Tag Archives: Japanese cinema

Outlaw Gangster VIP

Outlaw Gangster VIP
Outlaw – Gangster VIP

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 18 April 2016

Distributor: Arrow Video

Directors: Toshio Masuda, Keiichi Ozawa, Mio Ezaki

Writers: Gorô Fujita, Kaneo Ikegami, Keiji Kubota, Gan Yamazaki

Cast: Tetsuya Watari, Chieko Matsubara, Eiji Gô, Kayo Matsuo, Kyôsuke Machida

Japan 1968-69

93 / 97 / 92 / 87 / 86 / 86 mins

Based on a real-life yakuza, Nikkatsu’s gritty 1960s crime series is about a man on the wrong side of both the law and rival gangs.

Produced in rapid succession over the course of about a year and a half, Nikkatsu’s six-part Outlaw series exists within an interesting hinterland between two distinct phases of the Japanese yakuza genre. The first and perhaps most famous entry in the run, Toshio Masuda’s Gangster VIP (1968), was released by Nikkatsu in the wake of Seijun Suzuki’s spectacularly unceremonious dismissal from the studio following their dissatisfaction with Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1967), a move that caused great waves of discontent within the industry at the time. And the series wrapped up more than two years before the genre’s next major shot in the arm, Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles without Honour and Humanity (1972) for Toei, which spawned a series totalling five films (also released recently by Arrow Video), a second series dubbed New Battles without Honour and Humanity and numerous in-name-only spinoffs. The popularity of Fukasaku’s films can be attributed to their kinetic execution, grisly violence and the tabloid-esque sensationalism generated through them being based on a series of newspaper articles that were in turn based on the memoirs of notorious yakuza Kôzô Minô.

Despite the ‘all events and characters in this film are fictional’ disclaimer that appears at the start of Gangster VIP, and intermittently throughout the rest of the series, the Outlaw films are based on stories by Gôro Fujita, a former yakuza all too familiar with a lifestyle that’s governed by clan loyalty and debts paid with blood. The Outlaw series, then, can be seen as a missing link between the ‘Borderless Action’ and ninkyo eiga (chivalry films) that characterised the genre during the preceding decade or so, and the jitsuroko (true account, or actual record) films that came to dominate throughout the 1970s such as Battles without Honour and Humanity. Incidentally, Fujita’s writings would also go on to be adapted by Fukasaku with Graveyard of Honour (1975), another hit for Toei.

Starting in the mid-1950s, the Outlaw series stars Tetsuya Watari as Gôro Fujikawa, an on-again off-again yakuza henchman who often finds himself on the wrong side of both the law and rival clans (and sometimes even his own). But despite his best efforts to resist the pull of yakuza life, he frequently has to get his hands dirty to correct personal injustice. The first – and strongest – film of the series, Gangster VIP, sees Gôro freshly released from prison after a three-year stretch for stabbing a hitman in a bar (his former mentor Sugiyama, who now works for an opposing gang). A free man once more, he is disenfranchised with the kill or be killed mentality of his former peers and intends to shun his old ways. However, he finds his old clan in serious decline, pitted against the stronger Aokis group. He also has to frequently dissuade the curious advances of Yukiko (series co-star Chieko Matsubara), a young woman he happened to save while she was being harassed by a street gang. Yukiko becomes overly intrigued by both Goro’s criminal life and his attempts to abandon it, dutifully tidying his messy lodgings, supplied to him by his old clan. Goro manages to patch things up with Sugiyama (Kyôsuke Machida), who survived Goro’s blade but is now ailing from tuberculosis. But when gangland power plays culminate into personal tragedy, Goro feels compelled to exact gruesome revenge.

Perhaps best known in the West for the similarly-themed noir Rusty Knife (1958) and the Japanese sequences of 1970’s Tora! Tora! Tora! (along with Fukasaku), Toshio Masuda perhaps wasn’t the most audacious director working for Nikkatsu. However, he imbues the series opener with enough stylistic curveballs to elevate it above much of the competition. It’s also a film with a deceptive amount of emotional pull. Its climatic scene of vengeance, hauntingly set to the crooning tones of a nightclub singer, adds a satisfying twist to what could’ve easily turned into a disappointingly standard good-guy-gets-revenge-by-killing-all-the-bad-guys sequence. And a scene where one of Goro’s assigned underlings attempts to flee the city with a newly-requited love, only to be met with merciless refusal by his profession, is a more heart-breaking moment than the genre is usually willing to permit. Watari’s character often philosophises over the wasteful and futile nature of the yakuza game, with a regular motif throughout the series being Goro trying to protect those who naively get caught up in the carnage and to get them out before it’s too late. However, his efforts are usually met with failure. He is also haunted by memories of a tough upbringing, as illustrated by the film’s monochrome opening credits sequence featuring young versions of Sugiyama and himself escaping from a detention centre for delinquents. Indeed, Watari, and by extension the film, may not be ‘cool’ in the same way as number three assassin Jô Shishido in Suzuki’s jangly Branded to Kill, or the shotgun-toting Shishido in Yasuharu Hasebe’s Massacre Gun (1967), but that’s arguably not the point of his character (a latent self-insert for Fujita, exorcising the regrets of his real-life criminal past). Having said that, Gôro does rise to the occasion in fine style when the going gets tough, often finding himself a key player in many of the series’ chaotic raids, messy knife fights and protracted back alley brawls. And his effectiveness quickly earns him the title ‘Gôro the Assassin’. These sequences are surprisingly grisly for the period and bring a sense of scrappy realism to the whole series.

The second film, Gangster VIP 2 (1968), directly continues the story, starting with Gôro and Yukiko, along with Sugiyama’s seriously unwell wife (Kayo Matsuo), trying to make a new life for themselves in the countryside. But as Yumeko’s condition worsens, Gôro has no choice but to accept a job that will take him back into the fray. Using his wits and his trusty blade, he has to survive a new series of deceptions and double crosses as turf is fought over. Keiichi Ozawa replaces Masuda in the director’s chair for Gangster VIP 2 and manages to replicate the formula of its predecessor admirably. Gôro remains an enigmatic yet sympathetic protagonist and continues to be eminently watchable, and Matsubara’s Yukiko possess a quality that subtly sets her apart from other female hangers-on. However, this film doesn’t quite gel as well, even though most of the elements from the first film are present. What is missing is Masuda’s subtle yet effective stylistic flair. Ozawa’s attempts at visual creativity, such as intercutting the film’s final knife fight with stylised cutaways of nearby students playing volleyball, are interesting additions but feel muddled, and don’t land as well as Masuda’s forays into similar territory. Gangster VIP 2 is an enjoyable sequel to be sure; it just doesn’t quite match the quality of its predecessor. As a bonus, eagle-eyed fans will notice a young Meiko Kaji (of Lady Snowblood and Female Prisoner Scorpion fame) in an early yet somewhat pivotal supporting role.

Ozawa is replaced by Mio Ezaki to helm the series’ third film, Outlaw: Heartless (1968). Written by Ezaki and Gan Yamazaki, the film doesn’t directly follow on from Gangster VIP 2 in the same way that that film had followed on from the first. Instead, Heartless seems to almost function as a soft reboot, as indicated by the change in series nomenclature and, most intriguingly, by the complete recasting of Matsubara. Indeed, the recasting of actors into different roles from one film to the next in a given series was a typical strategy for Nikkatsu at the time, and as such it becomes an increasingly more common sight as this series progresses (actors Eiji Go and Kunie Tanaka show up a couple of times in different guises for instance), but Matsubara’s changes are the most readily apparent and have the most noticeable impact (or lack thereof) on the dynamic of each film.

Heartless starts with Gôro, now working as a yakuza enforcer, trying to save a man who has been unfairly duped into owing money to the Mikimoto clan. The man, Sawada, is however slain by one of Gôro’s entourage, concerned that ‘the Assassin’ has gone weak. Gôro forcibly steals the 3 million yen that the clan had cheated from Sawada to give it to Sawada’s widow. Gôro is pursued by the gang, as well as Sawada’s irate brother (a character who goes by the name ‘Ken the Razor’), who mistakenly believes Gôro to be the murderer. Matsubara plays Keiko, the naïve daughter of a former yakuza-turned-bar owner, who Gôro crosses paths with. Like Yukiko before her, Keiko is drawn to Goro’s tough yet sympathetic demeanour, despite the disapproval of her father and from Gôro himself.

One can’t help but feel that a rinse and repeat policy is in force with Heartless, as the film is littered with recycled moments: a knife fight that takes place behind the scenes of a nightclub as a song is performed echoes the superior climax of Gangster VIP, for example. But despite their familiarity, the film’s violent clashes (arguably bloodier than its predecessors) remain bracing, sometimes thrilling. Watari remains eminently watchable, even though creative changes behind the scenes have diminished some of the shading that made his character especially interesting in the first two films (for instance, the opening framing device that sheds light on Gôro’s traumatic upbringing is absent here and will be for the rest of the series). Matsubara also excels playing a new character in a now somewhat familiar universe, and her chemistry with Watari remains as strong as before even though she has a somewhat more incidental role to play this time.

Keiichi Ozawa returns to see out the remainder of the series. Outlaw: Gôro the Assassin (1968) sees Gôro, after another year in the slammer, taking a handyman job at a hotel resort. A woman who works there (Matsubara in yet another role) is embroiled with some gangsters, with one of them slipping her regular payments as a means of trying to redeem himself for the murder of her father several years prior. As the yakuza begin to throw their weight about the hotel, Gôro has little choice but to get involved, as they are all too familiar with his now legendary status as an outlaw in relation to both the police and fellow yakuza. Meanwhile, Gôro is also trying to track down the sister of his former cellmate to pass on an important message, requiring him to search various gang-controlled nudie bars and strip clubs. As a result, Gôro the Assassin moves the series into slightly sleazier territory, anticipating the wider industry’s move toward more exploitative fare in the early 1970s.

Penultimate entry Outlaw: Black Dagger (1968) plays the most with the continuity of the series. The black dagger of the title pertains to Goro’s famed weapon of choice, which is feared and respected by Goro’s enemies in equal measure. However, this marks the first time in the series when any kind of big deal has been made about it. Towards the tail end of the film’s opening night time knife fight between Goro and some bad guys in an abandoned snowy street, a woman from Goro’s past makes an unexpected appearance. Yuri (Matsubara) has ignored Gôro’s advice to stay away and has returned, just long enough to be accidentally stabbed by one of Goro’s opponents (Sueo, the ‘young master’ and son of the leader of the Buso clan). She dies in Gôro’s arms while Sueo makes his escape. A couple of years pass (moving the series into the early 60s) and Gôro manages to find work at a quarry. However the owner, Miura, is in debt to the Buso clan. After an accident on the site, Goro is put in the care of a nurse (played again by Matsubara). Her identical resemblance to Yuri sends Gôro on a little bit of a loop, and Sueo develops something of an obsession with her as well. As the Buso clan square off against Miura, as well as some old friends who are loyal to a rival group, Gôro unsheathes the black dagger once more.

