Orson Welles: On Writing ‘Citizen Kane’

Citizen Kane (Directed by Orson Welles)

Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and to reconstruct him. Form of multiplicity and incongruity abound in the film: the first scenes record the treasures amassed by Kane; in one of the last, a poor woman, luxuriant and suffering, plays with an enormous jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a palace that is also a museum. At the end we realize that the fragments are not governed by any secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances... In a story by Chesterton — ‘The Head of Caesar,’ I think — the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center. This film is precisely that labyrinth.  (Jorge Luis Borges)

Citizen Kane unfolds in a series of flashbacks drawn from those closest to the newspaper publisher, and relentlessly follows the reporter seeking in vain to find the meaning of "Rosebud.” The discovery in the last scene that Rosebud was the name of the sled Kane owned in early childhood “is not the answer,” wrote critic Roger Ebert. “It explains what Rosebud is, but not what Rosebud means. The film’s construction shows how our lives, after we are gone, survive only in the memories of others, and those memories butt up against the walls we erect and the roles we play. There is the Kane who made shadow figures with his fingers, and the Kane who hated the traction trust; the Kane who chose his mistress over his marriage and political career, the Kane who entertained millions, the Kane who died alone.” 

Welles, who had lost his parents at a young age, was a child prodigy. “There just seemed to be no limit as to what I could do. Everybody told me from the time I was old enough to hear that I was absolutely marvelous,” he said in a 1982 interview. “I never heard a discouraging word for years. I didn’t know what was ahead of me.” When he was only 23, Time magazine put him on it’s front cover, calling him the “brightest moon that has risen over Broadway in years. Welles should feel at home in the sky, for the sky is the only limit his ambitions recognize.”

Citizen Kane's release on 1 May 1941 was anticipsted with great enthusiasm. Welles had created a major sensation in the New York theatre. He had directed an all-black cast in a staging of Macbeth, which he transposed to Haiti, and set Julius Caesar in the context of Nazi Germany. He had also produced a famous radio broadcast of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds. These triumphs created great anticipation for his debut picture in Hollywood, which had given him unprecedented freedom, which he gleefully seized. 

The picture gained its most passionate audience in France after the Second World War, where future film-makers such as François Truffaut saw it when they were studying experimental film. After years of little attention in the United States, the picture was released in May 1956 and appeared about the same time on TV. In 1962, it came at the top of the poll in Sight & Sound magazine for the greatest film ever made.

The following extracts are taken from an interview with Peter Bogdanovich in which Orson Welles discusses the writing of Citizen Kane:

Peter Bogdanovich: There’s a film written by Preston Sturges called ‘The Power and the Glory’ [1933] which has been said to have influenced you in the flashback style of ‘Kane’. Is that true?

Orson Welles: No. I never saw it. I’ve heard that it has strong similarities; it’s one of those coincidences. I’m a great fan of Sturges and I’m grateful I didn’t see it. He never accused me of it – we were great chums – but I just never saw it. I saw only his comedies. But I would be honored to lift anything from Sturges, because I have very high admiration for him...

PB: The idea for the famous breakfast scene between Kane and his first wife [the nine-year deterioration of their marriage is told through one continuing conversation over five flash-pans] –

OW:  – was stolen from The Long Christmas Dinner of Thornton Wilder! It’s a one-act play, which is a long Christmas dinner that takes you through something like sixty years of a family’s life –

PB: All at dinner –


OW: Yes, they’re all sitting at dinner, and they get old – people wheel baby carriages by, and coffins and everything. That they never leave the table and that life goes on was the idea of this play. I did the breakfast scene thinking I’d invented it. It wasn’t in the script originally. And when I was almost finished with it, I suddenly realized that I’d unconsciously stolen it from Thornton and I called him up and admitted to it.

PB: What was his reaction?


OW: He was pleased...

PB: Just how important was [Herman J.] Mankiewicz in relation to the script?

OW: Mankiewicz’s contribution? It was enormous.


PB: You want to talk about him?


OW: I’d love to. I loved him. People did. He was much admired, you know.


PB: Except for his part in the writing of ‘Kane’... Well, I’ve read the list of his other credits...


OW: Oh, the hell with lists – a lot of bad writers have wonderful credits.


PB: Can you explain that?

OW: Luck. The lucky bad writers got good directors who could write. Some of these, like Hawks and McCarey, wrote very well indeed. Screenwriters didn’t like that at all. Think of those old pros in the film factories. They had to punch in every morning, and sit all day in front of their typewriters in those terrible ‘writers’ buildings.’ The way they saw it, the director was even worse than the producer, because in the end what really mattered in moving pictures, of course, was the man actually making the pictures. The big-studio system often made writers feel like second-class citizens, no matter how good the money was. They laughed it off, of course, and provided a good deal of the best fun – when Hollywood, you understand, was still a funny place. But basically, you know, a lot of them were pretty bitter and miserable. And nobody was more miserable, more bitter, and funnier than Mank,... a perfect monument of self-destruction. But, you know, when the bitterness wasn’t focused straight onto you, he was the best company in the world.

PB: How did the story of ‘Kane’ begin?


OW: I’d been nursing an old notion – the idea of telling the same thing several times – and showing exactly the same scene from wholly different points of view. Basically, the idea Rashomon used later on. Mank liked it, so we started searching for the man it was going to be about. Some big American figure – couldn’t be a politician, because you’d have to pinpoint him. Howard Hughes was the first idea. But we got pretty quickly to the press lords.

PB: The first drafts were in separate versions, so when was the whole construction of the script – the intricate flashback pattern – worked out between you?

OW: The actual writing came only after lots of talk, naturally,...  just the two of us, yelling at each other – not too angrily.

PB: What about the ‘Rashomon’ idea? It’s still there to a degree.

OW: It withered away from what was originally intended. I wanted the man to seem a very different person depending on who was talking about him. ‘Rosebud’ was Mank’s, and the many-sided gimmick was mine. Rosebud remained, because it was the only way we could find to get off, as they used to say in vaudeville. It manages to work, but I’m still not too keen about it, and I don’t think that he was, either. The whole shtick is the sort of thing that can finally date, in some funny way.

PB: Toward the close, you have the reporter say that it doesn’t matter what it means  –

OW: We did everything we could to take the mickey out of it.

PB: The reporter says at the end, ‘Charles Foster Kane was a man who got everything he wanted, and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get or something he lost, but it wouldn’t have explained anything...’


OW: I guess you might call that a disclaimer – a bit corny, too. More than a bit. And it’s mine, I’m afraid.

PB: I read the script that went into production... There were so many things you changed on the set, or, anyway, after you’d started shooting. From the point of view of Kane’s character, one of the most interesting is the scene where you’re remaking the front page for about the twentieth time. In the script, Kane is arrogant and rather nasty to the typesetter. In the movie, he’s very nice, even rather sweet. How did that evolve?

OW: Well, all he had was charm – besides the money. He was one of those amiable, rather likable monsters who are able to command people’s allegiance for a time without giving too much in return. Certainly not love; he was raised by a bank, remember. He uses charm the way such people often do. So when he changes the first page, of course it’s done on the basis of a sort of charm rather than real conviction... Charlie Kane was a man-eater.

PB: Well, why was it in the script the other way?


OW: I found out more about the character as I went along.


PB: And what were the reactions of Mankiewicz to these changes?

OW: Well, he only came once to the set for a visit. Or, just maybe, it was twice...

PB: Before shooting began, how were differences about the script worked out between you?

OW: That’s why I left him on his own finally, because we’d started to waste too much time haggling. So, after mutual agreements on story line and character, Mank went off with Houseman and did his version, while I stayed in Hollywood and wrote mine. At the end, naturally, I was the one who was making the picture, after all – who had to make the decisions. I used what I wanted of Mank’s and, rightly or wrongly, kept what I liked of my own.

PB: As you know, Houseman has repeatedly claimed that the script, including the conception and structure, was essentially Mankiewicz’s.

