Akasen Chitai

Kenji Mizoguchi - 1956
Known as 'Street Of Shame'... Mizoguchi isn't quite so much for the closer views in here is very last. It is however pretty busy, often compartmentalised, as we go through the different prostitutes. There are some great shots of the street, always of course in long. Of course the singular use Mizoguchi makes of off-screen space, not only in still eyelines, but how characters come from somewhere, walk through, leave on the other end.
Mizoguchi's sheer sympathy is remarkable; there are more simple things to say than the obvious, the hatred of what they do. It is difficult to love them and not then defend what they do, but I felt the balance was struck. Perhaps partly due to the narrative strategy; slow unfoldings of pretty clear stories.

Yokihi

Kenji Mizoguchi - 1955
In colour? Whatever next. Pretty well lit, I rather liked the paleness in the whole situation; especially in the water, and the bathing pools, and the bathing robes.
Sacrifice is centered here. It is at once political, but really I felt more of the pull of the personal here; ideas of transformation, who one is really connected to, and the love that crosses all, across real time, across cuts of the cinema.

Chikamatsu Monogatari

Kenji Mizoguchi - 1954
This is one of the busier of Mizoguchi's works I have seen. The close views aren't too obvious, but the long takes are, in the enclosed rooms, and later the enclosed forests, that I'm coming to associate, with the twinkling lights that just creep around, with Mizoguchi. Again we have tragic love, the figure of the women as the noble survivor, the good natured by rather weak man, and the evil man.
Mizoguchi and Deleuze (did the latter write on the former?); there's a weird combination. Here's my thinking. Mizoguchi is known as taking a relation to emotion that is not direct sympathy. In earlier entries I have talked about swirling effects in Mizoguchi, the idea of the lack of specificity ('A' Emotion / 'A' Life) in this portrayal. Add to this what I keep coming across in Mizoguchi (but forgot to mention in earlier entires); the idea of excess. His females, looking for love generally, for cosy home life, are, frankly insane. They are insane masochists. In Oyu-Sama the younger sister originally basically commits herself to a life of misery for another, giving more than she has; excess. Look at the face of Zushio as he goes to the advisor in Sancho Dayu. The idea od mysticism in Mizoguchi, excess, love beyond the exchnage principle, the sacrifice of this, the end of 'Ugetsu Monogatari'. For all the decorum, his is a cinema of insanity. But portrayed quite calmly.

Uwasa no Onna

Kenji Mizoguchi - 1954
Not concentrating hard enough. We have a very modern day, collision of people, in busy environments, quite loud people. Much of a sense of closeness, as the cuts, now almost portraiture, are a part of. This seems to gel with the overdetermined reasons for each sction, almost the cinfusion, the swirl of reasons, the tragic demeanours caught in this. Even within a struggling group we have internal conflict. ALso note the generally negative image of average man, though not all men; this examination is again and again found in the Mizoguchi I come across.

Gion Bayashi

Kenji Mizoguchi - 1953
The camera is getting closer with each one (which is silly, as this is before 'Sancho' in time, but anyway). Moving to quite a few at least mid shots; perhaps it is because it is modern day, less a tale, more a social analysis. It does keep the Mizoguchi looking and looked at, but it does some things differntly. This shift, when I think of my own reaction to it and something similar in Kurosawa, usually finds me an advocate of at least the equality of the modern day, against some critical opinion.
What I like, and I like this film very much, is how very specific it is. There is a kind of humour here, in the details; the lawyer, the legal codes given, the way the horror of the situation is reduced to these exact formulations (also congratulate the oppenness; anything better than Hollywood).
We have crushing fate again, which has cause, effect, solution, but is so built in as to be inevitable. It is pretty clear where Mizoguchi stands, hating the Geisha principles. One more thing; he can cut in, he does sometimes move in for tears. Just not always.