The series’ final film Outlaw: Kill! (1969) starts with a clan boss going to jail after an assassination attempt results in a tempura restaurant being wrecked during the ensuing carnage. With a power vacuum now in full force, the fraught status quo between various underbosses and rival clans begins to unravel. Goro, back in town, resists falling back into the yakuza life once more and seeks legitimate employment. Out shopping (for pants of all things), he soon crosses paths with a group harassing Yumiko (Matsubara), a department store elevator girl. Later, he looks up an old friend he first met in prison, a veteran yakuza called Moriyama, who offers him a place to stay. Little does Gôro know, however, that Yumiko is the sister of Moriyama’s wife, Minako, and that she is also staying with them. Inevitably, Goro winds up becoming the target of various movers and shakers in the underworld, despite Moriyama’s best efforts to keep him out of their affairs. As one may expect, this doesn’t end well, prompting one final killing spree – perhaps the most gruesome and spectacular of the lot.

With Ozawa’s return, the second half of the series starts to rest on its laurels somewhat. As such, Gôro the Assassin, Black Dagger and Kill! do run the risk of blurring together for the viewer. Black Dagger may be the highlight of the latter half of the series, featuring several moments of compelling drama in what is an otherwise efficient potboiler. But part of the problem with the series in general lies in the excessive repetition of plot points; every film pretty much ends the same way, and there is only so many times a formula can be applied before an immunity is built up. Kill! may be the biggest offender in this regard, as it tries to recreate several moments from the past, especially from the first film. The swift and surreptitious assassination of a key supporting character while out in public with his wife is extremely redolent of Gangster VIP’s most emotionally charged moment. And its climatic fight in the VIP and backstage areas of a nightclub uses the same audio visual technique that worked so well in that same film – having the fight unfold without diegetic sound, accompanied only by the music being played by whoever is performing on the stage of the club (except this time it’s a psychedelic rock band instead of a melancholic club singer).

Although Watari still sells the hell out of the role, Gôro’s character is also on autopilot at this point, seeing as his arc hasn’t really developed since Gangster VIP 2. Matsubara also suffers from a similar malady. Although she always remains perfectly likeable, each of her characters basically embarks upon the same arc – a somewhat naïve love for Goro that develops within 10 minutes of knowing him. This dynamic is changed up somewhat in Black Dagger, where Matsubara plays two roles, one of which states in no uncertain terms her disapproval of yakuza. But it is strange to see Goro and other characters get hung up on the fact that one character is (understandably) the spitting image of the other, whereas Matsubara’s other incarnations in other films of the series are treated as new entities with zero baggage. It bizarrely draws attention to her predictable yet paradoxically mercurial presence throughout the Outlaw series, and it’s a tactic that undermines the development of any real emotional investment in the overall continuity of the series, as an actor who is killed in one film may very well turn up as a different character in another. Any relationships that do manage to blossom, such as the budding romance between Watari and Matsubara’s characters in Gangster VIP and Gangster VIP 2, get swept under the rug by time the next film starts. However, maybe there is something deeper to be said about the series seemingly going back to the drawing board, severing emotional bonds and repeating the same mistakes – a thematic extension of the vicious circle that is Goro’s vicious life.

That’s not to say that there isn’t any more fun to be had. Ozawa’s confidence in handling the films’ action set pieces visibly grows as the series goes on, although the introduction of a stylised stabbing sound effect does detract from the realism of these sequences a little bit. This building prowess reaches critical mass in the aforementioned nightclub scene that caps Kill! and the Outlaw series. Despite it being a conceptual carbon copy of Gangster VIP’s conclusion (which had already been sort of replicated by a sequence in Heartless), it still manages to stand out as one of the most visceral and exciting moments of the series. The use of the floor with clear glass sections between the dance floor above and the VIP room below is a particularly inspired location. These horizontal windows, used by horny businessmen to sneak upskirt looks at the young clientele dancing above them, are put to creative use by Ozawa and his camera team when the blades are drawn, making for a more expertly realised juxtaposition than Ozawa’s previous attempt with the volleyball players in Gangster VIP 2. It may get bogged down by repetition, but at least the series goes out on a high.

Overall the Outlaw series, while formulaic, offers up decently entertaining yakuza thrills for the most part. The first film is definitely the highlight, perhaps even a minor classic of the genre, and while the rest of the series is not quite up to that same standard, there are still plenty of things to like in each entry. Watari is excellent throughout and is the glue that holds it all together. The series’ shifts between savage drubbing and crestfallen romanticism (the latter wonderfully underscored by a recurring, and very Enio Morricone-esque, music motif of strummed acoustic guitar and solemn trumpet) offer an interesting, if a little too consistent, variant on the genre as a whole. For fans of Japanese genre cinema from this particular period, the Outlaw series is definitely worth checking out.

Mark Player

Nippon Connection 2014

Band of Ninja
Band of Ninja

Nippon Connection

27 May – 1 June 2014

Frankfurt, Germany

EIFF website

Taking place across six days, the 14th Nippon Connection film festival, held in various venues around Frankfurt, continues to act as the vanguard for showcasing both populist and independent Japanese cinema in Europe. As with previous years, the festival proudly presented the latest efforts from up-and-coming talents alongside some of the biggest directing names working today. With a hugely diverse selection of features, shorts, documentaries and experimental films in four main strands – ‘Cinema,’ ‘Visions,’ ‘Animation’ and ‘Retro’ – it is impossible to see everything that’s on offer. Below is an attempt to collect some thoughts on a cross-selection of films from each programme.

Fuku-chan of FukuFuku Flats (Yosuke Fujita, 2014)
The festival’s opening film, and one of the more warmly received, Fuku-chan of FukuFuku Flats is a sometimes absurd, sometimes crass, but always charming comedy from the director of Fine, Totally Fine (2008) and Quirky Guys and Gals (2011). Residing in the titular FukuFuku apartment building, Tatsuo Fukuda (Miyuki Oshima) is a kind and chubby decorator who lives on his own but always has time to solve the problems of his dysfunctional neighbours. But despite his popularity, Fukuda – or Fuku-chan – has always been unlucky in love, partly as a result of an embarrassing episode involving a conniving girl during his school days. His fears are put to the test when the girl (Asami Mizukawa), now an aspiring photographer, re-enters his life. The film is very much like its protagonist: slightly flabby but with a big, smiling heart. Its absurdities and eccentricities are regularly counteracted with moments of disarming pathos, and it also manages to make you care about its otherwise oddball cast of characters. Co-produced by Asian cinema distributor Third Window Films, expect to see Fuku-chan of FukuFuku Flats on UK release at some point.

Band of Ninja (Nagisa Oshima, 1967)
Around the time when Nagisa Oshima was directing many of what would become his seminal works of the mid-to-late 1960s – Violence at High Noon (1966), Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (1967), Death by Hanging (1968), etc. – he found the time to make Band of Ninja, an innovative motion-manga that photographs the panels of Sampei Shirato’s popular manga series of the same name, complete with dialogue, music and sound effects. It’s useless to try and fashion a pithy plot summary, as the two-hour runtime covers a lot of ground, so much so that it’s easy to lose track of what’s going on. Therein lies an issue with directly adapting from the page: an advantage of reading graphic literature, as opposed to watching it, is that you can absorb the material in your own time. But it is better to be confused than bored, and Band of Ninja certainly isn’t boring. Its slightly rickety appearance is belied by its frequently violent imagery, compounded further by Oshima’s quick cutting during these sequences, making the inanimate seem animate for the briefest instance. Band of Ninja is both thrilling and perplexing in equal measure.

Unforgiven (Lee Sang-il, 2013)
Although it is always amusing – and sometimes bemusing – to see the polarity of US/Japanese film remakes reversed (the 2009 Japanese version of 2004’s Sideways springs to mind), was there really much point in remaking Clint Eastwood’s classic revisionist Western Unforgiven (1992)? This is a question that looms large over Lee Sang-il’s version of David Webb Peoples’s story of a retired gunslinger teaming up with his old partner and a cocky, young rookie for one last murderous hurrah to assassinate a couple of cowboys who cut up a whore. Many of the narrative beats from the original film are handsomely replicated here, with only some minor deviations. The main draw, though, lies in the cultural transplantation from the American West to the dawn of the Japanese Meiji era, and the recasting of Eastwood’s grizzled shootist to Ken Watanabe’s shogunate relic. Another interesting detail is the new government’s detestation of the Ainu aborigines that hail from Hokkaido, which serves as the story’s new location. However, while finely made in its own right, this version is not quite as gripping as the original, possibly due to its overt familiarity and, for all its minor narrative additions and immaculate photography, lacks much of the shading that made Eastwood’s film so compelling the first time around.

Watch the trailer for Unforgiven (2013):

Backwater (Shinji Aoyama, 2013)
While there was a strong showing of light-hearted comedies in this year’s ‘Cinema’ section, such as Robo-G (2012), Yokohama Story (2013) and the aforementioned Fuku-chan of FukuFuku Flats, all of which are pleasantly innocuous, it was strangely refreshing to see something as prickly and dark as Backwater. Taking place in a small, dead-end riverside town in the late 1980s, the film follows 17-year-old Toma (Masaki Suda), who lives with his father (Ken Mitsuishi) and stepmother (Yukiko Shinohara). His real mother (Yuko Tanaka) has moved out but lives nearby, as she could no longer endure the violence her husband exhibits while having sex. Engaged in a sexual relationship with one of his classmates, Toma is concerned that the apple may not fall far from the tree, and that he too may have a predilection for such tendencies. Equally threatening to veer towards both dour misogyny and histrionics, Shinji Aoyama’s iconoclastic psychosexual drama is largely carried by the unsettling vibe conjured by Takahiro Imai’s graceful yet downtrodden camerawork, and a sound mix where hyperbolic insect buzzes and swells of ominous discordant noise place us firmly in an environment of sweltering oppression. Backwater is certainly an interesting work with plenty to ruminate on, but whether it can be liked is another matter.

My House (Yukihiko Tsutsumi, 2012)
Shot in stark monochrome, My House looks at the meaning of ‘home’ through observing two groups of characters with two very contrasting lifestyles. The first is a collective of vagrants living in two makeshift domiciles (which can be packed down and wheeled away at leisure) in Nagoya Park, who scavenge for discarded odds and ends. The second group is a family, consisting of a mysophobic mother, a stern father and two kids, living in a reasonable modern suburb. Best known for the 20th Century Boys films, director Tsutsumi returns to his indie roots with this subtle and quietly thought-provoking work. The often enrapturing black and white cinematography not only reflects the harshness of destitute living, or by turn the sterility of a house scrubbed and cleaned within an inch of its life, but also lends the film a mythic quality that helps distance it from straight-up social realism. Tsutsumi’s observant style doesn’t hit the viewer over the head with messages, it merely suggests. My House proves to be an understated and rather endearing surprise.

