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.

Historical notes on "Passing Fancy"

These are random notes about Ozu’s Passing Fancy. First of all, I googled “Union Beer” and found out that it was a trademark registered by a beer company established in 1887 (20^th year of Meiji) by the man named Nezu Kaichiro (根津嘉一郎) who later built the Tôbu Railway (東武鉄道). The trademark was taken over by Asahi (we all know this company for Super Dry!). I wasn’t able to locate the factory we saw in the film, but as we speculated, it was somewhere along the coastal line in modern day Shinagawa, Kôtô, or Shinagawa Wards (品川区、江東区、江戸川区), given that we constantly identify it with smoke stacks.

Also, I wanted to draw your attention to the language people in the film used. It is very deep-down “Edokko (Edoites/江戸っ子)”accent, which would underline the status and socioeconomic background of the people surrounding the main character. The language itself accentuates the uneducated and poor, yet heart-warming characters of the people in “shitamachi” (下町/down-to-earth district). I think that Ozu strategically distinguishes themselves from newly emerging “bourgeois” moving to the areas called “garden cities” along with private railroad lines. During the interwar period, private railroad lines were constructed as package deals with the construction of residential areas—they sought to attract new residents by appleaing that such areas are accessible to the heart of Tokyo. Finally, it would be of historical interest (at least to me!) to see the development of the idea of “saving”—I noticed that the main character, especially after his son got sick, repeated the phrase “宵越しの金はもたねえ (yoigoshi no kane wa motanê/I don’t keep money over night=I’m gonna spend all the money I have over night). This phrase, if I understand it correctly, emerged during the Tokugawa period among day laborers. Since Edo was famous for fires, it is considered that they just spend all they had instead of saving because they did not know if the city would exist till the next day. Then, this phrase somehow turned out to be the one which represented the “spirit” of Edoites.

Kinema Junpo's 200 greatest Japanese films

This list was published in 2009 by Kinema Junpo, probably the most famous and definitely the longest lived film publication in Japan. After about 100 the ranking becomes chronological. This might be a good place to scan for titles/directors that sound interesting.

Some questions raised about "The Dancing Girl of Izu"

I wanted to reproduce a few points that Colin brought up while discussing Heinosuke Gosho's "The Dancing Girl of Izu" with me last night because I found them really illuminating:

1. Connected to Akira's wonderful explication of the fallout from the worldwide market crash in 1929 and the correlated rise of an ideology of a pure Japan or perhaps a Japanese exceptionalism as it relates to rural life and traditions, Colin raised an interesting point about the relationship of Japanese nationalism to the kinds of images of rural beauty captured by films such as "The Dancing Girl of Izu." Was Gosho's desire to tell Kawabata's story partially motivated by personal belief in the essence of Japan lying outside of the modern cities? Did the prominence of these images and narratives have any impact on the kinds of ideological movements that we're talking about? I don't have an answer to that question, but I think one of the strongest thematic undercurrents of the film (as I talked about in class), is a desire either to return or to advance depending on your individual position within the traumatic process of Japanese modernization. The student wished for a return; the dancer wished for an advance. The mirroring of urban and rural in "The Dancing Girl of Izu" (sorry to use a word I already repeated ad nauseum in Professor Xu's class this week) complicates any argument about the film as a text negatively comparing urban to rural.
Another question that I think is implied by this discussion: Is Kawabata's story itself really about the pure, innocent premodern nature of the rural or does that setting merely serve as a metaphor for something deeper about growth from adolescence to manhood and the emergence of a mature subject? I think there are elements of both in Kawabata's novella.

2. Colin framed this as possibly inconsequential but I think it is absolutely a valid line of inquiry: What is the reason for the multiple shots of Meiji chocolate bars in the film? Is this early product placement, certainly an option considering the fact that this was a studio film, or does the chocolate bar carry significance as a thematic motif? Here too I find that both are possible explanations.

