Martin Scorsese: Violence and Sin

Mean Streets (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

‘You don’t make up for your sins in church – you do it in the streets.’


Inspired by Scorsese’s own experiences of growing up in Little Italy around small-time mobsters and young hoods, Mean Streets tells the story of Charlie (Harvey Keitel), a young debt collector for his gangster uncle. His ambitions to rise in the family business are hampered by his friendship with the self-destructive Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), and his relationship with his cousin Teresa (Amy Robinson) who rejects his background of Catholic guilt and street machismo. 

Less a crime film than a character study and homage to the streets of New York’s Little Italy, Mean Streets is not strictly autobiographical but in Scorsese’s words, ‘was an attempt to put myself and my old friends on the screen, to show how we lived, what life was like in Little Italy. It was really an anthropological or a sociological tract.’ 

After his feature debut with Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967) – originally a film-school project inspired by John Cassavetes’ Shadows – Scorsese found work in Hollywood as an editor before being hired by Roger Corman to direct Boxcar Bertha (1972), a low budget genre picture set during the American depression. 

Corman then offered Scorsese another low-budget exploitation project when Scorsese’s mentor John Cassavetes urged the young director to make something more personal instead. Scorsese mentioned a script he was working on titled Season of the Witch, a sequel to Who’s That Knocking at My Door, that needed a rewrite. 

The script developed into Mean Streets and was eventually filmed in 27 days mostly in Los Angeles, where it was easier to get permits and shoot with a non-unionized crew.  Energetic, inventive and deeply personal, it is the first recognisably mature Martin Scorsese film. It opened to critical acclaim and established the careers of De Niro and Keitel and brought Scorsese to the attention of Hollywood.

In the following extract from his book Conversations with Scorsese, Richard Schickel discusses with Scorsese the events behind the making of Mean Streets: 

RS: I have to tell you: Of all your movies Mean Streets remains the hardest one for me to come to grips with.

      

MS: It’s an aggressive film. I didn’t think anybody was really going to see the film. Jonathan Taplin produced it. A young man named E. Lee Perry gave us the money, and I just thought it was going to be a film that ultimately might be on a shelf. But we thought it was a pretty accurate portrayal of that way of life—not on the upper levels, like The Godfather, but on the street level, what I knew and how I lived.

But it’s tough: People would get up in the middle, saying of it, ‘Please stop the screening.’ And walk out. ‘I hate pictures like this,’ they would say.

RS: Harvey, on the one hand, seems to want to be with these tough guys, he wants to be as tough as they are. He is as tough as they are, in a way. At the same time, he’s always going back to the church—there are those wonderful shots of him in the church. And the church is so beautiful and, as you said before, peaceful. It seems to me he’s projecting the conflict you felt.

      

MS: After about six years of working on the script and story, that’s what I channeled into it.  I had three different groups of friends. One group went to Fordham, and are now lawyers and bank presidents—good guys who made good lives for themselves. I had another friend who was more the intellectual of the group, and a loner, and I’d go with him to see Broadway plays. And then I had another couple of guys who were more street toughs. I was split among the three. When I went to NYU, in 1960, when I walked six blocks down Houston Street, it was like going to Mars. I had seen movies like Twelve Angry Men, showing the American process, and I was living with people who were not part of that.

People complain about my depiction of Italian Americans. But I can’t help them with that. I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s my perception of what I know. There are guys, as I say, who are upstanding members of the community. They’re doing fine. There are guys who are out of town, who can’t come back. There are guys who are dead. I was in the middle of it. In a way, I was trying to understand how one should behave in life. What is the moral code? What is right, and what’s wrong?

      

RS: Harvey’s character has a little bit of you and a little bit of your father in him, doesn’t he?

      

MS: Well, Harvey’s character is named after my father, Charlie, who is trying to live morally in a world that’s not moral, in a world that’s primal. But there are two things going on. There’s his relationship with his uncle, in which he can be elevated to a certain extent in that community. And I had him going to college at the same time, though he doesn’t have enough in him yet to utilize the American opportunity education provides to get the hell out of there. But he can, because he is generally a decent guy, work with his uncle and make a good living, and have a sense of dignity in that world.

He’s not a street tough. I mean, he hangs with them. But he tries to bring reason to all of this. And, ultimately, because of his relationship with Johnny and his girlfriend, Teresa [who is an epileptic], his chances are destroyed completely. He should have been killed, because he has nowhere to go. There’s no way his uncle could work with him now.

He’s messed up because he has this sense of love for the both of them. And he has to leave town and go to Texas or Florida or somewhere.

His love for the both of them, for Johnny and Teresa, is interesting, because for me it has religious implications, in that, for whatever reasons, this guy is just filled with guilt. Why he’s filled with guilt, that’s something else. There’s a kind of deep curiosity in him. He’s not part of a world in which he can go off into the desert, let’s say, and be a monk and a hermit: he’s got to deal in a rough world, a primitive world, a savage world. Can you still be a good person? Can good still happen? I know there’s no justice, but can it be worked out? And so that, along with his own feelings about leading a spiritual life, he calls down upon himself a kind of suffering.

