Aaron Gerow's Blog, page 16

Kurosawa, Aoyama, and alt-SCMS

I notice that this is my first post this month. Sorry about that! It's been quite busy here.

We finally are on Thanksgiving break, however. (Yale has a peculiar fall semester schedule where we have 12 straight weeks of class, with no breaks, then one week off at Thanksgiving, and come back only for one more week of class.) I'm still busy, but searching for other things on the net, I noticed for the first time this video of the alt-SCMS conference (a.k.a. the Josai International University Media Studies Department Media Workshop) that I helped put together last May when SCMS called off their Tokyo conference due to H1N1.

The video shows a bit of what happened, and even includes images of the talk I moderated between the film directors Kurosawa Kiyoshi (Cure) and Aoyama Shinji. For better or for worse, I am visible too.

The producer won't let you embed it elsewhere, so you need to click here to see it.

Reviewing Visions of Japanese Modernity

It's been a quite busy month here at Yale, so I haven't been posting much. We hosted the Association for Japanese Literary Studies annual conference, using technology as the theme (we thus had a number of film-related papers). Now we have to work on publishing the proceedings. It was also midterms, but since Yale has no midterm break, everyone gets quite exhausted around this time of year. We did start our annual film series, however, sponsored by the Council on East Asian Studies, which these year focuses on off-beat jidaigeki. The first film was Vendetta at Sozenji Temple (Adauchi Sozenji baba), a dark but powerful work from 1957 by Makino Masahiro that features the clash of samurai and yakuza, and male and female values. We showed a 16mm print with English subtitles we got via the Japan Foundation. This week we will be showing Samurai Saga, a samurai version of Cyrano de Bergerac by Inagaki Hiroshi, and in two weeks, the superlative Brave Records of the Sanada Clan, a jidaigeki musical by the incomparable Kato Tai about the Sanada juyushi. 

Given the lull, I thought I should mention two reviews of my most recent book, Visions of Japanese Modernity, that can be read on the net. 

The Japan Times has always been good at reviewing my books, but unfortunately Donald Richie, who has reviewed all of my books so far, is still not quite up to the task (he's a lot better after his terrible bout with pneumonia; I delivered a copy of my book personally before leaving Japan). Still the Japan Times reviewer did a good job of introducing the book.

Also, in somewhat of a surprise, the fellow who runs a Kurosawa Akira blog ended up being probably the first person to review the book. I was impressed by the effort to see my book as providing context for Kurosawa and later cinema--which in many ways was my intention.

Ikebe Ryo

I was sad to see that the great actor, Ikebe Ryo, passed away on October 8th at the age of 92.

Ikebe was somewhat the intellectual, the son of a painter who graduated from the Literature Faculty of Rikkyo University. He originally entered the industry in 1941 to become a screenwriter, but soon switched to acting. His career, however, was put on hold by the war. He served in China and New Guinea, experiencing great hardship (most of his unit died in battle or of starvation and disease), and left the army at the rank of lieutenant. He returned to Toho and came to fame in the 1949 hit Aoi sanmyaku (Blue Mountains) playing a high schooler of all things--even though he was already over 30 at the time. It was first his youthful but serious good looks that ensured his stardom in the 1950s, as he appeared especially in a lot of literary adaptations (e.g., Botchan and Snow Country). He successfully extended his career by playing yakuza in the 1960s, starting with Shinoda's Pale Flower and continuing with many of the great ninkyo pictures at Toei. A very intelligent and principled man, he headed up the Nihon Eiga Haiyu Kyokai (an actor's union) and won major awards for his essays. His essays are well worth reading and he was a great man to listen to in person.

Shimura Miyoko and Yumiketa Aya put out an excellent book on him, Eiga haiyu Ikebe Ryo (Waizu Shuppan), that every library should get.

I should note that Ikebe was my mother-in-law's favorite actor. She has a huge pile of bromides at home, and it seems like half of them are of Ikebe. She of course has his autograph--and even a photo of her with Ikebe in the 1950s.

So from all of our family, I say "Gokurosama deshita."