OW: It’s very funny that he does that, because he deserves some credit himself. It’s very perverse, because actually he was a junior writer on it, and made some very important contributions. But for some curious reason he’s never wanted to take that bow. It gives him more pleasure just to say I didn’t write it...

PB: What was the influence of your guardian, Dr. Bernstein? And why did you give that name to the character in ‘Kane’?

OW: [laughs] That was a family joke. He was nothing like the character in the movie. I used to call people ‘Bernstein’ on the radio all the time, too – just to make him laugh... I sketched out the character in our preliminary sessions – Mank did all the best writing for Bernstein. I’d call that the most valuable thing he gave us...

PB: Yes, that scene with the reporter [William Alland] –

OW: That was all Mank, by the way – it’s my favorite scene.

PB: And the story about the girl: ‘One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry... There was another ferry pulling in, and... a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on... I only saw her for a second... but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since, that I haven’t thought of that girl.’

OW: It goes longer than that.

PB: Yes, but who wrote it?

OW: Mankiewicz, and it’s the best thing in the movie. ‘A month hasn’t gone by that I haven’t thought of that girl.’ That’s Mankiewicz. I wish it was me.

PB: Great scene.

OW: If I were in hell and they gave me a day off and said, ‘What part of any movie you ever made do you want to see?’ I’d see that scene of Mank’s about Bernstein. All the rest could have been better, but that was just right...

PB: You once said about the editing of ‘Kane’, ‘There was nothing to cut.’ What did you mean?

OW: When I made Kane, I didn’t know enough about movies, and I was constantly encouraged by [cinematographer Gregg] Toland, who said, under the influence of Ford, ‘Carry everything in one shot – don’t do anything else.’ In other words, play scenes through without cutting, and don’t shoot any alternate version. That was Toland in my ear. And secondly, I didn’t know how to have all kinds of choices. All I could think of to do was what was going to be on the screen in the final version. Also, I had a wonderful cast...

PB: Why did you decide not to have credits at the beginning of ‘Kane’? No one had ever done that before.

OW: The script dictated that. Look at all the other things that go on at the beginning, before the story starts: that strange dreamlike prologue, then ‘News on the March,’ and then the projection-room scene – it’s a long time before anything starts. Now, supposing you’d added titles to all that. It would have been one thing too much to sit through. You wouldn’t have know where you were in the picture.

PB: In that prologue you just mentioned, why does the light in his bedroom suddenly go off – and then come on again after a moment?

OW: To interest the audience. We’d been going on quite a while there with nothing happening. You see a light in the window – you keep coming nearer – and it better go off, or a shadow had better cross, or something had better happen. So I turned the light off – that’s all.

PB: Then you cut inside.


OW: That’s right. Maybe the nurse turned it off because it was getting in his eyes. Who knows? Who cares? The other answer is that it symbolized death. Got that? All right...

PB: What did you mean by the mirrors at the end, when Kane walks by and you see his image reflected many times?

OW: I don’t think a moviemaker should explain what he means. About anything. Leave it to the customers. Why spoil things for people who enjoy finding their own meanings?

PB: But you just explained the light going off –


OW: Next.

PB: The black smoke at the end has been said to symbolize the futility of his life...


OW: I don’t know – I hate symbolism.


PB: Fritz Lang said he dropped the use of symbols when he came to America because somebody at MGM said to him, ‘Americans don’t like symbols.’


OW: I’m one of those Americans. I never use it. If anybody finds it, it’s for them to find. I never sit down and say how we’re going to have a symbol for some character. They happen automatically, because life is full of symbols. So is art. You can’t avoid them; but if you use them, you get into Stanley Kramer Town.

PB: I know you hate to think up titles –

OW: No! I love to think ’em up, but can’t! Citizen Kane came from George Schaefer – the head of the studio, imagine that! It’s a great title. We’d sat around for months trying to think of a name for it. Mankiewicz couldn’t, I couldn’t, none of the actors – we had a contest on. A secretary came up with one that was so bad I’ll never forget it: A Sea of Upturned Faces.

PB: Can we talk about Leland’s betrayal of Kane?

OW: He didn’t betray Kane. Kane betrayed him.


PB: Really?


OW: Because he was not the man he pretended to be.


PB: Yes, but, in a sense, didn’t Leland –


OW: I don’t think so.


PB: I was going to say something else. Didn’t Leland imagine that Kane was one thing and then was disappointed when he wasn’t?


OW: Well, it comes to the same thing. If there was any betrayal, it was on Kane’s part, because he signed a Declaration of Principles which he never kept.


PB: Then why is there a feeling that Leland is petty and mean to Kane in the scene when he gets drunk?


OW: Because there he is – only there, because he’s defensive. It’s not the big moment. The big moment is when he types the bad notice afterward. That’s when he’s faithful to himself and to Kane and to everything.

PB: I wonder if that’s as simple as your answer is now, because if you were put in a position like
that –

OW: I’m not his character. I’m a totally different kind of person from Jed Leland. I’m not a friend of the hero. And he’s a born friend of the hero, and the hero turned out not to be one. He’s the loyal companion of the great man – and Kane wasn’t great; that’s the story. So of course he’s mean and petty when he’s discovered that his great man is empty inside.

PB: Well, maybe one feels that Leland could have afforded to write a good review.

OW: Not and been a man of principle. That Declaration of Principles Kane signed is the key to it. Leland couldn’t – no critic can. He’s an honest man. Kane is corrupt. I don’t think he betrays Kane in any way.

PB: Well, one has an emotional response to Kane in the picture, and I certainly felt that Leland betrays him – I felt that emotionally.

OW: No, he doesn’t. You’re using the word ‘betrayal’ wrong. He’s cruel to him, but he doesn’t betray him.

PB: Well, he betrays their friendship, then.

OW: He doesn’t. It’s Kane who betrayed the friendship. The friendship was based on basic assumptions that Kane hadn’t lived up to. I strongly and violently disagree with that. There is no betrayal of Kane. The betrayal is by Kane.

PB: Then why do I somewhat dislike Leland?


OW: Because he likes principles more than the man, and he doesn’t have the size as a person to love Kane for his faults.

PB: Well, then, there you are.


OW: But that’s not betrayal. ‘Betrayal’ is a dead wrong word. He simply doesn’t have the humanity, the generosity of spirit, to have been able to endure Kane...

PB: Do you think that Thompson, the reporter, is changed by going through the Kane story? Is he altered?


OW: He’s not a person. He’s a piece of machinery –


PB: To lead you through.


OW: Yes.


PB: Was there any mystery before the Rosebud element? I mean, did you try anything else?


OW: Yes. And there was a scene in a mausoleum that I wrote – it was a quotation from a poem or something, I can’t remember – and Mankiewicz made terrible fun of it. So I believed him and just said, ‘All right, it’s no good.’ It might have been good – I don’t remember it, because I was so ashamed from Mankiewicz’s violent attack on it.

PB: Why did you begin and end with the No Trespassing sign?

OW: What do you think? Anybody’s first guess has got to be right.


PB: A man’s life is private.


OW: Is it? That should theoretically be the answer, but it turns out that maybe it is and maybe it isn’t...


PB: Is the name Kane a play on Cain?


OW: No, but Mankiewicz got furious when I used that name, because he said that’s what people will think. We had a big fight about that.


PB: The original name was Craig.


OW: Yes. And I said I thought Kane was a better name –


PB: Just because it was a better name –


OW: Yes. And Mankiewicz made the other point: ‘They’ll think you’re punning on Cain’ and all that, because we had a big murder scene in the original script. And I said they won’t, and he said they will, and so on. I won...

PB: Did you notice an influence on Hollywood films from ‘Kane’?

OW: You couldn’t mistake it. Everybody started having big foreground objects and ceilings and all those kind of compositions. Very few people had ever even used a wide-angle lens except for crowd scenes.

PB: But the effect wasn’t in terms of story construction?