RS: Is that what the girl represents—loss as a form of...

      

MS: To a certain extent. But mainly it’s Johnny. Because he says in the bar, Here comes my penance. Ultimately, I think Johnny senses something. Because at the end of the picture he says to Harvey, You’re doing it for you, not for me. So that you can feel better spiritually.

But he’s caught. He’s caught. In that world, they’re not dealing on the spiritual level. It’s fate. He has transgressed, and he’s going to have to pay for it.

      

RS: I don’t understand why the uncle is so dead set against the girl, who’s perfectly nice—

      

MS: She wants to move out. She wants to move out of the neighborhood. She’s different. She’s a troublemaker. She threatens the value of the family: to stay together and support each other.

RS: Let’s talk about De Niro. He comes on—

      

MS: —and he just inhabits the role.

      

RS: It is certainly the beginning of the Jake LaMotta...

      

MS: Yeah, it is. It’s the same picture, really.

      

RS: The main thing, I think, is that Johnny has no sense of consequence. He has no sense of being able to look ahead.

      

MS: Why should he look ahead? He’s got no place to go. He doesn’t have the education. He doesn’t have the temperament. And he acts out against these people, knowing to a certain extent that his youth will help him. He is all anarchy at that point.

He says, You want to stick with me, you’re coming down with me. It’s not just about how much you love me, and how much you want to take care of me. There’s a lot going on with you. You don’t even know what the hell you want out of life, he tells Harvey, in effect.

I thought what was going on between Harvey and Bob was great in those three and a half weeks of shooting. They understood that, ultimately, the relationship is based on loving each other, but that one was getting more out of it than the other. It was something that, in Charlie’s mind, was a more spiritual thing. But they’re all of them damned at the end. None of them die, which is worse, because they might as well die. The worst thing that could be—and it happens to all the characters at the end of Mean Streets—is that they wind up humiliated, not killed. Humiliated.

And so it was very real. In Mean Streets, the shooting in the car at the end was based on something I experienced. I was at NYU when it happened. I got out of a car with a friend of mine only a half hour before a shooting like that occurred. On the weekends I’d hang out with my friends—at after-​hours clubs, the backs of tenements, that sort of stuff. This kid had a car, and he was going around for a ride. He was a part-​time cop, had a gun. And so we went with him in the car a few times.

And then on Elizabeth Street one night at about two in the morning, we realized he was acting with bravado, in a way that we pulled back from. So we told him we were going to go home. So, all right, he drops us off. On Elizabeth Street you had cars parked on both sides. And he’s driving down the block. And there’s a red light, and there’s a car in front of him. And the red light changes to green, and the car doesn’t move. A guy comes over and starts talking with the driver in the first car. Our friend blows his horn. The car in front of him doesn’t move. The guys are talking. He blows his horn again. The guys continue talking. He gets out, walks up to them, he takes his gun out or his badge. He says, ‘I’m a cop. Move this car.’ The guy says, ‘All right.’ He moves the car.

The next morning, we heard our guy was driving on Astor Place. He looked over at a car next to him and the people in that car started firing shots into his car. There was another kid in the car who got shot in the eye. And it was because he talked to the wrong people the wrong way.

And that became something that was very important to me and my friend, who had left the car an hour or two earlier. Because we could have been killed. Mean Streets had to be made because I was in the car that night. I went backwards from that. How the hell did he get into a situation like that? We didn’t even know the guys. And I said to myself, That’s the story to tell.

It made you stop and think—the kind of world we’re in, the society we’re in. So, anyway, that was a major moment in my life, and that’s what Mean Streets comes out of. And it has to explode like that. I’ve seen it happen, a lot of times. It’s just the way things work. So that’s why the chaos is there. I was almost a victim of it. Another friend of mine was killed, taken out because he was a wild cannon. But by that point, I was moving to California, you know.

You get a touch of that sort of thing in Goodfellas—the poor kid who gets shot first in the foot and then in the chest. When the kid is shot in the foot, why the hell does he come back the next week? Why? Because he has no place to go. Can’t get on a plane. He doesn’t know anybody. He doesn’t have the education. And it was just one of those things. He came back. He came back and he said one word too many. You know? And that was it. It happens.

       

RS: One other thing: Right here at the beginning of your career the violence seems to me so characteristic of what we’d see later. It just occurs. There’s not a lot of motivation. It almost comes out of nowhere.

      

MS: Well, that’s the way it was. That’s the world I was in. The violence is always in the background. I’d go into a place, even in a movie theater, I always had my antennae out all the way, because I had to watch if somebody said something wrong to somebody else. Some complain that the films denigrate Italian Americans. But I’m just telling it from my perspective. That doesn’t mean that other friends of mine see it that way. But my experience is that there are certain groups of people who are aligned with certain families. I didn’t know they were called families at the time, but there were certain people with power, and if somebody hits somebody, or does something, not just on the street level, not just kids, the settling up is done, usually, in the old way, between the different groups. Lives were run that way. It’s a very tough way of living.