Number 10 Blues/Goodbye Saigon (Norio Osada, 2013)
A Japanese/Vietnamese co-production made on location during the closing months of the Vietnam War, Number 10 Blues/Goodbye Saigon was recently unearthed by the National Film Centre of Japan. It was intended to be the directorial debut by Norio Osada, who worked as a screenwriter with Kinji Fukasaku throughout the 1970s and 80s. However, tumultuous political conditions and the production company going bankrupt left the film unfinished for nearly 40 years. It was finally completed in 2012. Number 10 Blues follows a Japanese businessman posted in Saigon (Yusuke Kawazu), who goes on the run with his Vietnamese club-singer girlfriend (Lan Thanh) and the son of an Japanese ex-soldier after accidentally killing a slightly deranged Vietnamese man who used to work for him. Cue foot chases on the mean streets of Saigon, clandestine cross-country travel and shootouts with a gang in close pursuit. Like many Asian genre films of its era, Number 10 Blues is overly macho and too earnest to be the fun and breezy potboiler it could have easily been, which is disappointing considering the effort undertaken to get the film finished after so many years.

Watch the trailer for Number 10 Blues/Goodbye Saigon:

The Tale of Iya (Tetsuichiro Tsuta, 2013)
Nearly three hours long, The Tale of Iya was tucked away in a late-night slot in the ‘Visions’ strand, a risky programming decision that strangely paid off. There was something about watching this sprawling rural epic near the witching hour that lent it a dreamlike aura; one could simply melt in the chair and let its majestic 35mm imagery wash over the senses. Set in a small farming community, the film follows a disparate cast of characters whose lives overlap and impact on one another. An old man who lives alone on the mountain rescues a baby, the sole survivor of a recent car accident, from a blizzard. Now a teenager, Haruna spends her days going to school and helping her adoptive grandfather tend to the crops. Meanwhile, a disillusioned man from Tokyo arrives seeking a more humble life. He crosses paths with a construction company that is building a tunnel through one of the mountains, as well as the group of gap-year Westerners opposing its progress. Evoking past classics such as The Ballad of Narayama (1958/1983) and Kaneto Shindo’s The Naked Island (1960), the ambitions of the film’s young director – only 28 at the time of production – are highly commendable. However, the film perhaps overshoots, indulging in a final act set in Tokyo that doesn’t quite sit with what came before, even though it leads to the kind of wonderful moment that can only be realised in cinema. But even if it does meander, The Tale of Iya is by turns grounded and magical, and bears all the hallmarks and directorial assurance of a modern, almost masterpiece. It is a deeply impressive and immersive work.

Antonym (Natsuka Kusano, 2014)
In an era where most new Japanese films seem to be clocking in at over two hours, the presence of Antonym, a sprightly 73-minuter, was all the more intriguing. Partaking in an evening writing class, Aya (Yuri Ishikaza) wins a competition that will see her 10-minute radio play broadcast on a midnight time slot, but only on the condition that she take on a co-writer to rework the script. Intending to work on the project alone, the stubborn and selfish Aya asks a work colleague, Sachiko (Asami Shibuya), to pretend to be her co-writer and sit in on meetings with her teacher. However, Sachiko has a natural knack for writing and wants to get properly involved. What follows is a delicate drama on an intimate scale about two characters of opposing dispositions, but each lonely in their own way. Aya is insular, whereas Sachiko yearns for connection, going out of her way to be friends with the former who, frustratingly, does not wish to reciprocate. But as their relationship develops, it begins to unwittingly mirror the themes of Aya’s play, climaxing in the unlikely pair performing the re-developed script in a recording studio. Antonym is a decent little debut from director Natsuka Kusano, although, unfortunately, perhaps too modest and esoteric to find a broader audience.

Patema Inverted (Yasuhiro Yoshiura, 2013)
With Studio Ghibli curiously absent from the animé line-up (especially strange considering the recent releases of Hayao Miyazaki’s supposed final film The Wind Rises and The Tale of Princess Kaguya, Isao Takahata’s less publicised return after a 14-year directing absence), the role of flag bearer for the ‘Animation’ strand arguably fell to Patema Inverted. A mind-boggling adventure set in two dystopian worlds that have opposing gravitational directions, the film follows teenager Patema (Yukiyo Fujii), who lives in an underground city. While out exploring in the ‘danger zone’, she falls down a vertical shaft and soon discovers an outside world where everything appears to be upside down. She befriends Age (Nobuhiko Okamoto), a fellow teen who is confused about the totalitarian state in which he lives, despite the educational propaganda that claims those who are ‘inverted’, like Patema, are sinners who need to be persecuted. While the narrative endeavours to keep us guessing over which ‘world’ is in fact the right way up, it also ensures that we never lose sight of the budding, gravity-crossed relationship at its centre, which gives the film a beating heart and plenty of emotional weight. Maybe a Studio Ghibli title wasn’t needed this year after all.

Watch the trailer for Patema Inverted:

Like Father, Like Son (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2013)
Winner of the Grand Jury prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and the closing film of this festival, Like Father, Like Son poses an impossible dilemma no parent would want to experience. When two couples from different backgrounds find out that their six-year-old sons were accidentally swapped at birth, they must decide whether to swap them back or remain as they are. As with Nobody Knows (2004) and I Wish (2011), Koreeda continues to riff on the theme of broken families, but in doing so further solidifies his reputation as a world-class filmmaker, often showered with daunting comparisons to Yasujiro Ozu. But maybe these aren’t so daunting anymore as, with Ozu’s best work, Like Father, Like Son is humble, humanistic, deeply edifying and executed with such gentle precision you are barely aware of the mechanics at work in making you feel engrossed and moved. Certainly one of the strongest Japanese films of recent years, and seeing as it’s not long been released on DVD and Blu-ray, there really isn’t any excuse to miss it.

Short Peace (Shuhei Morita, Katsuhiro Otomo, Hiroaki Ando, Hajime Katoki, 2013)
An omnibus feature composed of four short animated stories, Short Peace is a mixed bag of minor successes and near misses, which has enjoyed exposure due to the involvement of Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo: he wrote and directed the second segment, ‘Combustible’, and his manga served as the basis for the fourth, ‘A Farewell to Weapons’. The format of equally allotted segments is problematic. The first segment, ‘Possessions’, feels a little too long, whereas the aforementioned ‘Combustible’, a story about firefighting in feudal Japan, feels too short and ends just as it starts to get interesting. Segment three, ‘Gambo’, where a famed and mythical white bear fights a hulking red demon, and urban combat set piece ‘A Farewell to Weapons’ are better paced, although the latter is tonally mismatched with the first three due to its futuristic setting. Despite being assembled by some of the industry’s leading figures, Short Peace, while intermittently worthwhile, doesn’t quite coalesce as a whole.

However, special mention needs to be given to one of the screenings’ supporting shorts. The Portrait Studio (Takashi Nakamura, 2013), a beautifully executed story of a late 19th-century portrait photographer who tries to coax a smile out of a particularly stubborn customer over the course of several decades, was of a similar length to the individual segments of Short Peace and roundly upstaged them all with its pictorial animation style, nostalgic air and delightful piano score.

Watch the trailer for The Portrait Studio

The Ko Nakahira Retrospective
This year’s ‘Nippon Retro’ strand honoured the work of the little known Ko Nakahira, an early innovator of the 1960s Japanese New Wave who laid the groundwork for the likes of Shôhei Imamura, Nagisa Ôshima and Seijun Suzuki. Nine films were selected to be shown at the German Film Museum, which served to highlight the variety of styles, genres and production circumstances that Nakahira worked within while at Nikkatsu throughout the 1950s and 60s.

Nakahira often got into hot water with studio executives over the quick pacing of many of his films, concerned that audiences acclimatised to the more tranquil and metered styles of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse et al., would have difficulty keeping up. He also got into trouble with the censors over his frank handling of sexual issues. For instance, That Guy and I (1961) is a vibrant yet bawdy school comedy focusing on the new youth culture that rocked the archipelago at the turn of the decade. Characters openly discuss sexual desires with one another as well as bodily functions like menstruation. But the film also isn’t afraid to touch on serious political issues, such as the student riots and the rape of one of the female characters. Only on Mondays (1964) is about good-time girl Yuka (Mariko Kaga), whose life consists of little more than exploring her sexual prowess and her hold over several men, all the while eschewing genuine intimacy as the result of a psychosexually damaging childhood trauma. Stylistically, the film seems to be a reaction to the French Nouvelle Vague, which in turn was partly influenced by Nakahira’s work – reportedly, François Truffaut was particularly receptive to what would be Nakahira’s calling card, Crazed Fruit (1956).

The retrospective also looked at the other side of Nakahira’s career: his less personal, director-for-hire output. A highlight of this was most certainly The Black Gambler – Devil’s Left Hand (1965), the last in a six-part Black Gambler series of films starring Akira Kobayashi as a superstar gambler, who beds women effortlessly and often gets caught up in plots of international intrigue. A professor from the fictional nation of Pandora concocts a scheme to take over Japan’s gambling industry, and plans to build an army (it is revealed that the nation’s army consists of only 56 soldiers) with the revenue. For reasons that are never quite explained, the professor must defeat Koji, the Black Gambler, in order to fulfil his plans. He enlists the help of his three brightest students at Pandora’s University of Gambling: an old woman, a blind man and a precocious child, who each take Koji on. Tongue firmly in cheek, what follows is akin to a Roger Moore-era Bond film (although this was produced before Moore took over from Sean Connery), a franchise that the Gambler series emulated in a number of ways to capitalise on its popularity.

The Koji Yamamura Retrospective
The ‘Animation’ strand also had its own retrospective of sorts this year, a screening that collected several short works by independent animator and teacher Koji Yamamura. Yamamura attended the event to present 11 of his films. Standout pieces included the Oscar-nominated Mt. Head (2002), a modern interpretation of a traditional rakugo story of a man sprouting a small cherry tree from his head after eating cherry seeds; The Old Crocodile (2005), an amusingly macabre tale based on Histoire du vieux crocodile (1923) by Léopld Chauveau; and Muybridge’s Strings (2011), an exquisitely crafted visualisation of Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 experiments of consecutively photographing each phase of a galloping horse’s movements. Filled with wit, intelligence and unusual ideas, Yamamura’s work shows a different side of animé, proving that there’s more to it than giant mechas, busty schoolgirls and fan service.

Mark Player

Nihon Noir: The Crime Films of Yoshitarô Nomura

Zero Focus
Zero Focus

The Crime Films of Yoshitarô Nomura

Format: Cinema

Screening at: Bradford International Film Festival (BIFF), UK

Dates: 27 March – 6 April 2014

Also screening at: ICA, London

Dates: 18-23 April 2014

At the height of its powers, the Japanese film industry produced over 500 hundreds films a year. As such, it is not uncommon for films, or entire filmographies of particular directors, to go overlooked or undetected for many years. This is certainly the case for director Yoshitarô Nomura (1919-2005), a name that is largely unheralded in international film criticism. However, decades after his most seminal contributions to Japanese cinema, Nomura is receiving his first ever international retrospective at this year’s Bradford International Film Festival.