OW: No, the things that I valued didn’t seem to have much effect on anybody. But the most obvious kind of visual things, everybody did right away.

PB: It seemed to me that your memory of your mother is reflected in the scenes with Kane’s mother.

OW: Not at all. She was so different, you know.


PB: I don’t mean the character, but the affection of Kane –

OW: Really no comparison. My mother was very beautiful, very generous, and very tough. She was rather austere with me.

PB: Well, the mother in ‘Kane’ was not a sentimental mother –

OW: It isn’t that. There’s just not any connection.

PB: It’s not so much the mother herself but the emotion of remembering a mother. As in the scene where you meet Dorothy Comingore and tell her you’re on a trip in search of your youth, and she has that line, ‘You know what mothers are like.’ And you say, in a sad, reflective tone, full of memories, ‘Yes.’ It’s one of my favorite moments in the picture.

OW: No, Peter, I have no Rosebuds.


PB: But do you have a sentiment for that part of your past?

OW: No... I have no wish to be back there... Just one part of it, maybe. One place. My father lived sometimes in China, and partly in a tiny country hotel he’d bought in a village called Grand Detour, Illinois. It had a population of 130. Formerly it was ten thousand, but then the railroad didn’t go through. And there was this hotel which had been built to service the covered wagons on their way west through southern Illinois (which is real Mark Twain country, you know, and people like Booth Tarkington). My father spent a few months of his year there, entertaining a few friends. They never got a bill. And any legitimate hotel guests who tried to check in had a tough time even getting anyone to answer that bell you banged on the desk. Our servants were all retired or ‘resting’ from show business. A gentleman called Rattlesnake-Oil Emery was handyman. One of the waitresses had done bird calls in a tent show. My father was very fond of people like that.

Well, where I do see some kind of Rosebud, perhaps, is in that world of Grand Detour. A childhood there was like a childhood back in the 1870s. No electric light, horse-drawn buggies – a completely anachronistic, old-fashioned, early-Tarkington, rural kind of life, with a country store that had above it a ballroom with an old dance floor with springs in it, so that folks would feel light on their feet. When I was little, nobody had danced up there for many years, but I used to sneak up at night and dance by moonlight with the dust rising from the floor... Grand Detour was one of those lost worlds, one of those Edens that you get thrown out of. It really was kind of invented by my father. He’s the one who kept out the cars and the electric lights. It was one of the ‘Merrie Englands.’ Imagine: he smoked his own sausages. You’d wake up in the morning to the sound of the folks in the bake house, and the smells... I feel as though I’ve had a childhood in the last century from those short summers.

PB: It reminds me of ‘Ambersons’. You do have a fondness for things of the past, though –

OW: Oh yes. For that Eden people lose... It’s a theme that interests me. A nostalgia for the garden – it’s a recurring theme in all our civilization.

– From Peter Bogdanovich: Interview with Orson Welles. In Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane:  A Casebook (ed. James Naremore. OUP, 2004)

 

The World of John Ford

The Searchers (Directed by John Ford) 

Ford’s major works can be traced in a rising parabola from Steamboat ‘Round the Bend and Judge Priest in the mid-Thirties to the extraordinary American trilogy in 1939 – Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and Drums Along the Mohawk – and then on to the postwar classics beginning with My Darling Clementine and culminating with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. How Green Was My Valley established Maureen O’Hara as the definitive Ford heroine, just as Stagecoach established John Wayne as the definitive Ford hero. The extraordinary rapport of the Wayne-O’Hara team through Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, and Wings of Eagles adds a sexual dimension to Ford’s invocation of tradition in human experience. How Green Was My Valley is also notable for introducing Ford’s visual treatment of the past as a luminous memory more real than the present, and presumably more heroic than the future. Ford and Hawks, the directors closest to the Griffith tradition, project different aspects of Griffith’s personality: Ford, the historical perspective and unified vi­sion of the world: Hawks: the psychological complexity and innate nobility of characterization. Of course, Ford can never become fashionable for the rigidly ideological critics of the Left. Too many of his characters wear uni­forms without any tortuous reasoning why. Even the orig­inally pacifistic What Price Glory is transformed by Ford into a nostalgic celebration of military camaraderie with the once raucous Charmaine emerging from the dim shad­ows as an idealization of the Chivalric Code. As a director, Ford developed his craft in the Twenties, achieved dramatic force in the Thirties, epic sweep in the Forties; and symbolic evocation in the Fifties. His style has evolved almost miraculously into a double vision of an event in all its vital immediacy and also in its ultimate memory-image on the horizon of history. – Andrew Sarris

The following extract is from an interview with John Ford by Jean Mitry. It appeared originally in Cahiers du Cinema, No. 45, March 1955 and was translated by Andrew Sarris.

The Informer (Directed by John Ford) 

Ford said he made films because it was his trade, which he liked. ‘But for producers,’ he continued, ‘there are other considerations, commercial ones, which must be re­spected. You see directors disappear, or make nothing but mediocre pictures. It is not that they have less talent, or that they have lost their ability. It is that they have turned out one film after another without box-office appeal, with the result that they lose their prestige and wind up on the beach. They must start again from the bottom to regain the confidence of producers. That can take a long time, and sometimes they are restricted to mediocre projects.’

The best directors can be defeated by this process of aesthetic attrition, and after enough setbacks they lose their ambition.

According to Ford’s calculations, directors who want to make only artistic films get a chance to do so about once every ten years. If the film is a commercial success, they get another chance, but otherwise they are through. ‘Only rarely,’ Ford added, ‘does the opportunity arise to make such films two or three times in a row.’

The secret, Ford said with the utmost seriousness, is to turn out films that please the public, but that also reveal the personality of the director. ‘That isn’t easy,’ he added.

I asked if he didn’t always do what he wanted.

‘What I want, yes, but what I would like to do, cer­tainly not.’

Stagecoach (Directed by John Ford) 

‘Do you choose your scripts or are they chosen for you?’

It depends, he explained, on the studio that employs him and on the kind of contract he signs. In rare exceptions Ford has what amounts to a choice – from among a dozen possible projects he may choose the one he likes best. In all his films, he said, he tries to maintain a certain feeling, a unity, and to retain in the script only that which contributes to this unity and sets forth his personality.

‘But that isn’t always possible,’ he exclaimed, ‘and I must make films whose success is assured in advance in order to have the right, and the opportunity, to make oth­ers that are commercial risks but more worthwhile. On their success hangs my freedom of action. In this way I have been able to make some films I wanted to make, and to make them according to my tastes and weaknesses. But I haven’t been able to make ten such films.

‘I waited four years to do The Informer and got the chance only after every sort of hesitation. Then I had a little more luck and was able to choose films which left me a certain leeway in which to express myself.’

‘But are you not also a producer?’

‘Yes, but like all producers, I am subject to the de­mands of the distributors. There’s not much freedom in being a producer. In fact, one takes on more worries – the financial ones. One is doubly responsible – for the film, and for the money. Like other producers, I hesitate to throw myself into an attractive but risky project.

Fort Apache (Directed by John Ford) 

‘At the moment I want to make – in Ireland, for very lit­tle money, a picture for my pleasure, to be called The Three Leaf Clover (later filmed as The Rising of the Moon). I hope it will express some of the poet­ry of my native land. After that I shall undertake a big Western with a subject that interests me – one that corre­sponds to what you call ‘my world.’ It is called – The Search (sic) and is set in the Rocky Mountains and concerns some pioneers who seek a little girl taken away by Indians. It’s a kind of psychological epic.’

I then ventured, the opinion that he seemed in almost all his films to have this theme of a small group of people thrust by chance into dramatic or tragic circumstances.

‘On purpose?’ I asked.

‘It seems so to me,’ he replied. ‘It enables me to make individuals aware of each other by bringing them face to face with something bigger than themselves. The situation, the tragic moment, forces men to reveal themselves, and to become aware of what they truly are. The device allows me to find the exceptional in the commonplace. I also like to discover humor in the midst of tragedy, for tragedy is never wholly tragic. Sometimes tragedy is ridiculous. I should like to do a tragedy, the most serious in the world, that turned into the ridiculous.’


