Monday 5 February 2024

Kon Ichikawa: Politics and Desire

Conflagration (Directed by Kon Ichikawa)
In a career extending from the mid-1930s to the mid-2000s, Kon Ichikawa directed almost 80 films that ranged widely in genre, form, and tone. He has made ferociously humanist war films (The Burmese Harp, Fires on the Plain) and light-hearted domestic comedies (Being Two Isn’t Easy); formalist documentaries (Tokyo Olympiad) and extravagant period pieces (An Actor’s Revenge); his celebrated adaptations of famous Japanese novels such as Enjo and The Makioka Sisters earned him a reputation as a “deadpan sophisticate”(Pauline Kael) with an elegant compositional style, venomous wit, and narrative daring, but he was also a crafty master of populist entertainments.

The problems of apprehension and evaluation posed by the diversity and magnitude of Ichikawa’s oeuvre are compounded by other factors, notably the formidable influence of his wife and scenarist, Natto Wada, whose withdrawal from writing his scripts in the mid-1960s marked a turning point in his career; and the difficulties he encountered with the studios, who occasionally punished his failures and transgressions by assigning him dubious projects, or hired him only on “salvage operations.” While often referred to as a link between the “golden age” of Japanese cinema and the New Wave of the ’60s, Ichikawa has rarely been given his due as an innovator, even though his experiments with formal elements (the CinemaScope frame, the tonalities of black and white and colour, the graphic design of compositions, the use of freeze frames, masking, flash cutaways), with unconventional registers of dialogue and acting, and with subjective or surreal imagery are among the most daring and influential in postwar Japanese cinema.

In the following excerpt from an interview with Joan Mellen from 1972 Kon Ichikawa discusses his influences as a filmmaker and the political dimension to his films.


Q: How did you start making films?

A: When I was a youth it was the time of the Western film world’s so-called renaissance. There were so many great European and American films. They had a great impact on the Japanese. Japanese then began to pursue filmmaking seriously. This influenced me considerably.

Q: Which European and American films or directors most affected you?

A: I should mention the names of filmmakers who moved me very much rather than individual titles. Among them, in America, Charlie Chaplin stands out, as does William Wellman. In France René Clair. Nor can I forget Sternberg and Lubitsch.

Q: Why have Japanese filmmakers been so interested in historical themes and period films?

A: I don’t think Japanese films lean particularly toward the jidai-geki, or costume drama. Some people are interested in episodes of a certain era, but I would not want to make the distinction between jidai-geki and gendai-geki. To me they are the same. If I may add my opinion, films which have modern themes and modern implications should not be simply classified as jidai-geki, even if they are set before the Meiji era. They are indeed modern films although they may take the form of costume plays.


Q: You don’t think there are more historical films made in Japan than in the United States, although we do have the "Western", which may be thought of as similar to the jidai-geki?

A: We probably have a few more and it may have some significance, in my case for one. It is true of course that there are more jidai-geki made here than gendai-geki. You see film is an art which involves the direct projection of the time in which we live. It is a difficult point to state clearly, but my general feeling is that Japanese filmmakers are somewhat unable to grasp contemporary society. In your country, there seem to be many more dramatic current themes to portray. To render something into film art we really need to understand thoroughly what we want to describe. Unable to do this, many of us go back to history and try to elucidate certain themes which have implications for modern society.

Q: Is it because Japanese society is undergoing great political and social change at the present time?

A: Yes, that is correct.

Q: Are you interested in the theme of political apathy or indifference in the Kogarashi Monjiro stories?

A: Yes, the protagonist is an outlaw and a loner, like an "isolated wold". He is like the character in many Westerns. He is always anti-establishment.


Q: Do you suggest through this character that political action is fruitless, especially in the sense that an isolated individual attempting to do away with evil would find it impossible?

A: You might say that in terms of the political implications, although the political element is not the main theme. I am much more interested in the search for what defines human nature.

Q: In general would you say that you are more interested in psychological aspects than political?

A: Yes, generally so...

Q: What aspect of the original novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, were you interested in when you made Enjo?

A: In this film, I wanted to show the poverty in Japan.

Q: Who wanted to show the poverty especially, you or Mishima?