Here is the NHK report on his passing:

Fukasaku Kinji, Underworld Historiographer

A colleague reminded me the other day that an article I wrote on Fukasaku Kinji was no longer on the net. The piece, which I originally wrote for New
Cinema From Japan News, Vol. 2 (January 2000), printed in conjunction with
a Fukasaku retrospective at the Rotterdam Film Festival, had been slightly
revised and put online at Asian Film Connections along with some of my other work. (It also appeared in Japanese in Eiga kantoku Fukasaku Kinji no kiseki [Kinema Junpo, 2003]). When that site went private (without telling me, I might add), all my articles there disappeared. My colleague's inquiry has inspired me to return this article to the Internet.

In
Fukasaku Kinji's world, to begin a yakuza movie with the Bomb, as with Battles Without Honor and Humanity
(Jingi naki tatakai,
1973), is not only to create a symbol of the nihilistic, nearly apocalyptic
realm of corrupt, internecine struggles that will ensue, but to fix a
historical marker that delineates the core of much of his work and makes him
one of cinema's unique historiographers. The Bomb did not simply designate the
first realization of nuclear horror, it prompted the end of the war and thus,
to many of Fukasaku's generation (he was born in 1930), the total collapse of
all the values - authority, nation, honor, etc. - they had been force-fed in
school. For them, the explosive leveling of Japanese buildings and institutions
meant less the end of the world than the thrilling opportunity to act in total,
anarchic freedom while starting from scratch.

That
didn't last long, what with the recovery spurred by selling parts for the Korean War and the high economic growth of the
1960s. So even with all the Fukasaku films that begin with images of the
immediate postwar, the narrative center is often the frustration over the loss
of that moment of liberation. If the violent yakuza, unruly hoodlum, or corrupt
cop is the symbolic object of Fukasaku's admiration of anarchic freedom, it is the
gangster just out of jail, confronted with a world utterly transformed, who
best embodies the realization that all those opportunities have been lost in
the resurrection of Organization, Corporation, State, and Nation. Whereas the
yakuza of Kato Tai or Yamashita Kosaku in the mainstream of 1960s Toei ninkyo (chivalric) yakuza films may fight
modernized gangsters seemingly in order to defend traditional social ties (though that is sometimes debatable), Fukasaku's
hoodlums reminisce about the past and lash out at the new - even when opposition
is clearly futile - in order to defend a world with no social bonds other than
those formed by the clash of bodies.

This
temporal shift - one could even say temporal collision - between what was and what
is, is important to Fukasaku's work not only because it resonates with the
narrative clashes, but also because it echoes the centrality of writing history
to his cinema. While he may be the precursor of a Miike Takashi in his
apocalyptic nihilism and sympathy for Japan's social marginals, Fukasaku,
unlike Miike with his presentation of an ahistorical postmodern mayhem,
resolutely grounds his narratives in a more traditional historical opposition:
between those who write history and those who do not.

In
his early work like The Wolf, the Pig, and the Man (Okami to buta to ningen, 1964), conflict is still offered in the form of a present bearing different temporalities (here social
classes). But the films from the late sixties begin to introduce into the image
the markers of an official history relating the passage of time: newspapers,
journalistic photography, police records, and the authoritative narrator. The
freeze frames that punctuate his works approximate these discourses and often
denote a moment of history officially told.

These
discourses, however, are really not Fukasaku's own. Just as the "official
record" in Under the Flag of the Rising Sun (Gunki hatameku shita ni, 1971) really hides more than it
tells, the means of much historiography - words - such as with the inscription on
Ichikawa Rikiya's grave in Graveyard of Honor (Jingi no hakaba, 1975), are misleading if you don't
know the story behind them (a story we the audience do know). Battles without
Honor and Humanity and
Under the Flag of the Rising Sun are
then powerful attempts to combat the dominant history of the modern era through
focusing on the underworld events and people usually left unspoken.