Considered to be a pioneer of Japanese film noir, Yoshitarô Nomura may very well be one of Japanese cinema’s best kept secrets. Including over 80 films, his long career began at the height of Japan’s cinematic golden age, and his genre-centric filmmaking was widely popular with Japanese audiences in its day. He was best known for his film adaptations of stories by revered crime/mystery author Seichô Matsumoto, who, at his commercial peak during the late 1950s, was Japan’s highest paid writer. Politically left-leaning, Matsumoto’s downbeat novels were emblematic of the post-war pessimism experienced by the Japanese people in the turbulent years following atomic destruction, foreign occupation and waning nationalism. Bradford’s retrospective collects the five best examples of Nomura’s Matsumoto adaptations, including Stakeout (aka The Chase, Harikomi, 1958), Zero Focus (Zero no shôten, 1961), The Shadow Within (Kage no kuruma, 1970), The Castle of Sand (Suna no utsuwa, 1974) and The Demon (Kichiku, 1978).

What is immediately apparent is that although Nomura’s films have never garnered much interest in the West, they demonstrate a clear interest in Western film conventions, particularly 40s and 50s American noir. This influence is perhaps best represented in Zero Focus, a strange and exhilarating fusion of duplicitous, Hitchcockian intrigue and post-war Japanese social commentary.

The story starts with newlywed Teiko (Yoshiko Kuga) telling us, via voice-over narration, that her husband of a single week, Kenichi (K244ji Nambara), a successful ad agency executive, has been promoted to the company’s head office in Tokyo, but needs to travel cross-country to his former branch to tie up loose ends. However, after boarding the train to Kanazawa, he is never seen again. Concerned, Teiko heads to Kanazawa in search of him, with only a couple of photos and a lead at Kenichi’s old office to go on. As she makes her enquiries, Teiko realises just how little she knew about her husband as the remnants of a secret double life come to the fore. Digging deeper into Kenichi’s past, Teiko soon meets a woman who may have had reason to murder him.

Zero Focus revels in several standard noir conceits. The film is framed around Kuga’s matter-of-fact voice-over, but also relies on nefarious characters, dual identities, quick plotting and shock revelations. There’s even a bottle of poisoned whiskey doing the rounds – bumping off characters who know too much. But rather than merely emulating his American muses, in particular Alfred Hitchcock and Rebecca (1940), Nomura blends these propensities with a slightly skewered rendition of presentational Japanese filmmaking. As is the case with many films from this era, Takashi Kawamata’s cinematography features plenty of immaculate compositions. However, something looks and feels different here; stripped down and strangely mechanical. Zero Focus is not gritty exactly – it’s too pristine for that – but a certain rough efficiency prevails. This is partly due to geography, with Nomura largely eschewing the cinematic comfort zone of modern Tokyo and keeping much of the action in small, rural and, as yet, relatively undeveloped towns along Japan’s west coast, creating a more down-to-earth quality that belies Kawamata’s professional framing.

Watch the original Japanese trailer for Zero Focus:

Indeed, Zero Focus has a number of things to say about the modernisation process the country was undergoing at the time. The film seems to subtly criticise the centuries-old social tradition of miai, where the family of an individual tries to match them with a prospective marital partner, prefaced with a brief period of courtship to see if they nominally get along (a suggested marriage rather than arranged). It’s through this process that Teiko and Kenichi are wed, and the story relies on Teiko’s naïveté about her husband for the mystery of his double life to function, which may not have been the case if their relationship had been built over a longer, more organic period. In the background of its murder/suicide plot, Zero Focus seems to suggest that if Japan were to truly modernise, maybe it needed to abandon such long-held, old-fashioned values.

Such progressive thinking carries over into the film’s structure, which is laid out in two distinct sections. The first consists of relentless investigation, as Teiko dutifully seeks out the next person to question. The second depicts an extended cliff-top confrontation, where we learn what really happened to Kenichi. The first act is the winding up that precipitates the grand unspooling of the finale, where light-footed flashbacks flesh out and tie together the multiple story strands, coupled with differing assumptions of events in a way similar to both Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) and Ikiru (1952). And yet, Zero Focus is so nimble, so brazenly twisty, that it’s all too easy to get lost in its heaps of convolution. The film moves briskly through each scene, which doesn’t leave much room for the building and releasing of tension. On the flip side, there is something equally refreshing in its single-mindedness and tightly constructed sequences. Dense it may be, but Zero Focus is an interesting minor success nonetheless.

And if Zero Focus is characterised by deft poise, The Castle of Sand is its inverse cousin: a sprawling police procedural that is consistently identified by Japanese critics as one of the greatest Japanese films of all time. Based on a popular mystery serialisation Matsumoto wrote for daily newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, later published as the novel Inspector Imanishi Investigates, The Castle of Sand sees two detectives – a veteran (Tetsurô Tamba) and a rookie (Kensaku Morita) – try to solve the murder of an elderly man found bludgeoned to death in a train yard.

Like Zero Focus, scant clues point to the countryside, which Tamba’s Detective Imanishi traverses via train – an increasingly key component to Matsumoto’s stories – and bus in the sweltering Japanese summer heat. Imanishi begins to track down characters from the victim’s past, who was a retired police officer well liked and deeply respected in the community he presided over. But just as Imanishi’s investigation starts to run out of steam, he begins to establish a connection between the deceased, Miki (Ken Ogata), and Eiryo Waga (Gô Katô), a famous classical composer with a buried secret.

Watch a trailer for The Castle of Sand:

Unfurling over nearly two and a half hours, The Castle of Sand front-loads its narrative with Imanishi’s investigation: following up leads, interviewing persons of interest, establishing motives, hitting dead ends, re-evaluating the evidence, finding new leads and so on. It’s very matter-of-fact and borders on being humdrum, executed in a plain, linear fashion that lacks the energy of, say, Zero Focus.

However, the film makes a noticeable gear change when Imanishi finally presents his findings, and the identity of the person he suspects is the murderer, to his department. All the loose ends from previous scenes start to tie together as he posits his hypothesis, which features an extended explanation to establish the connection between the murderer and the murdered. Imanishi’s presentation is intercut with scenes from a classical concert performed by Waga and his orchestra, which provides the backing soundtrack to a series of flashbacks concerning the murderer’s motivation – a childhood fraught with hardship and discrimination. These expositional scenes, where Ogata features as the still-alive police officer Miki, play out sans dialogue and, as such, are evocative of silent movie storytelling, with the sweeping symphony of Waga’s concert as musical accompaniment. It is at this point where The Castle of Sand reveals its hand, shifting from a mundane investigation to an engrossing character study enriched with pathos and complex emotional depth.

Nomura’s exploration of pathos and emotional complexity arguably reached its zenith with The Demon, perhaps the most downbeat and pessimistic of his Matsumoto adaptations. Based on one of the writer’s short stories, which in turn was inspired by a real-life incident, The Demon sees Nomura working again with Ken Ogata, who plays the put-upon owner of a failing printing business that he runs with his wife (Shima Iwashita). However, the story starts with Kikuyo (Mayumi Ogawa), the long-time mistress of Ogata’s Sokichi and mother of his three secret love children – Riichi (Hiroki Iwase), aged 6; Yoshiko (Miyuki Yoshizawa), aged 3; and baby Shoichi (Jun Ishii).

When Sokichi is unable to continue with his maintenance payments, Kikuyo snaps, corralling the kids onto the next train to confront him and break the news about his secret family to his wife. Upon finding out that he has no more money to pay her, Kikuyo takes off, leaving the children in Sokichi’s care. Sokichi tries to take on the burden of having three new mouths to feed. His understandably peeved wife, however, is not so inclined, and becomes increasingly hostile towards the children. What follows is a difficult yet strangely engrossing watch, as Sokichi tries to shirk this new responsibility he can’t afford to take on. With no sign of his mistress, who has well and truly disappeared, Sokichi is manipulated by his belligerent wife to conceive ways of disposing of the children (after all, there’s no concrete evidence proving that they are indeed his). But his growing attachment to them makes this easier said than done.

With its domestic tension and controversial subject matter that flirts heavily with child abuse, The Demon is certainly one of the toughest of Nomura’s films to stomach. But if there is only one thing that makes this fiendish and unsavoury tale palatable, even compassionate, it lies with Ogata’s fearless and mesmerising lead performance. While he doesn’t elicit sympathy exactly, Ogata does manage to convey a very real sense of conflict, hurt and desperation, with Iwashita’s wife character perhaps being more broadly ‘evil’ and antagonistic. Either could qualify as the ‘demon’ of the film’s title, and one could argue that Kikuyo, the mistress, is also not totally blameless. Playing the murder victim in The Castle of Sand, Ogata is, in his own way, playing a victim once again, torn between a lingering, unconditional paternal love and the cold reality of his wife and financial situation.

There’s the children to consider as well; all of whom perform admirably in the face of such terrible treatment (Iwase is a particular highlight as the precocious Riichi), with Nomura’s confident direction ensuring that the interplay between Ogata and his estranged kids is taut, unpredictable yet sensitive, and sometimes deceptively moving. The Demon, then, manages that rare trick in cinema of making you care about an absolute scoundrel. Ogata ended up winning the Best Actor prize for his efforts at the 2nd Japanese Academy Awards, securing a prestigious career playing unusual and/or challenging roles in films such as Shôhei Imamura’s The Ballad of Narayama (Narayama-bushi kô, 1983), where he won Best Actor again, and Paul Schrader’s multi-segmented Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985).

This modest sample of Nomura’s career strongly suggests a body of work that’s not afraid to retain its edges and venture places that threaten to render it unpopular. Hopefully, we will see more of his films released soon as a result of his rediscovery. To this end, the power of the film retrospective should not go underestimated. If it wasn’t for the retrospective curated by the late Donald Ritchie for the Berlin Film Festival in 1963, the films of Yasujir244 Ozu would have likely been confined to the position of niche curiosity, reserved only for the most dedicated of world cinema aficionados. Although it’s unlikely Nomura will ever receive the same admiration as Ozu, the fact that his work is finally having its moment in the sun at an international festival is cause enough for celebration.

Mark Player

A Far from Silent Battlefront: Ecstasy of the Angels

Ecstasy of the Angels

Kôji Wakamatsu’s Ecstasy of the Angels, like many films of the early 70s, opens with a song. In a darkened nightclub, while four conspirators plot their mission, Rie Yokoyama’s Friday sings an unidentified Japanese fôku song, accompanied by a plaintively plucked acoustic guitar. ‘I throw a tiny flame,’ she sings, ‘towards bright crimson blood / In any barren field / Burn the dawn / Burn the streets to the dawn’. Her distant-eyed delivery makes a curious counterpoint to the surreal, sometimes violent lyrics of the winsome, enka-esque melody and, as there is no further music for the next half an hour, the lines stick in your mind like an ear worm, becoming the unvoiced refrain of all the action that follows.

