18Sep06
Released in 1973, in the dying days of General Franco’s forty-year dictatorship, The Spirit of the Beehive soon established itself as the consummate masterpiece of Spanish cinema. Yet, strangely, many of the gifted artists who collaborated on Víctor Erice’s first feature, an atmospheric exploration of a child’s experience in a bleak village just after the civil war, have had troubled afterlives. Erice himself, acclaimed by critics as Spain’s greatest auteur, has completed only two features since (The South, another period drama, in 1982, and Quince Tree of the Sun/Dream of Light, a documentary on a painter, in 1983). The career of Luís Cuadrado, the creator of the luminous cinematography, was tragically cut short by blindness. Ana Torrent, the six-year-old star, remains haunted by the role that made her a Spanish icon. In 2003, on the thirtieth anniversary of The Spirit of the Beehive’s release, she posed for the poster for the San Sebastián Film Festival. Re-creating a scene she had shot so many years before, she stood solemn faced on the railway tracks. Erice has said, "When I’ve finished a film, it’s no longer mine—it belongs to the people." Surely few films have had such an enduring effect on both their makers and their audience.
The Spirit of the Beehive was controversial from the start. Although it won the main prize at San Sebastián on its release, the jury’s enthusiasm was not shared by all the public. Some of the audience, restless at the film’s slow pace, even booed. Yet The Spirit of the Beehive is a classic example of one strand of Spanish filmmaking at that time. Like many repressive regimes, Francoism attempted to use cinema to change its negative image abroad and to create the impression that freedom of expression was permitted. By producing some internationally successful "quality" films, the regime also hoped to raise the status of Spanish cinema generally, which was at that time dominated by crude, mainstream comedies. By the early seventies, these policies had led to the production and export of many experimental and even discreetly oppositional films, although, of course, no overtly leftist movies could be made. The gaping holes in the plot of The Spirit of the Beehive and the mysterious motivations of its characters are typical of this "Francoist aesthetic," a term used to describe artistically ambitious movies of the time that made use of fantasy and allegory. These characteristics, which remain so magical to modern audiences, were used in the period as a form of indirect critique.
18Sep06
Never mind that damnation to the fires of Hades is said to be eternal. For some of us, the wait we’ve already endured for a glimpse of hell has been plenty long enough. Director Nobuo Nakagawa’s Hell, that is, otherwise known as Jigoku (1960), the legendary—and for Western audiences, long elusive—genre-busting Japanese masterpiece about the infernal desires that forever tempt us during our mortal existence here on earth and the afterlife agonies awaiting those who succumb. An exact contemporary of (if rather more ideologically obscure than) the first films of the nascent Japanese new wave, Jigoku was released in 1960 and quickly attained the status of “cult classic” in its home country—even as it would remain, for decades thereafter, a wildly rumored about but rarely screened phenomenon in international cine-extremist circles. Today, it is recognized as the cornerstone of extremist-visionary Nakagawa’s long and extraordinary career.
Born from some unholy union of Goethe’s Faust and Genshin’s Ojoyoshu, a tenth-century Buddhist treatise on the various torments of the lower realms, Jigoku was the last in a nine-film string of innovative and deliriously eccentric horror films made by Nakagawa during his 1950s tenure at the genre-driven Shintoho Studios. Overflowing with brackish ponds of bubbling pus, brain-rattling disjunctions of sound and image, and at times almost dauntingly incomprehensible plot twists and eye-assaulting bouts of brutish montage, Jigoku is more than merely a boundary-pummeling classic of the horror genre—it’s as lurid a study of sin without salvation as the silver screen has ever seen. A tale of two male college students—one weak, one evil—who make a sudden detour from the path of righteousness and wind up on the road to hell, Jigoku’s plotline takes off from the same real-life Leopold-Loeb murder case that served as the basis for both Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Richard Fleischer’s Compulsion. But it’s the degree to which Nakagawa uses that familiar narrative framework to fearlessly extend the ero-guro-nansensu (erotic-grotesque-nonsense) ingredients beloved by Japanese filmmakers since the silent heyday of Yasujiro Ozu that preordained the film’s lasting notoriety. Fusing the goriest details of thirteenth-century jigoku-zoshi (hell scroll paintings) with Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s nineteenth-century ukiyo-e illustrations of innocence disemboweled—and climaxing in a centrifugal final blast of berserk, quasi-Butoh theatrics that seems to anticipate the lysergic gyrations of the 1960s’ Living Theatre as much as the flesh-hungry flailings of Night of the Living Dead—Jigoku’s dazzlingly art-directed and emotionally devastating evocation of unstaunchable dread continues to leave even the most stoic of modern moviegoers in a state of stunned dismay.
4Sep06
The great German composer Richard Strauss was conducting his three-hour-plus Der Rosenkavalier when—or so the story goes—he turned to his concertmaster and said, “My, this is a long opera.”
“But maestro,” the man replied, aghast, “you wrote it.”
“Yes,” the imperturbable Strauss answered, “but I never thought I’d have to conduct it.”
