Format: DVD

Release date: 23 April 2007

Distributor: Yume Pictures

Director: Yasuzo Masumura

Cast: Ayako Wakao, Kyôko Kishida, Yusuke Kawazu, Eiji Funakoshi

Japan 1964

91 minutes

Although Yasuzo Masumura was a major influence on directors such as Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura, his work has been incomprehensibly neglected in the West. This is a man who was a precursor of the Japanese New Wave and a pioneer of the kind of extreme cinema that has made Takashi Miike famous, a wildly imaginative filmmaker who has no less than 58 films to his credit and is responsible for some of the most savagely beautiful, erotically-charged images ever committed to celluloid, and yet he has been treated until now as little more than a footnote in film history. Thanks to Yume Pictures some of his films are now being released on DVD for the first time in the UK, making his work available to a new generation of cinephiles.

One of these releases is Manji, a feverish tale of obsessive lesbian love, adultery and manipulation. The bored housewife of a passionless lawyer, Sonoko enrols in a women’s art school. When, one day, the women are given the task of painting the Goddess of Mercy, Sonoko’s picture so closely resembles Mitsuko, the school’s beauty, that it triggers rumours about the two women’s relationship. Deciding to ignore the gossip, they become friends. But unhappy that only the Goddess’ face in Sonoko’s picture looks like her, Mitsuko offers to pose naked to allow Sonoko to paint her whole body. During the session model and painter are irresistibly attracted to each other and they embark on a passionate affair. But while her husband grows increasingly suspicious, Sonoko for her part discovers that Mitsuko has another lover. Soon Manji is no longer simply the story of a lesbian affair: Sonoko, Mitsuko, the husband and the lover become entangled in an intricate web of love, lust, jealousy and deceit.

If the plot sounds rather melodramatic, well, it is. But what sets Masumura’s work apart from overwrought, sensationalist soap opera is his deliberate use of excess to dynamite the norms of conventional society. ‘My goal,’ wrote Masumura in a 1958 essay, ‘is to create an exaggerated depiction featuring only the ideas and passions of living human beings… In Japanese society, which is essentially regimented, freedom and the individual do not exist. The theme of the Japanese film is the emotions of the Japanese people, who have no choice but to live according to the norms of that society.’ In Masumura’s work lurid melodrama is a liberating force: it is what allows him to explore the feelings and desires that fall outside the boundaries of good taste. The jaw-dropping scene in which a hysterical Sonoko, driven mad by desire, furiously tears the sheet that hides Mitsuko’s naked body, perfectly encapsulates Masumura’s approach. It may seem fantastically over the top, but only extreme, fanatical emotions can drive Sonoko to reject the repressive code of conduct imposed by her society. And if there is such a strong focus on deviant sexuality in Masumura’s work, it is simply because sex is the domain where the most personal – and the most powerful – emotions are expressed. In a highly regulated society that places the collective good above everything else sex becomes the vital expression of individual revolt. Under someone else’s direction, the lesbian affair and love triangle of Manji – and the amputee sex of Red Angel or the sado-masochism of Blind Beast – would be the worst of exploitation cinema. But in Masumura’s work, unorthodox sexual desire is the irresistible force that spurs individuals to rebel against the strictures of convention.

In the male-dominated, chauvinistic Japan of the time, nothing could be more shocking than assertive, let alone transgressive, female sexuality. In such a context women’s desires carry an even greater rebellious charge than their male equivalent so it is little wonder that they take centre stage in Masumura’s cinema. In Manji, both Sonoko and Mitsuko firmly tell their respective male partners that they are free and won’t be tied down. They explore a kind of love from which men are excluded. Both feel some contempt for the men in their lives, one being sterile, the other a lacklustre lover. Both are entirely in control of their bodies – Sonoko knows of a way of avoiding pregnancy – and both express their desires explicitly and without shame. In a society where women are expected to be content with their roles as passive, submissive housewives, Sonoko’s sexual demands and her outspoken dissatisfaction with her husband are nothing short of revolutionary.