Given that much about Sgt. Togashi and Rikiya remains ambiguous at the end, Fukasaku's history makes
few pretensions about telling the Truth. One of the reasons for this is because
this history is cinematic. That is, first, in the sense that these films reflect a part
of postwar Japanese film history. Starting out in the gang cycle before the
crystallization of the traditional ninkyo film at Toei, Fukasaku never fit well with that
mainstream and thus became instrumental in its downfall, replacing chivalric
duty and honor with, as epitomized by Graveyard, its complete lack. Having undermined
the yakuza genre, however, Fukasaku in a sense had to leave it, and worked
mostly in big budget entertainment after the 1970s.

Yet
even in some of those films, the writing of a "cinematic" history
remains central. If Fukasaku's history is not the words frozen onto the records
or the still shots of the news photographer, it because he emphasizes the
movement that escapes those means, a historical action expressed through a
kinetic style defined by hand-held cameras, canting frames, speedy pans and
zooms, and fast editing. One can say such cinematic action itself is Fukasaku's
historiographic calligraphy.

In
a film like Street Mobster (Gendai yakuza: hitokiri yota, 1972), these stylistic elements strongly
approximate those of cinema vérité, but Fukasaku is not really a documentarist
pursuing reality. The totally unfounded assertion in Shogun's Samurai (Yagyu ichizoku no inbo, 1976) that Tokugawa Iemitsu was
beheaded soon after his assumption of the shogunate, or the audacious (yet not
completely without foundation) combination of "Yotsuya Ghost Story"
with "Tale of the Loyal 47 Ronin" in Crest of Betrayal (Chushingura gaiden: Yotsuya kaidan, 1994) are less assertions of truth
against a false history than, like the ninja manga of Shirato Sanpei that were
influential in the 1960s minus the Marxism, efforts to provide alternative myths
to the official ones. Fukasaku's history is less concerned with facts than the
violence, action, friendship, corruption, love, humor (often provided by Kaneko
Nobuo), betrayal, and homoerotic beauty (Black Lizard [Kurotokage, 1968])--all the stuff of genre
cinema--that are present in history but which have no means other than perhaps
film to fully tell their tales. If Yagyu wails about the nightmare he has been
confronted with at the end of Shogun's Samurai, it is because Fukasaku's chronicle has continually been using the most oneiric of media to give Japan the bad dreams it both
dreads and craves about its own history.

Center for Japanese Studies Publications

website that makes it a lot easier to learn about and order their publications. Their previous site did not allow for online ordering, which meant you either had to go through Amazon (in a system that didn't always work) or order by mail. 

My book on Page of Madness was published by the CJS, and so was the Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies that I co-wrote...

Kobayashi Keiju

Kobayashi is most famous for helping define the image of the postwar salaryman in the famous "Company President (Shacho)" series at Toho. If Morishige Hisaya was the not incompetent president who sometimes seemed more concerned with flirting with women than running the company, Kobayashi was the one protecting the president and keeping the company together, even if he too had...

Tani Kei

I, like most older fans of Japanese cinema, grew up seeing the films that were available on film in the United States at the time. These were the classics of Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi, or the New Wave films of Oshima or Imamura. But there were few comedies. Comedies seemingly did not fit the image of Japan or its...

Japanese Cinema Is Alive (2)

Please forgive the lack of posts. The move back to the United States, the beginning of the academic year, new duties as Director of Undergraduate Studies for Film Studies at Yale, a new course in Japanese popular culture, and articles and other things to write - all of that has kept my nose to the grindstone.

But it was nice to receive in the mail the other day the third volume of the Nihon eiga wa ikite iru 『日本映画は生きている』 series that I talked about earlier. This one is numbered volume two and...

From Kon Satoshi to Kawamoto Kihachiro

I, like many others, was shocked at the sudden death of the animation director, Kon Satoshi, director of such challenging and influential works as Perfect Blue and Paprika. His passing was all too soon and his bravery in the face of death inspiring. 

But it would be a shame if we don't equally mourn the passing of another animation giant who passed away the same week, Kawamoto Kihachiro, who died on August 23rd of pneumonia. He was 85. Kawamoto was one of the deans of puppet animation...

Japanese Cinema Is Alive (1)

In some ways, Nihon eiga wa ikite iru 『日本映画は生きている』...