A: No, I.


Q: Is it a material or spiritual poverty?

A: I started from the economic and naturally pursued the spiritual also, because it is the story of man. The economic side represents sixty per cent and the spirital forty percent.

Q: Doesn’t this indicate a strong political element in your words?

A: Only for this film in which spiritual poverty is caused by economic poverty. Usually I don’t consider myself a politically minded director. When I am making a film, I don’t think of the political side of the film very much; it is not the main thing.

Q: Maybe political is the wrong word. By "political" I mean social consciousness, the relationship between the individual and society, not in the sense of political parties.

A: Then yes, that is important to my work. I am both aware of and concerned with social consciousness.


Q: Is there any similarity between your private Mizushima in Harp of Burma and Goichi Mizoguchi in Enjo?

A: They represent the youth in Japan. In the case of Mizushima the time was the middle of the war, and with Goichi it was just after the war. In this sense, both whether a soldier or not, represent Japanese youth.

Q: What is the origin of their disillusionment with the world? Are they each disillusioned about in a general way? Although their behaviour is, of course, different: one leaves the world to become a Buddhist monk and decides never to return to Japan and Goichi in Enjo burns down one of the most famous shrines in Japan.

A: Both are very young, and both are in search of something. Neither knows exactly what he is after, as they are still young. Both thrust themselves against the thick wall of reality and disillusionment trying to find out what they desire.

Q: As in the burning of the temple. What do they desire?

A: Truth.

Q: Is it the truth of themselves or of the world?

A: The truth of their own lives.



Q: Is the meaning they seek in their lives similar to that of Watanabe in Kurosawa’s Ikiru? Watanabe of course is an old man.

A: Possibly so. I can say it is close. It depends on the viewer’s interpretation.

Q: What is the statement about the nature of war that you are making in Fires on the Plain?

A: War is an extreme situation which can change the nature of man. For this reason, I consider it to be the the greatest sin.

Q: Do you use a social situation like war as a device to explore the human character? The social situation would be a means of showing what the human being is capable of – as in Tamura’s cannibalism, homicide, or the massacre in the film – as opposed to showing what happens in a society that leads to war?

A: I use the situation of war partly for this reason, but also to show the limits within which a moral existence is possible.

Q: Why do you have Private Tamura die at the end?

A: I let him die. In the original novel he survives to return to Japan, enters a mental institution, and lives there. I thought he should rest peacefully in the world of death. The death was my salvation to him.


Q: What he saw made him unable to continue to live in this world?

A: Yes, he couldn’t live in this world any longer after that. This is my declaration of total denial of war, total negation of war.

Q: In Alone in Pacific you seem to be saying that determination is important, not what you do, nor the nature of the act.

A: Yes. That was my precise conception.

Q: Isn’t what we do important? Wouldn’t you say that there is some distintion between doing some useful thing and voyaging alone on the pacific?

A: No, no difference.

Q: In Japanese films and in yours in particular, much more so than in Western films, there seem to be mixtures of styles or rather varied methods of filmmaking which are combined sometimes even within a single film. Many of your films, and those of Oshima and Shindo for example, are so completely different from one work to the next. Is this a special characteristic of the Japanese film? I am thinking in particular of your segment of A Woman’s Testament.

A: [Laughs] Do you think so! Probably you are examining the films in great detail! We don’t see this particularly. I believe that expression should be free, so this notion may affect the fact that you have just described. But I am never conscious of differentiating my methods or that I have one single special style. All depends on the story or the drama on which I am working.


Q: This seems to be something unique about the Japanese film. In American films one director’s works are generally similar, especially among the older directors.

A: I think each should differ according to what is being expressed. As I am Ichikawa and no one else, even when I try to change the style according to the theme there is always some similarity from one film to the next. Right now I am working with an Italian director, Pasolini. I have really been influenced by him. I consider him one of the greatest filmmakers today. Do you know his work?

Q: Which films of Pasolini do you admire the most?

A: Oedipus Rex, Medea, The Decameron, The Gospel According to St. Mathew, Teorema. I consider Pasolini the finest director making films today. Among American directors I was impressed with Peter Fonda, not with his Easy Rider, but with The Hired Hand. He seems to be very young, yet he has a very good grasp of his subject. He understands love so beautifully. How old is he?