She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (Directed by John Ford) 

‘Your penchant for unity of time and place,’ I asked, ‘does it tempt you to play down the story in order to make a film more universal, more abstract?’

‘Not at all!’ Ford said quickly. ‘That may be the re­sult, but it certainly is not the end. Unity of time and place is solely a means of defining the drama and individu­als, a way of getting there more directly and quickly. I look, before all else, for simplicity, for the naked truth in the midst of rapid, even brutal, action. To be as selective about time and place as one is about the action is to get rid of useless complications. When the circumstances are clearly comprehended, the force of the conflict is in­creased, since its effects are more completely understood. Time is important only when one follows individuals through all their lives.

‘I suppose everybody pursues one idea in many guises. In any event, everybody tends to emphasize those aspects of life he finds the most interesting. Movie directors cer­tainly do. What interests me are the consequences of a tragic moment – how the individual acts before a crucial act, or in an exceptional circumstance. That is everything.

‘However, a situation must never limit a director. It must never be more than a point of departure.’

My Darling Clementine (Directed by John Ford) 

‘How do you work?’ I asked. ‘Do you just shoot a scenario finalized by others, or do you collaborate on the cutting?’

‘The cutting! I do it myself. And I plan the film. When a subject interests me, I also take part in the scripting. If the subject doesn’t interest me, I am satisfied to do my job to everybody’s best interest. When I work with a scriptwri­ter, he outlines the situations, develops the continuity, writes the dialogue. The shooting arrangements, and the cutting, I do myself. We have numerous conferences with the cameraman, the set designer, and sometimes the actors. Each one knows what he has to do and understands the picture before starting to work it. A well-prepared film is shot quickly.’

I then remarked that some of my colleagues were sur­prised that American directors remain seated during the shooting of a scene. Ford was astonished.

‘What do you want them to do?’ he asked. ‘They ob­serve, they control, they direct. Everything is arranged be­forehand. There are assistants who rehearse the actors, who set the scene. It is quickly done. There is nothing more to do than to integrate it into a whole, to make it flexible. If everything goes well there’s no reason to be nervous.’

The Long Voyage Home (Directed by John Ford) 

‘Do you determine what the camera shall see?’

‘With the cameraman. It’s done in advance. A good cam­eraman knows how a shot should be framed. I have al­ways had excellent cameramen. Sometimes, when the com­position is very detailed, I may take over, but usually a few suggestions are enough.’

‘You never improvise?’

‘Oh certainly – but strictly within the predetermined framework. You can change cue, modify an incident, but the movement of the camera, like its position, is deter­mined in advance. A director who changes his mind is a director who loses time. You should make your decisions before, not during the shooting.’

‘But if a movement of the camera proves impossible?’

‘The director doesn’t know his job. You should know in advance what is and isn’t possible. I sometimes make a film in three weeks – after six months of preparation.

‘What would you think of an architect who arrived at his building wondering where to put the staircase? You don’t ‘compose’ a film on the set; you put a predesigned composition on film. It is wrong to liken a director to an author. He is more like an architect, if he is creative. An architect conceives his plans from given premises – the purpose of the building, its size, the terrain. If he is clever, he can do something creative within these limitations. Ar­chitects do not only create monuments and palaces. They also build houses. How many houses are there in Paris for every monument? It’s the same with movies. When a di­rector creates a little gem from time to time, an Arc de Triomphe, he certainly has the right to make some run­-of-the-mill pictures.’

The Searchers (Directed by John Ford) 

‘And your Arcs de Triomphe – your favorite films­ – what are they?’

‘Stagecoach; The Long Voyage Home; The Informer; Prisoner of Shark Island. Also The Sun Shines Bright – it’s a very simple story, the kind I like.’

‘And My Darling Clementine?’


‘Yes, if you like. My children liked it a lot. But I – you know.’


I then asked Ford about Henry Fonda, but I gathered from his manner there had been a falling out, so I did not pursue the subject. Ford’s great favorite is John Wayne. I asked him about The Quiet Man. Did he like it?

‘Yes, most certainly, especially because of the Irish set­ting; I shot it on my native heath. The actors were old family friends – they worked on it as pals. That is how I like to work.’

‘And Mogambo?’

‘I don’t know a thing about it. I haven’t even seen it. But why should I have deprived myself of a trip to Africa and the chance to make one more film? One does one’s job. The film of really personal interest is the exception.’

– Excerpt from Jean Mitry: Rencontre avec John Ford, Cahiers du Cinema 45 (March 1955). Translated by Andrew Sarris.

Paul Schrader: Writing, Violence and Therapy

Affliction (Directed by Paul Schrader)

Paul Schrader’s powerful Affliction (1997), adapted from the novel by Russell Banks, charts the inexorable decline into violence of a small-town New Hampshire sheriff Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte), the brutal legacy of his relationship with an abusive, alcoholic father (James Coburn). 

The plot ostensibly centres on a hunting death on the edge of town which Wade comes to believe implicates a colleague. As Wade delves deeper into the incident, he becomes convinced there is a conspiracy at work involving the mafia or crooked property developers. As the investigation proceeds, his personal life spirals out of control.

Estranged from his ex-wife and young daughter, confronted with the death of his gentle mother and isolated from his neighbours who find him strange, Wade slowly begins to come apart. Events come to a head when Wade moves in to care for his ageing father, and the cycle of generational conflict resumes. Wade’s girlfriend, Margie (Sissy Spacek) tries to stop the destruction, but she is powerless to help and is eventually compelled to leave. 

Affliction is narrated by Rolfe (Willem Dafoe), Wade’s younger brother who has sought to escape his father’s fearsome legacy by retreating into life as a university lecturer. Rolfe informs us from the outset that this is a story about Wade’s descent into criminality, and yet he acknowledges that he is implicated in his brother’s descent, because when he comes to visit Wade after the death of their mother, he encourages Wade’s increasingly paranoid theories.

Paul Schrader’s considerable reputation as a screenwriter and director rests on his exploration of the damaged psyches of American males as they try to come to terms with the contradictions of masculine desires and social reality, most notably in his famous screenplays for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Affliction revisits this theme as Nolte gradually loses each of his roles: father, husband, public official, son, lover. The power of Nolte’s existential descent is reinforced by a mythical resonance as Schrader demonstrates that Wade’s ‘affliction’ is a legacy of male violence, a hereditary cultural malaise that is passed on from father to son.

The stark beauty of the snowy wintry setting and Schrader’s understated yet intimate cinematic style builds the underlying tensions until they shatter in powerful close-ups, revealing the rage and fear as it breaks through Wade’s fragile facade.

In the following interview Paul Schrader discusses the film with Josh Zeman in an article first published in Filmmaker magazine.

So what drew you to this Russell Banks’ novel and kept your interest in it over the years it took to get the film made?

I saw it in a book shop when it came out in trade paperback, and it just caught me. The first line of the novel is actually the first line of the film: ‘This is the story of my brother’s criminal behavior and his strange disappearance.’ I was just grabbed by it, so I bought it. Besides the language, the depth of theme and the depth of the characters, I think what I liked most about [the book] was the gimmick: half or two-thirds of the way through, it’s like, boom! You realize that this small-time cop who thinks he is going to redeem himself by solving a murder is really going crazy, because there is no murder. The real drama is about his father, not about this ‘hunting accident.’

You’ve used that structure before.

Yeah, it’s kind of hidden. You use a genre to disguise your real business.

Wasn’t that same idea in ‘Light Sleeper’ and ‘American Gigolo’? You’ve found a novel that finally exemplifies your structure and style.