When the first bit of non-diegetic music does come in, it is every bit as violent as the intervening action. Clangorous piano chords burst in over a montage of newspaper headlines detailing the terrorist acts of the young revolutionary group. Drums skitter in freefall, as Yosuke Yamashita’s piano-playing veers from modal jazz to free atonality, switching dance partners from Alice Coltrane to Anton Webern.

Yamashita remains one of Japan’s most famous jazz musicians. He started playing with his elder brother’s swing band before he’d left school and by the 1960s he was spending every Friday at legendary Tokyo basement club Gin-Paris. One of his earliest teachers was Fumie Hoshino, a woman who played stride piano along to silent films in old cinemas, and Yamashita himself would go on to work on a number of films, from 60s pinku films by Wakamatsu and Noriko Natsumi to Shohei Imamura’s award-winning Dr Akagi. All the while carving out a distinctive live playing career as one of Japan’s most celebrated jazzers, with frequent comparisons to Cecil Taylor (his acknowledged idol) and one German critic – just a few years after the release of Ecstasy of the Angels – coining the phrase ‘kamikaze jazz’ to refer to his group’s wild musical antics.

Nowhere is the comparison to Taylor more apt than in the present film’s final scene. We are back in the same nightclub from the opening scene, but now one of the four conspirators is missing and the cool, collected spirit of their earlier meeting is long gone. At first we find Friday once more, singing the same song about a ‘silent battlefront’. But then, as if at the click of someone’s fingers, she and her accompanist disappear to be replaced by Yamashita’s trio, seen on screen for the first time. Akira Sakata’s soprano sax is squealing and honking like Ornette Coleman, Yamashita is pounding frenetically at the keyboard and Yuki Arasa’s section leader, Autumn, sat over at the table, is screaming hysterically as her empire crumbles around her.

Robert Barry

Interview with Koji Wakamatsu

11.25: The Day He Chose HIs Own Fate

Director: Kôji Wakamatsu

Writer: Masayuki Kakegawa

Original title: 11-25 jiketsu no hi: Mishima Yukio to wakamono-tachi

Cast: Arata, Shinobu Terajima, Hideo Nakaizumi

Japan 2012

119 mins

‘If we value so highly the dignity of life, how can we not also value the dignity of death. No death may be called futile.’ – Yukio Mishima

In 11.25. The Day He Chose His Own Fate, one of his last completed films, the late Kôji Wakamatsu turned his attention to the final years of Japanese writer, critic and nationalist Yukio Mishima, who espoused traditional values based on the Bushido code. On 25 November 1970, Mishima, along with four members of his own private army – the Tatenokai – went to the Self Defence Forces headquarters in Tokyo, tied up the commander and took to the balcony to call upon the assembled military outside to overthrow their society and restore the powers of the Emperor. When he was jeered, he returned inside to commit suicide, leaving behind a set of controversial writings, including short stories, plays and novels, and a mystery that echoes to this day.

Pamela Jahn took part in a group interview with Kôôji Wakamatsu after the premiere of his film on Mishima at the 65th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in May, where the film premiered in the Un Certain Regard section, to find out more about Wakamatsu’s take on Mishima and the reasons behind his actions.

Question: What was your motivation for making the film?

Answer: I first thought about it when I was shooting United Red Army. There is one scene where the Red Army marches during a very strong blizzard and it was actually a real blizzard that we were facing at that time when making the film. The Red Army was a formation of left-wing extremists. But I knew that there were also right-wing activists, young people who wanted to change the society just as much, even at the cost of their own lives, like Mishima, who formed his private militia – the Tatenokai, or ‘Shield Society’. I felt that portraying only one side of the whole spectrum wouldn’t be sufficient and that I should depict both extremes and I decided to make a separate film about the Tatenokai. First it was just an innocent joke. I’d tell my actors on the set of United Red Army that my next project would be on the extreme right for a change. But I knew that making these films in a row would be rather hard on me, so in the middle, as a sort of easy play, I shot Caterpillar . Both films turned out to get a very good audience and attendance that provided enough money for 11:25, and also two other films, Petrel Hotel Blue and The Millennial Rapture.

Your last visit to Cannes was just over 40 years ago when Sex Jack was shown at the festival in 1971. How does it feel to be back here after so many years with yet another film that is highly politically charged?

It doesn’t have any special meaning or significance. The only special thing back then was that on the way back I went to Palestine to film a documentary [together with Masao Adachi], and because of that, I was labelled as terrorist and declared a persona non grata in the United States, Russia and other countries. And the Japanese government also questioned me quite severely 15 or 16 times. It that sense, it was quite a memorable visit.

Arata Iura, who plays Mishima in the film, is very well known in Japan. You don’t usually cast stars like him.

He also had a part in United Red Army and I thought he was very good in it. I got to know him as an extremely hard worker and somebody who’s able to deliver great performances with consistency. I’m the type of person who feels strong gratitude and obligation towards those who give me something. Arata was very well known already, but he agreed to do the job on my terms and follow my method. I asked him to come alone, without any manager or personal assistant. On my set I use no make-up artists, script girls or secretaries – he had to accept that. I had several people in mind for Mishima’s part, but I finally gave it to Arata. Looking at the film only reassures me that I made the right choice. I never cast stars to attract a bigger audience. To me it doesn’t matter if it’s someone as famous as Arata or an amateur. As long as you have a heart, you can act. If cinema was only about attracting audiences with star power, I wouldn’t be making films anymore.

Both films, 11:25 and United Red Army, show a deep sense of comradeship that is essential to the development of any revolutionary movement but also more generally speaking in Japanese culture.

To put it very simply, the Japanese culture is not individualistic. The focus is not on the individual but on the community. Whatever we do, we always consider our neighbours, family and friends. For example, if you’re making dinner and it turns out really delicious, it is natural to offer it to your neighbours, to share. These cultural differences between Japan and Europe or the United States may be rooted in religious concepts of Christianity and Buddhism and, therefore, some behaviours or rituals might be harder to comprehend for a viewer from outside of our culture.

The only female figure in this otherwise male-dominated film is Mishima’s wife. She’s spoken of rarely, appears in one scene and barely has one line. How do you see her character in the film?

I believe that the very consciousness of her existence was necessary for the film. During the research stage, when reading through all the materials and documents available, I found many proofs of her role and influence in the Tatenokai, even though she acted behind the scene. But for example, every time they went to a training camp, she would come along and give pep talks to the trainees. Also in the household, her presence was natural. In Japan, the wife’s position is behind her man, in the background. It would have been difficult to bring Mishima’s wife into the spotlight because she would never have stepped out. She’d support him silently, like she did. Again, that’s a cultural thing that be might more difficult to understand for Westerners.

Your name is inevitably associated with the pink film genre (pinku eiga) that first appeared in Japan in the early 1960s, but actually soon after it became popular you stopped making that kind of films.

I was the first director of pink cinema, and everybody else followed me and copied what I came up with. But their imitations were focused only on showing naked women, sex scenes and so forth. Soon after, pink cinema went down the drain and became the mainstream. There were so many pink films around that I didn’t feel it was interesting for me to continue that path. If you compare pink cinema from the time when I was active in that genre and contemporary pinku eiga, they are entirely different. All the directors who made pink films back then have disappeared with the exception of Mr Takita, who became very successful. His film Departures is known around the world. To others, pinku eiga was just an easy way to make money. They’re too scared to be anti-establishment. For me, making a film means to throw a stone at the establishment, and what happened to pink cinema is that it became conformist entertainment.

You are not only an influence on, but a mentor to, young Japanese filmmakers like Banmei Takahashi, for example. Is helping the new generation of filmmakers important to you?

It is true that many young filmmakers started their professional career on my set or thanks to my recommendation. But it was they who came to work for me in the first instance. Of course, I can help them, I can give some assistance or mental support. But the truth is, they are my competitors, or in other words, they are my enemies. But by creating my own enemies I become more enthusiastic. If one of them makes a really good film, that only makes me more passionate about it and drives my own motivation to be better. I think that the young directors in Japan today whom I mentored are my best, most inspiring competitors. In the mainstream I don’t see anyone I’d consider as such.

You are a very precise author, whose art is so particular, that sometimes it might come across as hermetic.

I think in Japan, and anywhere else in the world, there are many mysterious things. My work might sometimes seem difficult, but I am just doing what I do and I am just turning these mysteries in society, which are sometimes hard to understand, into images, into films. Each person is different, in terms of their looks but especially in terms of their thinking – there are no identical human beings. Take this bottle of water on the table in front of you, for example. It might seem just ordinary clear water to you, but there may be someone else who doesn’t perceive it in the same way, who might think it’s red. It’s not us longing to be each other’s clones, it’s the authorities, who try to make everyone as identical as possible.

You are an internationally acclaimed director but your position in Japan is still difficult, especially in terms of financing your projects.

The government does not recognise my films because in a way they rebuild the part of Japanese history they’d like to hide. My work is most problematic especially for the Cultural Agency. They hold the budget to subsidise filmmaking in Japan but they wouldn’t give any of it to me, even though I requested it many times. They’d rather fund films with far less value instead of mine, mainly because I am very straightforward and open with bureaucrats and I tell them what I think about them. But in any case, you couldn’t make a film about the United Red Army or Mishima with money from the government. They wouldn’t give a single yen for a film like that.

How do you feel about Mishima’s suicide?

People in Japan have been wondering about Mishima’s suicide for long after his death. The reactions in the public have been quite ambiguous. People talk about it according to their own imagination and equally I made the film based on my understanding and interpretation of the events. I think that Mishima had chosen the venue and time of his own death quite carefully – he died at 45. The date, the 25th of November, was also the date when one of his close friends from the University of Tokyo committed suicide. That friend was involved in a financial fraud; he couldn’t get out of it and felt so cornered and hopeless that he decided to take his own life by hanging himself.

Could you relate to his decision?

At that time, when it happened, I thought it was just stupid. I also had my reservations about his idea of creating an army of ‘toy soldiers’. I thought that Mishima, who was an accomplished writer and well-established citizen, eventually went insane. But as time passed and I went through many documents, including his writings about planning that event, my opinion started to change. I also sometimes drink sake with one of the surviving members of the Tatenokai and slowly my view changed: I came to think that actually he is a phenomenon in his own right. There are other films about him and about the Red Army, but the names have been changed. I refuse to do that, in my films I use their real names. People around me warned me that I’d be assassinated by the right-wing if I did that and I said, ‘Well, if they want to do that, that’s fine.’ But I met some of the people and I read a lot of material and I believe that I am showing both sides, the right and the left extremes of the spectrum, and that it’s a fair view on both sides. I am telling them both that they were trying to do something good, that they meant good for society, and that they shouldn’t be ashamed or live in hiding. And after I made those films, they actually thanked me for what I did. They came to see the films, they even helped selling tickets, and I think it’s because my intention is genuine.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Koji Wakamatsu: From yakuza to pornographer

Red Crime

The following text from my book Behind the Pink Curtain (2008) forms the introduction to the chapters on Kôji Wakamatsu, Masao Adachi and the various other characters involved in Wakamatsu Pro. I should point out that this text was written over five years ago, before the premiere of Wakamatsu’s United Red Army (2007) at Tokyo Film Festival introduced a whole new generation of overseas viewers to the director’s startling and provocative work.

