Still Walking 2020

The notion of cinema as therapy is dangerous: not only can’t cinema replace therapy, using cinema as therapy can be harmful to mental health. Yet The Mourning Forest (2007, dir. Naomi Kawase) comes at such a right and crucial time that I can’t overlook its therapeutic power. Amidst the purgatory that is the world in 2020, The Mourning Forest was exactly the film I needed. 20 minutes into The Mourning Forest , there appears to be a facility for the elderly or those in mourning. The stench of (inevitable) death emanates in the room. But in this deadly environment, we’re looking at a birthday celebration. These grand concepts of life (birth! death!), contrasted through ordinary rituals (which is an oxymoron; how can a celebration be low-key?), remind me of Edward Yang’s  Yi Yi (2000), my favorite film of all-time. The Mourning Forest shares what I love so much about Yi Yi  – how a film can be so small yet so big, so big because it’s small. The Mourning Forest , especially ...

In his late post-WWII prime, Yasujirō Ozu left such an indelible mark on the genre of family gendaigeki that it’s impossible, to me at least, to watch any modern family drama and not see his legacy. That viewpoint of automatically defaulting everything to Ozu is lazily reductive and often misconstrued, but in Tokyo Sonata (2008, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa), I do see explicit and implicit homages to Ozu, in both style and theme. Tokyo Sonata is a flawed but still fascinating attempt to acknowledge then break free from Ozu’s influence, to update Ozu for the 21st century, and to marry the violently different styles of Ozu and K. Kurosawa. Tokyo Sonata , just in the title, unmistakably acknowledges the many “Tokyo xxx” films by Ozu, especially Tokyo Chorus (1931). 47 minutes into the film, during the conversation between Megumi and Takashi about Takashi’s enlistment, there’s suddenly a very Ozu-esque graphic match cut of two talking heads looking just slightly off-camera (see .gif). Bu...

In All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001, dir. Shunji Iwai), many conflicting modes of filmmaking are on display, from pristine, saturated 35-lookalike digital cinematography to overexposed night vision and DV home video, from planimetric wides of stunning vistas to jump cut, tight handheld. But the most transgressive of all these various choices is the film’s liberal use of onscreen text. Onscreen text is one of the big no-nos of filmmaking, as we all know the mantra “show, don’t tell,” and text is a direct violation of that. But Iwai uses movement to make his text cinematically compelling, and uses text to embrace the thematic contemporaneity of his film’s universe. The biggest obstacle onscreen text faces is stasis. For the audience, suddenly having to read text while watching moving images has the considerable effect of halting momentum. Filmmakers have devised myriad ways of working around this problem – animated text bubbles are a common one in the digital age – but I’ve never see...

The heartbeat of Pulse (2001, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa) must be a crawlingly, brutally slow 50> bpm. It has no interest in being the typical American cinema, in which a plot event leads to another and momentum clearly escalates. Yet it’s not exactly the common brand of international arthouse slow cinema either, as it doesn’t share slow cinema’s biggest trait, the fixed long take. Kurosawa’s camera is indeed clinical and long (in both time and space), but not to the point of ostentation; he healthily employs movement, and doesn’t indulge in duration. As David Bordwell puts it, “[Kurosawa’s] visual technique displays a dry, precise elegance ... the compositions are painstakingly exact, though they’re not as rigidly geometrical as Kitano’s planimetric images and they don’t self-consciously evoke Ozu...” I can’t find a word to describe his camera, except for the pun very much intended “ghostly.” In my .gif is an example of Kurosawa’s ghostly camera. We’re in a medium to medium lon...

The first great cut of Hana-bi (1997, dir. Takeshi Kitano) occurs 10 minutes into the movie. I use “great” here not in assessment of the cut’s quality, but to mark its significance. By cutting from the ignition of a lighter to a paralyzing gunshot, Kitano (who also serves as co-editor of his film) affirms the modus operandi of his film – to rupture the surface beauty of mundane life with unflinching violence. Blink and you’ll miss it. Fire and flower. The immediately obvious effect is that the cut mirrors the violence in the plot. In the first shot, a medium lasting a good ten seconds, Nishi takes a long, measured beat before lighting a cigarette. The flicker of the flame barely registers in the viewer’s brain before Kitano shockingly cuts to an extreme close-up of a bullet departing a gun barrel. This ECU lasts for only less than a second. (Kitano then cuts to a medium long of Horibe writhing in pain, but that’s not the cut in question.) Immediately, we see two major feature...

Queer-coding, as the name suggests, is the practice of coding characters as queer. The most widely known example of this in cinema is Disney villains, who have been queer-coded to various degrees of subtlety, from the drag-inspired Ursula to the slightly effeminate Scar. Some problematic aspects that instantly emerge from this are assuming certain stereotypes of queerness, using those stereotypes to code queerness, frequently attributing them to villains, and remaining at this superficial depiction of queerness. In The Family Game  (1983, dir. Yoshimitsu Morita), the queer subject is quite obviously Yoshimoto the tutor, and the characterization of him fits most of the patterns I set up above. The very first question to ask is: is Yoshimoto queer? There are many possible answers to this question. He is initially presented as 1. gay. Near the beginning of the film, his acts of intimacy with the same sex are presented with neither fanfare nor obscuration, which can be a good thin...

A few minutes into Proof of the Man (1977, dir. Junya Satō), a biracial man jumps joyously into the air and freezes. The camera punches in, and a title card in Japanese appears. At this point, we don’t know who this man is, and we don’t know why he is important, but the film has unmistakably marked him as “人間の証明”. Though I don’t speak Japanese, I can read kanji, and the title seems to translate not necessarily to “proof of the man,” but just “proof of human.” To place such momentous importance on anyone in a film is intriguing enough, but to place it on a half-black man in an African-American neighborhood screams thematically significant. Another few minutes later, he is unceremoniously killed. We still don’t know who he is, but his status hovers over our heads. He is the proof of human. “Look at me!”, he tells the audience. We later find out that this proof of human is Johnny Hayward, whose parents are a Japanese woman and an African-American man previously stationed in Japan ...

I’m usually quite vehemently opposed to “horrible people doing horrible things” cinema, as I find that to basically be torture porn, but Nagisa Ōshima makes atrocities on display compelling because of the meaning he injects and the sheer force of nature that is his directing. Witnessing an  Ōshima  film is always quite an experience – his films are mysterious in morals and meaning, yet also clear in construction and conviction. That tension between ambiguity and clarity permeates his second feature, Cruel Story of Youth (1960). The lingering question I had while watching it was “who’s the titular ‘cruel’?”, and the answer kept changing shape and position. We start the movie thinking the rapist must be the cruel one, but the answer slowly expands to men as a whole then to American-influenced capitalist society.  Ōshima  has smartly centered his focus on a woman instead of the awful men surrounding her; men are just evil of the worst kind in this film. For a ...

Welcome! We are still walking in 2020. Stay healthy!