I view the film as a collaboration between myself and Russell Banks. It’s not really one of my themes, it’s more Russell’s – this whole theme of generational violence, male violence that is passed on from father to son. One of the differences between things that I have written and Russell’s book is that I tend to end my pieces on a kind of grace note, and this one has none. I like some sense of moral grace. But Affliction is pretty bleak at the end. Another thing I like about the film and book – Russell said to me once, ‘You know who the main character of the novel is?’ It’s the narrator [Rolfe, played by Willem Dafoe]. You don’t see the narrator’s life, but he tells you right in the beginning, ‘In telling this story I tell my own story as well.’ And you have to figure out Rolfe’s story because it’s under the surface.

You say the murder mystery ends two-thirds into the film and that your subtext becomes the main text. Compared to ‘Light Sleeper’ and ‘American Gigolo’, that transformation happens much quicker in this film.

Yes, but you still need it to create audience identification. You need to get the audience behind the character when they may not be that willing. You can sort of root for Wade as long as [you think] he is going to solve this crime. And by the time you realize he isn’t going to solve any crime, you have already identified with him, and you’re caught.

So what do you think you as a director brought to the script if the themes were mostly Russell’s?

I sort of climbed on top of Russell’s theme: how do you kill the father? I had a very strong father and an older male sibling. My father was not abusive, he was not alcoholic, but there were enough similarities. I came from that part of the country with long cold winters, so I knew these people, and I knew their violence.

I was reading the press release, and it kept speaking of male violence. But I don’t think the film is really about violence. The violence in it seems more the result of cause and effect.

Yes, that is kind of an easy handle. You know movies need handles of various sorts, and there should be themes in films that are acceptable to everyone. And then there should be layered themes underneath. So when Rolfe at the end says, ‘This is the story of generations of boys who were beaten by their fathers,’ that’s kind of the obvious theme. That is put there so people who watch the movie can say, ‘Oh, that’s what it was about, and I didn’t waste my time.’ But there’s other things the film is about too.

What were your experiences working with Nick Nolte on this project?

Well, this took a long time to get made because I had optioned the book and written the script assuming Nick would want to do it. But Nick felt that he should get his full price, and that’s what took five years. I was not able to get it financed, and finally I gave up. When Nick realized that he would only get to play this role if he took substantially less money, then I was able to get it financed. What that also meant was that by the time he got into rehearsals, he knew this character cold. He had reams of notes. He had notes for every other actor. I remember once we were shooting and I was suggesting a different line reading. Nick said to me, ‘Oh, I don’t think he would say it that way,’ and I realized that his decision had been made months ago, maybe even years ago.

So it was fortuitous that you had to wait those five years?

Yes, and I wanted to stick it out with Nick. This character does some unpleasant things, and Nick has a very audience-friendly face and demeanor. He seems like a nice guy, a guy you would like to know. Other actors don’t invite you in easily, so you need an actor who seems friendly, like an ordinary Joe.

So you wanted that audience identification right off the bat?

I wanted the audience to root for him because you know from the first line that it’s not going to work out for him. So how do you still care for him? The actor has to get you to care for him. Willem wanted to play that role, and I just couldn’t offer it to him because he doesn’t have that kind of friendly physiognomy.

The father-son relationship between Nolte and James Coburn seemed very organic.

Well, I needed a big actor, a tall actor, someone bigger then Nick, because Nick’s a big guy, and I also wanted an iconic actor. Coburn and Nolte represent two generations of Hollywood leading men. James is very much of the ’50s, a swinging cat when men were men and girls were babes. Nick is a product of the ’60s, where men were partners with women. So even though they are only about 15 years apart, they represent two generations of Hollywood male sensibilities.

One of the most fascinating scenes in the film was Wade Whitehouse pulling out his own tooth.

Well, that was another one of those sort of gimmicks in the book. You think that the affliction is maybe somehow tied to this toothache. When he gets that tooth out, maybe he will be better.

Does the film have distribution?

We just got a offer in the last week or so that Largo finds acceptable. There have been some offers out there, but they have been so low that Largo hasn’t taken them. I think they got an offer, and it will be announced out of Sundance.

Why do you think it was hard to get a good distribution deal?

It’s a buyer’s market, and it’s a dark film. The company that made it was in financial trouble, and they had told their Japanese backers that they would get a certain amount for this film. They had overestimated what they would get, so they were in a very tricky position since they were asking more then the market would carry.

So you’re still defining your career, still learning about what choices to make?

Well, I think so. I wrote a script just recently that I think is one of the best I’ve ever written. It’s for Scorsese, and it’s called Bringing out the Dead, and Marty likes it a lot. This one is about a paramedic. Again, a kid who drives around Manhattan at night, only this time he is on the side of the angels, and he brings life instead of death. But he’s still going crazy.

Do you think, as an auteur making films, you can ever exorcise the themes that define you and reach some kind of catharsis? Or do those themes just become more important over time?

They can ‘exercise,’ but they can’t ‘exorcise.’ I got into film for the best of all possible reasons – as a kind of self therapy with Taxi Driver – and I still see it as self therapy. If you watch Deconstructing Harry, which is a very scathing film about Woody Allen, he’s not a likable character. I am sure he exercised a lot of those demons [with this film], but I am sure he hasn’t exorcised them.

So you never rid yourself of the demons?

No – all you do is learn more about them and pursue them into the next realm.

– ‘Sins of the Father: Josh Zeman talks to Paul Schrader about his new film Affliction’. Winter 1998 filmmakermagazine.com 

 

Alfred Hitchcock: On Creating Suspense

Vertigo (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Vertigo follows John "Scottie" Ferguson, a police officer who realises he has a fear of heights that presents as vertigo and is forced to resign after an unpleasant occurrence occurs as a result of his condition. He spends his time with his friend and ex-fiancée Marjorie "Midge" Wood (Barbara Bel Geddes), a brilliant and self-sufficient woman who clearly has affection for him. However, Scottie's daily routine becomes more interesting when an old college acquaintance Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) visits him and requests an unusual favour. Elster wishes to have his wife Madeleine (Kim Novak) watched, but not out of suspicion of infidelity, but out of concern for her mental health. Madeleine is apparently reenacting the latter days of her late great-grandmother's existence, and Scottie is interested by the strange blond young woman who appears to have no idea where she is or what she is doing. Our protagonist quickly becomes enamoured and unable to leave, urgently attempting to unravel the mystery around Madeleine while revelling in it, for it is precisely the unknown about this woman that fuels his infatuation turned obsession. 

Scottie's downward spiral begins with a plot twist that concludes with his obsession taking control of both his acts and his life. For it is here that we see the heartbreaking reality of a man in love with an impenetrable vision, a phantasm in his imagination that no woman—not even the one he claims to love—could ever live up to. For Madeleine is the epitome of the mysterious woman, so mysterious, evasive, and alluring that a person can project all of their deepest desires onto her, worshipping and feeling a miraculous pull towards the constructed image in their mind's eye, as long as real facts about her remain obscured and she herself remains just slightly out of reach. Scottie's inability to comprehend Madeleine drives him literally insane with desire and fuels a fruitless urge within him, since each attempt offers him only another difficult puzzle to solve. The more the truth eludes him, the more obsessed he becomes with unravelling Madeleine's mystery; however, this is a puzzle he subconsciously desires to remain unsolved, as it would imply the end of his attraction and, with it, his vertigo, which could be interpreted as a metaphor for the loss of control and sense of disorientation experienced when hopelessly in love.