Q: He is about thrity-five. Whom do you admire among the younger Japanese directors?

A: None among the young ones. I don’t know any of their films.


Q: How about among the older ones?

A: Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, of course.

Q: In connection with Mizoguchi’s Oharu I visited the Rakanji Temple in Tokyo. Didn’t he film one of the main scenes there?

A: But it could be that he made that movie in Kyoto. Is Oharu the American title? The title in Japanese is Saikaku Ichidai Onna. You know, there are several Rakanjis.

Q: Is there a contradiction in the fact that you seem to praise the family system in Ototo (Her Brother) but attack it in Bonchi? Or were you criticizing the matriarchal family in particular in Bonchi?

A: "Attack" is a strong word, but yes, I have criticized the family system in Ototo and yes, in Bonchi I attack the matriarchy. Ototo takes place in the Taisho era, before the war, about forty years ago, but today we still have much the same problem in our family system. I hold the opinion that each family should be accustomed to respecting the individuality of every member. This is what I wanted to say.


Q: What is your viewpoint in Hakai (The Outcast)?

A: The theme is racial discrimination. Japanese discriminate against burakumin. Originally when the Koreans emigrated to Japan, they brought their slaves with them; these were segregated and called burakumin.

Q: Were you then treating the great discrimination against the Koreans by the Japanese?

A: I think all human beings should be equal.

Q: Could you say something about how you used the visual details of the architecture in Enjo to reveal the psychology of the boy?

A: Yes, I sought to do this. This beautiful structure was simply nothing but old decayed timber, no more than that. The boy didn’t think so at first, but he gradually realized it.


Q: What is the relationship bewteen his feeling about himself and his feeling about the building?

A: Let me add this. It doesn’t have to be the Golden Pavilion. It can be any one of the so-called great monuments in our history. They are so fine. Nobody questioned their greatness because many generations were taught to revere them. Well, in actuality some people think the particular monument, in this case the Golden Pavilion, is great, but some think it is not. Varying opinions should be accepted because excellence is solely dependent upon the viewer’s conception.

Q: Does he hate the building and burn it down as an act of self-hatred?

A: Yes, he hated himself and destroyed himself.


Q: The building represented everything which oppressed him?

A: Yes, that expresses it.

Q: Is that why people are shown as very small and the building huge in some scenes? They are individuals very vulnerable to and unable to control outside influences which dominate them, of which the Kinkakuji stands as a symbol.

A: Yes, that’s right. One further thing, I wish to stress is that Goichi was handicapped. He stutters and cannot express himself well and in a sense he closes himself off from society. He has a sense of inferiority in relation to that magnificent building and he suffers from his isolation. I myself did not think the Golden Pavilion so great or beautiful a structure. I may be wrong but my point here is that the presence of this great structure does not secure the well-being of human beings around it, or make them happy.

Friday 5 January 2024

Bertrand Tavernier: Crime and the Surreal

Clean Slate (Directed by Bertrand Tavernier)
 ‘I always try to show social consequences in my films. This is a challenge, of course, but consequences are always more important than the action itself.’ 
One of France’s premiere directors, screenwriters, and producers, Bertrand Tavernier is renowned for making dramas encompassing themes as diverse as familial relationships, World War I, and contemporary social ills. Regardless of the subjects they explore, Tavernier lends his films great introspection and humanity, something that has established him as one of the French cinema’s more progressive and compassionate figures.

Born in Lyon on April 25, 1941, Tavernier grew up with a love of film and wanted to be a director from the age of 13. He was particularly influenced by such American directors as Joseph Losey, John Ford, Samuel Fuller, and William Wellman, and – during a spell at the Sorbonne, where he studied law – he became involved in the film industry as an assistant director for Jean-Pierre Melville. Tavernier became then a film critic and worked for prestigious publications as Positif and Cahiers du Cinema. His first feature film, L’Horloger de St. Paul (1974), received international acclaim and a Special Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. It also featured a starring turn by Philippe Noiret, whom Tavernier featured often in subsequent projects. Many of his films – from Le Juge et l’Assassin to Un Dimanche à la Campagne from Une Semaine de Vacances to La Passion Béatrice gained great critical success and earned a number of awards – (World Cinema Foundation).