RS: Is that violence explicable if you really, really connect it to the Mob? And it’s only to somebody like me that the violence seems almost totally inexplicable?

      

MS: I don’t want to seem to contradict what I said before. But, no, at least in this world, it’s always explicable. People criticized the film for pointless violence. I said, No, there’s no such thing as pointless violence. It comes from something. In that world we have to be very careful as to who insulted whom, who brushed by another, who said something a little in a nasty way. In Goodfellas, where Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta are playing a game, and joking around, and all of a sudden Pesci is saying, Why do you say I’m funny? Well, says Ray, because you tell a funny story. Do you think I’m a clown? No, I didn’t say you’re a clown. What did you mean then? And somebody starts to speak—No, he’s a big boy, he can talk for himself. And it changes on a dime. You could be killed. You could get into a fight, not be killed, but get beaten up pretty badly if you didn’t know how to handle yourself.

I mean, there was always tension. None of this business of the happy immigrants jumping and dancing and doing tarantellas. It’s Los Olvidados. It’s Journey to the End of the Night by Céline. That is the closest of anything I ever read to the reality of the people in those Lower East Side buildings.

    

RS: So all of that fed into Mean Streets?

      

MS: Mean Streets was based on myself and a couple of friends I had, but particularly two guys. One of them thinks the Johnny Boy character is really about him, and in a way it was, but not fully. He no longer lives in New York, but he always felt angry about that.

After my father died, I realized what the hell the picture really was about: my father and that brother of his who we’ve talked about; a lot of money that was owed, a lot of sit-​downs. Every night I’d hear the drama. For twenty, twenty-​five years, that’s all I heard. About what’s right and wrong and you’re in a jungle. It had to do with the dignity of the name, and respect—walking a tightrope of respect, not being a wiseguy. Mean Streets was about him and my uncle, but I couldn’t verbalize it until after ’93 or ’94, when it really hit home.

- Extracted from ‘Richard Schickel: Conversations with Scorsese’ Alfred Knopf, New York, 2011.  

An Actor’s Revenge and a Director’s Triumph

An Actor’s Revenge (Directed by Kon Ichikawa)

Kon Ichikawa is likely the least recognised and the least well understood among Japanese filmmakers who garner worldwide respect. The first of his pictures to gain worldwide distribution was The Burmese Harp (1956), which depicted the colourful native music of Burma. In 1959, Fires on the Plain, a moving World War II drama, also took advantage of this new distribution outlet. Other titles with international distribution in the 1960s were The Key (1959), Alone on the Pacific (1962), and An Actor's Revenge (1963). 

While Ichikawa's films lack the evident integrity of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa, on the surface, their sheer diversity reveals an underlying unity. Although everyone recognises Ichikawa's technical prowess, he has had to labour under more difficult circumstances than the other masters of Japanese film. Several projects (including one of his most renowned, An Actor's Revenge) were placed on him by the studio as a punishment for the financial failure of his more personal efforts. However, he was able to imprint his own personality on many works. Ichikawa categorised his films into "bright" and "dark". 

However, as most critics have emphasised his diversity, it is worth noting those aspects of Ichikawa's filmmaking that appear over again. His visual style was influenced by his early interests in painting and animation training. Ichikawa's use of manga-like storyboards, his preference for site work over studio shoots, and his own creation of sets, as well as his talents in makeup artistry, composing soundtracks, and cinematography. The approach to absolute control is similar to that of the cartoonist, and he made his debut in the cinema industry in 1933 as an assistant animator. One may see the influence of cartoons and painting in his career in the artificial staging used in such films as Ten Dark Women (1961) and An Actor's Revenge, where the style of film noir is heightened to mimic manga.

An Actor’s Revenge is set in the rarified realm of nineteenth-century kabuki theatre and chronicles a female impersonator's quest to revenge his parents' murders at the hands of a trio of unscrupulous men. Ichikawa subverts melodramatic norms, bringing the hero's wounded psyche to life in startling widescreen arrangements saturated with vivid colour, pop-art inspirations, and painstaking choreography. Anchored by a beautifully androgynous performance by Kazuo Hasegawa repeating a part he portrayed on-screen three decades previously, An Actor's Revenge is a stunning investigation of how art's illusions collide with reality. 

When we encounter Yukinojo for the first time, his group has travelled from Osaka to perform on the Edo stage. From the balcony, he overhears two of his three intended targets. Later, the emotional actor confides in his mentor, Kikunojo (Chusha Ichikawa), that he wants to develop a relationship with the men and, rather than just disposing of them, wants to torment them until they go insane and suffer like his parents did. 

Hasegawa also plays a secondary part in the film, as a thief who chooses to assist Yukinojo in obtaining his vengeance, a guy who, as one of the characters comments, looks a lot like Yukinojo. 

