Criterion Sunday 226: Onibaba (1964)

An odd slow-burn of a film, pitched somewhere between horror (of which it has elements) and the everyday ordinary tension of living under the fear of war and all its manifestations. It’s really something of a psychological thriller about two women slowly losing their minds under such circumstances, a mother and her daughter-in-law linked by their missing-in-action son/husband. There’s a jazz score and deep visceral high-contrast black-and-white cinematography, evoking a really tangible sense of place, the heat and humidity of the swamplands, the sweat dripping off bodies, and the punishment of death. This is a film which would surely bear rewatching on the big screen.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Kaneto Shindo | Cinematographer Kiyomi Kuroda | Starring Nobuko Otowa, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Kei Sato | Length 102 minutes || Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 9 September 2018

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Criterion Sunday 221: Ikiru (1952)

Clearly one of Kurosawa’s greatest films, it’s also perhaps a little forgotten — possibly not amongst hardened cineastes, but that at least is the feeling I get when talking about Kurosawa with other casual film lovers. Part of this is undoubtedly that it’s not set in the shogun era of samurai and peasants (like, say, Seven Samurai), but rather contemporary Japan. It’s about a humble bureaucrat (played by Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura) who mournfully realises the failure of his life as he gets a cancer diagnosis, and has to deal with that. There’s a hint of Rashomon to the latter half of the film, as people argue at his wake about his lasting achievement — the construction of a children’s playground — but the framing of it, as flashbacks from his funeral, clearly indicate that it is altogether too late in his life. It is, however, poignant and heartbreaking, and feels like a movie that’s not so much depressing in its accounting of a person’s life, as perhaps a little hopeful that some may at least achieve something despite all the obstacles placed in their way.

CRITERION EXTRAS:

• A fairly easygoing documentary (an episode of a TV series, It Is Wonderful to Create, which pops up on most of Criterion’s Kurosawa releases), which uses interviews with surviving members of Kurosawa’s cast and crew to shed light on how he made his films. This one features Miki Odagiri (the young woman who befriends Kanji after his illness is diagnosed, and then finds him a little creepily intense) talking about Kurosawa’s methods of inspiring her performance, as well as screenwriters and technicians. There’s not a huge deal of insight, but it’s pleasant enough.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Akira Kurosawa | Writers Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni | Cinematographer Asakazu Nakai | Starring Takashi Shimura, Miki Odagiri | Length 143 minutes || Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 8 July 2018 (and earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, June 1997)

Criterion Sunday 220: Naked Lunch (1991)

I worry that this is a film for those who like to vaunt the magisterial status of author William S. Burroughs, or who laud the cinematically outré and self-consciously cultish qualities of David Cronenberg as director — and I assume many of the same people will rep for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (Gilliam and/or Thompson) in many of the same ways, or perhaps something out of the filmography of David Lynch. For this is a film about being a writer as well as a habitual user of narcotics, and is made with an attendant kind of insane dream logic that leads to hallucinatory bugs-as-typewriters who speak through anus-like holes and set up complex plots in alternate worlds (the Interzone) that touch as much on Burroughs’ own life (his well-known murder of his spouse for one) as on any kind of verifiable reality. Peter Weller is a capable straight man for this carnivalesque creepshow, which has some of the qualities of Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (maybe I’m thinking of the prosthetics) and a typically Gilliam-esque crowded mise en scène, while of course the spirit of Kafka seems to hover over it all… and if any of these swaggering artistic men do not thrill you, then perhaps this is not the project for you.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer David Cronenberg (based on the novel by William S. Burroughs) | Cinematographer Peter Suschitzky | Starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Roy Scheider | Length 115 minutes || Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Monday 16 July 2018

Criterion Sunday 217: Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953)