Rejecting the compromises of a society that only offers politely disguised unhappiness, Masumura’s characters are fanatically fighting for l’amour fou – for an absolute, radically binding emotion that leaves no room for concessions, comfort or convention, the kind of love that leaves physical as well as emotional scars and can only end with the death of one or both lovers. In Red Angel, nurse Nishi would rather brave the dangers of the front line than be separated from the doctor she loves. In Manji Sonoko manically repeats that she’d rather die than forfeit her love for Mitsuko. In Blind Beast the lovers take their passion to physically degrading extremes. In Masumura’s world, life is only worth living if it is lived to the full, with the utmost intensity, even if that intensity is ultimately crushing. Self-destruction is the inevitable and worthwhile price to pay for an instant of absolute love and unbounded freedom.

Love is a double-edged force that contains both liberation and enslavement, an idea that is evoked in the title: ‘Manji’ is the name of the Buddhist swastika, which represents the balance of opposites. A left-facing Manji, symbol of love and mercy, appeared on the original poster of the film – it has been eliminated from the UK DVD cover, possibly to avoid confusion with the Nazi symbol. Mitsuko, increasingly identified with the Goddess of Mercy, is an inscrutable, ambiguous figure that is the source of both the fulfilment and the destruction of her lovers. They become entirely subjugated, accepting the sleeping potion Mitsuko gives them every night to keep them under her control, even though it leaves them mentally and physically diminished. All is sacrificed on the altar of love, the self being the ultimate offering. While only the excessive emotion of love can free individuals from the norms that bound them, its force may also destroy the very sense of self it helped create.

For Masumura love is also deeply connected to art. Sonoko admires Mitsuko’s body as she would a painting. Just like the blind sculptor in Blind Beast who is able to ‘see’ the beauty of a statue by running his hands all over it, Sonoko’s interest in art is deeply sensual. This is not just one of the major themes of Masumura’s work but crucially, it is also how he conceives of his own art. For Masumura, art, like love, is a powerful sensory experience. While showing very little nudity, Masumura infuses Manji with a deep, dark, warm eroticism, teasingly capturing bodies just emerging from behind screens or garments, yearningly tracing the light on nude, honey-hued skin with the eye of a lustful painter. Masumura’s filming is vibrant with desire, burning with the same passion as the characters’, and it is through the tactile beauty it creates that it communicates its most subversive ideas and intense emotions. For all this Masumura deserves to be recognised as a true master of cinema.

Virginie Sélavy

Format: DVD

Release date: 26 March 2007

Distributor: Yume Pictures

Alternative title Go To Hell, Hoodlums!

Director: Seijun Suzuki

Cast: Koji Wada, Chikako Hosokawa, Eitaro Ozawa, Mayumi Shimizu

Japan 1960

80 minutes

This is one of the early B-movies that Seijun Suzuki made for Nikkatsu studios before he found his stylistic feet with Youth of the Beast in 1963. A rebellious youth tale, it portrays the head-on collision between traditional and modern Japan as young orphan Sadao is revealed to be the long-lost heir to the respectable Matsudaira clan. Sadao accepts to move from the house he shares with a gang of orphans in Kobe to Awaji Island in the hope that he will meet his mother. Once there Sadao shocks the elder with his joyous lack of respect for the staid rituals and hierarchy of the clan and soon has the venerable house of his grand-mother shaking to the sounds of rock’n’roll.

Sadao is less the delinquent suggested by the title than a pretty decent young man and he uses his new-found power and money to transform the island to benefit all people. To succeed in his project he has to fight the ruthless face of capitalism represented by an unscrupulous gangster who wants to turn the island into a lucrative amusement park. In the struggle against greed old and young find a common ground and deeply-rooted class prejudices are overcome in a happy, festive finale.

Although this is Suzuki-lite, Fighting Delinquents already displays some of the director’s typical stylistic flourishes as when a scene of dramatic revelation turns into a series of coloured pop art vignettes. Shows and performances punctuate the action, from a traditional puppet theatre to bikini-clad nightclub dancers and a fantastically kitsch number sung by an unlikely throaty-voiced pop chanteuse. The master colourist of Tokyo Drifter and the eccentric iconoclast of Branded to Kill are already visible here and there is a lot of fun to be had from this exuberant, pastel-coloured retro lollipop. One for Suzuki completists or amateurs of sixties Japanese camp.

