And suddenly, in my memory, everything turns real: the summer breeze of Izu, the lazy sun of an early afternoon, the stale smell of water standing in the rice fields. For a moment it is that day in 1956, 37 years ago, and I am standing there, 33 years old myself. See—just to the left of the camera, just out of range. Here comes Mifune running, and there stands my younger ghost, right of that pillar, just off screen... And the summer sun beats down and the fresh breeze of Izu bathes my face, and then the story continues and the film ends and the lights go up and the students open their notebooks and I stand up and began talking about the influence of the Noh.
Donald Richie (previous post), the worldwide authority on Japanese film,
shares his movie memories.
posted by matteo
on Feb 1, 2006 -
9 comments
The Emperor's Bunker. "The Japanese, with sadness and irony, stressed that Hirohito couldn't even speak properly. This was partly to do with the fact that he didn't have to speak - people spoke in his name and he was isolated from real life".
"
The Sun", the third part in
Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov's 'Men of Power'
tetralogy after the gloom of
Moloch (1999), about Hitler and Eva Braun, and the despairing tones of "
Taurus"
(2001), focused on the wheelchair-bound Lenin in his death throes, "The Sun" seems almost upbeat. This, after all, is a film about reconciliation. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Sep 13, 2005 -
21 comments
A Tale of Two Chinas, by photographer
James Whitlow Delano.
Whole
swaths of cities have vanished, to be transformed with developments that have quickly made them look more like Houston, Qatar, or Singapore than
the ancient China of our mind's eye. The old hutong, or alleyways, of Beijing that once formed a mosaic of passageways and the siheyuan, or walled courtyard houses,
have been largely razed. The old brick rowhouses of Shanghai, are now being leveled and replaced by modern high-rises.
Traditional marketplaces, residential neighborhoods, streets where medicine shops or bookstores bunched together,
are now either gone or have been rouged up as tourist destinations, part of a new synthetic, virtual version of China's incredible past.
The energy fueling this transformation bespeaks a powerful but often
blind, unquestioning faith in an inchoate idea of progress that
takes one's breath away, often literally. (Unrestrained growth has left China with the dubious honor of having 9 of the 10 most polluted cities in the world).
Delano's new book
is "
Empire: Impressions from China". More inside.
posted by matteo
on Feb 17, 2005 -
23 comments
Discovering Japan. As a
perennial outsider at loose in Japan,
writer Donald Richie captures the
joyous freedom of being foreign. The foreign observer is likely to be happy only if he sees his foreignness as an adventure, and recognizes that he has given up a sense of belonging
for a sense of freedom, traded the luxury of being understood for that of being permanently interested.
Richie, the philosopher-king of expats in Asia for the past half-century, arrived in Tokyo in 1947 as a typist with the U.S. government and never really left,
writing dozens of books ,
on Japanese movies,
temples, history and
fashion, while enjoying himself as an actor, musician, filmmaker and painter.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 is a monument to the
pleasures of displacement. Richie watchers can observe, more intimately than ever, a man who is generally happiest observing. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Nov 9, 2004 -
12 comments
Memories of a Dog .
Moriyama Daido's
pictures are
taken in the
streets of Japan's major
cities. Made with a small, hand-held camera, they reveal the speed with which they were
snapped. Often the frame is tilted vertiginously, the grain
pronounced, and the
contrast emphasized. Among his city images are those shot in underlit bars, strip clubs, on the streets or
in alleyways, with the movement of the subject creating
a blurred suggestion of a form (warning: NSFW images if you scroll down the page) rather than a distinct figure.
His best known picture,
Stray Dog, (1971) is taken on the run, in the midst of bustling street activity.
It is an essential reflection of
Moriyama's presence as an alert outsider in his own culture.
Moriyama is also a
toy-camera enthusiast (
his favorite is the
Polga)
. He has worked
in the US, too: "
N.Y. 71".
(more inside)
posted by matteo
on Sep 27, 2004 -
6 comments
Agitator. Blood doesn't politely trickle in
Takashi Miike's
films: it
gushes out in
(warning: NSFW, graphic) improbable fountains,
painting walls and filling up small cars.
His trademark point-of-view shots are
taken from places other directors wouldn't dream of: the bottom of a dirty toilet bowl (as a man falls into it after being killed); within the ear canal (as it is pierced by a metal spike); even from inside a character's vagina. He has
depicted incest,
drug abuse, teenage prostitution,
violence against women and children
and small dogs, and necrophilia -- and that was just in one film,
Visitor Q, his take on
Pasolini's
Teorema.
Miike has just introduced his latest movie,
Izo, at the
Venice Film Festival (.pdf file).
Miike is less sure about why Americans are now embracing Japanese horror films. His country's horror genre is influenced by "
kwaidan," traditional Japanese
ghost stories that feature revenge and malice: "The stories always have the 'hatedness.' You always bring the feelings of hate [that] you don't see in American cinema". What freaks him out the most, however, is the
everyday automobile accident. "Even in a film, I can't bear to watch it -- it's so much (about) how people are weak, to be just crushed with a car. It makes me feel really depressed".
posted by matteo
on Sep 22, 2004 -
24 comments
"We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."
In
The Fog of War, a revelatory new documentary about his life and times, a disquieted
Robert McNamara implores us to understand why he did the things he did as an Air Force lieutenant colonel who helped
plan the
firebombing of Japanese cities in
World War II, and, later, as a secretary of defense and pivotal decision-maker during
Vietnam, which some Americans came to call
"McNamara's War."
One of the movie's most powerful passages covers McNamara's little-known service in World War II, when he was attached to Gen.
Curtis LeMay's 21st Bomber Command stationed on the Pacific island of Guam.
LeMay's B-29s showered 67 Japanese cities with incendiary bombs in 1945, softening up the country for the two
atomic blasts to come. McNamara was a senior planning officer. Story by
"Killing Fields"' Sydney Schanberg in the
American Prospect
(more inside)
posted by matteo
on Nov 12, 2003 -
83 comments
