Jason Gray : 'Ring' director's spooky tales

Interview with Hideo Nakata on his new movie, Kaidan, at The Japan Times (03.08.2007) :

There have been more than 10 adaptations of Encho Sanyutei's original story, including films by masters such as Kenji Mizoguchi and Nobuo Nakagawa. What made you want to make your own version?

Taka Ichise, the producer, offered me another project, and I somehow instantly came up with this idea. The story deals with a handsome but doomed young man who gets involved with five beautiful women, so basically I wanted to work with five beautiful actresses (laughs). Of course there are many other kaidan (ghost stories), but I chose this one because it's mainly a love story with some horror elements.

It's your first period film.

Yes. I've always loved jidaigeki (period dramas). When I was in college, I would watch classic movies, mainly chambara (samurai action films). I'm also an admirer of Nobuo Nakagawa's ghost-story movies. I've wanted to direct period films since those days.

How did you manage to give the film its very classic feel without it coming across as old-fashioned?

I watched three classics — Sadao Yamanaka's "Humanity and Paper Balloons," Kenji Mizoguchi's "The Crucified Lovers" and Kenji Misumi's "Yotsuya Kaidan." Surprisingly enough, the oldest film, by Yamanaka, was the most modern, with contemporary dialogue. That was a breakthrough moment for me. "Kaidan" is for people living in Japan in 2007. But production designer Yohei Taneda did a lot of research, and we hired a dialogue coach.

The interviewer is great. I won't forget his name, Jason Gray.

Rafaële Brillaud : "Ayako", les malheurs d'une gamine maudite

Reviews Osamu Tezuka, Ayako (Delcourt, 3 volumes), at Rue89 (02.08.2007) :

Au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, Jiro Tengé, prisonnier devenu agent secret au service des Américains, rentre chez lui, dans une région reculée du Japon. Il y retrouve sa famille, de grands propriétaires terriens largement dépossédés par la réforme agraire. Et découvre la benjamine du patriarche, Ayako, adorable gamine de 4 ans maudite par sa naissance. Dans une atmosphère sordide, le secret de ses origines ne tarde pas à s'éclaircir... Tout au long de cette trilogie, Tezuka décrit une nation anéantie et divisée, où les uns sont prêts à tout pour s'enrichir et les autres s'accrochent à des valeurs passées sans voir que le monde a changé. Ayako, elle, n'échappera pas à son destin tragique pour sauver l'honneur des Tengé. Une épopée particulièrement sombre au récit impeccable.

Nostalgia haunts me. Ayako might belong to Tezuka's minor works. But I love it along with Zero Man.

Blythe in Kimono

LUVSIS. — I came across this blog when I googled my friend's artistic activities. Wow !! The shop Fu Ring-doh will open soon, fucco-san announces.

Giovanni Fazio : Last words on hell from the skies

Around Steven Okazaki, White Light/Black Rain, at The Japan Times (02.07.2007). Quotes :

In an interview with The Japan Times, Okazaki described how he was "tired of" the political debate surrounding the dropping of the atomic bombs. "The Japanese tell the story one way, which is: 'Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a completely separate incident from WWII,' " says Okazaki. "It was just this one day with no connection to the rest of the war. And the Americans tell it another way, a very defensive way, and they cite their statistics about why it was necessary. But this discussion doesn't get anywhere; neither side meets the other in any way. I needed to find a different way of approaching the subject, which was: leave the argument out, just tell the story."

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When asked whether being Japanese-American gave him a unique perspective to explore an issue that divides the two nations, such as the atomic bombings, Okazaki replied: "I feel very detached from Japanese culture — an observer more than part of it. And frankly I feel the same way as an American, because I grew up with a minority consciousness — both my parents were put in (wartime) internment camps. I know I'm not fully part of that culture either. I've always felt like I was floating in the Pacific, looking both ways."