Oh sure, yes, it is deliberately paced, as so many Ozu films are, but for all its acclaim (it used to regularly show up on best-ever lists, and I think it still does), it is one of those films that really does deliver. I’m not even personally very good at communicating with my family sometimes, but I still get all up in my feelings whenever I see the way all these grown children act atrociously towards their elderly parents, who are visiting Tokyo from the countryside. Obviously Ozu is, to an extent, commenting on modern society, and we get interstitial shots of trains and built-up urban areas, but none of that is particularly forced, and this works very well too on simply an emotional level — what it means to get older, the responsibilities you continue to have to family, showing respect for the elderly. Only Setsuko Hara’s character (the daughter-in-law) seems to make much of an effort, and the way she radiantly smiles at the camera even when she’s clearly upset just seems to make it all the more poignant.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Yasujiro Ozu | Writers Yasujiro Ozu and Kogo Noda | Cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta | Starring Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara | Length 136 minutes || Seen at Victoria University, Wellington, Monday 27 April 1998 (and earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, April 1997, and most recently on DVD at a friend’s home, London, Sunday 27 May 2018)

Criterion Sunday 207: Erogotoshitachi Yori Jinruigaku Nyumon (The Pornographers, 1966)

This Japanese film about a small-time filth merchant doesn’t actually feature any of what the title suggests (probably for the best) but is instead a sort of odd, madcap series of incidents that hangs together really strangely — although I admit I was a little drowsy when I watched it, which hardly helped me keep it all straight, though I don’t really think it’s interested in straightforward narrative storytelling. It has enough oddity to make it more of a satire, and it probably helps if you know the society to pick up on what’s being skewered.

Criterion Extras: Nothing but a trailer.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Shohei Imamura | Writers Imamura and Koji Numata | Cinematographer Shinsaku Himeda | Starring Shoichi Ozawa | Length 128 minutes || Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 8 April 2018

Criterion Sunday 196: Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

When people think about pretentious French movies, I think this is somehow the Platonic ideal they’re thinking about, an ur-text of reflective voiceover, alienated detachment and pain, the possibility (and impossibility perhaps) of cultural rapprochement following imperialist aggression, opening as it does with the conjoining of bodies under the ash of nuclear fallout. It is, as has been far more eloquently expressed by commentators far more engaged than I am, about the complex interplay of memory and desire, but it is also aggressively modernist in its construction and the way it engages with the viewer, so unlikely to be for all tastes. I first watched it 20 years ago, and I’ll watch it in another 20, and I can only hope to catch up with what it’s doing by then.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Alain Resnais | Writer Marguerite Duras | Cinematographers Michio Takahashi and Sacha Vierny | Starring Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada | Length 90 minutes || Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 11 February 2018 (and earlier, on VHS in Wellington, December 1997)

Criterion Sunday 190: Kumonosu-jo (Throne of Blood, 1957)

The most striking aspect of this (very loose) adaptation of Shakespeare is the mist that swirls about the characters, especially at the start as they ride about, lost, in “Cobweb Forest”, and again at the end with its strange uncanny trees. The costume design, too, is richly detailed, as Kurosawa transposes the story to feudal Japan, with a number of competing warlords seeking to usurp one another’s power and thus Shakespeare’s story doesn’t seem out of place at all, even within Kurosawa’s own oeuvre. Toshiro Mifune has never been more expressive in his facial acting — perhaps too much so at times — and the persistent sense of imminent danger, as well as those atmospheric effects, remain the finest achievements of this adaptation.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Akira Kurosawa | Writers Shinobu Hashimoto, Ryuzo Kikushima, Kurosawa and Hideo Oguni (based on the play Macbeth by William Shakespeare) | Cinematographer Asakazu Nakai | Starring Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada, Takashi Shimura | Length 110 minutes || Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 7 January 2018 (and years earlier on TV)

Criterion Sunday 159: Akahige (Red Beard, 1965)