Virginie Sélavy

Also released as part of Yume Pictures’ Suzuki collection is The Flowers and the Angry Waves, a period yakuza drama set in 19th-century Tokyo.

Format: DVD

Release date: 20 November 2006

Distributor: BFI

Director: The Brothers Quay

UK 2006

314 mins

The stop-motion animation of the Brothers Quay (never ‘The Quay Twins’) has often been likened to that of Jan Švankmajer, their great Czech forerunner. The Quays are clearly irked by the comparison, despite their clear admiration for Švankmajer, even claiming not to have heard of him when they started out as animators. But really there’s no need for them to be so worried. This magnificent 2-disc set more than confirms the reputation of a highly personal (geminal?) body of work. In fact, work like this whose public life is inevitably fleeting, fragile and obscure - all the more so since Channel Four ditched its experimental remit - gains more than most from being collected and presented as an oeuvre.

The curious thing is, having now traced the oeuvre from one end to the other, I’m no longer sure animation quite covers what the Quays do. At any rate, they are not really puppeteers, or only incidentally. Accidentally, even. In fact, they learned animation on the job because money to make an animated film came their way. The result, Nocturna Artificialia (1979) - discreetly tucked away under the ‘Next’ menu on the bonus disc, which is itself disarmingly titled ‘Footnotes’ - is avowedly a journeyman piece. Even so, it is astonishing how little in the way of actual stop-motion it gets away with. The protagonist figure scarcely shifts; the tram trundles from one end of the frame to the other. I don’t want to underestimate the amount of painstaking work that goes into even this relatively basic animation. But it is positively interesting that most of the movement comes from the way camera and lights travel over surfaces and gaps in the set to create space. This, more than anything, is the aspect that carries on into later films.

The classic Street of Crocodiles (1986) is light years on in terms of technique, and makes striking use of moving parts of all sorts: inexplicable machines perform enigmatic repetitive tasks; bobbins spin endless threads into darkness; screws unscrew themselves; a light-bulb-headed salesman sells light bulbs; a monkey staring moronically through the smutty glass of a shop front periodically goes into spasms, frenetically clashing its cymbals. But the real triumph is the production of a sense of enigmatic space, of action glimpsed dimly through grimy glass. We start out in live action with an elderly Polish gent viewing a section of a city plan through some sort of magic lantern. We then descend into the interior of the machine, which, it turns out, is actually where the street of louche shops on the map is located. The set is of fantastic complexity: a glass plate opens allowing access to a theatre stage/camera aperture, leading into a dark chamber run across with spooling threads. Then, above opens the domed glass roof of an arcade; then on into a labyrinth of nested vitrines, and so on. Our puppet protagonist does move, ostensibly leading us through this odd landscape. But the animation is there to serve the virtuoso camerawork, rather than the other way round. Gestures are caught reflected in glass or in the infinite regress of tailor’s mirrors; telephoto lenses dissolve in mid-animation from one toy going through its motions to another; with his eye to a tiny window/viewfinder, the protagonist’s face is bathed in flickering light. Even in the climactic scene in the tailor’s shop, where the explorer of the tawdry delights of the street is almost seduced in some worryingly obscure manner, the ‘girls’ are basically doll’s heads on trolleys; thus avoiding the pointlessly complex illusionism of making puppets walk. The movements that do interest the Quays here are the repetitive arm-jerks signalling the breakdown of the girls’ mechanisms as the seduction of the zone disintegrates, and the really breathtaking tracking shot that whirls us back out through chambers and compartments we never knew we’d been through in the first place.