At the time, the films of Wakamatsu were little discussed in the West, particularly in the English language, and the context in which he operated virtually unknown. (There have been a number of retrospectives subsequently, particularly in France). Behind the Pink Curtain was my attempt to remedy this, and the whole project was largely inspired by my early encounters with the films of Wakamatsu, which have proved an enduring influence on me personally. He shall be sorely missed.

Kôji Wakamatsu is a difficult figure to place within the broad history of Japanese cinema. While his films screened at a number of festivals in mainland Europe in the late 60s and early 70s – which in itself is enough to distinguish him from his contemporaries in the eroduction world – the general climate and context in which they were made, along with those he produced for other directors through his company Wakamatsu Pro, was not one treated with much significance by many Western writers at the time. There were those in France, like No&#235l Burch and Max Tessier, who wrote seriously about those few Japanese erotic films that began to appear in Europe in the late 60s and 70s, and consequently it has been this country that has provided a home for two noteworthy retrospectives of Wakamatsu’s films with the director himself in attendance, at the 1998 L’Etrange Festival in Paris, and as part of a season entitled ‘Sex Is Politics’, in the town of Saint-Denis in 2006. But, clearly uncomfortable with the spectacle of sexual violence against women, English-language commentators seemed at a loss when it came to interpreting the new phenomenon of the 60s, either ignoring it or dismissing it out of hand. Few took time to engage with the films even on the level at which they were intended to be consumed. It’s a stance Donald Richie has maintained until this day, as is spelled out by this classic snub of Wakamatsu relayed in a 1990 entry from his journals, published in 2004: ‘He makes embarrassing soft-core psychodrama (or used to), and No&#235l Burch led the French into seeing great cinematic depths in Violated Angels. It occurs to no one that the reason for making it (nurses skinned alive) was noncinematic. So Kôji was treated as though his junk meant something.’

Junk or not, Wakamatsu’s films do mean something, or at the very least are representative of something. While in the Japanese film industry at large he may be better regarded more as a particularly canny producer than for the level of craftsmanship to be found in his films, even in the capacity of a director his early work is stylistically distinct enough to at least merit some consideration. At its best, it is direct and abrasive, seething with an infectious energy and electrifying zeitgeist, its stark power immediately appreciable, even if hidden deeper meanings prove maddeningly elusive. At the very least his films serve as socio-historical documents; not only visual testimonies to an era of new sexual frankness and a deep-rooted uncertainty in which oblivion seemed to lurk around the corner; the development of Wakamatsu’s oeuvre, along with that of his close friend and ally Masao Adachi, also runs parallel with the development of the student movement and the growth of the radical left wing. Those looking back at this turbulent period and trying to fathom just how extremist political groups like the Communist League Red Army Faction (Kyôsanshugisha d^ômei sekigun-ha) – hereafter referred simply as the Red Army Faction – and the closely related groups of the Japanese Red Army (JRA, or Nihon Sekigun) and the United Red Army (URA, or Rengo Sekigun) developed as they did might well find clues in titles like Sex Play (1969), Shinjuku Mad (1970), Ecstasy of the Angels (1972), and the infamous Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971).

It is immediately clear to the modern viewer that there is something very unique about these films that sets them apart from run-of-the-mill softcore. Wakamatsu himself denies that he ever really made pinku eiga, and indeed, it would be difficult to describe much of the output of Wakamatsu Pro, especially those films made by Masao Adachi and Atsushi Yamatoya, as representing the typical face of the genre. ‘All in all you can say that our films were underground films with a sexy touch. At least, that’s how we saw them,’ Wakamatsu later claimed. The eroduction world just provided a distribution system for him and his collaborators to exploit, and they therefore needed to tailor the content of the works, to some extent, to fit its requirements. The Kôji Wakamatsu titles best known today seem to bear this out, though this is also due to the director himself owning the rights to the majority of the hundred or so films in his back catalogue, allowing him to be selective about which titles today find themselves most regularly screened and accessible on DVD. Wakamatsu will also concede that there were many films he made in his heyday that are no longer readily available that were, in his own words, ‘not very interesting’. His filmography is full of titles, such as White Man-Made Beauty (1966), Black Narcissus of Lust (1967), and Kama Sutra: Love Technique (1970), that were more directly intended for the sex film market, and made mainly to earn money to finance more adventurous, experimental or personal projects. He also proved more adept than most when it came to selling his films to foreign distributors.

How successful really was Wakamatsu then? According to the director himself: ‘My films fared pretty well. Troublesome were the films of Masao Adachi. Since nobody wanted to buy them, we added my name on the billboard and advertised them as joint productions.’ However, according to Daisuke Asakura, the president of Kokuei – the company that produced some of his earliest works – Wakamatsu Pro’s films, ‘weren’t too popular… which is understandable because the scripts were written by people like Masao Adachi and Atsushi Yamatoya. But I think Waka was the first “name value” in the world of pink films… in a sense, he’s the one who led the world of pink film.’ There are other benchmarks of success apart from commercial performance, and in many ways Wakamatsu can be described as the most significant figure to emerge from the eroduction field. Not only has his name been cited as an influence by successive generations of pink directors, but he has also achieved a unique level of crossover success during the time Wakamatsu Pro was active, with his films accepted by critics and intellectuals from outside the seijin eiga world, including such pivotal figures from the creative avant-garde as Shûji Terayama, Jûrô Kara, Nagisa Ôshima and the ATG producer Kinshirô Kuzui.

So how exactly did this bumpkin from a poor uneducated farming background in the north of Japan make the leap from the low-budget sex film market to the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, play a pivotal role in the most prominent foreign co-production of the day, and wind up tangentially involved in the pro-Palestinian cause?

Wakamatsu’s rise to prominence is all the more remarkable when you take into account his humble roots. Born 1 April, 1936, in the small town of Wakuya in the rural Miyagi prefecture of the mountainous northern Tôhoku region, he was one of several sons of a farmer who specialised in horse breeding. His relationship with his father was turbulent, as it was with his teachers at school, and though naturally a bright student, he soon let his studies slip after discovering a channel for his energies playing baseball. After being thrown out of agricultural college due to a violent altercation with a fellow member of the judo club (who was later to become, somewhat ironically given Wakamatsu’s problematic relationship with figures of authority throughout his life, a police officer), at the age of seventeen he found himself, like so many of his generation, packing his bags and heading down to Tokyo in search of work.

Wakamatsu’s entry into the world of filmmaking was a convoluted process. After his initial arrival in the city, he worked in a variety of lowly positions, on construction sites, at a confectionery company making daifuku, and in a bar, before he somehow became involved in a local yakuza group. Soon, at the age of twenty-three, a brush with the law led to a six-month spell in Hachiôji prison. Wakamatsu emerged from the ordeal with an even deeper mistrust of authority and a resolve to tackle it in a more constructive fashion that wouldn’t end up with him behind bars for a second time. The most obvious solution was through fiction. After all, engaging in real-life crimes such as killing politicians, policemen and other such figures of repressive authority tends to land one in trouble; committing the same act as fantasy in prose or on film seemed a safer way of expressing feelings of dissatisfaction with the current state of society. Wakamatsu’s initial plan was to vent his spleen by writing a novel based on his life story so far, but not long into it he discovered that his early departure from the education system made this a trickier task than he’d first envisaged. Might his talents perhaps be better suited to a life in the movies?

It was then, and indeed still is now, a customary practice for film crews in Tokyo to ask permission from local yakuza groups rather than the police when it came to location shooting in a particular quarter. And so Wakamatsu’s first brush with the film world came through his old mafia connections, with him working as a scout in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo, watching over the crew and standing nearby the shoot to indicate that they had mob approval. During this time he approached one of the television producers whom he was monitoring and asked to be taken on as an apprentice.

Within a very short time he was working as a director for Nihon TV, a route taken by many pink directors before embarking on their big-screen careers. As Wakamatsu tells it, his next step up the ladder was characteristically serendipitous. A huge row, after a last-minute order to change the script and all the cast members on a project he was then working on led to Wakamatsu attacking his producer with a chair and storming off set. Only briefly out of work, he received an out-of-the-blue phone call from an actors’ agent in a hurry to find a director for a new film project. What kind of film did they want made? ‘They gave me a free rein as long as it included some shots of women’s naked backs and some love scenes. At that time the label pinku eiga didn’t exist. The censorship exercised by Eirin was very severe, to the point where you couldn’t show pubic hair or women’s nipples: so you were obliged to film naked women from behind. I asked him if it was worth the bother, but he insisted.’ And so, in 1963, Wakamatsu came to direct his first theatrical work, entitled Sweet Trap.

Sweet Trap no longer exists in a viewable form. What appears to be his earliest film in existence, and his seventh as a director, (1964) tells the story of a podgy salesman named Mizushima (played by the actor Takuzô Kamiyama in his first and only leading role) who, when visiting the household of the Tsuchiya family, disturbs an assault on the lady of the house, Yûko (Daydream’s Kanako Michi), by her brother-in-law Toshio. Coming to her rescue, he nevertheless finds himself on the wrong side of the law when Yûko’s husband, an influential public prosecutor, frames him by giving false evidence in order to protect Toshio, his younger brother. When Mizushima is betrayed to the police by his girlfriend Akemi, who remains unconvinced of his innocence, he returns to visit Yûko and, after making love, the couple decide to flee together across the countryside, with the film climaxing in a memorable confrontation on the rim of a volcano crater. Playing far more conventionally than the director’s later, more enigmatic meditations on violence, subversive politics and sexual hysteria, if Red Crime can be linked to the new eroduction genre in any way, it is more by dint of its low-budget production circumstances than its actual content. With its lovers-on-the-run scenario reminiscent of Godard’s A bout de souffle (1960), it in fact owes more to crime thriller conventions, and there are none of the overt addresses to contemporary political issues that would characterize his self-produced work.

Jasper Sharp

London International Animation Festival 2012

Midori-ko

London International Animation Festival

25 October – 4 November 2012

LIAF website

The London International Animation Festival (LIAF) returns next week with its ninth edition of eclectic programming, spanning 30 countries and three London venues. This year sees a special focus on Japanese animation with a retrospective of filmmaker Koji Yamamura and special screening of Keita Kurosaka’s Tokyo-set feature, Midori-Ko, which presents an apocalyptic, dystopian city ravaged by food shortages. There will also be a series of shorts programmes that aim to showcase the diversity of recent works produced in the country. Several of the selected works provide poignant reflections on the effects of the 2011 tsunami: Florian Piento’s The People Who Never Stop shows human resilience through the persistent flow of pedestrians, who remain unfazed by earthquake tremors or engulfing sea water but finally stop in contemplation, looking skywards as cherry blossom petals fall; while Isamu Hirabayashi’s award-winning 663114 reveals the endurance of life through the tale of a 66-year-old cicada.

