Terayama’s Pastoral Hide and Seek is a post modern meditation on the nature of truth and memory. Totally surreal, a man’s childhood populated by bizarre circus troupe, nuns with eye patches, strange fascinations with clocks. Then the director gets fed up with the deceptiveness of his own vision, so then he tuns up inside his own childhood and tries to mess about with it. Odd but oddly affecting
Matsumoto once said that if Funeral Parade of Roses was filmed in white, this was filmed in black. It’s certainly a very bleak and unsettling film with its dreamlike horror and sense of inevitability. The film begins with a sort of vision sequence where the protagonist comes home to find a tangled mess of body parts, followed by bodies, followed by the lifeless corpse of the woman he loves and a man hanging from the ceiling. Later he is visited by a former servant who’s arrived with the news that 47 of his fellow samurai (yep, THAT 47) plan to rise against their cruel master and that his former serfs and peasant folk have clubbed together and raised the money for him to take his rightful place alongside them.
Overcome with joy and relief Gengobe takes the money and pledges to go to the town the next morning and join his comrades. However, he’s also gotten himself mixed up with a courtesan who has other ideas and urges Gengobe to spend this money on her freedom so that they might marry. At first Gengobe sticks to his duty but fearing for the courtesan’s life he gives in and squanders the money on her. Of course, as it turns out there’s more to this woman and her, er pimp?, than first thought. Gengobe has been conned out of the money so many people made big sacrifices to get him and now there’s no way he’ll be able to fulfill his samurai duties. Hurt, humiliated, ruined, Gengobe has nothing left to live for and this pushes him into a dangerous mania for revenge that trails behind him a wake of scattered corpses.
Chilling. Somehow the atmosphere of this film is so completely unsettling you feel the cold rising through your bones just sitting in the cinema seats. There’s no other word for the world of this film than hell. It’s not a horror film, it’s not the violence or the blood that’s upsetting, it’s the sheer oppressive atmosphere of despair. A claustrophobia of fate. It’s this that stays with you, an odd feeling of inevitable doom.
Not a pleasant a film to watch then, but a very impressive one.
Imamura’s A Man Vanishes starts out as a documentary surrounding the disappearance of a plastics salesman but eventually becomes a discourse on truth, reality and cinema. We begin in documentary fashion by paying a visit to the police station and having the details of the missing man related to us. We then hear from the man’s fiancée who it seems is very keen to find him, and his family who are worried but also hurt and disappointed. It transpires that Oshima, the absent centre of the film, had many secrets those closest to him did not know. He had previously been suspended from his place of work for embezzlement, though the money had been repaid and the matter settled. He was also a drinker and according to his friends had been expressing doubts about his planned marriage, either because he did not want to marry or because he disapproved of his future sister-in-law’s supposedly ‘immoral’ lifestyle. There is also a rumour he’d been having an affair with a waitress which resulted in a pregnancy.
All this information uncovered and still no real clue as to Oshima’s whereabouts, Imamura takes the bold step of deciding to put the fiancée on television. After this things start to change, the fiancee seems to have lost her zeal to find her intended and, as it turns out, has developed feelings for the interviewer on the documentary (who is actually an actor). Shortly after this they visit a kind of spirit medium who claims the future sister-in-law has poisoned Oshima and disposed of the body because she too was in love with him and did not wish to share.
This ultimately leads to a showdown in a tea house in which the fiancée confronts her sister with the evidence so far and seems unwilling to believe her denials. Except at the climactic moment Imamura orders the set to come down around them and we see they’re just in a pretend tea house room in the middle of a soundstage. This ‘reality’ was fabricated, and other filmmakers will come here to make their fictional truths or untruthful realities. We thought we were watching fact, but it was a construction.
The final scene of the film then follows this up further, Imamura announces what we’re watching is a reconstruction, a fiction, as a man swears he saw Oshima going up the stairs with the sister, which she flatly denies. Another witness then shows up and reaffirms his testimony about having seen Oshima and the sister, and the debate continues with some of the participants becoming quite irate. Can we believe anything we’re seeing here, what or how much of this is truth? What is truth anyway, what is reality?