Of course, I’m exaggerating: both The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer (1984) and This Unnameable Little Broom (1985) contain a fair amount of minutely choreographed puppet-work. But the use of motion as a focus for light and perspective to play on remains a strong defining part of the Quays’ work. In a sense, their live action film Institute Benjamenta (1995; not included in this collection) differs only in shifting the onus of making stilted, repetitive moves onto the shoulders of human actors. A much more recent work, In Absentia (2000), which also features live action alongside animation, bears this out spectacularly. The opening set is truly hellish, with odd scaffolds and pulleys in a foggy prospect shot through with light that glowers, flashes and rumbles with varying intensity and from abruptly shifting sources. The best way to imagine this would be a detail from a Hieronymus Bosch painting illuminated by a manic overload of the sort of laser-through-dry-ice sculpture once favoured by old school heavy metal bands. But the musical accompaniment is much more unpleasant than this suggests: an original, and authentically disturbing, Stockhausen score of snarling, wailing electronics and treated voices. From here we move beneath a distressingly open window - shot from below, oddly illuminated, and flanked by a tiny, inexplicable balcony from which disembodied child’s legs dangle rhythmically - and into an equally worrying interior where a live action actress and her animated pencil shavings go through the obsessive motions of the madness of Emma Hauck, the subject of the film. It’s probably not a good idea to watch In Absentia if you are feeling even slightly on edge. Actually, you may not want to watch it if you are feeling happy. But you should certainly watch it.

I haven’t even mentioned the Stille Nacht series of short compact pieces ranging from some quite odd stuff about deer testicles and furniture, to music videos that are a little more obvious in some respects (bunnies and dolls on the edge of puberty), but still very good. And even then there is lots I haven’t mentioned, all good. The whole thing is beautifully packaged, complete with a (much) more than usually informative booklet containing an a-z of vital references and the whole of the original scenario for Street of Crocodiles. The films themselves have been transferred and presented with great care, and plenty of extras: commentaries, alternate cinemascope versions, interviews. The interviews offer genuine insight into the work, especially the one in the Paris doll museum where the true extent of their loathing for puppetry becomes apparent. But the twins are fascinating in their own right: watch for the way as one twin becomes animated, the other falls silent and motionless. The bonus disc even includes the short segment of Peter Greenaway’s The Falls featuring the young Quays as ‘Ipson and Pulat Fallari’. Curiously enough, they only appear as stills: frozen in shirtless monochrome, with shades, pouts and wavy hair, they look eerily like some stereoscopic premonition of Andrew Ridgeley. Later, they would refuse to take moving parts in another Greenaway film.

Stephen Thomson

Format: DVD

Release date: 5 March 2007

Distributor: Warner Home Video

Director: Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg

Cast: James Fox, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Michí­Â¨le Breton

UK 1970

105 mins

‘While we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.’ (Jorge Luis Borges)

Performance is finally to be released on DVD, complete with around 30 minutes of extras. Unfortunately these don’t appear to include any of the footage that had to be cut before the film could get its initial release. Although whether any of the cut footage would make the story any clearer or merely further muddy the waters, I cannot say. But of course, as with many Nicolas Roeg films, following the plot is hardly the most important element (although, despite the elliptical editing, the story is a simple one).

Performance was produced in 1968 by Warner Brothers in a pre-Easy Rider attempt to exploit the ‘paisley pound’. It was co-directed by the screenwriter Donald Cammell (he also wrote Duffy 1968) and the then well-known cinematographer Nicolas Roeg (Petulia 1968, Far from the Madding Crowd 1967). Central to Warner Brothers’ interest in the project was the casting of Cammell’s friend of a friend: Mick Jagger. Whether they were really expecting a knockabout comedy in the vein of A Hard Day’s Night or Help, as has been suggested, I am not sure. But when they saw the finished product they were horrified and shelved the film indefinitely; as one disgusted exec claimed, ‘Even the bath water is filthy’. It was not until the ownership of Warner Brothers changed hands that Performance was finally released at the end of 1970 (after a dramatic re-edit).

There are so many myths and stories about the film’s troubled production (and after-effects) that it is hard to know what to believe. Did James Fox (Chas) take his performance too far and become involved with real gangsters before becoming a born-again Christian? He didn’t make another film, or even act, for many years. Keith Richards, so the story goes, was so unhappy about girlfriend Anita Pallenberg’s sex scenes with Jagger (apparently not a performance) that he had to be banned from the set. And Jagger having difficulty playing himself (he wasn’t very convincing) decided to play Turner as Brian Jones (Pallenberg’s original Rolling Stone boyfriend).

