26Mar07
Torment (1944) marked the official emergence of Ingmar Bergman onto the world cinema stage. Though directed by his renowned compatriot Alf Sjöberg, it was the twenty-four-year-old Bergman’s big break as a screenwriter and, in its themes and preoccupations, is a remarkably precocious precursor to what was to come from this fledgling master. After Bergman had successfully staged one of his plays, The Death of Punch, at the Student Theater in Stockholm, in 1942, he was hired to read scripts for Svensk Filmindustri on a one-year contract. At the same time, fortuitously, Sjöberg—who had made a name for himself on the stage as well as with such films as They Staked Their Lives (1939) and The Heavenly Play (1942)—had been hired by the studio, but executives were having trouble finding a project for him. When Bergman offered his own script to the company, Sjöberg took notice immediately: he had produced several plays with antifascist sentiments at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater, and Torment’s Nazi allegory must have appealed to his own sensibilities.
If the film’s visual flair (mobile camera movements, sinister low angles, noirish chiaroscuro lighting) comes courtesy of Sjöberg—who would later use similar techniques to great effect in his classic adaptation of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1951)—the distinctly rebellious yet world-weary outlook is pure Bergman. Both a scathing critique of formalized education (and, by extension, all forms of established repression) and a mordant romantic melodrama, Torment is infused with the dread that would mark so many of Bergman’s later films. Upon its release, he publicly stated that his inspiration was his own hellish school experiences. This summarily prompted a letter from the headmaster of his old boarding school, chastising him for sullying its reputation. Bergman responded: “I hated school as a principle, as a system, and as an institution. And as such I have definitely not wanted to criticize my own school, but all schools."
19Mar07
In 1945 Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, a canny and gifted tabloid newspaper photographer, did something unprecedented: he assembled some of his best shots, of corpses and fires and arrests and crowds and spectacles, and made them into a book, published in hardcover—this at a time when photography books were still relatively rare, and tabloid photography lay beneath the notice of most people who bought books. It was called Naked City, and it became a minor best seller.
Not long after, Mark Hellinger, a producer and screenwriter who had gotten his start as a newspaper columnist of the sunlight-and-shadows school (think Damon Runyon with an extra dose of schmaltz), was putting together a crime picture in the wake of his success with The Killers (1946), Robert Siodmak’s adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway short story, one of the first postwar pictures to earn the designation “film noir.” He wanted New York City to be the main character, as it had been in his columns, and for the film to partake of a documentary feel, even to be shot on location, something not much done at the time. His chief writer, Martin Wald, brought him a script titled Homicide. Someone, possibly Wald, also brought Hellinger a copy of Weegee’s book, and the script was suddenly retitled The Naked City. Hellinger then hired Weegee as the production’s still photographer.
16Mar07
The Burmese Harp was the forty-one-year-old Ichikawa Kon’s twenty-seventh feature, and the first real landmark in his career. He had entered the film industry as an animator (his first film was a twenty-minute puppet short), but switched to live action the moment he had the chance, fired by his love of films by Yamanaka Sadao and Itami Mansaku, which he’d seen as a young man in the 1930s. Nobody in the industry or the press singled him out as a major talent on the strength of his first twenty-six features, all of them company assignments, although Japan’s smarter critics noticed that Mr. Pu (1954) was an unusually inventive satirical comedy. If anything brightened this journeyman period in Ichikawa’s career, it was his sure and sometimes arresting sense of visual framing and composition; his training as a graphic artist hadn’t gone to waste. But The Burmese Harp (1956) changed everything. It was the last of three films that Ichikawa shot in 1955 for the company Nikkatsu—a brief port of call between his long-term contracts with Toho/Shin-Toho and Daiei—and he lobbied the company hard to make it. “Oh, but I wanted to make that film,” he told Donald Richie ten years later. “That was the first film I really felt I had to make.”
His enthusiasm was vindicated by the film’s national and international success. It was the first Ichikawa film to appear on Kinema junpo magazine’s annual Best Ten list (it ranked fifth) and the first to be shown outside Japan (it won the San Giorgio prize at the 1956 Venice Film Festival and was sold for distribution in many Western countries). This dramatically raised Ichikawa’s profile: the Japanese press began taking him seriously, and film companies allowed him more leeway than before in his choice of projects.
12Mar07
Across an eighty-plus-film career as marred by indifferently rendered studio assignments as it is marked with peerless visual innovations and boldly imagined literary adaptations, director Kon Ichikawa—the unlikeliest of auteurs—has nevertheless long since been acknowledged, alongside Akira Kurosawa, Kinosuke Kinoshita, and Masaki Kobayashi, as one of the preeminent figures in the golden age of postwar, “humanist” Japanese cinema. Not that the playfully perverse and persistently paradoxical Ichikawa would ever have courted such a distinction. Indeed, as he once notably remarked to an admirer, though he remained ever hopeful of locating some evidence of “humanism” in contemporary Japanese society, he had yet to actually find it there.
At once a consummate professional and commercially successful studio team player and an idiosyncratic artist whose bravest films—often displaying a thoroughly odd obsession (to borrow the title of one of his most brilliantly sardonic black comedies) with fusing the brightest and bleakest aspects of human nature—were passionately personal (if not political or polemical) prefigurations of the Japanese new wave, Ichikawa has always had a gift for crystallizing contradictions. This is a man who once insisted that Walt Disney and Pier Paolo Pasolini were his two favorite filmmakers. His awkward if ultimately undeniable status as an auteur depends on an equally paradoxical dynamic: Ichikawa’s most distinctively personal movies aren’t the ones he attempted to shape from his own experiences but those he—and his scenarist-spouse Natto Wada—so boldly adapted from source materials quite famously not his own. Whether he’s starting from a piece of fiction by Yukio Mishima or Junichiro Tanizaki or a monumentally media-managed event like the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Ichikawa’s ability to concretize the emotional quintessence of his material and visualize it on-screen has proved both his most defining and, for his critics, most damning of traits. But while Ichikawa’s detractors have often accused him of covering his lack of intellectual consistency with a surplus of illustrative technique, critic Tadao Sato was quick to elucidate the ways in which the opposite is actually true: “Ichikawa consistently attempts to render visual something metaphysical that is invisible, like the heart or the soul.” The incendiary and extraordinarily brutal Fires on the Plain (1959), one of the central films upon which Ichikawa’s reputation is based, underscores the accuracy of Sato’s assessment: few war films have ever had the courage to wallow so directly in the offal of man’s inhumanity to man, or to render so bleakly and so bluntly the emotional carnage that festers long after the battle’s end.