Was there a man who vanished, are these the people in the his life? If they are, are they themselves or have they begun to play versions of themselves more suited to film? Imamura later said this film might more rightly have been called ‘When a Woman Becomes an Actress’, and it is true that you can see a definite change in the fiancée after her television appearance. Or can you, is it just the way Imamura presents it or has the change really taken places since the woman became a ‘character’ watched by the TV audience? Just as we’ve been unable to reconstruct a accurate picture of Oshima through the descriptions of those who knew him, our vision of the major players, the fiancée and her sister is also clouded by Imamura’s presence.
Imamura’s assertions that objective documentary making is pointless and that greater truth can be displayed through fictional film making are carried right the way through the film. What you largely have are ideas which are then reconstructed by the film maker in the editing suite. It’s a document of real people and real lives but only from one perspective. Fictional film making, in Imamura’s view, is better able to articulate human truths than this patching together of material which cannot be a fully accurate representation.
A Man Vanishes is one of Imamura’s most intriguing films but nevertheless has been unavailable with English subtitles for a long time. Thankfully Masters of Cinema will be releasing a new version on DVD in a couple of months the viewing of which will, hopefully, help to clear things up a little (but then again, maybe not).
An inverted retelling of Sophocle’ Oedipus, Funeral Parade of Roses has become a landmark in Gay Japanese Cinema. Eddie (geddit?), a transvestite living in Tokyo makes her money at a gay bar and has begun an affair with this boss. This has created an awkward situation with the boss’s ‘wife’ who runs the club and has become increasingly jealous and antagonistic towards Eddie. Something from Eddie’s past is also haunting her and will turn out to have major repercussions for herself and others.
Funeral Parade of Roses is notable for its explicit detailing of 1960s gay life in Tokyo. Eddie and her friends have wild parties where they take drugs and discuss avant-garde films from America whilst watching distorted pictures of the student riots on the TV. The films even breaks with its narrative to interview various people, including a couple of the the actors, about gay life.
This is just one of many of the post-modern techniques that Matsumoto employs, often breaking up the narrative with vox pop sessions, inserted signs etc. He often repeats scenes or sections of scenes and sometimes breaks them off only to return at exactly that point later on. The overall timeline of the plot only becomes clear near the end when you’re able to piece these scenes together into a coherent narrative. An important and influential film, Funeral Parade of Roses is a must for fans of Japanese Cinema.
Human Bullet (Nikudan) is a powerfully absurd antiwar satire. Set in the very last days of the second world war, when most can see the writing on the wall but don’t want to admit that their situation is hopeless, the film attempts to capture the bewilderment and confusion as people start to comprehend the situation. An unnamed soldier of about twenty years old is training to be an officer and is repeatedly subjected to ridiculous tasks and ideas sent from high command.
Whilst in charge of the food store, it’s discovered that three packets of biscuits have gone missing. Whilst being question about this the soldier remarks that himself and the other men have become cows, that is they’ve learnt to ruminate – a skill which he then demonstrates to the non plussed superior officer. They stole the biscuits because their rations are pitiful and they lack the strength for their training. Pointing out the obvious that this warehouse is full of food whilst the men are collapsing from malnutrition, the superior angrily tells him the food is for the final battle. Pointing out that there won’t be a final battle if they’ve all died of starvation further annoys the officer and our hero is reprimanded for his defeatist attitude by being forbidden to wear any clothing until further notice.
This further notice only comes when the squad is abruptly designated an anti-tank suicide squad, they will basically run into tanks whilst carrying explosives. Given one day of freedom before being expected to make the ultimate sacrifice, the soldier finds love after a few wrong turns and a strange meeting with an armless bookseller (a noticeably odd late performance from Chisu Ryu). He also develops a strange friendship with some orphaned children and ‘saves’ a suicidal woman.
Alas his orders are abruptly changed again and having failed to meet up with his unit he ends up, in the most absurd image of the film, a man in a barrel strapped to a torpedo. When you hear about lost Japanese soldiers years later not knowing the war is over and you wonder how that can happen, well it’s because of things like this. Aimlessly drifting and bemoaning the ridiculousness of his situation, his feelings of helplessness and bewilderment perfectly sum up the events of the summer of 1945.
Okamoto’s trademark dark humour prevent this from being as bleak as the subject matter might suggest, although the finality of its ending is still incredibly powerful. Like Catch-22 or Dr Strangelove the film beautifully sends up the absurdity of war, and especially of an authoritarian win at all costs philosophy. It’s a shame this film isn’t currently available on DVD anywhere with English subtitles as it’s a very unusual film even by the standards of the Japanese Wave. Human Bullet is unforgettable and really deserves to be better known in the West.