Performance is often cited as a film that defines the end of the 60s; as a perfect example, along with Altamont and the Manson murders, of the hippy dream destroyed by violence. But the violence in the film comes not to end peace and love; it exists alongside it. Hate is merely the flip side to love; violence to sex. One of the scenes that most disturbed the censors (and Warner Brothers too, I presume) was the inter-cutting of the whipping Chas receives from a gangland enemy with the scratching fingernails of his lover. The film suggests that violence and pleasure have gone hand in hand throughout history. Turner relates the mythical story of Hasan-i-Sabbah and his hashishin or assassins (most famously told by Marco Polo) who committed murders in order to be allowed to return to their drugged garden paradise.

Hasan-i-Sabbah’s last words, Turner tells us, were: ‘Nothing is true. Everything is permitted’. It is a maxim that would surely appeal to the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges. Borges is the film’s main literary influence and reference. Turner reads excerpts from his story ‘The South’; even the gangsters are seen reading a Borges collection; and it is his portrait that is smashed by the tunnelling bullet. With its philosophical questioning of who we are and the roles we play Performance plays like a Borges story set between the East End underworld and a Notting Hill hippy underground of the late 60s. However, where Borges’ stories are short allegories or parables about ideas only loosely attached to a particular place or time, Performance‘s mise en scí­Â¨ne gives us rich descriptions of its two contrasting milieux.

Despite its universal themes, it is a film that could indeed only have been made at that time (although its 1977 reissue claimed, ‘Ten years ahead of its time… Are you now ready for Performance?’). It is hard to imagine it being made either two years earlier or later and impossible to think of a major studio financing such a film at any other time. It is heavily stylised in both its cinematography (distorting lenses, switching of film stocks) and its design (Turner’s Moroccan interiors). The editing is often non-linear (images from the story’s end are cross-cut into the very start of the film) and Jack Nitzsche’s soundtrack is possibly the most experimental element of the whole film. However, many of the performances are almost ‘kitchen sink’ in their realism (many unprofessional actors are used, not least Mick Jagger) and the dialogue is loosely scripted and delivered with a certain amount of improvisation (the actors were often told what to talk about rather than what to say). But what places the film so clearly at the end of the 60s is the heavy-handed symbolism (costumes, wigs and mirrors feature prominently) and forced metaphors (when asked what his performance entails, Chas replies, ‘I juggle’), although in the gangland section the dressing-up (Chas putting on his ‘work clothes’) is more subtly played than when searching through Turner’s fancy dress box, later in the film.

The film’s bohemianism shows a continuation of the literary drugs and decadence of the Romantics (Shelley and Byron) through to the turn-of-the-century occultists such as W.B.Yeats and Aleister Crowley (Cammell’s father was Crowley’s biographer). Rimbaud and Verlaine’s pot circle called themselves ‘Club des Haschischins’. The drug-taking in the film is in that same ‘experimental’ vein rather than the hedonistic joyride one would expect from Mick Jagger. Even the hallucinogen given to Chas is the more literary mescaline and not the 60s trip favourite LSD.

It is through his unsuspecting experiment with hallucinogens that Chas begins to rediscover his true self beneath his multi-layered performance as a gangster pretending to be a juggler. It was widely believed (and still is) that such drugs allowed access to the deep unconscious mind. Thus the film’s famous line: ‘The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is one that achieves madness’. The unconscious mind needs to believe the performance too. Both Chas and Turner have lost touch with their true selves through over-playing a role. Chas’ stylish and violent gangster has lost touch with his more ‘feminine’ side perhaps due to his (at least hinted-at) repressed homosexuality. The film shows this through a series of mind games and visual metaphors, some of which are a little heavy-handed, others beautifully playful as when Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) reflects her breast onto Chas’ with a mirror.

