Kyoto Film Festival
AbeNornes at aol.com
AbeNornes at aol.com
Tue Sep 28 23:06:44 EDT 1999
On Sunday, the Kyoto International Film Festival held its closing ceremonies.
A few of us were there, and I thought I would report on some of what was
going on. I was not at the first festival, but those who were said it has
become considerably smaller. However, size hardly matters if there quality is
there (especially since you are torn in multiple directions with more and
more violence as a festival gets big). Kyoto's programming is very
interesting, and actually has the feeling of a festival (over?) run by film
scholars. Basically, there is a large section of new films, nearly all of
which will be distributed in Japanese theaters in the upcoming season. I
heard these were filled to the gills, but I spent all of my time in smaller
subsections.
These included an Ichikawa Raizo retrospective concentrating on his Daiei
films, a student film festival, a women's film festival, a collection of
1930s "meiro jidaigeki" and an assortment of smaller programs. Of the latter,
the most intriguing were the screening of a newly restored print of Murnau's
_Faust_ and a selection of experimental animation. The latter was a very
clever idea, as it exploited Grierson's reputation as the "father of
documentary" to foreground his important role in "fathering" experimental
animation by supporting Len Lye and Norman McClaren. This raises some
interesting questions about the way film history has been written,
particularly since there is a quiet backlash against the kind of credit
patriarch Grierson is always given for giving life to documentary film (as an
example, see the special issue on Grierson on the current screening the past,
particularly the article by his former colleague). In any case, beyond short
kaisetsu, I'm not sure the Kyoto event went any further in exploring these
issues besides throwing the unlikely name of Grierson together with Lye and
McClaren. I spent all my time at the meiro jidaigeki event.
This was the centerpiece of the festival, and it climaxed with a symposium
with critic Yamane Sadao, archivist Saiki Tomonori, sociologist Tsutsui
Kiyotada, and film scholars Tom Gunning, Bernard Eisenschitz (the restorer of
Faust and a translator of subtitles), and KineJapan's Kato Mikiro (who also
teaches cinema at Kyoto University). Meiro jidaigeki (明朗時代劇) were translated
as "cheerful period films." An example that most people on KineJapan are
familiar with is Post Worth a Million Ryo by Yamanaka Sadao, but they also
showed Denjiro's Yaji-Kita sonno no maki, Mito Komon and a slate of Chiezo
films including Horo Zanmai, Tabi wa aozora, and the stunning Oshidori uta
gassen. Most of the silent films included benshi and live music.
The basic premise of the sidebar was the curious existence of these
"cheerful" period films in an age that is usually called a "dark valley."
What are we to make of Makino Masahiro's Oshidori uta gassen, a film produced
at the height of the China War in 1939. It has nothing to do with war, and
the usual rhetoric and value system we expect of this era's cinema is out to
lunch. Instead, it's Kataoka Chiezo, Dick Mine and Shimamura Takeshi (who has
quite a wonderful voice, by the way) singing their way through a narrative
that has three beautiful women chasing Chiezo. This is a musical in the
Hollywood sense of the word. The narrative is propelled largely through song;
whenever the music come in it takes over the actors' bodies, which dance and
are animated to the beat. Other films have the same musical features, but
also have something less cheerful about them at the same time. For example,
halfway through Marune Santaro's Shunju itto-ryu, the characters start dying
off and in what appears to be an homage to Bantsuma's Takadanobaba, Chiezo
wildly runs and runs and runs and runs to a battlefield to help a friend
fight a hoard of bad guys.
In other words, the films are incredibly complicated. And so the symposium
had an extremely difficult task ahead of itself. Perhaps too hard, and the
panelists were coming from such disparate positions that not many answers
were forthcoming. The most interesting part was a discussion of meaning
making, and how audiences (and censors for that matter) might have read the
films at the time. In a post-symposium "press conference" which was basically
a continuation of the discussion in a smaller forum, it got even more
interesting as questions from our KineJapan members, Peter High and Aaron
Gerow, started raising issues about the category meiro jidai geki itself. It
all ended just as it seemed we were going to start talking about the
"function" of the foreigners on the panel. They were probably invited for the
same reason that I've done the same thing for events I've organized in Japan:
you want the chance to hear a radically different perspective from important
scholars, and at the same time create personal and intellectual connections
between foreign film cultures. This certainly happened at Kyoto, but it is
also interesting to see how the foreign experts also end up with the
uncomfortable task of talking about something they actually know little
about. Thus, they have to take the word of the organizers that what they're
talking about actually exists, and raises the possibility that they are there
to valorize something that is less straightforward than it initially appears.
This might be the reason that Gunning's responses consistently backed away
from saying anything confidently about the films, and instead made pointed
comments about how historians should and should not approach films, genres,
and audiences. It occassionally felt a little like Cinema 101. I'll leave it
at that; perhaps someone who was there could flesh it out if they want.
The last night, they showed Ichikawa Kon's new film, Dora heita, and had an
awards ceremony.