Vertigo is a deft story about the factuality of the persistent male gaze that dominates and determines both our shared collective reality and the bulk of the narratives we as a species make and willingly consume, but it is also a deft deconstruction of it. By portraying a man who, at one point in the film, exerts control over what a woman should look like, how she should speak, walk, and behave in order to conform to his fantasy and satisfy his gaze, Hitchcock subtly reveals his own obsession with controlling his actresses and his attempt to transform them into the perfect "Hitchcock blond." As Kim Novak noted in a 1996 interview with Roger Ebert, "I could completely relate to (...) being pushed and pulled in many directions, being instructed what clothing to wear, how to walk, and how to behave. I believe there was a slight edge to my performance, as if I were implying that I would not allow myself to be pushed past a certain point—that I was present, that I was myself, and that I insisted on myself.” In other words, possessing a woman becomes an obsession unto itself—and when a man obsesses, he acts as if possessed. However, on another level, Vertigo's male voyeur is the one who finds himself on the receiving end of this patriarchal powerplay—for he does not control the narrative, she does. Scottie is made impotent by the idealised and romanticised fantasy in his head, unconscious of the true identity of the unknown woman and unaware of what is truly occurring. On the other side, she is perpetually one step ahead of him, relying on his attention, attraction, and impulses to bring both of them where they need to be in order for the plan they are a part of to play out as planned. Ultimately, the decision to stay or leave was hers alone—she willed it that way, intentionally and willfully, whatever the consequences. 

In 1963 Peter Bogdanovich prepared the first complete Alfred Hitchcock retrospective in America, ‘The Cinema of Alfred Hitchcock’ at The Museum of Modern Art. As part of the exhibition Bogdanovich conducted an extensive interview with Hitchcock about his career. In the following excerpt Hitchcock discusses the role of suspense in ‘Vertigo’ and ‘Psycho’:

Isn’t ‘Vertigo’ about the conflict between illusion and reality?

Oh, yes. I was interested by the basic situation, because it contained so much analogy to sex. Stewart’s efforts to recreate the woman were, cinematically, exactly the same as though he were trying to undress the woman, instead of dressing her. He couldn’t get the other woman out of his mind. Now, in the book, they didn’t reveal that she was one and the same woman until the end of the story. I shocked Sam Taylor, who worked on it, when I said, ‘When Stewart comes upon this brunette girl, Sam, this is the time for us to blow the whole truth.’ He said, ‘Good God, why?’ I told him, if we don’t what is the rest of our story until we do reveal the truth. A man has picked up a brunette and sees in her the possibilities of resemblance to the other woman. Let’s put ourselves in the minds of our audience here: “So you’ve got a brunette and you’re going to change her.” What story are we telling now? A man wants to make a girl over and then, at the very end, finds out it is the same woman. Maybe he kills her, or whatever. Here we are, back in our old situation: surprise or suspense.

Vertigo (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

And we come to our old analogy of the bomb: you and I sit talking and there’s a bomb in the room. We’re having a very innocuous conversation about nothing. Boring. Doesn’t mean a thing. Suddenly, boom! The bomb goes off and they’re shocked – for fifteen seconds. Now you change it. Play the same scene, insert the bomb, show that the bomb is placed there, establish that it’s going to go off at one o’clock – it’s now a quarter of one, ten of one – show a clock on the wall, back to the same scene. Now our conversation becomes very vital, by its sheer nonsense. ‘Look under the table! You fool!’ Now they’re working for ten minutes, instead of being surprised for fifteen seconds. Now let’s go back to Vertigo. If we don’t let them know, they will speculate. They will get a very blurred impression as to what is going on. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘one of the fatal things, Sam, in all suspense is to have a mind that is confused. Otherwise the audience won’t emote. Clarify, clarify, clarify. Don’t let them say, “I don’t know which woman that is, who’s that?” ‘So,’ I said, ‘we are going to take the bull by the horns and put it all in a flashback, bang! Right then and there – show it’s one and the same woman.’ Then, when Stewart comes to the hotel for her, the audience says, “Little does he know.”

Vertigo (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Second, the girl’s resistance in the earlier part of the film had no reason. Now you have the reason – she doesn’t want to be uncovered. That’s why she doesn’t want the grey suit, doesn’t want to go blond – because the moment she does, she’s in for it. So now you’ve got extra values working for you. We play on his fetish in creating this dead woman, and he is so obsessed with the pride he has in making her over. Even when she comes back from the hairdresser, the blond hair is still down. And he says, ‘Put your hair up.’ She says, ‘No.’ He says, ‘Please.’ Now what is he saying to her? ‘You’ve taken everything off except your bra and your panties, please take those off.’ She says, ‘All right.’ She goes into the bathroom. He’s only waiting to see a nude woman come out, ready to get in bed with. That’s what the scene is. Now, as soon as she comes out, he sees a ghost – he sees the other woman. That’s why I played her in a green light.

You see, in the earlier part – which is purely in the mind of Stewart – when he is watching this girl go from place to place, when she is really faking, behaving like a woman of the past – in order to get this slightly subtle quality of a dreamlike nature although it was bright sunshine, I shot the film through a fog filter and I got a green effect – fog over bright sunshine. That’s why, when she comes out of the bathroom, I played her in the green light. That’s why I chose the Empire Hotel in Post Street – because it had a green neon sign outside the window. I wanted to establish that green light flashing all the time. So that when we need it, we’ve got it. I slid the soft, fog lens over, and as she came forward, for a moment he got the image of the past. Then as her face came up to him, I slipped the soft effect away, and he came back to reality. She had come back from the dead, and he felt it, and knew it, and probably was even bewildered – until he saw the locket – and then he knew he had been tricked.

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Do you really consider ‘Psycho’ an essentially humorous film?

Well, when I say humorous, I mean it’s my humor that enabled me to tackle the outrageousness of it. If I were telling the same story seriously, I’d tell a case history and never treat it in terms of mystery or suspense. It would simply be what the psychiatrist relates at the end.

In ‘Psycho’, aren’t you really directing the audience more than the actors?

Yes. It’s using pure cinema to cause the audience to emote. It was done by visual means designed in every possible way for an audience. That’s why the murder in the bathroom is so violent, because as the film proceeds, there is less violence. But that scene was in the minds of the audience so strongly that one didn’t have to do much more. I think that in Psycho there is no identification with the characters. There wasn’t time to develop them and there was no need to. The audience goes through the paroxysms in the film without consciousness of Vera Miles or John Gavin. They’re just characters that lead the audience through the final part of the picture. I wasn’t interested in them. And you know, nobody ever mentions that they were ever in the film. It’s rather sad for them.

Psycho (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Can you imagine how the people in the front office would have cast the picture? They’d say, ‘Well, she gets killed off in the first reel, let’s put anybody in there, and give Janet Leigh the second part with the love interest.’ Of course, this is idiot thinking. The whole point is to kill off the star, that is what makes it so unexpected. This was the basic reason for making the audience see it from the beginning. If they came in half-way through the picture, they would say, ‘When’s Janet Leigh coming on?’ You can’t have blurred thinking in suspense.

Didn’t you experiment with TV techniques in ‘Psycho’?

It was made by a TV unit, but that was only a matter of economics really, speed and economy of shooting, achieved by minimizing the number of set-ups. We slowed up whenever it became really cinematic. The bathroom scene took seven days, whereas the psychiatrist’s scene at the end was all done in one day.

How much did Saul Bass contribute to the picture?

Only the main title, the credits. He asked me if he could do one sequence in Psycho and I said yes. So he did a sequence on paper, little drawings of the detective going up the stairs before he is killed. One day on the picture, I was sick, and I called up and told the assistant to make those shots as Bass had planned them. There were about twenty of them and when I saw them, I said, ‘You can’t use any of them.’ The sequence told his way would indicate that the detective is a menace. He’s not. He is an innocent man, therefore the shot should be innocent. We don’t have to work the audience up. We’ve done that. The mere fact that he’s going up the stairs is enough. Keep it simple. No complications. One shot.

Did you intend any moral implications in the picture?

I don’t think you can take any moral stand because you’re dealing with distorted people. You can’t apply morality to insane persons.

– Alfred Hitchcock: 1963 interview with Peter Bogdanovich at MoMA.org

Imamura: Vengeance is Mine

Vengeance is Mine (Directed by Imamura)

Vengeance Is Mine is an intricately woven depiction of a sociopath's 78-day killing spree, but it is also a strange and profoundly empathetic depiction of individualism and the infinitude of a species terrified of not being able to diagnose itself. Vengeance Is Mine is a sprawling 140-minute work that traverses Japan from top to bottom, moving between time and perspective.