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The effects of this neocon movement to deny the past are apparent right from the film's opening scene, where Okazaki stops youths in the teenage mecca of Takeshita-dori, in Tokyo's Harajuku district, and asks them the significance of Aug. 6, 1945 — none can answer. Says Okazaki: "I thought we'd interview 30 kids or so, and some would know, some wouldn't. I couldn't imagine worse than 60 percent getting it. So we went down the street, and the first eight kids I interviewed are all in the film. None of them knew. I stopped filming; I thought this is such a huge statement. I did not expect it at all. And I didn't cut anyone out — I'm not Michael Moore, I don't have a message that I'll cheat for." Admittedly, the kids who would know probably don't hang out on Takeshita-dori, but that's not to say the Harajuku kids aren't representative. Okazaki points to a recent poll in Nagasaki, where only about 30 percent of youths questioned could name the date that the city was nuked.

RIP : Michelangelo Antonioni

From La Repubblica (31.07.2007) :

ROMA - Con Michelangelo Antonioni - morto ieri sera nella sua abitazione nella capitale, a 94 anni, assistito fino all'ultimo dalla moglie Enrica Fico - non se ne va solo uno dei grandi vecchi del cinema italiano e internazionale, amato e celebrato in tutto il mondo, come dimostra l'Oscar alla carriera ricevuto nel 1995. Con lui scompare anche uno stile davvero unico, all'interno della settima arte: quello di un regista che ha sempre fatto dell'occhio - quello della cinepresa, spesso apparentemente impassibile, e quella dell'autore che silenzionsamente la muove - il centro della sua visione poetica. In cui emergono l'incomunicabilità tra le persone, l'insufficienza delle parole, la solitudine. E poi, per contrasto, il potere dello sguardo, la perfezione dell'immagine.

It's like my youth has evaporated. When I was in the college in the latter half of 1970s, I was mad about European cinema : Antonioni, Bergman, Renoir, Visconti, Fellini, Godard, Truffaut, Rosselini...

RIP : Ingmar Bergman

From Le Monde (30.07.2007) :

Le cinéaste suédois Ingmar Bergman est mort à l'âge de 89 ans dans sa maison de l'île suédoise de Farö (Gotland), a annoncé, lundi 30 juillet, sa fille Eva Bergman à l'agence de presse TT. Sa mort est survenue "calmement et doucement" selon Eva Bergman, qui ne précise ni les causes exactes ni la date de son décès.

Trailers, clips and interviews at Bergmanorama.

For my part, Bergman's death is more important than LDP's defeatof the Upper House poll.

Philippe Azoury : Quand Nagisa Oshima n’en faisait qu’à sa tête

Sur Rétrospective «Oshima en cinq films» à Paris, aux cinémas le Champo et MK2 Beaubourg jusqu’au 8 août, puis en tournée en province, à Libération (30.07.2007) :

Dans les années 70, Nagisa Oshima était le Japon à lui tout seul. Il en était l’expression de la colère, le signe de cette sexualité dont on ne sait jamais, à moins d’être japonais, si elle est raffinée et sauvage ou raffinée parce que sauvage, le maître d’une manière de faire du cinéma «à la japonaise», c’est-à-dire pas comme nous, même si les premiers noms qui venaient à l’esprit pour comparer son travail étaient ceux de Godard et de Pasolini.

Il avait lu Marx et détestait les communistes, envisageait toute expression comme politique, portait sa génération, elle-même surnommée «nouvelle vague nippone», à bout de bras. Il fonctionnait comme une île dont on se doutait qu’elle n’avait rien à voir avec celle de ses ancêtres illustres Mizoguchi ou Ozu ; s’il admirait Kurosawa (à qui il a plus fait les poches qu’il ne le dit), il travaillait à le faire oublier.

Peter Schjeldahl : Gustave Courbet and the making of a master

On Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture (Princeton; $45), at The New Yorker (30.07.2007 Issue) :

