore that very few American films have touched on or revisited. After this there was of course Samuel Fuller's Park Row which was set in roughly the same period and revolved around the early days of journalism. Then of course there's Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York which directly "quotes" the most famous scene of this film. The heroes of The Bowery are two brutal rivals - Chuck Connors(Wallace Beery) and Steve Brodie(George Raft). Neither actor were ever better. Like many Walsh characters, they are fabulists, fibbers and performers. In the case of Chuck, he's an old-time kingpin of the street. He shelters the orphaned and abandoned of the street and takes them under his wing. He's a local hero. But he'll be superseded by Brodie.
The way both of them fight and maintain their hold is through spectacle. In a boxing-match between both of their respective gangs, Brodie wins by secretly slipping in real-life boxing hero John L. Sullivan(George Walsh, the brother again) to defeat Connors unwitting chump. Then Brodie decides to one-up everyone by faking a jump off the Brooklyn Bridge(Brodie is a real figure who apparently did gain infamy for doing this). Of course when the time comes, he has no chance to back out. So he'll have to jump for real. The Bowery is about a world, a culture with all its flaws that will be wiped away and the gutter feudalities of the two heroes will go with it. The world of The Bowery is one where the characters are trapped in self-made myths, and self-told tales.
In both these films, Walsh creates whole worlds filled with people. In one case, the people of the present day New York and in the other, the New York of his childhood, as nostalgic and inaccurate as it always is. And the creation of this world has the same spirit of discovery as in the early Griffith films because now it's wedded to a personal aesthetic and viewpoint. Walsh was a fabulist to the core, an adventurer who at the age of 15 travelled and drifted far until he came across Griffith and became a film-maker. He started as an actor until a jackrabbit jumped through his car window destroying his right eye(this incident is homaged in High Sierra).
Both The Bowery and Me and My Gal(among other Walsh films) are films filled with a spirit of invention and discovery. In that sense, it's not the kind that's made anymore. Not in terms of subject matter but in the approach of the film-maker to his actors and through them his audience. This makes it all the more necessary for a film such as this to be restored and re-issued. It's a cinema of excellent craftsmanship, great performances and wonderful dialogue. It's also a cinema in the spirit of fun and adventure. In today's world, you don't often feel the people who made it had any fun making it, with Walsh at his best, you always do.
So if you'd like to ensure that films such as these ones by Walsh and others just like it can be seen around the world then...proceed here...
The New Year has arrived. Over a hundred years ago, the first ten years of the 19th century culminated in a period that came to be known as “La belle époque”. As Jean Renoir says in his final film, Le Petit Theatre de Jean Renoir, of course it had its intolerance, its cruelty but, “I like it!” admits the great man. The first decade of what became mythologized, even during its first quarter, as “the 20th Century” was mostly a holdover of the “Gay 90s” of 1890-1899, the imperial powers still ruled the roost, their colonies remained under control but the calm either implodes on it blows up. The decade that will come will see centennial anniversaries of such unprecedented events as the Great War (as it would be known for a few decades), the Russian Revolution, the Easter Rising, the end of the Manchu dynasty in China, and the forming of the League of Nations. We will also celebrate hundred years of D. W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley,The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, True Heart Susie, Way Down East, hundred years since Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, John Ford, Raoul Walsh, came into movies. That is to say the hundred year anniversary of the beginning of the classical period of film history, which began with this decade and would stretch till the early 60s.
The first ten years of the new century, hopefully, will be called, “La mal époque”, a period of deranged political strife, and the complete collapse of moral order in the world today. I use the word “hopefully” in the naïve logic that where in the 20th Century, the period of calm with which it commenced was mostly a self-fostered illusion that was promptly shattered by the myriad bloodbaths of the succeeding forty years; the period of violence with which the new century begins will hopefully be followed by an age of restoration, rational discourse and flexible interaction. This is the hope that one can gather from the appendix of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the use of the past tense has let some people, Thomas Pynchon amongst others, to argue that the book is a text from a distant period of the future that narrates how bad the period of the novel’s narrative is, for future generations. 1984 has come and gone and while political correctness is scarily like newspeak, one cannot say that our world of human relations bears direct relationship to Orwell’s paranoid nightmare projection of Cold War(a moniker he invented) divisions. Judi Dench’s M in Casino Royale, laments the passing of the Cold War as if it were the belle époque. The world today is more complicated and more divided than the one in the immediate post-war world.
