KAIRO connections

[Miles Wood]

M Arnold wrote:

> >From: "Tom Mes" <china_crisis at hotmail.com>
>
> >Some people are a bit too eager to elevate him above the level
> >of a genre director,
>
> As much as I want to call Kurosawa a horror director (I do love Cure), the
> more I see of his various "roots" the harder it is for me to define him like
> that.  Hebi no Michi, Kumo no Hitomi, Revenge, License to Live, Barren
> Illusion, and even Charisma; these aren't horror movies.

I think Kurosawa was probably the first person to "elevate him[self] above the
level of a genre director." After the success of CURE it is easy to detect a
conscious attempt by by the director to disassociate himself with genre and move
towards a more "arthouse" (a genre in itself?) cinema, or at least one that
would be favoured by International Film Festivals rather than cinemagoers at
home.  Kurosawa always admired Godard and Fuller as much as Hooper and
Cronenberg, and while he became familiar with, and mastered, the mechanisms of
"cinefantastique" I wonder if the horror genre was for him ultimately much more
than a fertile working ground. Even his Yakuza dramas are borderline horror
films. He would certainly not be one to try to conveniently forget his earlier
work, as might the case with a number of pink film directors turned mainstream
filmmakers, but it perhaps played the same sort of role...Kurosawa's seeming
unease with erotic situations indicate pink films or AV could never have been an
area where he could refine his art. Unfortunately, I feel he maybe one of those
directors who works best when constricted by the boundaries of genre, his
subsequent work for me being simply too cerebral, pretentious, tedious etc. It's
not necessarily a major fault, as the same critique could applied to many great
artists, ranging from Ford to Cronenberg,

>  He obviously knows a lot
> about the horror genre (his recent book has some interesting ideas on what
> counts as horror and what does not) and other genres, and he does have a
> talent for finding our scare zones, but I think his recent "horror" films
> try to examine the style with some other effect in mind.

Would anyone care to share more info on this book? I'm guessing an English
translation would fall into the "extremely unlikely" category, along with the
Konuma book and far too many others.

> Kurosawa directed one episode in the recent spring Gakko no Kaidan TV
> special.  The story ended on a fairly interesting note--the one remaining
> young woman is backed into a corner by two different traditional horror
> "monsters" at once (Hanako-san and a bullied-ex-school-mate).  Hanako "gets"
> her (she disappears), and the ghosts sort of stand around for a few seconds.
>   We then see Hanako walking off into the city streets.

I also happened to catch a Kurosawa directed School Horror short recently --
does anyone know if he has he directed a lot of TV horror? -- though in my case
it was on a tape released back in 1998 by Daiei, "Gakkou no Kaidan G," and I
thought the 20 minute short (whose title translates as "Wood Spirit") most odd,
seemingly totally lacking any sort of ending or closure...or maybe I missed
something in the lack of translation. Indeed,  I found the only other feature of
any substantial length on the tape (starring Maeda Aki, recently of BATTLE
ROYALE fame, and directed by...her father?) entitled something like "Eating
Ghost" to be a far more successful venture.

The tape also includes lots of very short pieces including some animation; does
anyone know if these were these originally made for broadcast television, as I'm
not familiar with the format of the series?

Miles