Worthwhile contemporary films about journeys to the countryside by Tokyo-ites that played on the Japanese rural nostalgia/imaginary:
"Departures" (2008, Yojiro Takata)
"Only Yesterday" (1991, Isao Takahata) -- This is a Ghibli film by the director of "Grave of the Fireflies" about a Tokyo woman remembering her childhood as she travels to the countryside to for a vacation on a family farm. Disney bought the rights along with the entire Ghibli catalog a few years ago but refuses to release it reportedly because of scenes where the boys in the main character's school learn about menstruation and begin making fun of the girls, which I guess doesn't jibe with Disney values. In any case, it's a wonderful movie and I can lend you a copy if you are interested in watching it.

fall guy

I watched the first 20 mins of the Fall Guy (in Chinese). Film studies aside, this movie has got to be the silliest and craziest one I have ever seen... Well maybe no, now that I recall some hong-kong movies.

question for John

I am amused to see "The Fall Guy" on our recommended viewing list. It was one of the Japanese movies that China dubbed in the 80s. The Chinese audience certainly enjoyed it but some were asking: so what's educational about it? (you know how they were) I guess I have a similar question here: why is this movie here on our list?
I should definitely watch it in the original and maybe dubbed version later. I am happy that this group is so directly helping my research.

Satoshi Kon, "Millennium Actress," and "Perfect Blue"

"Time fits together in a peculiar way: fortune and misfortune, pleasure and pain, all are exiled to the past to form a landscape in monochrome. It is a mystery—and a blessing."
-Hikaru Okuizumi, "The Stones Cry Out"

This quote from Okuizumi's great 1993 novel is about the nature of memory, but I have always found it also speaks to the way cinema functions -- the confinement of everything put in front of a film camera to the two-dimensional plane of celluloid, then projected onto a two-dimensional screen. Both cinema and memory are flat and intangible, and we occupy a world separated from them by space and time. The late Japanese director Satoshi Kon's film "Millennium Actress" is, at its core, about the way cinema and memory interact, particularly how they melt into one another to form a new narrative distinct from the separate pieces.

The films of Satoshi Kon are chaotic portraits of post-modernity, washing away the grand narratives of Japanese popular culture in a chaotic torrent of fan authorship and a constantly shifting line between fantasy and reality. This post, particularly my reading of "Millennium Actress," is indebted to two sources: Melek Ortabasi's "National History as Otaku Fantasy: Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress" from "Japanese Visual Culture" and Hiroki Azumi's recently translated theoretical text "Otaku: Japan's Database Animals." Both texts engage with the postmodern in Japan, particularly the desire in pop culture fans for authorial control that is created by the widespread availability of media (films, TV, music) in digital form.

In "Millennium Actress," two characters are given agency over the progress of the narrative: actress Chiyoko and documentarian/fan Genya. Genya lives out the otaku fantasy by re-authoring Chiyoko's history as she tells it, inserting himself into the narrative and, essentially, creating fan fiction. Chiyoko's filmography itself represents a form of postmodern database, to appropriate Hiroki Azuma, an amalgam of famous Japanese films/genres/images. Genya, a master of this database, finds it easy to insert himself -- always in the role of selfless retainer. With Chiyoko, as she tells her life story (which is also a shorthand history of modern Japan) it becomes inextricably bonded with her films. Her memory is cinema, and her agency as storyteller is ultimately stripped by the scripts of the movies she tells (as well as by Genya's narrative meddling). Chiyoko's life story is reduced to her parts and in her Kon creates a new master narrative for the Japanese female protagonist: the eternal pursuer, tragically chasing after a lost and shadowy male hero (a comment on the elusiveness of masculinity in the postwar era?). Chiyoko has no other modus operandi and no other desire. I'm not sure if she is "an empty vessel" to quote Michael Arnold in Ortabasi's article, but she is certainly not three-dimensional (277). We must return to a telling quote from an interview with Kon conducted by Tom Mes of "Midnight Eye", also quoted in Ortabasi, "I don't know [women] the way I know a male, [so] I can project my obsession on to the characters and expand the aspects I want to describe" (277 -- my edit in italics). Chiyoko's agency is partially defined by Kon's desire to rewrite Japanese film image as a coherent narrative through her fictional life story. The unity of Chiyoko's narrative is created from fragmented pieces of actual film history, a postmodern retelling that borrows images from Japanese films and from Kon's eiga-otaku memory bank.