(The New York skyline with the real towers as seen at the end of Gangs of New York)
As Jean Renoir noted in the final chapter of his memoirs – “With the development of new means of communication we are back in the state of horizontal compartments, just as in the Middle Ages the Western world was united by the Latin language and Christianity. Our present-day religion is the bank, and our language is publicity. The key-word is output, by which we produce more. When the world market is saturated we start another war to get new customers. The aim of warfare is no longer conquest but construction. When the building is destroyed the wheels turn again. We build skyscrapers on the ruins of pagodas, and this fills the belly of the working-man, who would otherwise revolt.”
On that note, the best films of the last ten years.
Yi Yi/A One and A Two (2000), directed by Edward Yang
‘The characters in "Yi Yi" live in a world that would be much the same in Toronto, London, Bombay, Sydney; in their economic class, in their jobs, culture is established by corporations, real estate, fast food and the media, not by tradition. NJ and Yang-Yang eat at McDonald's, and other characters meet in a Taipei restaurant named New York Bagels.’ – Roger Ebert
Edward Yang passed away in 2007. He made a mere seven films, but as in the case of Jacques Tati, that was enough for him to join the ranks of the great masters. Yi Yi, his last film was the closest he ever got to the mainstream. For years, he was “the other guy” of the Taiwanese New Wave, overshadowed by the far more prolific Hou Hsiao-Hsien(who was cast in Yang’s Taipei Story). Yi Yi, released in the year 2000, was named the best film of the year by the National Society of Film Critics. Yi Yi is often considered in the realm of the Altmanesque ensemble film and it is similarly accomplished in the editing and juxtaposition of the multiple storytelling arcs and the poetic associations and connections created through the cutting, as well as a keen awareness of urban topography as displayed by the auteur of Short Cuts and The Long Goodbye but Yang’s neo-modernist seriousness is on a different wavelength than Altman’s post-modernist expansiveness. Yang seeks to define nothing less than the experience of living in cities today, especially the experience of living in a traditional family in a modernist consumerist landscape. Mr. Ota(Issey Ogata) tells N-J(Wu Nien-Jen) that every day is new, and each moment is a new experience but “we are always afraid of the first time”. Yang shows that the reason for this fear is the myriad repetitive patterns human society falls into - whether it is our love lives, or in our conversations with our loved ones, we often have little to say or little we can do different. At the end of the film, the characters return right back to square one, the exception is the young child of the family Yang-Yang(Jonathan Chang) who notes that when he sees his newborn cousin, “I feel old too”.
L’anglaise et le duc/The Lady and the Duke (2001) by Eric Rohmer.
Eric Rohmer made two period films in the 70s. Perceval le Gallois, an anti-naturalist rendition of the Arthurian chronicle by Chrétien de Troyes and Die Marquise von O…, the adaptation of the Heinrich von Kleist novella of the same name. Since the box-office failure of these films, he has remained a film-maker of the contemporary urban world. In this decade, he has made three features, all of them period films. One reason he cited is that he is unable to write modern French dialogue on account of the decline in the quality of spoken French today. Dialogue, the spoken word are central concerns in The Lady and the Duke and Triple Agent. The former film is based on the real-life memoirs of Grace Elliot(Lucy Russell), a Scottish noblewoman who lived in France during the revolution, a former mistress and friend of the Duc d’Orleans (Jean-Claude Dreyfuss). Rohmer is astute and intelligent enough to remain with the point-of-view of Grace Elliot whose presence as an outsider in a changed world is shown objectively, as a foreigner she is spared the violence of the Revolution on account of her nationality but is allowed to witness it and record it, thereby making her the perfect subject for Rohmer. Rohmer, who is a realist, re-creates Paris during the revolution as it really was, by inserting his characters into painted landscapes with the use of digital technology. More than Fellini Satyricon or Barry Lyndon, this film treats historical recreation like it was science-fiction and its use of special effects makes George Lucas’ work in the Star Wars prequels look positively shambolic.