Dora heita is the script, from a Yamamoto Shugoro story, co-written by the
Shiki no kai. This was the group that Kurosawa Akira tried to create in 1969
to co-write and co-direct films. However, the personalities were a little too
strong: Kinoshita Keisuke, Ichikawa Kon, Kobayashi Masaki and Kurosawa. I
hear various reasons that the project fell apart (and this was all Ichikawa
said in his introduction onstage). Perhaps someone out there knows more, but
what I recall is that each ended up writing their own script and couldn't
decide which to use. There were attempts to make the film in the subsequent
30 years, but this year was the first time any were successful. This is a
rather crude way to put it, but it's too bad Ichikawa was the one to survive
of the four. I can't imagine what Kinoshita would come up with---perhaps a
meiro jidaigeki---but this is clearly a story for Kurosawa or Kobayashi, and
a main role for Nakadai not Yakusha Koji. The style has all the flashy
cut-aways that Ichikawa Kon is so good at, but the dialogue scenes have the
odd feeling of a jidaigeki Sasameyuki. The ending is the ridiculous
culmination of an already weak subplot that looks a lot like the ending of
Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August.
This was one of three major films being shot in Kyoto this year. I've
forgotten what one of them was (Fukusaku, right?) and the other is Oshima's
Gohatto. As a matter of fact, Oshima was on hand to receive the 40th Makino
Shozo award for lifetime achievement, joining a list of the biggest names in
Japanese film history.
Before going into this, I'd like to point out that during this award ceremony
there were a couple other awards of note. One was a set of awards to
technicians and staff members of Kyoto productions over the years. Old guys
that are masters at their craft and rarely get credit for their
contributions. The other is an award for the best essay of the year on
Japanese film history. This year it went to a young student of Kato Mikiro's
at Kyoto University, Itakura Fumiaki. Itakura wrote on Ito Daisuke, using
primary materials at the Kyoto Bunka Hakubutsukan which he is helping to
catalogue. [An aside: Aaron and I accompanied Makino Mamoru to the Kyoto
Bunpaku to check out the Ito Daisuke Collection, whose cataloguing is nearing
completion thanks to Itakura and other Kyodai students. I saw this collection
some 5 or 6 years ago, and it was a mess of cardboard boxes. Now there is a
fine list of what they've got, which includes runs of many unusual journals,
Ito's book collection, and boxes of photographs, scenarios, budgets,
receipts, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. It's quite a resource, so anyone out there
looking for a book or dissertation project might want to take a trip to
Kyoto!] Matsumoto Toshio introduced this award, and gave special mention to
three other writers, Kitano Keisuke on Tanizaki and film, Misawa Mamie on
colonial film in Taiwan, and Fujii Jinji on Naruse (Fujii is one of the other
students cataloguing the Ito collection). In any case, Kyoto Film Festival
should be proud of awards like this, awards that thank people for a great job
done and/or encourage them to do great jobs in the future.
So it was quite a shock to see Oshima walk on stage. I knew he had problems,
but few people realized how debilitated he is. He walks with the jerky motion
of a puppet on strings, and couldn't really hold the large trophy they handed
him so an assistant haunted the background to help him. He had a gruffer look
than usual. But when he opened his mouth, he spoke in an absolutely booming
voice and his mouth stretched into a wonderful smile. He drew massive
applause when he talked about trying to rid himself of Kyoto his entire life,
but with this award he now feels like a "Kyoto no eigajin." Afterwards, they
held a press conference in the green room of the theater. He came in on a
wheelchair, jerked over to his seat, and politely fielded stupid questions.
When slightly more ambitious people asked more complicated questions, he
basically refused to answer them. This inspired silence on the part of the
journalists, although it might have been a sheer lack of imagination. So
there were uncomfortable silences as he sat with a rather frightening,
unmoving facial expression, waiting for the next question. But every time he
answered, his face lit up and his voice boomed out with uncommon force. You
could feel a will to conquer his own body. It was uncomfortable to
experience. I certainly wish they had shown Gohatta instead of Dora Heita.
Finally, a couple other notes from the Kyoto weekend:
----Kyoto Bunka Hakubutsukan has a handsome new book called Eiga no seishun
that collects their interviews with various film artists with Kyoto
connections, includeing Ushihara Kiyohiko, Inagaki Hiroshi, Kinugawa
Teinosuke, Ito Daisuke, Arashi Kanjiro, Tanaka Kinuyo, Miyagawa Kazuo, the
recently deceased Ichikawa Utaemon, and a few others. It's worth checking
out: put out by Kinejun in 1998, ISBN 4-87376-216-2.
---A student at Ritsumeikan introduced Aaron, Makino and I to a collection of
film books that has gone unnoticed and unused, but it definitely worth
noting. The Kyoto Furitsu Sogo Shiryokan (tel: 075-781-9101) has an
impressive collection of Taisho/Showa shoki programs from Kyoto theaters. We
even came across yet another Kinema Club theater, this one in the old
capital. There are also a sprinkling of studio records, publications, and
unusual books from the same period.
---KineJapan members at Kyoto got together after the symposium and went out
on the town. It was a very good time and it was good to put faces on
electronic friends. Let's make it a tradition!
Markus
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