In an interview with Michael Carlson in 2008 for the Crimetime website Bertrand Tavernier discussed his fondness for the crime genre and his early embrace of American crime movies:


BT: Well, I was interested in all kinds of film in those days, but perhaps because everyone wanted to write about Visconti and no one was writing about westerns, or musicals, or film noir, I was drawn to that. I was attracted by style; these crime films were saying much more than what they were supposed to say; they were full of information about the American way of life, there was lots of social context, and they were written or directed largely by progressive people, or people forced to leave their own country...

MC: So many of the great noir directors are immigrants.

Yes, they brought things that were not existing, so much, a sense of doubt or skepticism...well, this is too simple but American cinema tends to be about affirmation, and the European was more about doubt. Directors like Siodmak, Preminger, Lubitsch, Wilder, bring this with them.

You could argue film noir was European sensibility meeting the American gangster film.

Oh yes, but even in France at the end of the 1930s, you had Carne, and films written by Prevert.

‘Quai des brumes’?

Of course.

You were a critic before you started as an assistant director with Jean-Pierre Melville.

I never considered myself a critic; I did it merely out of passion because I wanted to be a film director. But I was not a good AD working with Melville; it was a bad experience, and he was not an easy man to work with, very intimidating to people on the set. But he knew I was not suited, so he suggested I might be better as a press agent, and that proved perfect: I could learn about films without the problems of being an AD, sit in on every stage of the process, and as I became more successful in PR it was special because I could work only on films I liked: so I did PR for Ford, Walsh, Henry Hathaway, and also for Godard, Chabrol, Jacques Demy, Agnes Varda... the second thing I did as a press agent was to make a trailer for the Godard film.

The Watchmaker of St Paul (Directed by Bertrand Tavernier)
And for your first feature, you adapted Simenon.

Because I loved him. I had already written one screenplay, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Beach Of Falesa, and I’d got James Mason and Jacques Brel to agree to be in it, but I couldn’t get the finance. I tried to write another screenplay, about the French Gestapo, but when I showed it to (the screenwriter) Pierre Bost he said ‘these people were scumbags, to make them into heroes is dangerous’, well, not heroes, he meant they become interesting by being the main characters.

Which is interesting, because that’s one of the themes of Laissez-Passer (Safe Conduct).

Yes, and the French critics called that picture an attack on the New Wave, and they didn’t know I’d worked on pictures like Pierrot Le Fou or fought for him on Le Mepris. I saw Godard at his tribute at the Institute Lumiere, and he was very nice to me. But Laissez-Passer is about the spirit of resistance, and the behaviour of people under occupation.

I think of someone like Soderbergh today, and wonder if the crime film helps provide a structure for film makers.

Yes, it does, and it’s a structure that you can break or destroy – but you must have a basis. Dexter Gordon said to me once ‘before trying to break all the barriers, learn how to play Laura. When you know Laura in the right mood, then you can expand.’ John Boorman once said he only needed the shot of someone putting a rifle in a suitcase. After that, you can go in a lot of innovative ways, because you have that moment of danger and conflict. And in film noir they found thousands of ways, flashbacks, false flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks.

Yes, I just saw ‘The Locket’ again.

Exactly. Resnais called film noir the best school for telling a story in the most modern way, and it’s amazing how they are still very much alive and not dated. Pitfall, The Big Clock, as interesting as they were, maybe moreso. They give the opportunity for the writer to write different dialogue, always interesting. Out Of The Past has wonderful dialogue, it’s not one note, and you have the literary, very sparse, like The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle, Crime Wave. The people doing the writing knew they could smuggle ideas in.

The Watchmaker of St Paul (Directed by Bertrand Tavernier)
Which brings us back to ‘The Watchmaker of St Paul’.

Yes, because Simenon is on of the most important writers in France – at least thirty masterpieces, plus all the great Maigrets. He’s often reduced to atmosphere, but suddenly he gets the essence of something, the naked man: we had this wonderful scene, when Noiret lies down on his son’s bed, after learning he’s a killer, and he’s a man deprived of what society has made of him.