Je rentre à la maison/I’m Going Home! (2001)- Manoel de Oliveira
“The nation, as we now know it, is an invention of the French Revolution. Men who had been merely subjects were raised to the rank of citizens. Systems crumble slowly…The nation is like an outworn house, but we like it and prefer it to a more modern dwelling…Yes, the nation was a pleasant thing. It was the widow of the local grocer’s shop…the song of the house-painter reaching us through the leaves of chestnut trees. It is the hair of a beloved woman, the caress of a family pet. A very pleasant thing, but it is dying, and we cannot bring the dead to life.” – Jean Renoir, My Life and My Films.
Manoel de Oliveira knows a lot about death of course. He has outlived many people in his one hundred and one years of existence. It was not until he turned eighty that his output became prolific and as the greatest active film-maker in the world today, he represents many things - A figure of inspiration whose example makes us less afraid of growing old and as an artist who like Manny Farber’s termite, is entirely devoted to “eating away the boundaries of his own art”. That is to say that Oliveira has refused to accept or take on the mantle of the Grand Old Auteur of Europe that his great age and quality allows people to readily cast him as. His A Talking Picture, is a harsh “goodbye to all that” to the good and the old Occidental civilization. A civilization that Oliveira loves, whose best qualities his cinema represents and whose decline he chronicles dispassionately. In I’m Going Home! he chronicles the story of a grand thespian (Michel Piccoli) who struggles with his life and his career after the death of his loved ones in a car accident. He still has his grandson for company of course. But even then the civilization is routinely putting him through more and more hoops and traps be it a role in a cop film or as Buck Mulligan in a weird-as-hell adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses. Oliveira is harsh in his dismissal of modern life with it’s synthetically made fish food(as he describes in the interview on the Artifical Eye DVD) and the inability of the increasingly stagnant civilization to find avenues of rebirth.
Xiao cheng zhi chun/Springtime in a Small Town (2002) – Tian Zhuangzhuang
Rebirth is a theme of Tian Zhuangzhuang’s exquisite chamber piece. Tian was part of the Fifth-Generation of Chinese Cinema. Where Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige got the awards and prizes, Zhuangzhuang got the controversies and suffered marginalization from the Bosses. The Horse Thief which was made in the 80s(it impressed Scorsese enough to call it the best film of the 90s since that was when he saw it and he didn’t think any new film was as good) was poorly distributed and released with a tacky title card that set the film in Pre-Invasion Tibet(when Tian made this film for the people of the 21st Century). The Blue Kite got him banned from film-making. His first film made after this ban was a remake of a 1948 classic by Fei Mu. I haven’t seen the original but Tian’s remake is a major film in every way. The mise-en-scene of the film where the interiors of the broken house as well as the landscapes around it form the perfect setting in which the characters deal with the pains of memory. Of love that was lost, of lives that could have been different from what they are. Yet the promise of starting over, of rebirth is too late because people are too set in their ways. Change is either too late or not enough to fill the void.
Gangs of New York (2002) – Martin Scorsese
If the nineties represented Martin Scorsese’s most consistent period, the Double Zero decade is a period of uncertainty that hearkens to the troubles he faced in the 80s. Gangs of New York is the only great film he made this decade. It’s flawed, contains awkwardly cut expository scenes at the beginning of the film and never quite solves the dilemma between the operatic revenge story that serves the surface plot and the revisionist political mythmaking project it undertakes in the background. But after two viewings one can leave these obstacles at the door and relish the pleasure of a delirious fevered imagination, of film-making on a scale that probably won’t be seen for a long time or ever again. This is above all a despairing Great American Movie - A film about American history, ideals, myth in the tradition of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The larger than life universe of the characters, the sense of suffering and oppression accumulated over the years is vividly etched in this film.