Sancho Dayu

Kenji Mizoguchi - 1954
In many ways this is a play of looking, seen in distance what is looked at, with the back turned to the camera, and the look, seen close up, where we don't see the other half of this double. This, as in the famous boat scene, is used in variations for the appropriate effect. In this sense, editing is key for all this; a deliberate edit, not always tied to narrative extrapolation.
We have that lovely dappled forest throughout, and many huge long shots; a finish again on the notion of work, the singular plowing the field, or beach here. I again felt, with the mysticism, the wide open islands, the idea of powers swirling, not settling.
I can't help but have to bring up fatalism; throughout this and other works of Mizoguchi, perhaps? A pile up of problems, what I dislike is the dramatic arc to them, which gives me a feeling of a sense of relish to them. To be fair, specific problems are dealt with (slavery, land rights), but really it seems more like the principle of misery is more at play than anything.

Ugetsu Monogatari

Kenji Mizoguchi - 1953
The play is of long takes, small people, high and low in that wonderful environment full of reeds, rivers, mist, busy busy markets (people as mist). Through these we are moved pretty quickly, along the top and/or the bottom of the screen.
This is a film about male hubris, about pride, about ethics, what one wants, what is good, about art and that vocation. Ultimately, work cannot just be dismissed, for all the problems; the high shot of the workers at the end, the return to pottery. Yet Mizoguchi is a tragedian, and this comes with the price of a kind of eternal suffering.
The infusion of ghosts, of memory, is at its best when the mis-en-scene corresponds with the boats, and best yet with pans that move to dissolves, along the earth, that cross time and space; of course the famous, restrained pan around the house. Of course, this is a terrific film.

Oyu - Sama

Kenji Mizoguchi - 1951
Mizoguchi's camera starts long, and can stay there. A mixture of stillness and movements, often those sideways movement that, along with zig zag compostions, non-geometrical framings (though he can do geometrical, perhaps because houses are so...) give that famous sense of a world beyond the frame (similar effect caused by entrances and exits). So he starts long, and tracks or pans along with the movements, usually. He does not though, ever seemingly, cut in for emphasis. If they are far away, they are far away, even if its an important plot point, they can be very far away, the camera not disturbing. The depth is very much a part, all in focus, using a wide stage. Ideas as to why later.
He can cut around sometimes, though this seems to follow a formal pattern (ninety degree moves, for example) before an emotional one, perhaps.
The film overexposes the light, but we only get the light dappled through trees, often at the tops of frames. Thus there is this hazy, mystical effect, through the leaves. It all seemed pretty soft to me. The framings don't give a sense of being exact, but I think they are; one movement can reveal the back of someone else's neck in a new light, or such things, a lot.
So how is the story told? An initial situation, not overmilked, then basically a pile-up of woe, never individually melodramatic but ultimately proving too much for tyhe charatcers. It can be surprisingly honest, or rather straightforward, about sex. There is also an ability to create awkwardness, discomfort, or simply the realistation of how someone else in the room is feeling. The time is passed with quite fast dissolves, often, sometimes in what are essentially silent montage sequences. There are also some lovely non-narrative bits, of empty rooms or flowers.
So what did this add up to for me? The reluctance to place or define an emotion. Not saying; 'this is tears, the emotion' but hiding any exact one for one. A world, a situation, is built, in which forces swirl. The moves off screen, the flow, the exits, are just one element where the emotion is not allowed to be singulaires (and neautralised), defined as one thing. It creates a very individual style.

Boiling Point

Takeshi Kitano - 1990
Kitano's aesthetic of simple, almost Bressonian actions, laconic editing with ellipses on violence, jumping from before and after the blood is spilt. He uses sound really to convey the strikes. As Bresson again, he often constrcuts the scene (actually, more like Hitchock) from initially closer eyeline stuff, then can move out.
A classic Kitano compostion is a face looking ever so slightly to the left or right. Yet one always has the sense of exact geometry, partly because of very careful seperations in the staging, and clear shapes of the (always very important) objects around. Lots of straight on, blank faces (used very well in some impressionist lightening fast montage, absurdism clearly also), often at the bottom of the frame, though also can be at the top. They also take up a relatively thin amount of his pretty wide frame. He uses mainly a still camera, though can move in a bit, smooth moves, especially near the car, for some reason.
What really is Kitano on about, I wonder? The violence of the social contract, surely, seething undertones to everyday life. Brutality is really deeply sad, one has to say. I didn't feel as strongly in support of this film as certainly 'Hana-Bi' and 'Dolls'- which I regard as masterpieces, especially the former. Why? Perhaps I felt Kitano didn't quite have the same handle on his violence; or more simply, that his mis-en-scene had less beauty, the counterpoint, in it, in here the rather nondescript locations. Still, in many ways an excellent picture, always intriguing. And also; why Kitano himself inflicting the violence?