As usual, specific filmmaking techniques are also celebrated at LIAF with a flipbook challenge workshop and a special programme of live action/animation hybrid films. The use of live action also crops up in several films screening in this year’s international competition screenings. In Joseph Pierce’s The Pub , hand-drawn faces replace actors’ features to create a drinking cast of grotesque animals down a North London boozer: the local ex-gangster morphs into a chest-thumping gorilla and a raucous hen party become a group of clucking chickens. In Anja Struck’s How to Raise the Moon, actress Tora Balslev acts the part of a sleeping pianist enveloped in a surreal dream world of time-lapse camerawork and stop-motion puppets. Struck’s unique, otherworldly animation will be playing as part of a special strand – Into the Dark – devoted to the creepiest, darkest shorts submitted to the festival; a screening that promises to provide a nice complement to the festival’s much-loved Late Night Bizarre.

As well as welcoming back other popular annual fixtures such as the British Showcase, LIAF will be screening some new works from previous festival attendees. Theodore Ushev, who was the focus of a special event last year, returns with a beautiful, impressionistic short, Nightingales in December. Building on techniques displayed in Lipsett Diaries (2010), Ushev has created a stunning work of claustrophobic, pulsating paintings – with hints of Francis Bacon and World War I landscape painters – that fade into pixels with the crack and fizzle of an old television set straining to keep signal. Excitingly, there will also be an opportunity to see It’s Such a Beautiful Day, the final part of a much anticipated trilogy by Don Hertzfeldt, whom LIAF brought to London in 2009, and Max Hattler’s Spin, which was produced by Parisian animation studio Autour de minuit, who received a special LIAF retrospective in 2010. Spin begins as a simple kaleidoscope of toy soldiers spiralling through vaudeville zoetropes and Busby Berkeley formations into increasingly intricate and farcical set routines that powerfully and inventively portray the de-humanisation and mass murder involved in modern conflict.

These shorts – wide-ranging in their subject matters and techniques – are just some of the treats in store at LIAF. Other highlights will include a screening of unseen pilots by Arlene Klasky and Gabor Csupo (who created the first three series of The Simpsons) and the opening night screening of For No Good Reason , a feature film that explores the work of British artist Ralph Steadman through vibrant animated sequences. The organisers of LIAF always provide one of the most energetic and imaginative programmes in the capital and this year promises to be no exception.

Eleanor McKeown

East Asian Films at the 56th London Film Festival

Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time

56th BFI London Film Festival

10-21 October 2012, London

LFF website

Mark Stafford, Sarah Cronin and Virginie Sélavy review the most notable Japanese and Korean films that screened at this year’s London Film Festival.

Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time

Opening in Busan in 1982, Yoon Jong-bin’s Nameless Gangster is a vastly enjoyable sprawling mob saga that clearly references Coppola and Scorsese in its story of the rise and fall of a would-be godfather, but adds a caustic sense of humour and ironic distance. Introducing the story with the definition of ‘daebu’, it plays on the various meanings of the term, including ‘elder relative’ and ‘crime boss’. Choi Min-sik (Oldboy) gives another fantastic performance as corrupt customs official Choi Ik-hyun, who comes into contact with local gangster Choi Hyung-bae when he is sacked from his job. Hyung-bae turns out to be related to him and Ik-hyun takes advantage of his status as his elder relative to get involved at the top of his gang.

Ik-hyun is a fascinating multi-faceted character: a comical figure who is often ridiculed, a ‘half-gangster’ – as he is called by the brilliantly ruthless prosecutor Jo – who can never really cut it as a crime boss, he is also impressively cunning and resourceful, and despite his shameless lack of scruples and despicable conduct, he has a sympathetic and very human side in his love for his family. One of the big joys of the film is his relationship to the younger, more attractive, scarier, real gangster Hyung-bae (played by rising star Ha Jung-woo), who exudes the sort of power and authority that will always elude Ik-hyun. And yet, despite his menacing aura, Hyung-bae is a man of principle who, unlike Ik-hyun, abides by gangster codes and even traditional social rules (in his respect for Ik-hyun as his elder relative for instance), which puts him at a disadvantage when dealing with his less honourable enemies. This reversal of the usual dynamic between young and old is another of the pleasures of this exhilarating, humorous, smart gangster saga. VS

Helpless

The second outstanding Korean offering of this year’s festival was adapted from a novel by Miyabe Miyuki and directed by female filmmaker Byun Young-joo. Helpless is a captivating, intelligent thriller on the nature of love and identity that takes a hard look at what happens when a victimised character is forced to devise extreme strategies to survive. It starts like The Vanishing: young veterinarian Mun-ho is taking his bride-to-be Seon-yeong to meet his parents when she disappears at a service station. When he finds her apartment has been emptied in a hurry and the police are useless, he asks a relative who is a disgraced former cop to help him find her. As they investigate, her identity becomes more and more mysterious, and they must make sense of her possible connections to large debts, loan sharks and even suspected murder. The many revelations thrown up by their investigation repeatedly throw into question our assumptions about Seon-yeong and build a finely nuanced and affecting portrait of a complex woman. A convincing, tense, insightful thriller in which there is more than one victim, with a deep sympathy and understanding for the kind of dynamic that leads seemingly helpless characters to commit terrible acts in order to defend themselves when no one else will. VS

Doomsday Book

An apocalyptic triptych from Korea, written and directed by Kim Jee-woon and Yim Pil-Sung, the creators of The Good, the Bad and the Weird, and Hansel and Gretel. Part one is an eco-horror of waste and consumption where dodgy food production causes a kind of zombie outbreak. Part three is the tale of a family attempting to survive an impending meteor strike. Both share a wild, freewheeling sense of humour and are dizzy, bizarre satirical fun, especially the pot shots aimed at idiotic TV news coverage.

The side is let down a little by the middle section, where problems arise for a corporation when one of their robots assigned to a Buddhist temple achieves enlightenment. The tale is over-familiar from decades of SF, the robot is a poor cousin to Chris Cunningham’s Björk-bot in the ‘All Is Full Of Love’ promo and a ponderous tone takes over. It’s not bad, just a bit dull, and overall, considering the talents involved, Doomsday Book comes as a bit of a disappointment. Definitely has its moments though. MS

For Love's Sake

For Love’s Sake

Takashi Miike returns with the adaptation of a manga by Ikki Kajiwara and Takumi Nagayasu – filmed many times before – about a rich young girl’s impossible love for a boy from the wrong side of the tracks. The original title Ai to makoto means ‘Love and Sincerity’, which is also the name of the two main characters. Ai is a sweet young girl from a well-to-do family, who was rescued by Makoto while skiing as a child. When Makoto returns to Tokyo for revenge and immediately gets into a fight, Ai does all she can to save him from his delinquent life. An insanely colourful, at times kitsch teen melodrama, it mixes the badass attitude and energy of Crows Zero with the demented chirpiness of The Happiness of the Katakuris. It may not be Miike at his most ground-breaking or daring, but it is wildly entertaining. The director once more demonstrates his boundless inventiveness and impressive visual sense with a variety of animated sequences and (cheesy) musical numbers, as well as great decors, gorgeous colours and brilliantly choreographed fights, all pulsating with his customary high-voltage energy. VS

Helter Skelter

I was a big fan of Mika Ninagawa’s 2008 Sakuran, a fun, gorgeous-looking film with a fantastic female lead. Unfortunately, her second film, Helter Skelter, is a major disappointment. Ninigawa began her career as a fashion photographer, and returns to that world with a story, based on Kyoko Okazaki’s manga, about the unravelling of a top model’s career. While there are some likeable elements in this satire of the fashion industry, the film is let down by its total lack of narrative structure and an irritating subplot, while the riot of colour that made Sakuran so refreshing seems like nothing more than eye candy in Helter Skelter, helping to gloss over the film’s weaknesses.

Erika Sawajiri stars as Lilico, Japan’s hottest model and teen idol. She’s bitchy, tyrannical and stunning – but also a fake. Her looks have been created at an expensive clinic, paid for by her agent, who is still extracting a heavy price for turning her into a commodity. When Lilico is pushed aside by a younger model, her anger and frustrations are taken out on her unfortunate assistant, who’s forced to endure endless humiliations. In the meantime, a team of police, led by an obnoxious, irritating character who spouts trite philosophical soundbites, is investigating the clinic for illegally using human tissue in its patients (a sorely underdeveloped idea – although strange bruises do begin to appear underneath Lilico’s skin.) But rather than use this investigation to add an element of noir to the film, the scenes with the police are mostly shot in a very bland office, with them doing very little. They add nothing to the already fractured narrative, while the dialogue is simply excruciating.

Despite some good moments – Ninigawa does an excellent job capturing the absurdity of the industry, and the public’s obsession with beauty at all costs – the director’s inimitable style can’t make up for the unlikeable characters, needlessly frenetic pacing, and worst of all, the weak script. SC

The Samurai That Night

Adapted by Masaaki Akahori from his own play, The Samurai That Night is the story of a meek factory owner, Nakamura, who is still grieving after the death of his wife and is looking for revenge against the thug who killed her in a road accident five years earlier. The title ironically refers to Nakamura’s vengeance fantasy, which is comically and pitifully deflated in the realistically depicted modern world of the film. The film is indeed anything but an action film: it takes the classical opposition between the wronged good man looking for payback and the unredeemable evil brute but films it as a slow-paced, introspective character study. When – in another nod to the samurai film – the final big showdown in the rain comes, there is no resolution, or even progression, and both characters remain the same.

This could have been interesting, were it not for the excessively simplistic characterisation, the unbearably ponderous tone and the affected, sometimes sentimental quirkiness (the main character obsessively eats custard desserts; while on a date he takes his late wife’s bra out of the pocket of his trousers; when he plays ball with his overly sweet date, just as he used to with his wife, she delivers an exasperating ode to simple things – I could go on). This is a film that is not as deep as it thinks it is and its self-important slowness just makes it tiresomely dull. VS

After Life and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Cinema of Memory

After Life

Memory is a recurrent element in the cinema of Hirokazu Kore-eda. In some of his films, it provides the perspective or structure. In others, it is the central theme, or a supressed undercurrent of anxiety that permeates the surface of a contemporary Japan where people rarely discuss their problems. In his first feature Maborosi (1995), the central character of Yumiko (Makiko Esumi) is haunted by the deaths of her grandmother, for which she still feels responsible, and her husband, who has committed suicide for no apparent reason. Relocating with her daughter from Osaka to a quiet fishing community, she tries not to dwell on the past. Nobody Knows (2004), based on the tragic true story of four young children who were abandoned by their mother in a small Tokyo apartment, presents a recollection of childhood that is steeped in trauma with its focus on confined space, inanimate objects, and psychological signifiers. Still Walking (2008) observes a strained family gathering, as unemployed art restorer Ryota (Hiroshi Abe) spends a few days at his parents’ house, bringing along his new wife and stepson. The events of the film are ultimately framed as memory in a closing scene that has Ryota visiting his parents’ graves and reflecting on the final visit that he made to their home, several years ago. If these protagonists are defined by their memories, the heroine of Air Doll (2009) is characterised by a lack of personal reference. After magically coming to life, sex toy Nozomi (Bae Doona) searches for experience, whether pleasurable or painful, in order to make sense of the world. However, the director’s most direct rumination on the individual significance and selective nature of memory is After Life, a reflective fantasy that filters its premise through the quasi-documentary aesthetic that Kore-eda has practised throughout his fascinating career to date.