Iwao Enokizu is a vague fictionalisation of real-life serial killer Akira Nishiguchi, played by the great Ken Ogata. When the film opens, Enokizu has been apprehended by authorities and has become a media star following months as Japan's most wanted man. While the film is purportedly narrated through flashbacks as Enokizu is probed by police, Imamura quickly disassociates his narrative from the framing tale, opting for a more freewheeling approach. The film follows Enokizu as he kills, relocates, and takes on new identities. Peripheral characters capture an unusual amount of Imamura's attention, as they are all bound together by the monotony of their lives. 

Ogata's charisma conceals Enokizu's sociopathy, his countenance revealing none of the thoughts that drive his character to murder. Enokizu performs his killings in the manner of a man running errands, hurried but uninvolved in the moment. As the film progresses Enokizu recalls his killings casually. The film explores every conventional explanation for Enokizu's violence, only to end up refusing to endorse any of them. Is he this way as a result of his aversion to conformity? Is he a victim of childhood trauma? A vaguely Freudian collateral damage of the fight between Christianity and Japanese culture. Perhaps, but Imsmura offers no single solution to this mystery.

Imamura Sho ̄hei once said to the poet Sugiyama Heiichi that he wanted to ‘make messy, really human, Japanese, unsettling films’. His obsessive and visually intricate explorations of what he has termed ‘the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure on which the reality of daily Japanese life supports itself’ (17) certainly propose a provocative association between the unreliable nature of ordinary cinematic representation and the insecurities behind conventional Japanese social organisation. This chapter will argue that the distinctively interwoven relationship between the visual and the social in Imamura’s cinema is especially evident in the case of one of his greatest commercial successes, Vengeance is Mine (Fukush ̄u suru wa ware ni ari, 1979 – hereafter Vengeance).

Vengeance, which came at an important turning point in the director’s career, may at first glance seem simply to be a retrospective investigative drama about a notorious Japanese serial killer during the 1960s, but the fluctuating geography of the film’s narration, as well as its unsettling non-chronological structure, point to a particular concern with temporal and spatial fluidity. This interest in the instability of visual and social surfaces, characterised also by the constantly shifting identity of the murderous protagonist, may be seen as a central component of the wider disturbing claims about Japanese national history and culture that Imamura engages with so compellingly in this key film of the 1970s.

Imamura himself has played a leading role in the shifting fortunes of the Japanese film industry from the beginning of his career as an assistant director to Ozu Yasujiro ̄ on such films as Tokyo Story (T ̄oky ̄o monogatari, 1953) up to, most recently, his work on the Japanese related segment of the international compilation film, 11’09’01 – September 11. After writing and directing several plays while at Waseda University in Tokyo, Imamura passed an examination to join Sho ̄chiku studios as an assistant in 1951. There, along with Ozu, he also collaborated with the likes of Kobayashi Masaki and Nomura Yoshitaro ̄. Imamura soon distanced himself from Ozu’s rigid screen direction and precise framing of actors preferring to work with the satirical comic director Kawashima Yu ̄zo ̄ with whom he moved to Nikkatsu in 1955. He later published a critical biography of his mentor, Sayonara dake ga jinsei-da [Life is But Farewell] (1969) – a title which resonates strikingly with the concerns of Vengeance.

What Imamura saw as Kawashima’s deep aversion to authority and hypocrisy is certainly visible in his early work such as Stolen Desire (Nusumareta yokujo ̄, 1958) – his debut film – and Pigs and Battleships (Buta to gunkan, 1961). With The Insect Woman (Nippon konchu ̄ ki, 1963) the director also began to elaborate on his favoured depiction of the vital and tenacious ‘Imamura woman’ embodied in Vengeance by Kiyokawa Nijiko who plays the mother of the innkeeper, Asano Haru (Ogawa Mayumi). Imamura’s interest in unearthing the more irrational elements repressed in conventional modern-day Japan has been a dominant theme in his subsequent filmography. It has also led to an ongoing investigation of the relationship between documentary and fictional film practice that is strongly visible in Vengeance along with a keen interest in the observational ethics underlying the ethnographic impulse. His radical investigative film, A Man Vanishes (Ningen jo ̄hatsu, 1967), for example, explicitly drew attention to the artifice behind the conventions of Japanese social representation, and the revealing literal translation of his 1966 film, Jinruigaku nyu ̄mon, known in English as The Pornographers, is ‘An Introduction to Anthropology’. As Imamura himself says, ‘In my work people take centre stage . . . There are no shots which do not contain human action . . . I want to capture the smallest action, the finest nuance, the most intimate psychological expression because filmmakers must concern themselves with more than facades’.

Vengeance represented Imamura’s return to the dramatic form at a time when his own career was in flux. During much of the 1970s, Imamura had renounced fiction altogether, partly as a result of the financial losses suffered by Nikkatsu after The Profound Desire of the Gods (Kamigami no fukai yokubo ̄, 1968) and partly from his professed frustration with working with actors, a turn towards television documentary production and his involvement in the foundation of the Yokohama Academy of Broadcasting and Film in 1975. (Now called the Japan Academy of Visual Arts and based in Kawasaki, the school’s graduates include Miike Takashi.) Although other directors such as Fukasaku Kinji had originally wanted to tackle the property, Vengeance eventually led to the reunion between Imamura and Sho ̄chiku. The studio was by now, of course, much changed in comparison to the more structured production regime of the 1950s.

The film was based on the best-selling prize-winning novel by Saki Ryu ̄zo ̄ that fictionalised the real-life story of the serial killer Nishiguchi Akira which had gripped Japan during the latter part of 1963. Born, unusually, into a Catholic family in the hot spring resort of Beppu in Northern Kyu ̄shu ̄, Nishiguchi had killed an employee of Japan’s nationalised tobacco company and his driver in October that year, then stolen money and travelled as far north as Hokkaido ̄ in disguise while often swindling further funds. He subsequently killed a mother and daughter in an inn in Hamamatsu before murdering an elderly lawyer in Tokyo. The killer was finally apprehended, but only after his face had featured on more than half a million ‘wanted posters’ around the nation. He was hanged in 1970.

Saki had converted Nishiguchi’s name to Enokizu Iwao. Although his book had been written after careful research using classified police files, Imamura went further and uncovered new documentary elements worthy of dramatic development. In a manner typical of much of his practice, he also worked in an intensive collaborative fashion during the gestation of the final shooting script. Ikehata Shunsaku was employed as an assistant to the main scriptwriter, Baba Masaru, and all three worked on an initial temporal structure before Baba and Ikehata wrote the first draft, followed by a second written only by Imamura, a third set of further revisions between Baba and Imamura and then a definitive fourth version devised solely by the director.

This high degree of preparation relates to the fact that Imamura rarely changes his scripts during rehearsals and shooting. By this stage, he prefers to concentrate instead on the visuals, especially in relation to the direction of actors and the construction of spatial relations within the screen frame. Individual scenes are therefore first closely plotted with his cast. This is usually an arduous process. Ken Ogata, who plays Enokizu in Vengeance, recalls, for instance, that ‘in the course of producing a scene [in the film], and to further pursue the latent power required to make the scene all the more strongly appealing, every actor and staff [member was] required to be physically and mentally tough, stubborn and [perseverant]’. According to Imamura’s long-standing colleague Kitamura Kazuo, who plays the former husband of Asano Haru (Ogawa Mayumi) in the film, the director also spends a lot of time getting the measure of the specific district in which he shoots. The acute sense of place in Vengeance is certainly vital to the film’s distinctive emotional timbre as well as its obvious concern with the representation of regional and national identity. In another example of his collaborative method, Imamura then works closely on image construction with his Director of Photography – on Vengeance he devised the framings with his long-standing cinematographer Himeda Shinsaku – before filming using a high shooting ratio. This relates to the extended period usually required by Imamura for editing, something especially important in this film in particular given its intricate mosaic of different, but also inter-related, temporalities and locations.