In artistic matters, as in everything else, length is relative. Clocking in at three hours and twenty-seven minutes, Seven Samurai was to be the most popular—and longest—film of director Akira Kurosawa’s extensive career, but that didn’t stop it from making people uneasy. In fact, Toho Studios cut fifty minutes before so much as showing the film to American distributors, fearful that no Westerner would have the stamina for its original length. And the New York Times’s august Bosley Crowther did contend that “it is much too long for comfort or for the story it has to tell.” Yet, paradoxically, more than any other kind of cinema, long films done right have the potential to envelope you completely in character and experience.
4Sep06
There’s an old Chinese curse that runs, “May you live in interesting times.” And sixteenth-century Japan was certainly an interesting time, from a dramatic point of view—which is undoubtedly why Akira Kurosawa chose it as Seven Samurai’s setting. But those who lived in that period might well have considered themselves peculiarly accursed, especially if they were unlucky enough to be farmers. “Land tax, forced labor, war, drought . . . The gods want us farmers dead!” lament the villagers in Kurosawa’s film.
From the late twelfth century onwards, Japan was ruled by a shogunate—the shogun being the commander of the Imperial Army—with the emperor reduced to a puppet figure lacking all power or influence. (One emperor became so impoverished that he could survive only by selling samples of his calligraphy.) From time to time, the ruling shogunate clan would be overthrown by another. The Ashikaga shogunate gained power in 1338, but over the next two hundred years, its control steadily dwindled. By the early sixteenth century, the country was racked by incessant civil war, as rival daimyo (local warlords) struggled for supremacy.
4Sep06
The themes, symbolism, and aesthetic forms of Akira Kurosawa’s films owe their origins to the ideas and sensibilities that captured his imagination as a young man. They include Marxism, which caught the attention of the Japanese intelligentsia in the twenties and thirties; classical Russian novels, which mesmerized the country’s cultural elite; impressionist painting, which rocked the contemporary art world; and the sport of kendo, which Kurosawa practiced as a young boy.
In 1928, when Kurosawa was eighteen years old, Japan attacked Manchuria and assassinated the warlord Zhang Zuolin. Society was in turmoil. A year later, the Great Depression struck, and as Marxist thinking carried the day, Kurosawa joined the Proletariat Artists’ League. Though he later renounced his belief in political organizations and actions as effective means to correct social ills, Kurosawa never denied the populist slant of his films. He said it was youthful passion that brought him to join a left-wing organization, but his compassion for the plight of the lower classes and his practice of engaging class differences as dramatic structure are readily discernible in Seven Samurai (1954), Ikiru (1952), High and Low (1963), and Dodes’ka-den (1970).
4Sep06
Federico Fellini was born and brought up in Rimini, Italy, a small seaside town in the province of Emilia-Romagna. Amarcord is a neologism he contrived, which comes closest to the Emiliano-Romagnolo dialect phrase mi ricordo (I remember). Fellini, a great liar, denied this origin, claiming instead that it is a mysterious, cabalistic word, linked to invention rather than memory. Whatever the meaning, amarcord evokes another world: evanescent, unreal, unreachable, impalpable, like an image in the depth of a mirror that can only be attested to for a brief instant before it vanishes, like the images of the cinema.
Amarcord embodies this equivocation between memory and invention, between a world represented (remembered) and a world created (imagined). Amarcord is not memory—or if it is, it is false memory—not fragments of what once was but fragments of what is imagined to have been.
At times in Amarcord, the characters speak directly to a filmmaker (Fellini?), who appears to record the events and actions in the town. There is in the film, as in so many late Fellini works, the figure of a journalist-documentarian-archivist, who reports and comments on the happenings that are seen. But this is false, and rather than rendering the events as true, this device emphasizes their unreality and the artificiality of the representations. As the characters are exaggerated, so too is the documentary, and both become unreal.
4Sep06
I suppose it could be argued that I saw Playtime for the first time in ideal circumstances—as an American tourist in Paris. Yet to argue this would mean overlooking the film’s suggestion that, like it or not, we’re all tourists nowadays—and all Americans in some fashion as well.
It’s a brash hypothesis, arguably somewhat middle-class and rooted in the assumptions of the 1960s—but then again, a great deal of what’s known today as “the sixties” can be traced back to the vision and activity of middle-class Americans. I was certainly enough of a middle-class American tourist to find myself bemused as well as amused by this account of a day spent in a mainly studio-built Paris—and sufficiently intrigued by the seeming absence of focal points during several busy stretches to return to the movie a couple of times. This was during the summer of 1968. I’d arrived in Paris in June, at the tail end of the famous May events, the very day that the police took back the Odéon from the students. I caught the movie in 35mm, during what must have been its second or third run, a good half year after it had opened in 65mm—the format in which it was shot, which Jacques Tati suggested was the shape of the modern world—with a running time of 152 minutes. Under pressure from exhibitors, and to avoid an intermission, Tati had trimmed about fifteen minutes between the December premiere and mid-February, and with rare exceptions, most of the versions seen ever since have been about this length, in 35mm and monaural. Sadly, not all of the missing footage—most of it reportedly devoted to further variations of existing gags—has been recovered, but everything else was enhanced in a 2002 65mm restoration of the original sound and image. So we can finally see and hear the film as Tati conceived it.
