Kore-eda's Kiseki （奇跡）

Greetings from Japan! Sorry for the long absence from this blog, I hope everyone stateside will use it some next semester. I saw the latest film by Kore-eda Hirokazu, whose Maboroshi we watched last semester, and I was inspired to give a few thoughts. As Kore-eda is one of the most highly and widely regarded Asian directors on the European and American foreign film scenes, I imagine this movie might make it over to the states in some form.

The film is called Kiseki, which literally means Miracle and I think has been translated as I Wish. Like most of Kore-eda's movies, it is a relatively simple story centered more on character than plot. Goichiro and Ryunosuke are young brothers separated by thousands of miles after their parents divorce. Goichiro lives with his mother and desperately wishes to reunite the family. He hears that two people wishing upon the first two bullet trains of a new line in southern Japan passing will experience a miracle, and so he convinces his brother to meet him and wish for the four of them to be together again.

The same year that Takata Yojiro's sentimental Departures won an Academy Award and convinced dozens of Japanese moviegoers to buy property in rural Yamagata prefecture, Kore-eda's Still Walking took apart the "urbanite visits hometown" genre that has been present in Japanese cinema since before Ozu. The melancholy and humor that usually accompanies this scenario, which was done all but perfectly in Departures, is subverted by Still Walking, which forcibly removes most of the (fake) nostalgia for the rural homeland and replaces it with old wounds and indelible bitterness between parents and children. Departures is wonderful in its formula, Kore-eda's version of the old story -- reportedly based on his own fractured relationship with his father -- is a brutal emotional cage match that belongs in the same echelon as Nichols' Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I make the comparison to muse that perhaps after the experience of making Still Walking, Kore-eda's retreat into childhood was a natural course of action.

Call Kiseki "sentimental" is tempting, particularly because of the energetic music, but nevertheless incorrect. As with Nobody Knows, Kiseki attempts to capture childhood with a realism far distant from most movies about children. Toward this end, Kore-eda improvised much of the script after casting the children, a style reminiscent of Mike Leigh. Odagiri Jo, Otsuke Nene and Abe Hiroshi turn in typically reliable performances in adult roles, but the real stars are the seven children: Go, Ryu and their five friends. Go and Ryu are played by real brothers, which is remarkable considering how different their performances are. Go is visibly melancholic, a trait expressed outwardly by the grey ash from Sakurajima that forms a thin layer over everything in his new hometown of Kagoshima. Ryu is energetic to the point of hyperactivity, resembling his carefree musician father, but bright enough underneath to understand most of the implications when his mother calls him drunk and sobbing late in the film. Where the relationship between the sibling actors comes into play is perhaps in the little moments when they are together, where with a look or a playful touch you are reminded that despite their wildly different personalities they possess a deep familial bond.

The first two-thirds of Kiseki are set in the respective worlds of Go and Ryu. Kore-eda's cinematography is typical for his films: workmanlike and effective, expressing both the miniscule beauty and grandiose ugliness of modern Japan (a technique he perfected in his last film, Air Doll). Flairs come in quasi-confessionals where each child explains what they would wish for and also wonderful, lingering tracking shots of children at play that fully capture the kind of carefree movement only possible in youth. The final act of Kiseki involves the seven children journeying to the midpoint between their two towns to wish upon the bullet trains. Here Kore-eda's camerawork returns to it's least restrained form, best exemplified by the narrative interlude of step-siblings at play in Maboroshi. The landscape is ugly on it's face, a more rural side of Japan than the childrens' hometowns that is punctured and blotched by elevated train tracks and shopping centers. But the children find beauty within this industrialized side of rural Japan, and through them so do we.

Kiseki is sweet in a way that no other Kore-eda film is, sweet in a way that only a movie populated by real children can be. It mostly rings true, particularly Go's bittersweet character arc. Kore-eda has made a "children's movie" in the spirit of The 400 Blows, Spirit of the Beehive or of course his own Nobody Knows. It inspires not false nostalgia for childhood but rather a deep melancholic satisfaction, the kind that can only be achieved by watching a child grow up just a little over two hours. Intertwined in Go and the other children are both the childlike logic that drives the plot and a fast-developing understanding of the adult world.

Note: Obviously the movie had no subtitles. Even though it was in Kansai dialect, I would estimate I could understand about 85% of the dialogue. What I missed was mostly in scenes with Go's grandfather.

I thought if Kevin were with us in our discussion (of Akira etc), he would talk about religion.

I thought, why did Ginjirô Takeuchi have to dump the briefcases? If I were him I'd just leave them in my room for even if the police got a warrant to search my room the briefcases were no more suspicious than all the cash.

New resource and April event

This is a new Japanese film research guide created by Aaron Gerow and the Yale library. It complements his book with Mark Nornes "Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies."

Obviously the sources Gerow cites are available at the Yale library and are mostly in Japanese, but you might be able to find them in our Asian library or even ask Noguchi-sensei to order them for you. The guide in general could be very useful if you're writing a paper on Japanese film.

For something very old school, the University of Chicago is hosting a magic lantern performance by the Minwa-za Company of Tokyo in April. Check out the description of the company and their art on the page I've linked. This is an opportunity to see a recreation of a cinematic performance that predates cinema as we know it. The event is part of a series put on by Tom Gunning and the Film Studies Center on the magic lantern in general. I will try to go to this so please let me know if you want to come with me.

The movies ---- great with shochu :)

First of all, I have been meaning to post this forever. I got sick since Friday and Advil pm which I took for the last resort put me in sleep for long, long hours.

I wanted to express my great sympathy, (and sadness) for those people in Japan. I have my family members and friends in Tokyo, suffering from the shortage of electricity (maybe not now), fear of radiation, etc.