The film's aesthetic never settles on one genre. There are sequences where Ichikawa frames them securely with lines of windows and doors, yet others, particularly the ones with no set location, seem to live on an eternal stage, surrounded by floating, enveloping darkness or mist. The use of light is bold and very theatrical even in scenarios that take place outside the theatre. Conversations are often observed by an “audience” of observers. 

The flowing, dream-like story is echoed in the delicate portrayal of Hasegawa as Yukinojo, who seems delicate and dreamy when compared to his villainous portrayal as Yamataro, who is earthier and funny. Yukinojo is like the theatre itself; as he fades away at the end of the play, his audience takes away memories of his performance, which lingers in their minds.

By the time Yukinojo's scheme is realised, An Actor's Revenge has devolved into a terrifying examination of a mind falling apart. Though Ichikawa was known for his active dislike of kabuki, the complex layers of actor and audience relations call attention to their role in both film and theatre. An Actor’s Revenge is more experimental than anything Ichikawa had created before and is attempting much more than a straightforward vengeance story. Rather, An Actor's Revenge is a contemplative look at destiny and the numerous masks we wear in order to get what we want, even if it is something genuinely dreadful.

In the following essay, Michael Sragow elaborates on the role of theatre and performance, in Ichikawa’s film.

An Actor’s Revenge, the English name given to the 1963 Japanese film Yukinojo henge (Yukinojo the Phantom), is the perfect title for a killer blend of cinema and theater. The director, Kon Ichikawa, transforms a standard period revenge plot, rooted in the cross-dressing kabuki theater of the 1830s, into a hypnotic prism that generates fresh colors as he holds each facet to the light. The palette of the film is psychedelic: the opening performance explodes in red, pink, gold, white, and purple. The kabuki proscenium, letterboxed against the darkness, looks wider than widescreen—it’s an incandescent ribbon that tests the limits of the frame. And in Ichikawa’s hands, even the shape of the screen seems changeable. He breaks up the space with exhilarating audacity, whether by adopting an artful version of picture-in-picture or literally spotlighting his characters (in the theater or in the street) or dissolving boundaries so that a snow-blanketed stage stretches out in all directions like a vast Arctic landscape. The story runs the gamut from farce, soap opera, and action-packed chanbara all the way to heart-crushing tragicomedy. The supporting characters cover the emotional spectrum. They can be satirically rapacious and grotesque yet still transfix us with their pathos and terror.

If any movie requires a protean protagonist to pull everything together, it’s this one. Yukinojo (Kazuo Hasegawa) fits the bill. Orphaned at age seven, trained as an onnagata (a male performer of female roles), and schooled in martial arts, Yukinojo has become a star whose soft face and physique belie his physical strength and steel will. His experience and expertise do more than make him a top performer; they also put him in a position to observe Japanese culture and society, high and low, with ruthless, flexible objectivity. As Yukinojo plots vengeance against the three powerful, greedy men who drove his mother and father to suicide, he analyzes their ambitions and sets them at loggerheads. Being an actor and thus déclassé, close to “the people,” he knows how dangerous it is for big shots to wheel and deal in basic commodities like rice as the masses face famine in the turbulent Tenpo era, beset by droughts, fires, and floods. Warehouses become targets for hungry mobs. This movie is an aesthete’s delight that’s also socially aware. As a pickpocket at the theater remarks in one scene, “People spend more when times are hard.”

The film’s cinematic reach stems from the peerless range of Ichikawa, who continues to defy critical categorization a decade after his death in 2008. He made An Actor’s Revenge during his peak period, which began with the antiwar fable The Burmese Harp (1956) and ended with the epic documentary Tokyo Olympiad (1965). Studio executives at Daiei intended to punish the director for his costly techniques on Conflagration (1958), Bonchi (1960), and The Outcast (1962) by saddling him with this assignment. After all, it was a remake of a trilogy made by Teinosuke Kinugasa (1953’s Gate of Hell) between 1934 and ’36; it even showcases the same star, Hasegawa, ostensibly in his three hundredth production. Ichikawa, though, made this old chestnut of a tale bloom. With the help of his preferred screenwriter—his wife, Natto Wada—Ichikawa made the project an excuse to go all-in creatively, with a whirling narrative and eye-popping beauty. His virtuoso moviemaking melds stage magic and the uncanny while exploring psychological and gender role-playing in a time of chaos.

