22Aug05
One of the biggest celebrity scandals of the early postwar period erupted when Italian director Roberto Rossellini, who had become world famous with his 1945 neorealist classic Open City, and Ingrid Bergman, the Hollywood star of such wholesome films as The Bells of St. Mary’s—both married to other people—fell madly in love while shooting Stromboli on a remote Italian island, in 1949. Ironically, at the very height of the affair, while Bergman and Rossellini were being condemned on the floor of the United States Senate for crimes against morality, Rossellini was busy making the most overtly religious film of his life.
The Flowers of St. Francis—or, Francesco, giullare di Dio (Francis, God’s Jester), to give it its full title in Italian—is a delicate, fascinating hybrid, a film that is self-consciously, almost militantly, naive, and, as such, something of an anomaly in Rossellini’s body of work. Never again would his films attain the directness, simplicity, even purity that is so gloriously on display here, a work poised between the theological and the historical, between the Rossellini who emerged from neorealism into the full-blown spiritual crisis manifested in The Miracle, Stromboli, and Europa ’51, all set in postwar Italy, and the latter-day director whose abiding interest was in the depiction of history. Those later works often took religious subjects, but unlike in Acts of the Apostles, Augustine of Hippo, and The Messiah, Rossellini in The Flowers of St. Francis is less concerned with creating a portrait of a particular historical figure than he is with exploring the nature of spirituality, specifically, of “Franciscanism” itself and its impact on the medieval world.
22Aug05
When Jean Renoir looked back on Boudu Saved from Drowning from the vantage point of 1967, there were two aspects of the film that stood out in his mind. One, not surprisingly, was the brilliant, idiosyncratic performance of Michel Simon, in the role of Boudu, which led the director to call the film a “free exercise around an actor.” The other was the film’s commendation of loitering as the antidote to efficiency and perfection. These two aspects are not, of course, distinguishable. Our delight in the film today has a lot to do with watching Simon’s eccentric Boudu raise loitering in the city to the level of art.
Renoir’s recollections are an inducement to think of Boudu Saved from Drowning as a spatial story. The film was adapted from a play by the minor boulevardier René Fauchois, but to open up the confinement of the story, Renoir kept just half of the play’s first two acts and invented all of the exteriors for the film’s beginning and ending, when he takes us outside into the Paris summer of 1932. Light filtering through the leaves in a park, women in summer dresses and men with open shirts, boats chug-chugging on the Seine, traffic in the streets, music along a riverbank, and couples in the long grass still play on our senses seventy-five years later. The film’s locations in the city are as instantly recognizable today as they would have been to an audience in 1932. One can still cadge tips in the Bois de Boulogne, wander along the banks of the Seine, past the bouquinistes, or throw oneself into the river from the Pont des Arts—and doubtless make a scene and draw a crowd. There is, however, a somber aspect to the lolling about depicted in the film. This is the period of the Depression in France, which accounts for the indifferent remark by a working-class character on the bridge that, of late, people have been throwing themselves into the Seine with regularity. Simon’s Boudu—who seems to have walked out of the end of Renoir’s La chienne a tramp and into this role a year later—would have been just one of the more than ten thousand clochards living in the city’s parks and streets and under its bridges in the early thirties, ragged figures as iconic as Paris’s most famous cultural and political monuments and a constant reminder of the city’s disparities of wealth and power, education and social class, privilege and place.
22Aug05
Japanese director Masaki Kobayashi came of age in the postwar moment, a time when filmmakers were at the vanguard of dissident expression in that country. Drawing upon a rich history of protest in Japanese cinema, which had fallen dormant during the war and occupation years, filmmakers seized the opportunity to challenge those institutions that remained wedded to the nation’s feudal past. Of this generation of directors, none was as passionate as Kobayashi. Every one of his films, from The Thick-Walled Room (1953) to the feature-length documentary Tokyo Trial (1983) to The Empty Table (1985), is marked by a defiance of tradition and authority, whether feudal or contemporary. Kobayashi found the present to be no more immune to the violation of personal freedoms than the pre-Meiji past, under official feudalism. “In any era, I am critical of authoritarian power,” Kobayashi told me when I interviewed him in Tokyo, during the summer of 1972. “In The Human Condition [1958–61] it took the form of militaristic power; in Harakiri it was feudalism. They pose the same moral conflict in terms of the struggle of the individual against society.”
Like other directors of this period—notably, Akira Kurosawa—Kobayashi often expressed his political dissidence via the jidai-geki, or period film, in which the historical past becomes a surrogate for modern Japan. In Kobayashi’s hands, the jidai-geki exposed the historical roots of contemporary injustice. (Japanese audiences were well schooled in history and could be counted on to connect the critique of the past with abuses in the present.) Harakiri, made in 1962, was, in Kobayashi’s career, the apex of this practice. In the film’s condemnation of the Iyi clan, Kobayashi rejects the notion of individual submission to the group. He condemns, simultaneously, the hierarchical structures that pervaded Japanese political and social life in the 1950s and 1960s, especially the zaibatsu, the giant corporations that recapitulated Japanese feudalism.