Perhaps all these sentimental reasons made me watch three Japanese movies in a row last night, which I want to share with you guys. These are nothing like John shows us in our meetings - not at all artsy or profound for that matter. Just watch them for fun and like I said, these are good movies with a dokkuri of shochu (Sweet potato kind is the best).

1. The Taste of Fish (2008) - I was going to write in Kanji, but I dont have the program. (Why cant I do "cut and paste"????) Since 'cut and paste' is not working here, just google it!

2. The Fallen Angel (2010) - Who doesnt love Oba Yojo??? Some say the book version is better but I havent read the book,

3. Bedevilled (2010) - Korean Horror movie, which I can confidently say it is the best in recent years of my Ph.D life. If you like American Hillbilly horror in the 70s and 80s, this will be a great counter part for that. And this film won Cannes in 2010, when Chan Wook Park won his for THIRST (2010).

I will send you a link to watch it, if you email me, (I can't post the link here for some reason,,,)

Nuclear Celluloid

This is an interesting New York Times article by English scholar Peter Wynn Kirby that the concisely summarizes the most common historical analysis of the atomic monster movie and ties it together with the current nuclear crisis at the Fukushima plants. It strikes me as a little early to be performing film criticism related to this tragedy -- in fact, I cannot think of any time when such an article appeared so quickly into the news cycle surrounding a crisis -- but Kirby's points are nonetheless interesting for our purposes.

I have studied the atomic image in Japanese film in depth in the past and I think our screening of Akira in a few weeks will resonate strongly with the current crisis still fresh in our minds. For now, however, we must remove ourselves from the illusive and cathartic world of cinema and pray for the resolution of a real and terrifying crisis in Japan.

A short biography of Kenji Mizoguchi

Stitched together from readings I've done this week in preparation for Sisters of the Gion (1936), this might be helpful since Standish doesn't give much background in the chapter I sent out.

Mizoguchi was born in 1898 (5 years before Ozu) into a well-off family that lost everything in investments into the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). His older sister was sold to a geisha house and eventually became the lover of the son of a former daimyo family that had retained its wealth after the Meiji Restoration. She was his financial support and provided him with a home in Tokyo. He first applied to be an actor with the Nikkatsu studio (which would become Shochiku's chief rival during the inter-war period) but due to a labor crisis resulting from the end of the practice of using male actors in female roles (onnagata) in 1922, he became an assistant director instead. He became a director only a year later, directing many successful films in the so-called Nikkatsu style in the '20s. Donald Kirihara describes Mizoguchi in the '20s and '30s as working in what David Bordwell calls a "pictorialist" mode, which is "characterized by urban dramas set in Meiji or Taisho with material often derived from plays, favored long shots, camera movements, and a dense, textured mise-en-scene" (67). Kirihara sees the influence of Joseph Sternberg on Mizoguchi's style, as well as Robert Wiene's German Expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921), a film whose influence on early Asian cinematic style was so widespread that I wish someone would study it's exhibition and reception in greater detail. Overall, Mizoguchi made "modern" films that were based on the shinpa tradition, the "new school" of theater that arose in the Meiji period and attempted to find a balance between kabuki-style drama and depictions of modern life. The resulting style was decidedly melodramatic and theatrical, and carried over into early cinema well, holding position as the most popular film genre well into the '30s (interestingly, a trend mirrored in colonial Korea).

I will set up a too-simple comparison between Mizoguchi and his contemporary Yasujiro Ozu to help explain Mizoguchi better. I would like to describe Yasujiro Ozu using a term John Ford used on himself: craftsman (deliberately not "artist"). Ozu was a brilliant filmmaker who exerted near total control over his productions from early in his career, something facilitated by his development of a trusty crew of actors and technicians that worked with him through his long career. If Ozu was a brilliant craftsman, the Mizoguchi was a maniacal and mercurial genius. Legendary for his passionate and tyrannical onset demeanor (there are some great stories about this), Mizoguchi never committed to one genre or style, oscillating constantly during the '20s and '30s. Critics have noted how, after making some realistic "women's films" such as Sisters of the Gion and Osaka Elegy (which did have melodramatic qualities), he returned to the over-the-top shinpa style of melodrama only a few years later with Late Chrysanthemums in 1939. He changed styles to suit the genre that he worked in. In the '30s he also switched studios numerous times, making Sisters of the Gion with Daichi Eiga (though it was distributed by Shochiku). Like Ozu, he surrounded himself with young technical innovators and cinematic craftsmen who helped make his films as memorable as they are.

As Akira pointed out last week, much of Passing Fancy was inspired by the structure of the naniwa theatrical form, and many of Ozu's films are about and inspired by traditional theatrical styles. Even more than Ozu, Mizoguchi was clearly inspired by his life in Kyoto (at the Nikkatsu studio), where he became a patron of kabuki and other theatrical forms. Tadao Sato thinks that we can see the influence of kabuki in Sisters of the Gion and some of his other films from the '30s.

Mizoguchi is most famous not for this '30s films but for the movies he directed after the war, especially Sansho the Bailiff (1954) and Ugetsu (1953), both based on pre-Taisho works of literature. Both of these are must-sees for anyone interested in Japanese cinema.

Sources:
Kirihara, Donald. Patterns of Time. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992.

Sato, Tadao. Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema. Trans. Brij Tankha. New York: Berg, 2008. (original edition 1982) -- this is a dubiously translated (and, I fear, poorly written in the original Japanese) version of a text by one of Japan's most famous film critics. It is a poor source that nonetheless did provide some essential kernels of information about Mizoguchi's life.