Ichikawa and Wada’s storytelling has an ultramodern briskness and edge. As the main attraction of the kabuki company, Yukinojo, born in Nagasaki and raised in Osaka, conquers Edo (later renamed Tokyo) on the troupe’s first appearance in the capital city. The movie begins on opening night, which draws two of the bad guys to the box seats: Kawaguchiya (Saburo Date), an ex-clerk, now an ambitious trader; and Sansai Dobe (Ganjiro Nakamura, who had recently starred in Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds and The End of Summer), formerly a Nagasaki magistrate, now a member of the shogun’s retinue. (The shogun, Japan’s military ruler, controlled the country’s entire feudal structure and government, up to and including the mikado, or emperor.) Dobe’s daughter, Lady Namiji, the shogun’s favorite concubine—played by Ayako Wakao, who had appeared in Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1956 swan song Street of Shame and alongside Nakamura a few years later in Floating Weeds—also attends the show, and instantly falls for Yukinojo’s peculiar masculine-feminine charms. None of them knows Yukinojo’s true identity. Since the onnagata wears women’s clothes and subtle makeup even during his downtime, it’s unlikely that the men will recognize him as the boy they orphaned back in Nagasaki. Yukinojo, on the other hand, knows all about them, as well as the third villain, Hiromiya (Eijiro Yanagi), a rich merchant. Ichikawa reduces the rest of the first-night audience to a blur, then outlines Dobe, Kawaguchiya, and Namiji in the actor’s vision like a group portrait in a rearview mirror. Yukinojo confides in voice-over that he will use Namiji to sunder and destroy Hiromiya and the other two.

Yukinojo’s enemies consider theater people amoral members of the demimonde. Still, it’s a staggering insult when Kawaguchiya offers Yukinojo lifelong protection in exchange for his amorous services. Namiji’s father, Dobe, invites Yukinojo to their home, hoping that she’ll tire of him after one or two visits. All the while, Kawaguchiya bets that if he can put Namiji in his debt by setting up a long-term affair between her and the actor, he can use Namiji’s sway with the shogun to expand his own wealth and prestige. As he leads the way to her room, he thinks he’s the one toying with Yukinojo.

But Yukinojo himself has determined to exploit Namiji’s crush and snake his way into Dobe’s household. Again and again, Yukinojo takes advantage of anyone who underestimates him. Extreme weather has produced catastrophic famines, generating riots against rice merchants who hoard their stores. Realizing that Kawaguchiya has tried to corner the market in rice, Yukinojo advises his third target, Hiromiya, to bring his stash of the grain into the city and unload it. When the unholy trio are weakened and at one another’s throats, Yukinojo pulls off two primal performances: impersonating his dead father for Kawaguchiya, and recreating his mother’s suicide for Dobe, thus shattering his antagonists’ confidence and sanity. Here, the director’s careful preparation and expressionistic masterstrokes of lighting, staging, and composition—for instance, the shadow Yukinojo casts as he plays the part of his mother possesses a life, and death, of its own—take us into a phantom zone as eerie as anything in Shakespeare, Tarkovsky, or the Superman franchise.

What Yukinojo brings down on his foes really is an actor’s revenge, dizzyingly dramatic in its form, surgically perceptive in its manipulation of movers and shakers too vain to recognize their own weaknesses. And Ichikawa’s giddy, experimental movie is itself an auteur’s revenge on his studio, because he treats the timeworn material as an opportunity rather than a punishment. Until the tragic drama of its climax, the movie remains inventive, amusing, antisentimental, and playfully meta about almost everything and everyone, including the downtrodden and even the hero himself. Yukinojo inspires passionate debate among theatergoers who buy cheap tickets for standing room (the equivalent of “the gods” as seen in Children of Paradise or the balcony in The Red Shoes). An Actor’s Revenge doesn’t idealize the popular audience, or the dirt-poor, either. It’s frightening to see desperate men riot for rice; they recall the cutthroat gangs in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, released just a couple of years earlier. Thugs lurk in the film’s plentiful shadows and around each corner of its stylized sets. Yukinojo shocks even himself with his cold-bloodedness. He doesn’t strike immediately: he waits for the moments that will produce maximum emotional torture. He takes actions that result in the death of an innocent woman who genuinely loves him.

Hasegawa’s performance is extraordinary from beginning to end. Yukinojo’s onstage postures and gestures, generally soft and elegant, are sometimes definite and passionate. They’re always expressive, often of two things at once—the emotions he’s acting out and the ones simmering beneath the surface. It’s significant that Hasegawa was in his fifties when he made An Actor’s Revenge. Watching this weathered, stocky man play Yukinojo is a bit like watching the burly Shintaro Katsu play the blind swordsman Zatoichi. His age and bulk humanize a mythic character, putting the focus on Yukinojo’s intensity and powers of suggestion. Ichikawa is so comfortable in the world he has created that he can be irreverent about the time-honored kabuki theater and the tradition of the onnagata. He allows us to laugh at and with the tomboy thief Ohatsu (Fujiko Yamamoto) when she says she finds Yukinojo creepy. But Yukinojo’s art and presence are potent enough to turn skeptics into converts. Hasegawa interprets Yukinojo’s craft as an elevated form of dissembling. In close-ups, we see from his eyes that he has more going on in his head than whatever he’s miming, dancing, or reciting in the moment. Offstage, he wraps himself in his onnagata guise as if in a cloak of privacy. Whenever a former fellow student from martial-arts school, consumed with jealousy, challenges Yukinojo to a duel in the street—something he does repeatedly—Hasegawa snaps into a fierce, magnetic concentration. Ichikawa’s focus on these galvanizing transformations stokes the film as much as do his nonstop innovation and imagistic dazzle.