The Company (2003) – Robert Altman
I had only seen Popeye as a young child before I saw Robert Altman’s appearance on the Academy Awards in 2006(he would die a few months later). Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin(who play singing sisters in his final film, the delightful A Prairie Home Companion) in one of the great Oscar moments, roast Altman by giving a live demonstration of “overlapping dialogue”, then Altman steps in and reveals that he has lived with a heart transplant these past few years. Over the following period of years I began seeing his films which is one of the great careers in American cinema. In this decade, he made the fantastic Gosford Park, Tanner on Tanner, a sequel to Tanner ’88 which is essentially a time capsule of the crisis of American politics of the last decade and a parody/ode to the burgeoning documentary cinema. My favourite is a film I saw for the first time on Boxing Day a few days ago. The Company is a film about the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago. It stars Neve Campbell(who is a gifted ballet dancer, who also produced and co-wrote this film), a pre-stardom James Franco and Malcolm McDowell in a splendid cheeky role as the manipulative but canny artistic director of the company, less Boris Lermontov and more Jeffrey Cordova. This is also an ensemble piece but it’s far more quiet and moody than the cacophony of Nashville. The Company hearkens to the Depression era Busby Berkeley musicals in their celebration of performance as a solution to the problems of the “real world”, Malcolm McDowell is in the mode of the James Cagney/Warner Baxter impresario role. In Altman’s film, the real world is there every step of the way. Whether in the lack of time available in maintaining romantic relationships, the clash of bruised and hurt egos or the transient nature of the life of performance as well, this is a tribute to performance as a selfless calling. The mood of loneliness in the film often recalls Edward Hopper’s paintings especially the first meeting between Franco and Campbell in a bar as he watches the ballerina shoot pool.
Elephant (2003) – Gus Van Sant
In a first, the film won both the main award at Cannes and the director’s prize at the insistence of instant fan Patrice Chereau who recognized it as a major work. Elephant is simply greatest film about teenagers since Rebel Without A Cause and one bold, challenging American masterpiece.
Notre Musique - (2004) – Jean-Luc Godard
Notre Musique didn’t get much attention in the States. Philippe Garrel, among others consider it among the best and most major films of Godard’s career. Godard’s cinema is one that interrogates, with much humour, the functioning of images, the functioning of cinema itself. Notre Musique interrogates the ability to speak against conflict without resembling the side with which one is conflicting, in the hope, that “unlike Hawks I can understand that a woman is different from a man.”
Les amants réguliers/Regular Lovers – 2005 – Philippe Garrel
Garrel described his film about May ’68 as a B-Film to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. He used the same actor, his own son, Louis Garrel and used some of the same extras. His film of course is a wholly different thing. It aims to subscribe to the New Wave film policy that Vigo’s L’Atalante is the most beautiful film in the world whereas Bertolucci said the 60s were the coolest period in history. This austere portrait of disaffected youth and the collapse of utopian dreams from the 60s feels like a lived memory more than a period recreation. The use of black-and-white by the great William Lubtschansky enhances the immediacy as does the anachronistic use of This Time Tomorrow from Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One by The Kinks.
Of Time and the City – 2008 – Terence Davies
Terence Davies in this film and elsewhere mourns the fading of traditions and the passing of time. Yet by re-creating the Liverpool of his youth, by showing in detail the careful disintegration of the world of his often imperfect and tormented childhood, he recreates or rebuilds the bridges to the old traditions. Partly it’s through the use of the poetry excerpts in his voice-over, it’s also there in the amazing rhythmic editing of the archival footage mixed with the modern footage shot on digital. Of Time and the City returns the documentary form(which Davies notes is British in origin) to that of its roots, the great Humphrey Jennings’ Listen to Britain. Hopefully England's finest active film-maker can get more films of the ground in the wake of this film's artistic success.
In so far as there is a plot, it revolves around the preparations of the coup d'etat to which Kita is shown as an ambiguous and ambivalent influence. He comes across a soldier (Yazue Miyake) who gushes to him whether he is in fact Professor Kita Ikki and Ikki in turn takes him under his wing as a pupil. In Chris Fujiwara's interview with Yoshida, the director states that his initial idea was to tell Kita Ikki's story through the viewpoint of this figure entirely. In the final film, the young soldier serves as a character who surrogates for Kita's contradictory idea of rebellion and reforming the state to liberate the Emperor who is in fact the head of state. In some scenes he confesses to being a spy which Kita regards as guilt for his inability to following through with the sabotage mission given to him or the desperation of being a young man trying to impress his mentor.
