12 December, 2013

In defense of Hollywood films, or at least one of them; also, Japan...



I Was Born, but… 
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
Japan, 1932

How did they manage to so completely control all of those kids, or generate these naturalistic performances as they did so?  Ozu fans shouldn’t be surprised at the humour here, as a certain lightness graced even the most solemn or autumnal of the late works.  Ozu fans may be more understandably, more justifiably surprised at the extraordinarily tight, efficient filmmaking on display here.  Though the subject is decidedly and even defiantly Japanese—fuel for lots of generalizations (hierarchies, subordinations, etc.), and evidence for the rebuttal of same—this also feels like some propulsive early 30’s Warner Brothers’ picture.  Framing and cutting and eyeline matches are exhilaratingly efficient.  Ozu?  Well, he was young, and his job was to make these comic pictures.  In other words, the great artist started out as a craftsman, or a professional.  Also, it’s not just an Ozu picture.  Hideo Shigehara shot and edited this picture.  Maybe he's the auteur!  Or maybe this film is the product of a collective effort, like always.  It’s an industrial product!  And a fantastic one, too.  Efficient, but not inhuman.  There are lots of comic pauses here, and reflective ones too.  It’s one of those frequent, happy combinations: accessibility and substance in happy balance.  

The more-or-less remake, also by Ozu

Make Way for Tomorrow 
Directed by Leo McCarey
US, 1937

Or, in the words of a 1911 D.W. Griffith film, what shall we do with our old?  This is exhibit A for the notion that McCarey was Hollywood’s answer to Jean Renoir.  Some of the daughters here don’t come off so well, but the fact is that everyone in this scenario really does have his or her reasons.  What’s great, and what’s so forceful, is that the sympathy that this fact engenders doesn’t at all diminish the criticism that follows.  Sympathy for wrongdoers doesn’t eliminate the fact that they've done wrong.  For all of its gentleness, maybe because of its gentleness, this is ultimately a film that howls on the heath.  It is about Goneril and Regan, and the fact that in industrial modernity Goneril and Regan will generally get away with it. 

Craft!  You can’t just dismiss Hollywood, can you?  The pacing of this commercial film is quite courageous, and quite remarkable when you compare it to contemporary texts (i.e. The Awful Truth, also McCarey, also 1937).  It’s positively geriatric, taking its time to the point of near excess.  This is utterly intentional, of course.  The glacial pace hints at the maddening intransigence and obliviousness of the elderly.  More importantly it also contains the tremulous attendance of the pilgrim on the brink of crossing over.  We have an invitation to consider which of these two interpretive options is more important.  There’s lots of good comedy, lots of good critical satire up to the point of our elderly protagonists' last afternoon together. 



Then it gets shattering.  Notice those four acts of conspicuous kindness—the salesman that takes his foot off of the gas, the check girl that smiles and says she’ll remember, the manager who knows when to forego the pursuit of profit, the bandleader who is mindful of the greater need of less significant patrons.  These old folks have not been anywhere, and they’ve not done much.  Their recollections are nevertheless as poignant and profound as the most celebrated and momentous.  The sparrows, falling.  Then, of course, the sparrows die.  The comparison is made, quite properly, to Tokyo Story.  This ending is closer to Late Spring.  Devastations, most quietly.  


Late Spring 
Directed by Yasujiro Ozu
Japan, 1949

This is a surpassingly gentle, quiet film.  Also, in a complicatedly apt way, it's overwhelming.  Parents, children, definitively and divinely.  “Why didn’t we do this more often?”  “Father, for all the years of loving kindness, I thank you.”  Once I watched this in a class, sitting right beside my own daughter.


All the substance & sorrow, right here


Ugetsu Monogatari

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

Japan, 1953

Mizoguchi's mis-en-scene is mind melting (note the parallel peasant groups in the background of that last shot), the very definition of cinematic.  And then look at all of these boldly theatrical lighting effects.  This is versatility, a really rich aesthetical assembly.  But also, such modesty!  This is not only dispositional—master director, late career—but also thematic.  It's all in that justifiably celebrated, practically inexplicable reunion shot.  It combines the theatrical and film and cinematic techniques quite wonderfully.  More wonderful is how it somehow pulls off that famous and pretty well impossible directorial binary of Carl Theodor Dreyer's.  Treat the sacred matter-of-factly.  Treat the matter-of-fact with reverence and devotion.  The source, setting and subject of this remarkable conjoining: salvific females, in the domestic sphere.  Humility, gratitude...