“The Most Arrogant Man in France: Gustave Courbet and the Nineteenth-Century Media Culture” (Princeton; $45), by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, a Dutch-born American scholar of nineteenth-century European art, details the rise, the fall, and the tireless machinations of art’s first recognizably modern careerist. (The title is Courbet’s contented characterization of himself.) The book advances a present tendency among art historians to reconsider the Old Masters with reference to the art worlds that allocated wealth and prestige in their times. This emphasis is a sign of our own times, when money and celebrity—proliferating fairs and biennials, roaring auctions, around-the-clock Web journals and blogs—exalt the grandstand plays of a Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, or Matthew Barney. Chu’s treatment of Courbet isn’t cynical, exactly; it acknowledges his artistic talent. But, by highlighting every possible instance of manipulation, Chu gives a puppetlike cast to the behavior of the artist and his contemporaries. That’s timely, too; some days in Chelsea galleries it’s hard not to feel like a laboratory animal, grubbing for cheese in a scientifically engineered maze. A reassuring figure in Chu’s book is Charles Baudelaire, who was befriended by Courbet but remained stubbornly cool to his work, which, in a review of the Universal Exposition of 1855, he called a form of “fanaticism” that waged “war on the imagination” in service to “a sectarian spirit.” (His attack did Courbet the honor of bracketing him with Ingres, whom Baudelaire charged with a variant of the same offense.) Not that the elephant-skinned Courbet minded. In the vast and stupefying “Studio of the Painter (Real Allegory of Seven Years of My Artistic and Moral Life)” (1855), a work that still foments competing interpretations, he had taken sardonic note of Baudelaire’s anxious integrity by caricaturing the poet off to one side, reading a book with weirdly intense concentration.

Emilie Bickerton : The timeless Marguerite Duras

On Marguerite Duras, Cahiers de la guerre et autres textes (P.O.L.), at TLS (25.07.2007) :

These Cahiers de la guerre will be useful to anyone keen to understand Duras’s oeuvre more fully; the discreet, instructive editing is a bonus. But read in the context of her time, Duras doesn’t quite hold her ground convincingly, at least as a writer of ideas. While she evokes a memorable atmosphere, life in her novels is lived “in a desert-like light, raw and as far away from a dream as possible”. The question remains: where do her characters lead readers? The moment in La Vie tranquille (1949) when Françoise watches a man drown, half aware of the unfolding tragedy, but does nothing to stop it and is treated as an outcast by villagers for her appalling inaction, distils the Duras oeuvre: a detached, half-conscious protagonist looks out on to a world that she is ultimately powerless to affect.

Comparisons with Beauvoir are striking. Duras’s fictions exist in a world dominated by ennui, a sense of otherness from the world, full of intense emotions, but mostly internal experiences. When events and a historical context are required, there is a blandness to the writing that means one layer separates from the other; reality and how that reality is experienced become two distinct things. In Beauvoir’s work, the two remain soldered together because her literary aim was to present her protagonists as actors in the world, to explore where their moment of self-consciousness took them. In “La Femme brisée” (1967), for example, Monique is alone at her dining table: her husband has left her and her children have married. She stares at her abyss: the non-life she created, where she put everything into existing for others. But there is a sense of a beginning here: “I’m scared”, she says, as an introduction to what she might now begin to initiate. History has written Duras with her contemporary existentialists; it is necessary to split them apart. These Cahiers remind us of what is more timeless in Marguerite Duras’s contributions, as well as of her limitations.

Donald Richie : Not all nonsense is silly

On Miriam Silverberg, Erotic Grotesque Nonsense : The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times (California), at The Japan Times (29.07.2007) :

From the late 1920s on, the impact of the modern on traditional Japan had become so noticeable that some new terminology was required. It took the form of a slogan: "ero guro nansensu."

Descriptive, it was also ambivalent. While seemingly critical it could denote admiration, and while ostensibly antimodern (and hence anti-Western) it was to be described through imported terminology — all three words in the slogan are derived from English.

In her long-awaited and richly detailed account of this slogan as descriptive of mass culture of the time, Miriam Silverberg defines its parts. "Erotic," meaning pornographic, also connoted an energized, colorful vitality. "Grotesque" may designate malformed, but it is also descriptive of the culture of the jobless, the homeless, that underlined this period. "Nonsense" can mean silly, but it also makes an amount of sense if seen as criticism.

In all, the tripartite phrase, in Silverberg's reading, indicates the vitality of the time. It is "expressive of a politics that was quite cognizant of the power play involved in the attempts of culture to colonize" and the attempts of the Japanese government to paternalize and to control.