Silence Has No Wings follows the journey of a butterfly from it’s larval phase in Nagasaki to it’s eventual fate in a small boy’s butterfly net on Hokkaido. Well, it’s much more complicated than that. The butterfly is also deeply associated with a female atomic bomb survivor whilst at the same time becoming the centre of a yakuza/triad disagreement. The film also mixes several styles and genres, at one moment a documentary – stock footage/taped interview of bomb survivors, another time a surreal gangster comedy or a social comment and even romantic melodrama. It’s truly a film that defies explanation and deserves to be seen
Ecstasy of the Angels
Koji Wakamatsu’s 1972 discourse on the nature of political activism is an unpleasant film that perhaps owes more to the director’s background in pink eiga than to any concrete argument. Despite being choc full of (explicit) sex and violence it’s incredibly boring and ponderous. It may be the case that I’m not well versed enough in the period but I really struggled to understand what the point of this film was. It seemed really very dated, the directorial choices (deliberately?) primitive and the acting terrible.
Lost Lovers
This was a lot better than Ecstasy of the Angels. A young, disillusioned pole vaulting champion dressed up like Jimi Hendrix and definitely overfond of his kit bag wanders aimlessly around Japan until he meets a deaf and dumb couple who become his companions. It’s an entertaining film about the nature of communication, romance and the treatment of outsiders.
Pitfall, Teshigahara’s 1962 ‘documentary fantasy’ is a difficult film to describe. It begins with the story of a poor migrant worker and his son, skipping out on an ill paying prospect the worker travels to another mine but discovers he doesn’t have the necessary papers. Despite this he is offered another job, however this turns out not to be the stroke of luck he hopes it might be. A strange man wearing a white suit and gloves begins to follow him and around and eventually spreads confusion throughout this strangely desolate landscape.
The film is deliberately vague and offers no answers to the problems it poses. Though its political intentions are quite clear through the use of actual documentary footage of mining accidents and malnourished children the more surreal aspects remain unexplained. Exactly who is the white suited man, and who (if anyone) has given him his instructions? In this ghost town that is both literal and figurative, where identities are confused and long for events always arrive too late is there something strange and unnatural going on, or is it just the surreality of everyday life? The figure of the boy is also problematic, why does he only react to the death of the man who resembles his father but isn’t? Though perhaps if he’s the type of boy to pull the skin of frogs and watch a rape impassively through a small hole in a wooden wall the answer to this may be self evident. As he runs off alone down the winding road at the end of the film, what or whom is he running from or to. Is it his childish passivity that’s saved him, for the moment at least, from from the adult’s internecine warfare or is it just blind dumb luck that might just be leading him deeper into hell.
This month the BFI have put together a season of films produced or distributed by the Art Theatre Guild of Japan. This includes many new wave and independent art films that have either not been previously screened in Britain or have been unavailable with English Subtitles for quite some time, if they ever have been at all. To launch the season a panel discussion was held featuring Tony Rayns, Ronald Domenig, Yuriko Furuhata, and Julian Ross regarding the work and influence of the Guild.
The Arts Theatre Guild was launched in the early sixties during a time of crisis in Japanese cinema as television started to steal audiences away and the old studio system was crumbling. The Guild originally had the idea of buying in the more artistic foreign films which many distributors would no longer touch because they needed to be more sure of a profit. However they soon found themselves supporting Japanese art cinema and eventually producing it themselves. These films were obviously very low budget, and ATG supplied only 50% the other half the directors had to find themselves and should the project go over budget ATG would offer no additional support. Despite this many new young directors were eager to work with them for the comparative freedom they received from the big studio. Likewise they could only afford to hire unkown actors but as the prestige of the projects began to rise filmstars became eager to work on them and can often be found in smaller parts in these movies.
Each of the panelists chose a clip from a film in the season. Tony Rayn’s clip was especially interesting because he had appended a two minute section from a Terayama performance art show in Tokyo to a brief clip from Pastoral Hide and Seek. Yoriko Furuhata’s clip from Funeral Parade of Roses demonstrated the intersection of all the avant garde underground art and politics in this period. A brief except from Silence Without Wings showed the new directorial techniques, fast cutting and rapid POV changes. This definitely looks like a series to look forward to.
Windows on Worlds 