Undoubtedly one of Kurosawa’s stronger films, the central drama in Red Beard (named for Toshiro Mifune’s defining facial accoutrement, even if the film itself is in black-and-white) isn’t introduced with any big flourishes or self-aggrandising camerawork. The focus remains on the small events, inside a clinic where Mifune’s Dr Niide schools a cocky young intern (Yuzo Kayama as Dr Yasumoto) on what it means to be a compassionate doctor. Yasumoto’s journey towards caring about his fellow people is moved forward by a number of encounters with patients, which unfold slowly without any big setpieces (though Mifune dispatching a town of hooligans is the closest to that), just the riveting human drama of one man’s education. Fundamentally decent.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Akira Kurosawa | Writers Masato Ide, Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa and Hideo Oguni (based on the collection of short stories Akahige shinryotan by Shuguro Yamamoto) | Cinematographer Asakazu Nakai | Starring Toshiro Mifune, Yuzo Kayama | Length 185 minutes || Seen at a friend’s home (DVD), London, Sunday 4 June 2017

Criterion Sunday 155: Tokyo orinpikku (Tokyo Olympiad, 1965)

As far as documentaries about sports go, for all the experience I have of them (which, for the avoidance of doubt, is very little, though I have seen Riefenstahl’s one about Berlin 1936), this documentary on the 1964 Summer Olympics is very good. It has all the techniques we’ve become used to in modern sports coverage, but framed and edited to emphasise the human form, the endurance, the technique, rather than simply who won. There are plenty of beautiful shots, poetic inserts, crowd details and little bits other films wouldn’t bother with — like athletes hammering in their starting blocks, or the sand being levelled in a waterlogged long jump pit, stuff like that. It’s all beautifully done and even three hours passes quickly.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Kon Ichikawa | Writers Natto Wada, Yoshio Shirasaka, Shintaro Tanikawa and Kon Ichikawa | Cinematographers Shigeo Hayashida and Kazuo Miyagawa | Length 169 minutes || Seen at home (DVD), London, Monday 1 May 2017

Criterion Sunday 138: Rashomon (1950)

Though it may be one of those films that’s always on a best-of list somewhere, and therefore has the sense of being a boring dusty old classic, thankfully it’s for many good reasons and none of them involve being bored. Whatever else, it must be one of the most influential movies ever, not least for its audacious structure, moving back and forward in time and presenting overlapping testimonies on a rape/murder, each of which conflict with the others. It’s a film about the power and responsibility of storytelling, and of the infinite variety of interpretation, made by a filmmaker who — more than most others — has utter mastery over narrative exposition in filmic form. Kurosawa really is peerless in this regard; every cut and every scene moves the narrative forward in some way, or develops a theme of the film. The acting is iconic (suitably so) and much has been written about the sun-dappled cinematography. But for all the exegeses and critical plaudits, it stands up as a film which still entertains and educates.

Criterion Extras: Chief among the extras is a documentary called A Testimony as an Image (2012). This is, essentially, a making-of extra, albeit with the benefit of over a half-century of hindsight. The few remaining living crew members who worked on Kurosawa’s film come together to discuss their memories of its creation, so we get plenty about how the script came together (from one of the assistant directors, and a script supervisor), then about the set construction (from one of the lighting people), about that notable cinematography and the challenges of shooting in a dark forest, and about the stresses Kurosawa was under to get the release finished despite setbacks include a studio fire. It’s based around these reminiscences, with a few archival shots and some explanatory text, but these elderly men (and one woman) retain vivid memories and their recollections are worth listening to.

Also on the disc are around 15 minutes of excerpts from a documentary about cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, and a short address to camera by Robert Altman about how all the influences he stole from Kurosawa and from this film in particular. There’s also a halting radio interview with Takashi Shimura from around 1960, which is interesting if not especially enlightening. Donald Richie’s commentary track helps to pull out a lot of the themes, and engages the viewer with an awareness of all that Kurosawa and his team achieve in the film, making it even better and more interesting (I rewatched it with the commentary immediately after the film, and it didn’t get boring at all).

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Akira Kurosawa | Writers Akira Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto (based on short stories “Rashomon” and “Yabu no Naka” [In a Grove] by Ryunosuke Akutagawa) | Cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa | Starring Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyo, Masayuki Mori, Takashi Shimura | Length 88 minutes || Seen at Paramount, Wellington, Wednesday 14 April 1999 (as well as earlier on VHS at home, Wellington, November 1997, and most recently on DVD at a friend’s home, London, Sunday 1 January 2017)