In the volatile culture of the film’s setting, the ambiguity of Yukinojo’s gender is an asset. His ability to put a man’s muscle behind an onnagata’s demure composure spellbinds the second female lead, Ohatsu. Why wouldn’t it? Most males she sees are either callow youths or vicious bastards. Ironically, Ohatsu plays the reckless seducer with Yukinojo, while Namiji, the courtesan, acts like a blushing ingenue with him. Yukinojo’s sake-drinking sessions with Namiji are so tender they might be called love scenes. Both clad in elegant kimonos in different shades of purple, the two sip from tiny silver cups and embrace cheek to cheek, as the strings on the soundtrack play a bittersweet romantic theme that would suit one of Sirk’s, Minnelli’s, or Hitchcock’s melodramas. (The gleefully eclectic score also includes an amped-up version of traditional kabuki music, and jazzy interludes and staccato riffs for ruminative moments and action scenes.) Yukinojo doesn’t take an aggressive, conventionally masculine role when he woos Namiji. He’s modest, at times coquettish. And Namiji, though sensitive and gentle, is no shrinking violet. Ichikawa cuts away just after they press their bodies together as if ready to make love.

The director establishes their apparent emotional parity but never lets us forget that Yukinojo controls the power dynamic with his secret agenda. As a revenge artist, the actor has chosen the ideal path to annihilating her father: Dobe’s life will be hell without the apple of his eye and his sole source of power at court. But Namiji gets to “Yuki,” as she calls him, and to the audience, too, so we understand why the onnagata must seek some sweeping expiation for fatally exploiting her.

Adding to the movie’s gender-role merry-go-round is the general perception around the city’s underworld that Ohatsu, lovely and handy with a gun or knife, isn’t traditionally “feminine” or sympathetic enough to be a desirable mate. The only guy’s guy who can turn Ohatsu’s head is her fellow cutpurse Yamitaro, who operates like an urban Robin Hood without a band of merry men. As he did decades before, Hasegawa plays Yamitaro as well as Yukinojo, and in this part he exudes a gruff, warm charm. It is comical and touching that Yamitaro is attracted to Yukinojo in ways he finds difficult to explain. At the end, he tells Ohatsu that he may give up banditry and girls and beg to become Yukinojo’s assistant. Ichikawa employs the dual casting wittily. It feels organically funny, not at all self-conscious, when Ohatsu tells Yamitaro that, in profile, he resembles Yukinojo.

Remarkably, Ichikawa’s moviemaking wizardry makes this spinning contraption of a film feel all of a piece. Each shot contains something marvelous—such as Yamitaro effortlessly scaling a wall like a figure from a Cocteau fairy tale (Ichikawa adored Cocteau), or Ohatsu popping out from a black nocturnal forest as a royal-blue horizon line streaks across the screen—or something devastating: say, a corpse hanging from a rope like an unstrung marionette. Of course, the film is more than a collection of flourishes. Ichikawa uses classic and contemporary materials to create his own elastic, personal aesthetic.

The filmmaker is perhaps best known today for the tough-minded nostalgia of his 1983 masterpiece The Makioka Sisters. There, he intimately and lyrically evokes the elegiac side of Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel about the fraying of an old Osaka merchant family as it confronts westernization. An Actor’s Revenge does something fundamentally different. It bristles with modernity while miraculously retaining the nuance of an art form that began in the sixteenth century. The director displays an old-time stage, illuminated, as Tanizaki once wrote, “by the meager light of candles and lanterns.” But that’s just a conceit. All the tools in Ichikawa’s studio contribute to his very 1960s light show. At the same time, he treats his star performer lovingly, like a master portrait artist preserving the illusions of gender.

Tanizaki hated the “vulgarity” of kabuki seen in bright Western stage light. (He favored the refinement and simplicity of Noh theater.) For him, the authentic Japanese sensibility rests on an appreciation of darkness. His book-length essay In Praise of Shadows celebrates, among other things, “the mystery of shadows,” “the secrets of shadows,” “the magic of shadows,” and “delight in shadows.” Yet that’s also the basis of the kaleidoscopic, sometimes “vulgar” beauty of An Actor’s Revenge. Working with breathtaking confidence and freedom, Ichikawa shapes both his interior and exterior action so that it always leaps out of darkness. He stages one fight primarily as the clash and clang of a blade and a dagger at night. Steel glints and slashes through the blackness. In another coup de cinéma, two constables try to lasso Yamitaro, and for a moment they snag one of his wrists (or does he grab the rope?). The lasso disappears into the night as if falling down a bottomless well. Shrouded in murk, the constables proceed, hand by hand, along the taut, tingling cable, only to discover that Yamitaro has tied it to a post. All these episodes work visually and viscerally. Ichikawa choreographs camera and actors for maximum punch.