Noiret conveys an amazingly lonely man, which I associate with Simenon’s characters

Yes, he is alone. My early films are always broken families, people are always lonely. Perhaps because my parents never got along, so I was raised that way.

And it’s odd to see Simenon set in the summer, in Lyon.

He’s always done in fog and rain, but I wanted to shoot the film in summer, in great light, because the foggy atmosphere is merely superficial. In fact, about 80 per cent of the screenplay is original, but when you add, when it’s good, it’s what Jean Aurenche called a gift inspired by the love you have for the book.

The Judge and the Assassin (Directed by Bertrand Tavernier)
Your third film, ‘The Judge And The Assassin,’ combined crime, like your first one, with a period piece, like your second, ‘Que La Fete Commence’.

I was doing a trilogy with Noiret, dealing with issues of justice, and this was based on a very famous case at the time. I was looking for the texture behind the crime story; the time of Dreyfus, the battle between religion and the state. It’s set between the death of Van Gogh and the birth of Freud. As the killer, we cast an actor who’d done only low class bad comedy films, but he was very good, and brought the uncertainty to the role.

It’s in Cinemascope.

We shot in the Ardeche, and tried to integrate the landscape. I was influenced by Delmer Daves and he saw that and loved the film. The early films I loved, of John Ford especially, rooted the heroes in their environment, and with wide screen you can show them close up with the landscape still there behind them. I love Anthony Mann, how he gets the landscape into the film, and Cinemascope lets me do that.

You mention Daves; what did you think of the remake of ‘3:10 To Yuma’?

Oh I hated it! Hated it! They take a shortcut through the Apaches and discover a town full of Chinese the sheriff had no idea existed there! Really. In the original, two men are killed in the opening, and those deaths mean something; the first reverberates throughout the picture.

His funeral in Contention that morning...

Exactly. But in the remake, they kill dozens, randomly. The town, everyone is shooting. It makes no sense.

It seemed to me they deliberately inverted the most crucial things about the film. The son is now the hero, not the father...

Yes, perhaps because of the audience. They make films for children, so the big choices in this film are made by a child. And the father must die, not triumph.

Clean Slate (Directed by Bertrand Tavernier)
Then we move to 1981, and ‘Coup De Torchon’ (Clean Slate), which is many people’s favourite of your films and favourite Jim Thompson adaptation.

It took me five years to adapt. At first I wanted to set it in Lyon, my native city, but it didn’t work. You can’t kill someone in France without someone else noticing, the body turning up. I asked Perec, Blier, to help, but nothing worked. Then I was re-reading Celine, and I thought ‘Ah ha’! I wanted to ask Jean Aurenche to write it, because he had lived in Africa, and he brought that surreal sense of irony – his sister was married to Max Ernst, by the way – the paying of the workers in cinema tickets for example. Though the scene of the pigs and the dead bodies, that we took from Gide.

But the surreal is there in the original too.

Oh yes. But when the Americans adapt Jim they wipe that out, they lose the metaphysical. There is always something strange going on, you’re not walking on solid ground, that’s why I used the stedicam so much; things are not stable, you can suddenly fall into a pit, that’s what Jim’s books are about. It leaves no way out for the audience, and I decided to keep that. There is no character who the audience can embrace at the end.

Which is true of ‘The Grifters’, to an extent, as well.

Donald Westlake, who wrote the screenplay for The Grifters, said he thought Coup de Torchon was the best Jim Thompson, and Westlake is a very very great writer.

L. 627 (Directed by Bertrand Tavernier)
It would be another decade before ‘L.627’, which was very different for you.

It’s a story about someone trying to do what he’s been asked to do, in this case a cop on the drug squad, but he becomes a pain in the ass because he tries, and he’s told not to think about results.