Vengeance can thus, in fact, be seen as a carefully designed production despite Imamura’s professed predilection for ‘messy’ cinema. It begins with a forlorn high-angle long shot of a police cavalcade driving through the mountains in the sleet. A sequence of yellow lights indicates the progression of the cars across the empty wintry terrain and the camera pans slowly to the right to keep them in view. This isolation of a single colour element – it is frequently yellow – is a recurring aspect of the overall design of the film’s mise-en-scène. We cut dramatically to a low-angle close-up at a bend in the road which takes in just the headlights and radiator grilles of the passing vehicles before cutting again to a full-frame windscreen shot taken from outside the car which, we soon learn, contains Enokizu and the police officers who have arrested him. This is not yet obvious, however, and the fact that the camera gazes through the glass for some time heightens a sense of the scrutiny of a secondary visual surface within the texture of the film that is demonstrably resistant to clear explanation.

In just three stages, therefore, Imamura and his collaborators have established a particular regime of looking which will be emblematic of the film as a whole. Yann Lardeau has argued that the blurring of documentary and fictional film practice in Imamura’s work can best be characterised ‘not by the cinematographic material that is utilized, but by the quality of the look’. What does this look consist of here? First, there is a sense of detachment which is evoked by the issue of reduced vision. Second, there is a play between distance and proximity and then, finally, especially when we actually move inside the car, there is an inter-relationship of internal and external fields of observation. It is this shift between either hikisoto (from the outside) or hikiuchi (from the inside) that Imamura has suggested to Donald Richie is a key characteristic of his general cinematic principles. ‘A lot of the decision depends upon the way the set is made, but a lot of it is psychological as well’, he says. ‘I always have to think of who is seeing this, who is doing the viewing. And putting the camera outside and letting it peer in gives a kind of intimacy that no other shot can’.

– Excerpt from Unsettled Visions Imamura Sho ̄hei’s Vengeance is Mine (1979) Alastair Phillips Japanese Cinema: Texts and Contexts.

Akira Kurosawa: On Screenwriting

Red Beard (Directed by Akira Kurosawa)

In October 1990, Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez visited Tokyo during the shooting of Akira Kurosawa’s penultimate feature, Rhapsody in August. García Márquez, who spent some years in Bogota as a film critic before penning landmark novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, spoke with Kurosawa for several hours on a number of subjects. In the following extract Kurosawa discusses how he approaches the task of writing a script:

Gabriel García Márquez: I don’t want this conversation between friends to seem like a press interview, but I just have this great curiosity to know a great many other things about you and your work. To begin with, I am interested to know how you write your scripts. First, because I am myself a scriptwriter. And second, because you have made stupendous adaptations of great literary works, and I have many doubts about the adaptations that have been made or could be made of mine.

Akira Kurosawa: When I conceive an original idea that I wish to turn into a script, I lock myself up in a hotel with paper and pencil. At that point I have a general idea of the plot, and I know more or less how it is going to end. If I don’t know what scene to begin with, I follow the stream of the ideas that spring up naturally.

García Márquez: Is the first thing that comes to your mind an idea or an image?

Kurosawa: I can’t explain it very well, but I think it all begins with several scattered images. By contrast, I know that scriptwriters here in Japan first create an overall view of the script, organizing it by scenes, and after systematizing the plot they begin to write. But I don’t think that is the right way to do it, since we are not God.

García Márquez: Has your method also been that intuitive when you have adapted Shakespeare or Gorky or Dostoevsky?

Kurosawa: Directors who make films halfway may not realize that it is very difficult to convey literary images to the audience through cinematic images. For instance, in adapting a detective novel in which a body was found next to the railroad tracks, a young director insisted that a certain spot corresponded perfectly with the one in the book. ‘You are wrong,’ I said. ‘The problem is that you have already read the novel and you know that a body was found next to the tracks. But for the people who have not read it there is nothing special about the place.’ That young director was captivated by the magical power of literature without realizing that cinematic images must be expressed in a different way.

García Márquez: Can you remember any image from real life that you consider impossible to express on film?

Kurosawa: Yes. That of a mining town named Ilidachi, where I worked as an assistant director when I was very young. The director had declared at first glance that the atmosphere was magnificent and strange, and that’s the reason we filmed it. But the images showed only a run-of-the-mill town, for they were missing something that was known to us: that the working conditions in (the town) are very dangerous, and that the women and children of the miners live in eternal fear for their safety. When one looks at the village one confuses the landscape with that feeling, and one perceives it as stranger than it actually is. But the camera does not see it with the same eyes.

García Márquez: The truth is that I know very few novelists who have been satisfied with the adaptation of their books for the screen. What experience have you had with your adaptations?

Kurosawa: Allow me, first, a question: Did you see my film Red Beard?

García Márquez: I have seen it six times in 20 years and I talked about it to my children almost every day until they were able to see it. So not only is it the one among your films best liked by my family and me, but also one of my favorites in the whole history of cinema.

Kurosawa: Red Beard constitutes a point of reference in my evolution. All of my films which precede it are different from the succeeding ones. It was the end of one stage and the beginning of another.

García Márquez: That is obvious. Furthermore, within the same film there are two scenes that are extreme in relation to the totality of your work, and they are both unforgettable; one is the praying mantis episode, and the other is the karate fight in the hospital courtyard.

Kurosawa: Yes, but what I wanted to tell you is that the author of the book, Shuguro Yamamoto, had always opposed having his novels made into films. He made an exception with Red Beard because I persisted with merciless obstinacy until I succeeded. Yet, when he had finished viewing the film he turned to look at me and said: ‘Well it’s more interesting than my novel.’

García Márquez: Why did he like it so much, I wonder?

Kurosawa: Because he had a clear awareness of the inherent characteristics of cinema. The only thing he requested of me was that I be very careful with the protagonist, a complete failure of a woman, as he saw her. But the curious thing is that the idea of a failed woman was not explicit in his novel.

García Márquez: Perhaps he thought it was. It is something that often happens to us novelists.

Kurosawa: So it is. In fact, upon seeing the films based on their books, some writers say: ‘That part of my novel is well portrayed.’ But they are actually referring to something that was added by the director. I understand what they are saying, because they may see clearly expressed on the screen, by sheer intuition on the part of the director, something they had meant to write but had not been able to.

García Márquez: It is a known fact: ‘Poets are mixers of poisons.’ But, to come back to your current film, will the typhoon be the most difficult thing to film?

Kurosawa: No. The most difficult thing was to work with the animals. Water serpents, rose-eating ants. Domesticated snakes are too accustomed to people, they don’t flee instinctively, and they behave like eels. The solution was to capture a huge wild snake, which kept trying with all its might to escape and was truly frightening. So it played its role very well. As for the ants, it was a question of getting them to climb up a rosebush in single file until they reached a rose. They were reluctant for a long time, until we made a trail of honey on the stem, and the ants climbed up. Actually, we had many difficulties, but it was worth it, because I learned a great deal about them.

García Márquez: Yes, so I’ve noticed. But what kind of film is this that is as likely to have problems with ants as with typhoons? What is the plot?

Kurosawa: It is very difficult to summarize in a few words.

García Márquez: Does somebody kill somebody?

Kurosawa: No. It’s simply about an old woman from Nagasaki who survived the atomic bomb and whose grandchildren went to visit her last summer. I have not filmed shockingly realistic scenes which would prove to be unbearable and yet would not explain in and of themselves the horror of the drama. What I would like to convey is the type of wounds the atomic bomb left in the heart of our people, and how they gradually began to heal. I remember the day of the bombing clearly, and even now I still can’t believe that it could have happened in the real world. But the worst part is that the Japanese have already cast it into oblivion.

– Extract from: García Márquez / Kurosawa (via kino-obscura.com).
Full article here