In the movie’s ultimate poetic irony, a benshi (or narrator) tells us that Yukinojo, “the greatest female lead of his age,” the inspiration of so much life-or-death conflict and passion, fades from memory once he gives up the stage. The final shots depict the actor disappearing into the wild flora of a windswept plain. It’s as if Ichikawa is saying, like Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “Our revels now are ended,” his actors “melted into air, into thin air.” The “gorgeous palaces” and “solemn temples”—the enigmas of sexuality and the moral vanities of justice—“dissolve, / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.” The glory of An Actor’s Revenge is its infinite suggestiveness. Ichikawa, like Shakespeare, transforms a revenge saga about playacting into a profound masquerade about man’s, and woman’s, fate.

– An Actor’s Revenge and a Director’s Triumph. By Michael Sragow

For original article see here

Michelangelo Antonioni: ‘My scripts are not formal screenplays’.

Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eclipse (L’Eclisse)

L'Eclisse is a modern masterpiece. It is the last of Antonioni's trilogy pictures providing an uncompromising critique of life in European postwar bourgeois society. Antonioni finds spectacular surroundings for the film's image of a contemporary wasteland in the Rome stock exchange and the Esposizione Universale di Roma (EUR) housing complex — a tract of parched modernist structures situated amongst mostly vacant lots. 

Antonioni contributes his complete range of graphic design capabilities to L'Eclisse. He meticulously positions his characters amid this iconic image of the postwar urban landscape's stiff, off-putting, but enticing geometry. The film's defining image is a massive mushroom-shaped skyscraper that dominates numerous shots. The picture is saturated with the sensation of atomic dread evoked by the tower, making L'Eclisse the strangest of Antonioni's oeuvre. 

The stunning score by Giovanni Fusco adds to the sense of impending doom. The ideological themes of L'Eclisse extend beyond the broad philosophical meditation on the eclipse of humanity in the modern, post-Hiroshima era that appears to be the more obvious reference of the title, despite the fact that he is rarely regarded as an overtly political filmmaker. 

The film's point of view is mostly that of Vittoria (Monica Vitti), whose reaction to events serve as the audience's anchor. Antonioni represents the remaining traces of human feeling and experience via her fear, surprise, delight, and agony. Piero (Alain Delon) and Riccardo (Francisco Rabal), her two lovers, are obnoxious and egotistical. 

Piero is a young manic-depressive stockbroker who works on the floor of the Rome Borsa, a structure built on the foundations of the Hadrian monument. The frenzied, bankrupt rituals of financial capital are depicted here as a temple built for a man regarded as a deity. The postwar Italian economic "miracle" is intertwined with the history of European colonialism, most memorably represented in Vittoria, a translator recovering from the gloomy end phase of an affair with Riccardo, who won't take no for an answer, on her distracted nightly excursions. 

Riccardo can't comprehend why Vittoria would wish to stop things, therefore their parting is shown with a dreadful stillness. In the lengthy, wordless scene that opens the film, Antonioni demonstrates his remarkable skill in demonstrating how dreadfully uncomfortable such moments can be – due primarily to the male need for affirmation, even in the face of an obvious dead-end, amounting to the wasting away of moments of one's life.

‘It seems to me that L’Eclisse is one of the most interesting films of and about the middle of the last century, when humanity was caught between the promise of modernity and the threat of atomic annihilation. This air of paralysis hangs heavily throughout the film and partly defines the once critical term ‘Antonioniennui’ which was used to describe the psychology of his characters in this cycle of films. And yet in spite of its specific historical backdrop and its self-evident modishness in the early 1960s, the film remains a rich and complex portrait of the modern world that still demands and rewards repeat visits.

It is worth quoting David Sin at length on the film.

‘On the surface L’Eclisse is a love story, with its main character Vittoria (Monica Vitti) ending one affair with the writer Riccardo and moving on to a new relationship with the stock market trader Piero (Alain Delon). The setting is Rome – metropolitan, sophisticated, the subject and setting for Fellini’s La Dolce Vita only a couple of years before. We witness a breakup, a new affair, stock market crash, a car crash.

‘The character types and genre elements are all there, and yet the first striking aspect of the film is the deviation from the classic narrative structure of the modern romantic drama. From the very first frame, it sets out to defy conventional expectations and encourage the audience to create meaning from the film in a different way.

‘There are no conventional story signposts, climactic peaks or moments of emotional resonance. It’s as if Antonioni has designed a classic love triangle story and placed it in a time and place where the usual story drivers simply don’t work. He places the actors like static objects into conventional seeming scenes, but the underlying chemistry is missing its catalyst. Every gesture, every declaration of love between Riccardo and Vittoria, or Vittoria and Piero becomes completely artificial when evacuated of all feeling. In this the director is supported by the beautifully blank faces of Monica Vitti and Alain Delon. It’s hard to imagine two other actors who could be better used in this film.’