Woman Of The Dunes

Hiroshi Teshigahara - 1964
Teshigahara essays claustrophobia with deep compositions with slightly differing shades that give us cramped passageways of space on the inside. Even outside, we meet walls of sand, real enclosed spaces. Their are many many close-ups. We move, or rather jump cut from one to another, sharp jarring ellipsis, cracking up the space into junks, often seemingly in time with the music, or playing off it. Their are near birds-eye shots, for example.
The sand can be so many different things, hard and soft, jagged and smooth, but it is nearly always smothering, drowning. It seemed more often dark than overexposed to me, though on a few occassions the feeling from outside could burn through.
Their are such a wealth of symbols here, though to be fair to Teshigahara he keeps them so clear that opaqueness isn't really a problem. It is hugely complex though, with ideas of entrapment and so on. The elephant in the room for me, and coming from Abe's source text presumably, is Kafka; so many resonances.
Not least of these are the slightly absurdist villagers, and more importantly the general feel of a kind of gritty realism to the piece; what would 'actually' happen were a man to be trapped in the dunes? How would he reason himself out?

An Actor's Revenge

Kon Ichikawa - 1963
I mean, it flies from genre to genre, cut to cut, mucking about with expectations of space, never mind plot. The big TohoScope or whatever frame is used as a Kabuki set, with flagrantly unreal backgrounds, black or white, which the figures are played off against. All are utterly ridiculous, quite deliberately, slightly uneasily addressing the camera. One doesn't quite know whether or not to laugh at the lead, and whether or not they are in with the joke. The colours seem picked at random for each surface.

The Burmese Harp

Kon Ichikawa - 1956
With some aggressive deep focus photogrphy, big faces at the front, complex arrays on various levels of soldiers, nearly always still figures, in the background. The forest is made to seem huge, looming and suffocating, as are caves or other paraphenalia.
I have to say I found it a bit talky, long speeches that verged on the sentinemental. It clearly tried to at least get some view of the insanities of Japanese warfare, avoiding any clear charicatures.

The Sun's Burial

Nagisa Oshima - 1960
This is a really brutal film. Shot in a lot of 'scope, with some really jerky movements (much more than 'Night and Fog in Japan'). The takes are rarely extremely short, but it gives a sense of crashing about. The edit also is like this; nearly every cut seems to be a shot cut. Tone to tone, place to place, far to near. We expect one story to continue, another crashes in; it is unclear to what extent what we see is chronological. The sense of violent urgency is more explicit than are a cohesive, classical storytelling.
The images themselves are a mixture, often pretty long, but there are also some distinctive framings of just heads. The version I saw was a terrible transfer, but it seemed to be pretty incredible colours. Blood orange absolutely everywhere, sidelit for sweat, darkness on the faces. The locale is absolutely filthy. Also some incredibly dramatic deep blues.
This must have hit the screens with a crash, it portrays the end of a country, so far beyond redemption, better just to be annihilated, everyone is grim. The violence is horrible and explicitly shown; rape, other physical forms. Everyone is at once self-serving and masochistic, brutal in all. The sun is buried, we have to start again.

Night And Fog In Japan

Nagisa Oshima - 1960
We have long takes in that 'scope ratio, with a camera panning, and sometimes tracking, in huge horizontals. These are huge long movements across the room, the faster the more urgent finding its target is. It is relatively smooth usually, but is happy while this to duck and dive in and out.
The lighting is also fasinating. Deeply 'theatrical', one could say, in that it can change in a scene so we only have spotlights on one or other individual people inside the room. The rest of the stage is blacked out. I got the same kind of idea from the use of contiguous spaces which are seperate in time and space; the themes of memory and so on are here, as is simply the exciting cinema.
This is really a fasincating discussion, and show, of tactics. Oshima isn't going to simplify down on one side, but there is generally a reaction against a kind of complacent, almost right wing Stalinism. He accusses, and here is the Resnais triangle, fogetfulness. Forgetfulness is inevitable, but it leads to complacency, the destruction of ideals. What has happened to these so called 'revolutionaries' now? What can they remember, do they try to remember? What does one choose to remember? I really found this film very, very fine ;an intelligent, in depth, exciting and at once engrossing.