After Life imagines a space between Earth and Heaven, where the recently deceased are taken once natural causes or physical misfortune have brought an end to their mortal existence. On arrival, they find themselves in a ramshackle office building where they receive guidance from case workers who are tasked with helping them go to the next stage. Each person must select the happiest memory from their life so that it can be recreated on film. Once the scene is complete, the deceased watch it in a screening room, and vanish, able to relive this moment for eternity. While the film begins with the deceased and their reactions to their respective deaths, the focus gradually shifts to the case workers, who must deal with the variable attitudes of these individuals: some believe that their lives yielded no memories of great significance, others struggle to decide from so many options, and one simply refuses to choose on the grounds that a single recollection cannot completely represent his mortal years.

The first half of After Life involves the detailed interviews that case workers must conduct in order to decide which memories to recreate, suggesting that such recollections constitute a stockpile of personal information that must be systematically sorted and considered in relation to suitability. Many of the memories, although eventually scripted, were actually researched, with 500 people being interviewed. Kore-eda cast the film during this process, balancing non-actors with professionals, and recruiting the documentary cinematographer Yutaka Yamazaki to achieve an otherworldly realism. The second half examines the tentative romantic relationship between two case workers, Takashi (Arata) and Shiori (Erika Oda) that cannot develop due to the emotional power of memory: Takashi is unable to reciprocate Shiori’s feelings as he still yearns for the fiancée that he left behind after being killed in World War II.

The process of recreating memory that these case workers facilitate serves to show how such recollections can be erroneous, or subject to embellishment. Indecision or inconsistency on the part of some of the deceased indicates that the memories that are chosen as their passport to eternal happiness are possibly falsely remembered, or partially fictionalised, although Kore-eda does not see this as a problem in the grand scheme of things, providing that sufficient personal resonance is evoked. After Life proposes that memories are ever-shifting, with certain details dependent on the situation in which past circumstances are recalled, or to whom they are being imparted. In the press notes for the film, Kore-eda states: ‘Our memories are not fixed or static. They are dynamic, reflecting selves that are constantly changing. So the act of remembering, of looking back at the past, is by no means redundant or negative. Rather, it challenges us to evolve and mature.’ While most of the deceased ultimately force themselves to examine their personal history, sifting through lives of disappointment and strife to find a positive moment that will take them forward, it transpires that the case workers have been trained for their positions due to being unable to choose a memory. This steadfast refusal, or emotional inability, to explore their past has resulted in a weekly office routine, presented in a pared-down fashion to reflect the salaried existence of many Japanese professionals. However, through assisting the elderly Ichiro (Taketoshi Naito), Takashi discovers that their lives are linked and is finally able to make a choice due to the recollection that is prompted by a realisation of interconnectedness. It is Takashi’s contented expression as his scene plays out that best summarises Kore-eda’s beautiful illustration of the role played by memory in belatedly finding meaning in life’s special, if sometimes fleeting, moments.

John Berra

Tetsuo: Metal Machine Music

Tetsuo: Iron Man

Title: Tetsuo: Iron Man

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 4 July 2012

Venue: Hackney Picture House, London

Director: Shin’ya Tsukamoto

Writer: Shin’ya Tsukamoto

Cast: Tomorowo Taguchi, Kei Fujiwara, Shin’ya Tsukamoto

Japan 1989

67 mins

Title: Tetsuo II: Body Hammer

Format: Cinema

Screening date: 4 July 2012

Venue: Hackney Picture House, London

Director: Shin’ya Tsukamoto

Writer: Shin’ya Tsukamoto

Cast: Tomorowo Taguchi, Shin’ya Tsukamoto, Nobu Kanaoka

Japan 1992

83 mins

A man in a scrap yard cuts a gash in his leg and then shoves in a metal rod. Later he finds maggots in the wound, runs down the street screaming and is hit by a car. And we’re off.

Released in 1989, actor/director Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo is an utterly inspired and darkly hilarious black and white romp. According to Wikipedia, there is a story but it is only sketchily revealed as the film progresses, and even if you’re glad of a synopsis, you’ll be perhaps healthily distrustful. Stuff happens certainly, but the whys and the wherefores are almost beside the point. The point is the energy with which the film is shot through and the inventiveness and downright oddness of Tsukamoto’s vision.

The man with the rod in his leg (played by Tsukamoto himself) pursues the couple who were driving the car and exacts revenge upon them by turning the bespectacled man (Tomorowo Taguchi) gradually into metal. It starts with his electric razor hitting something in his cheek which tings, then there’s a demure-looking woman at the railway station who turns into a metal-infected demon. From the very beginning, we are in a universe of extreme physical craziness. Parts of the film feel like elaborate dance numbers, a danse macabre of metal, flesh, wires, sexual organs, memories, television screens, guilt, rust and blood that sprays as black as oil. The acting is exuberantly physical and pitched operatically high, wavering between terror, agony, wheezing anxiety and all-out panic. The dialogue all the while blankly denies this. As Taguchi undergoes a metallic rupturing in the next room, he reassures his wife: ‘Nothing’s the matter.’ There is a dream sequence in which the bespectacled Taguchi is anally raped by his wife with a snake like probe. But to say ‘there is a dream sequence’ is to misleadingly suggest that there can be such a distinction between dream and reality. In Tetsuo, reality is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.

Often compared to David Lynch’s Eraserhead and the early work of David Cronenberg, Tetsuo is actually in a league of its own. In comparison, Lynch’s film is a stately, brooding work of quiet desperation, and Cronenberg, although thematically radical, is stylistically conservative, often filming with TV movie reserve. Tsukamoto directs like one of his possessed characters. Everything is thrown at the screen from stop-motion animation to camera trickery: the camera races down streets and through alleys and the percussive soundtrack hammers along with growing intensity. Although the comment that a film resembles a music video is often meant dismissively, here the comparison is perfectly apt.

The pace of the film ends up having a logic of its own as it rushes headlong towards a collision between the now almost totally transformed victim and the demonic joyous fetishist. This is what the narrative really is: a process of initially vicious but energetic mutation. There is sex and there is the idea that we are perhaps just machines anyway. The drill penis seems like a literal realisation of our own violent idiom, talk of screwing, nailing, banging, etc., which reduces (or promotes) sex to a kind of carpentry. We are machines that use machines. From the car to the electric razor, we are already intimate with machinery and metal. The naked lunch of forks scraping against teeth reveals our daily internalising of metal. When the main character is remembering something (usually having sex with his wife), we see it through the stroboscopic screen of a portable television set.

And yet, the horror is, in this metaphoric resemblance, becoming identical to a machine. While we see ourselves becoming increasingly reliant on technology and ever more intimate with it (a blue tooth you stick in your ear, a touch pad), Tsukamoto’s maniacal insistence takes the relationship between man and machine to a literal, if bonkers, conclusion. The Godzilla-like monster that threatens to destroy Tokyo and the world at the end is merrily apocalyptic. The film ends with the cheeky letters stamping out ‘GAME OVER’.

A far more conventional film than its predecessor, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer was made in 1992 with a significantly bigger budget and yet is still mad enough for many. This time round, Tomorowo Taguchi plays Taniguchi Tomoo, a sort of Japanese Mr Bean, similar to the role he played in the first film, but now with a wife, Minori (Keinosuke Tomioka) and child. Shin’ya Tsukamoto once more plays the catalyst for the story, Yatsu, the leader of a violent skinhead cyborg army who kidnap Tomoo’s child and by enraging him cause him to start changing into a terrifying metal weapon. Whereas Tsukamoto’s first film was a low-budget anarchic helter-skelter of accelerated mutation, Testuo II is sporadically and superficially punk. The Iron Man disdained to have a story, but Body Hammer has a familiar-to-the-point-of-bog-standard thriller plot of the weak-willed family man being pushed to the edge by ruthless violence. If they do an English language remake, Liam Neeson can play Tomoo.

Of course, this being Tsukamoto, the plot pushes itself over into parodic lunacy. Tomoo has a Rocky-like training montage in which his feeble attempts become metallically assisted. There are stock figures: a mad scientist who wears a white coat and talks about his brilliant brains, just before said brains get visibly blown out, and villains who grin, jibber and sneer. There is a car chase, during which Tomoo pursues the villains on a push bike, mutating as he goes until he is able to ram the car with his bike. It is witty and absurd, but the wit and the absurdity seem to be at the service of a plot rather than being the point itself. The villains dress like punks – one of them obviously gave Laurence Fishburne costume tips for the Matrix sequels – but the film’s radical vision seems to have become watered down, or exhausted itself.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Iron Man was really like watching a ménage á trois between metal, rust and sex. This wasn’t a story about mutation but mutation as story. World destruction arrived at the end, almost as an afterthought, something glibly funny to do with all this power. The cause of the mutation wasn’t explicitly given – the man didn’t get bitten by a radioactive spider or anything like that – and as brilliant as Wikipedia is, the plot is a reading into the film rather than a description of what we actually see. The first film has no characters as such. There is Man and Woman and Metal Fetishist. The limit of all this was that the film didn’t have much to say. It was a disturbing nightmare that left you confused – was supposed to leave you confused.

In Body Hammer, the family has arrived, and with the family comes narrative proper. The beginning, middle and end of narrative are the child, the parents and the holy ghost. A poisonous family romance (we will eventually learn) is behind the whole fracas, a wicked father, fraternal estrangement and oedipal passions. It is Tomoo’s old family that has effectively destroyed his new one. Body Hammer has explanations, exposition for crying out loud, and as such feels like the smaller film, despite having a more ambitious agenda. The concluding apocalyptic fusion is effectively a repetition of the ending of the first film and feels like an admission that it has nowhere to go.

The East End Film Festival opens on 3 July and runs until 8 July 2012. The Tetsuo double bill screens on 4 July at Hackney Picturehouse. For more information please visit the East End Film Festival website.

John Bleasdale

Watch the trailer:

Tetsuo: The Iron Man from East End Film Festival on Vimeo.