The following extract is from an interview by the film critic Bert Cardullo with Antonioni in which the director discusses his approach to filmmaking, his ideas for films, and his attitude toward his work.

BC: Do you do a lot of research before you start shooting a picture?

MA: Yes. If I didn’t do so much research for my films, my work would then be a lie. I must always start from more or less scientifically proven data. The biggest danger and temptation of cinema is the boundless possibility it gives movie directors to lie.

BC: When did you first put your eye behind a camera?

MA: “When” is not so important, but what happened at that moment was. The first time I got behind a camera was in a lunatic asylum. I had decided with a group of friends to do a documentary film on mad people. We positioned the camera, got the lamps ready, and disposed the patients around the room. The insane obeyed us with complete abandon, trying very hard not to make mistakes. I was very moved by their behavior, and things were going fine. Finally, I was able to give the order to turn on the lights. And in one second, the room was flooded with light . . .

I have never seen again, on any actor’s face, such an expression of fear, such total panic. For a very brief moment, the patients remained motionless, as if petrified. That lasted literally only a few seconds, followed by a scene really hard to describe. The men and women started having convulsions, then they screamed and rolled on the floor. In one instant, the room turned into a hellish pit. All the mad people were trying to escape from light as if they had been attacked by some prehistoric monster.

We all stood there, completely stunned. The cameraman didn’t even think to stop the camera. Finally, the doctor shouted, “Stop. Cut off the lights!” Then, when the room was dark and silent again, we saw piles of corpses, slightly shaking as if they were going through their final death throes. I have never forgotten that scene, and it is one of the reasons I keep making films.

BC: Research aside, how mentally prepared are you when you arrive on a set to shoot?

MA: Just as an actor, in my view, must arrive on the set in a state of mental virginity, so, too, must I. I force myself not to overintellectualize, and I force myself never to think the night before of the scene I’ll be shooting the next morning. I have a lot of confusion in my head, a real mess—lots of thoughts, lots of ideas, one of which cancels out the other. That’s why I can’t think about what I’m doing. I just do it.

Once on the set, I always spend a half hour alone to let the mood of the set, as well as its lighting, prevail. Then the actors arrive. I look at them. How are they? How do they seem to feel? I ask for rehearsals— a couple, no more—and then shooting starts. It’s while I’m shooting that everything, so to speak, becomes real. After a shot is finished, I frequently continue to shoot the actors, who don’t know that I am doing this. The aftereffects of an emotional scene, it had occurred to me, might have meaning, too, both for the actor and for the psychological progression of his character. Once shooting really stops, sometimes it takes me fifteen minutes of complete silence and solitude to prepare for the next scene. What I still cannot do, however, is concentrate when I feel the eyes of a complete stranger on me, because a stranger always interests me. I want to ask him questions....

BC: Where do you get your ideas for films?

MA: How can I say it? It’s one of my failings that everything I read or see gives me an idea for a film. Fortunately, I can’t do them all. If I could, maybe they would all be very bad. One thing I can say: Until I edit a film of mine, I have no idea myself what it will be about. And perhaps not even then. Perhaps it will only be the reflection of a mood; perhaps the film will have no plot at all in the conventional sense. I depart from my shooting script constantly, so it’s pointless beforehand to release a synop- sis of the film’s action or to discuss its meaning. In any case, my scripts are not formal screenplays but rather dialogue for the actors and a series of notes to the director—myself. When shooting begins, there is invariably a great degree of change. I may film scenes I had no intention of filming, for example, since things suggest themselves on location, and you improvise. Only in the cutting room, when I take the film and start to put it together—only then do I begin to get an idea of what it is all about.

Usually I write the original stories of my films myself, but I never start out with an idea that afterwards turns into a story. Most of the stories which go through my hands in search of form are simply germs which have been breathed in as from the air. If, when the film is finished, it turns out to be saying something, it has happened a posteriori, and that is natural enough. I am a human being, and I am not lacking in perceptions about the people and affairs of this world. If I make the film in all sincerity, then these perceptions will inevitably reveal themselves. However, it is the story which fascinates me most; the images are the medium through which a story can be understood. To be a lover of form for me means being a lover of substance.

BC: Are you ever satisfied with any of your films?

MA: Sometimes I think L’Eclisse is my best work. Other times I like L’Avventura better. The other day I screened La Notte again and thought it was pretty good. But I don’t think Blow-Up is one of my best pictures, and I don’t know why. I guess I am never really satisfied; I amuse myself by experimenting. Even though my experience is deeper now, and technically I am more mature—everything I have to say comes out fluently— I’m not happy after I complete a film. I’m not even happy while I’m shooting it. Again, I don’t know why. Still, I don’t look back, or at least I try not to. These are the best years because they are the only years. You can’t afford to look back; you have to make the best of the present, whatever it may send your way—and however, finally, you may respond.

– Bert Cardullo, Extract from ‘Interview with Antonioni’, Soundings on Cinema.