Even Kon's editing and cinematography serve to fragment his narrative. The whirlwind of movement in the climactic final chase of "Millennium Actress" seems to unify several different threads of the storyline (and threads of movement) with a relentless use of Kon's favorite editing technique: the cut-on-motion. In reality, this sequence stitches together the disparate scenes from Chiyoko's life/filmography into a fluid movement -- jarred loose periodically with cuts to motion counter to the flow of the scene -- into a narratively nonsensical mess. Kon's brilliant style foregrounds the motion over the meaning behind it, leaving the viewer in a morass of emotion brought on by Chiyoko's frantic and relatively unified sprint and by the concurrent complication of the plot that runs beneath it.

We see many of the same visual and narrative techniques in Kon's first feature as director, "Perfect Blue," which Ortabasi rightfully sees as a dark mirror to the lighthearted image of fan obsession in "Millennium Actress." Kon's debut is about a pop idol (Mima) who gives up her career to become a television actress. Her fans are outraged by her decision and she eventually finds herself stalked both by an obsessed male otaku and a murderous doppelganger.

"Perfect Blue" can also be read within the parameters of Azuma's theories of the postmodern otaku author. The dangerously obsessed fan who rewrites the life of his idol on the internet after she departs from the path that appeals to him influences the actions her doppelganger seems to take: murdering anyone associated with her departure from music and the associated fall from innocence. Mima loses her agency as a character and becomes an object of projected desire of her fans. When she tries regain agency and depart from that status (by leaving her life as an idol), her mind is almost destroyed.

While "Perfect Blue" draws equally on tropes from Japanese pop idol culture, horror TV serials and Hitchcock, its pastiche isn't foregrounded in the way that the chaotic amalgam in "Millennium Actress" is. "Perfect Blue" is still fundamentally about fragmentation, particularly as a blurring between the real world and the world on set. Both Mima and the viewer become unsure of the line -- as well as the status of Mima's sanity -- as she seems to be committing crimes and repeating the actions of her onscreen characters off the set. She is stuck in an out-of-body experience, her agency defined both by the expectations of her fans and by the characters she plays on TV -- always corrupted innocents. Kon is contrasting the saccharine, purified image of the pop idol with the softcore, often misogynistic nature of '90s Japanese cop dramas -- but more deeply he is highlighting the ancient dichotomy between innocence/corruption (and virginity/sexual experience) that confines women on the silver screen to a prison of two-dimensionality. Mima's fan is so jarred by her descent into defilement (one that, it should be remembered, involves her changing from fictional persona to another) that he is willing to murder her and install her uncorrupted doppelganger in her place. Mima is so tied to the personae that she adopts as an entertainer that her mind becomes unhinged, a imbalanced site reflecting fragmented/opposing nature of her roles.

Kon is also saying something using the time-honored tradition of the confused dynamic between horror heroine and her murderous stalker, which in this case is split into the doppelganger Mima and the psychotic male fan. I don't know enough about horror film conventions to write intelligently on this topic, but it is absolutely one that warrants further investigation. I also think the role of Mima's body (which is sexualized in a way that Chiyoko's isn't) is another point that deserves more discussion.

Sources:
Azuma, Hiroki. Otaku: Japan's Database Animals. Trans. Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2009.

Ortabasi, Melek. "National History as Otaku Fantasy: Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress." Japanese Visual Culture. Ed. Mark W. MacWilliams. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2008. 275-294.

Both quotations from within Ortabasi's article come from articles at Midnight Eye, an absolutely invaluable journalistic source on contemporary Japanese film.
Michael Arnold's review
Tom Mes' interview

Aside: this post was written while listening to Secret by Megurine Luka -- a song/video created on Nico Nico, the Japanese music site that is a source of numerous amateur musical uploads and has strong ties to Japan's otaku scene. Studies on Nico Nico and other fan forums are, I believe, the next step for contemporary Japanese fan studies.