Floating Weeds

Yasujiro Ozu - 1959
Ozu, for all the reflection, doesn't cut too slowly. He can pretty much be said to analyse, whatever that means.
It is the clearest thing I can think to say about Ozu that his is a cinema of space. We have pure fun in the shapes, of the whole frame and of objects. The colours of windows, the way something obscures a part of the frame. Often quite a lot of depth, where we particularly focus on the people. Space is not used for narrative purposes; we can have a position, can cut to a position, for the shape of the space it gives, rather than clearing narrative purpose.
Does Ozu establish? Yes and no. Place to a small extent, more of a mood.
Ozu, as I said, does move in. There is quite a lot of SRS, intersting ones. Often with their backs to us, facing a wall. Often at a slight angle. And then that straight on one. Ozu's camera is without exception low-angled, so I'm not sure they don't look above.
The underplaying, reticencce, gives a huge emotional complexity, as simply does the plot, We enter the world, see thne connections, the changes reverberate so strongly. A slight fatalism? Perhaps. Resigation? Ozu can do something so remarkable with the emotions in the second halves of his film.

When A Woman Ascends The Stairs

Mikio Naruse - 1960
I love Naruse's repeated motif of the woman approaching the stairs. Low angle look up ,pause, track along with her feet, at the top. There are some great bits of editing as we move further into the bars. The edit here, especially at the start, can be a little surprising. Graphically discontinuous cuts, making us have to reprocess the image, of couples talking in the bar, as well as some pretty much graphically continous jumps across time and space, give this feel. Altogehter, this is surely a more 'modern' picture than 'Late Chrysanthemums' or 'Floating Clouds', as much for the locale as anything.
Neverthless, it shares much with these other two works. The matter of fact attitude towards sex and the body (the bathing in 'Late Chrysanthemums' is a good example, and the rape reference in that film as well). The obsession with money, money, money, it is a driving force behind nearly all the action. The repetitious music. The long, twisting narratives. The nearly entirely awful men, or rather cruel, often not intentionally. The woman trying to escape, becomg cruel in this process, ultimately failing. It is all pretty grim stuff, for all the quiet beauty Naruse also shows.

Floating Clouds

Mikio Naruse - 1955
Some fascinating decisions in the edit here. The two stories, when crosscut, always seem to have a connection, This can be almost thematic, they are both thinking about money, or wandering, or it can some form of graphic match, often both walking. The theme of walking is big here; especially the walk together. This is repeated as a motif throughout the film, apart from the first sequence taking in a single smooth track. This repetition, tracing over old steps, is important thematically and also reflected in the repetions of the music.
The lighting is not quite so distinctive as in 'Late Chrysanthemums', but I would still argue that Naruse generally does not exactly flood his sets.
And those cuts, the flashback at the start. Four or five years before 'Hiroshima Mon Amour' we have a non-cued flashback. I kept anticipating this to happen again, which made me get a little confused, which may be my fault rather than the films.
The telling of the story is certainly complex, perhaps not totally a positive. I wouldn't say Naruse narrates in an economical way his themes; it can be a little baggy. This may partly be down to how, formally with all the SRS, this isn't particularly exciting much of the time. Scenes talking in a room can get a bit samey.
Nonethless, there are incredibly powerful parts here. The theme, again making us cross with Resnais, of at once the inadequacy but the tugging persistence of memory is present. The man isn't up to much; but the relationship goes on, in this strange back and forth. Leading to a remarkably affecting conclusion.

