Subscribe"A director is like a cook in a restaurant who doesn't know the stomachs of his guests: what he makes is sort of an ideal recipe. The viewer comes into the theater and begins to eat time. Some of it he digests, some of it he does not digest. That can make him sick or irritated. Painting knows no such phenomenon, nor does literature. We could call it the curse of film, the non-artistic component. Painting is therapy, film is still a kind of surgery."
-- Alexander Sokurov
And Sokurov himself is promising to lighten up. He plans to round off the 'Men of Power' series with a film based on the Faust myth as interpreted by Goethe, Thomas Mann and others. "It will be a very colourful, elegant picture with a lot of Strauss music," he says. "There won't be any smell of war but you'll sense the aroma of chocolate in the room."
Whatever the revisionist historians may say about Hirohito, Sokurov regards him as a holy innocent: a man who was neither articulate nor especially bright.This is nonsense from start to finish: Hirohito was no dullard by any stretch of the imagination, and as a scholar he even managed to make the odd minor contribution to marine biology. Compared to the mentally unstable father for whom he played regent, Hirohito was the figure of clear-thinking - so clear-thinking, in fact, that after a war he'd long refused to declare lost for fear of losing his throne, he knew enough to play up his harmlessness to a Douglas McArthur who ate it up.
"Unlike Hitler or Lenin, Hirohito had no lust for power, no interest in ideology and didn't "kill anybody or step over anybody" in his bid to achieve high office.How much more laughable is it possible to get: no lust for power on the part of a man who warmly approved of the invasion of first Manchuria and then China proper? As for the not having to "kill anybody or step over anybody" bit, well of course he didn't have to - he was born to reign, after all!
But: Literal historical accuracy hasn't got much to do with seriousness, or even value.I'm not saying it does. What I am saying is that a movie which pushes a whitewashed version of history palatable to those who'd like to forget what really happened way back when isn't worth taking seriously: Shintaro Ishihara, the uyoku and all the other right wing types will love this picture, if for no other reason than that its success will make their efforts to sell a revisionist history of Japan's war of aggression that much easier, but anyone who's concerned with where all this mythmaking might lead can't help but view this particular picture with contempt. Aestheticism detached from ethics or historical memory leads to the worship of "Triumph des Willens" and the stylish cut of SS uniforms.
arguing that films are supposed to teach sound history is just like arguing that one should learn science from, ahem, the BibleFilms that try to sell their viewers on the "peaceful" and "simple" natures of extreme right-wing militarist are nothing but propaganda vehicles, and there's nothing wrong with saying as much. This guy doesn't claim to be making a film about a fictionalized Emperor of Japan, he says he's making a picture about a real man who really existed and made some real f***ing bad decisions which cost tens of millions of people throughout Asia their lives, and here I am being told I shouldn't be taking objection at its artistic licence? Would you be just as okay with a movie which recast Hitler as a simple Austrian corporal forced against his will into a bloody war by Jewish manipulators, just as long as it was entertaining and had high production values?
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Ingmar Bergman is Sokurov's fan.
Sokurov's paean to the Hermitage museum, shot in a single 99-minute take.
posted by matteo at 9:56 AM on September 13, 2005