I worked with a real detective in his office, his boss left me completely free, he showed me people dealing, explained the situation. But I made that film out of anger, because I’d had lunch with Laurent Fabius, who was Minister of the Interior, and he asked me for an example of something he could work on. So I told him my son had been a drug addict, and had taken me in the Metro, at Chatelet, where you could walk through an open drug market, to schools where people were selling, so I said, you could do something about that. And he said he wanted something important! I was speechless! The film created a big controversy in France, the Minister of Interior was angry, and said their policy was against drug-dealing, but they actually did nothing, so the film was supported by the cops who understood. And it became a racial issue, because many, if not most, of the dealers were black. That was simply a fact. But by avoiding a crackdown, they opened the door for the likes of Le Pen, because it allowed him to then damn all blacks as dealers.

There is a documentary feel, less lyrical, and you’ve done many documentaries.

Maybe it reflects the change in the social situation, the generation. My films seem to take on the energies of their main characters. All the actors were unknowns, Didier Bezace, Phillipe Torreton, Milo, and my son actually plays a young cop. But I wanted to show a hero who is sometimes doing things that are wrong, beating up suspects, because he has grown so frustrated with the so-called correct way, because it doesn’t work. My films are about people who are passionate, and that can lead him over the line, into doing things that are evil. In all my films people make mistakes.

Fresh Bait (Directed by Bertrand Tavernier)
Which is the sense one gets from The Bait (L’Appat, aka Fresh Bait) that it is the culture, perhaps, which has let down these three killers.

I felt it was an uncomfortable subject, how three people who would not harm anyone, but are ignorant, and dream of becoming rich in America, how could they kill people.

It’s as if it’s the easy way out?

They are lazy, too. And the pressure eventually turns them into killers. It was released in France on DVD, and I’m sorry it wasn’t in cinemas. The New York Times called it a French Natural Born Killers, the same subject but opposite in treatment.

Which brings us to ‘In The Electric Mist’, with Tommy Lee Jones and based on the novel by James Lee Burke. Is there a connection with ‘Coup de Torchon’, with the American South, the original setting of Thompson’s ‘Pop. 1280’?

Not intentionally, but as you say it, I think there is a similarity. I adore Burke, and his books present something different, and like Thompson there is a surreal element to them.

Especially in ‘Electric Mist’...

Yes, with the dreams. So I tried to shoot the dream sequences very straight-forwardly, very very realistically, with no distorted lenses or bizarre angles. He’s like Thompson too, in that his books have long sequences written in italics, because they are different from the real, and how do you film italics? In Thompson crime is explained by prejudice, intolerance, humilation. And the other element is Burke’s great sensitivity to social context, his sense of place. The past is always there, it’s his obsession, it explains the crimes of the present: it all goes back to slavery and the Civil War, things kept under the blanket and not dealt with.

In the Electric Mist (Directed by Bertrand Tavernier)
It’s very Faulknerian.

Faulkner was a nightmare to interview; the critics were asking all sorts of intellectual questions, and he wanted to talk story specifics. Very American. If you ask is Burke intellectual, I don’t know how you answer. Raoul Walsh could quote any line from Shakespeare; Olivia de Haviland once said she walked in on him and he was reading Stendahl, and he hid the book lest she see it.

If not intellectual, Robichaux is a reflective character, the thinking man’s cop, and Tommy Lee Jones isn’t always seen that way.

Oh but for me he embodies everything about Robichaux, for me he is the best American actor. In No Country For Old Men and Three Burials he showed that side. He worked on our script, he’s very obsessive, even changing punctuation, and wrote some beautiful scenes, including one with Bootsie where he defines understanding by asking what salamanders understand, that won’t be in the finished film. But when you say ‘action’ there’s no fuss. He gives you the inside of Dave Robichaux, and I have never seen an actor who can express contempt for another character in such a restrained way; it couldn’t be more intense. Jacques Tourneur understood this: he had his actors speak very low all the time, shot them using only real light: there’s only one scream in I Walked With A Zombie, it plays like a confession.

That’s an interesting comparison, because the Creole culture is common to New Orleans and Haiti...

And the food! I used a lot of hot sauce there; I came back with a case of Bin Laden’s Most Devilish hot sauce. There is also a very Catholic element, very religious to Burke, but very progressive, very anti-Bush, with the post-Katrina setting...

– ‘Simenon and the Surreal: Bertrand Tavernier talks to Michael Carlson’.  
Original article here