Late Chrysanthemums

Mikio Naruse - 1954
Lilting, beautiful, intelligent, deeply effecting.
The establishing shots need not be at the start of the scene. They are, as we saw in Yamanaka and see in Ozu, often pushed in at the side of the frames deep, with converging lines leading to distant doorways. The camera, again thinking of Ozu here, is in a low position. It generally only moves to reframe. There are also frequent, not narrative driving shots of a road stretching deep away on the right of the frame. That various characters go down this shape (the roads can be different) gives juxtapositions, as do sights of people both coming towards us, and going away.
Naruse isn't really all that much Ozu-ean in his direction (in the pathetic amount of Ozu I have seen), in that his edit is different. He has a wonderfully smooth pace, perhaps helped by the rythmic repetitions of the music, dog barking, or other noises that follow each other through parts of the film.
His compostions raise some fundamental questions? What is a SRS sequence, and what is the line between it and an establishing shot? What I mean is that not full establishing shots, but clear two shots with a bit of the room, favour one person, and the next shot of the conversation is invariably the 'reverse' to the other partner. So if this is SRS, much of it includes both in it. There is also a lot of more traditional SRS, never impatient.
The mis-en-scene is also surprisingly dark (forgetting that this might be the print). The light is generally from above, perhaps in front, and quite harsh, but the fill seems minimal. The film is all the same quite soft, with the shades in a cloish palette. Yet, there seems a bit of depth. How? Well, the characters sink into the background, but there's not a lack of depth... this may be a matter of focussing not entirely on the character's faces.
People are always doing something. Drinking, with their hands. This is Naruse's famous focus on materiality, here principally money. It shapes the characters, what they do. This is really terrific, intense and complex, deep, dense, requiring concentration, social analysis and analysis of life. The dialogue and the image are both dense, complex, with their own thoughts and richochets between them. As I said, it requires great concentration, but it achieves quite something when one is up to it (as I am of course not always; I could get a impatient for the end, I sadly confess).
We have here women aging, it is sad, yet they are not sentimentalised. Trying to live without the worldly miseries of men, the oppression of patriarchal society, has one bitter and twisted (for all the comprehension), or just slowly fading. This is though far too simple an analysis; 'bitter and twisted' is all wrong. More like 'finding a way', that we, and she surely, know is weak. Is there a right way? We understand that the children, for all their forgetful cruelties, do, as is said, know how to live? But what for those whose way of life has greyed? Do they follow this? They must, and they can't. Their is friendship, is that enough? What would enough be? A great work.

Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence

Nagisa Oshima - 1983
Use of long takes, multiple places of interest in the frame. Use of high and low vantage points, creates juxtapositons in mis-en-scene. Also some SRS stuff. Strong colour schemes, justified realistically-ish but scenes almost entirely in blue and red.
Pretty unflinching looks at violence, and challenging conventions by exploration of homosexuality at the time. Challenge to Japanese mysticism and various degraded traditions. All gets a little tiresome, couldn't really stomache Bowie. Likely to prove a bad way to get to know Oshima.

The Face Of Another

Hiroshi Teshigahara - 1966
Again, a difficult film to talk about. Perhaps a little easier than 'Pitfall'. We have the great variety of shots, perhaps constructed in a slightly less ecletic way. What Teshigahara seems to be doing is breaking up space, by constantly disorientating us; going from overhead, to close-ups, varying angles. The use of false frames, mirrors, cutting up perspectives with screens and glass boards, takes us into this modernism. Perhaps not quite as systematic as Antonioni's incredible stock-market scene in 'L'Eclisse', is is though more varied. It is also extremely effective and conveying some of our Antnioni-like themes.
These are enhanced by the slow pace, the low key acting, the way people fail to connect up, and the idea of the kind of floating mass, obviously here without an identity. The story again jumps, with the side non-story of the girl seemingly taking us out of the diegetic world. The actual make up of the images is very hard to generalise about, but it is certainly modernist before classical. Backs of heads, disembodied body parts are often used.
Teshigahara uses zooms and other techniques to also mark out the constant alterity from our expectations. His use of freeze-frames, often in montage, creates some startling sequences. This film deserves to be called fascinating, and deeply enigmatic. I look forward to being able to have another look at it.