Turner is perfectly in touch with his feminine side, often morphing into the androgynous Lucy (Michí­Â¨le Breton) and back again, via the magic of the editing suite. However, he is missing something (his mojo has stopped working, it seems). Similarly at that time, The Rolling Stones had just finished their much-criticised attempt at a Sergeant Pepper. Although Their Satanic Majesties Request, released in 1967, was a brilliant psychedelic album, Jon Landau wrote in Rolling Stone at the time: ‘They have been far too influenced by their musical inferiors and the result is an insecure album in which they try too hard to prove that they too are innovators, and that they too can say something new. [It is] an identity crisis of the first order’. In the film Turner and Chas’ identities are enigmatically merged with the final murder/suicide/execution pact. In real life the Rolling Stones replaced Brian Jones, the inspiration for Turner, with the more prosaic Mick Taylor and rediscovered the back-to-basics libido rock of Sticky Fingers and Brown Sugar. Jones was mysteriously drowned less than a month later.

Overall, it is a flawed (Chas overhearing Turner’s address in a café doesn’t work and seems unnecessary) and messy film but it is held together by James Fox’s incredible central performance. The Krays-styled underworld is as curious as the Notting Hill scenes; the gangsters have pretensions as businessmen (‘It’s a merger, Chas’). The boss Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon) is both hilarious and menacing with his misplaced maxims: ‘United we stand. Divided we’re lumbered’. It is an ambitious and experimental film (although not necessarily ‘ahead of its time’) that kick-started Roeg’s career as a director (and virtually ended Cammell’s). It is another long overdue release for one the key British films of any decade.

Paul Huckerby

Format: DVD

Release date: 26 February 2007

Distributor: Liberation

Director: Mark Kirchell

USA 1990

117 minutes

Berkeley in the Sixties is ostensibly a film about the sixties and about the incredible move from political protest to active, oftentimes violent, resistance throughout the decade. In this sense, Berkeley as a place, or an institution in the form of the University of California, quickly becomes more of a state of mind than an actual location. This doesn’t matter so much though, for this highly entertaining and thought-provoking documentary unashamedly uses Berkeley as the launch pad for an impressive rumination on the meaning of politics, counterculture, and sadly, the inability of an entire generation to, in the end, fight the powers that be.

Having said this, it is also one of those rare documentaries that remain remarkably uplifting. Interspersing documentary footage of Berkeley from the early sixties with the rise of the Civil Rights movement, the beginning of organised leftist anti-war movements and onwards through the Black Panthers and Women’s Lib, the film rolls out a small but impressive list of surviving activists, all of whom are remarkably articulate.

We thus get what is perhaps a not very innovative but still highly effective documentary structure of having people who actually engaged with, and lived through the events, recounting the ‘history’ of countercultural activity in the sixties. There is little interruption by the interviewer, and despite a somewhat laconic voice-over by another ex-activist there is a real sense that this film is as much about how you survive wanting to change America, with the realization that it was perhaps doomed to never happen.

Fittingly, and scarily pertinent taking the last decade into consideration, the documentary starts with The House of Un-American Activities Committee, an organisation which clearly should be credited with more than just giving George Clooney the opportunity to make a film with a lot of smoking in it. As it transpires, the vehemence of the McCarthyist witch-hunts was precisely the sort of thing that spurred on a growing disgust with the Establishment. This – coupled with the fact that civil unrest and protest was being televised on an unprecedented scale – is set up from the beginning of the documentary as a quintessential reason why people eventually flocked to Berkeley, whether it be to drop in, tune out or simply turn on to what was happening.

The film is deceptively shrewd in this manner, for despite its folksy musical soundtrack and footage of flower power girls doing that topless swaying dance we always get in snippets from Woodstock, the film lays bare the necessary media savvy-ness of the more successful countercultural movements. There is some great commentary from ex-Black Panther leaders acknowledging how the fascination with Afros and guns led many impotent-feeling white middle-class revolutionaries to suddenly become ‘brothers’.

Possibly a sign of old age, or simply growing disgust with the complete lack of engagement by university students in current affairs, I was struck by how one student leader shouted into a megaphone on the campus steps: ‘There are times when the operations of the machine become so odious you just have to do something.’ This is a film, then, about a brief moment in American history when some people actually did.

CB