Three More From Ozu

In his book "Ozu and the Poetics and Cinema," David Bordwell argues that Ozu is a playful, "experimental" filmmaker whose style emphasizes abstract patterns--not only across individual films but his entire oeuvre as well. After watching five Ozu films in two days, I'm about ready to declare the experiment a failure. That's not a strike against Ozu's films so much as Bordwell's book, since a lot of the things he talks about can't be perceived by human beings while watching a film in a theatre. To cite only one example, in a chapter on Tokyo Story (1953), he discusses several aural motifs associated with the mother, none of which I noticed even after reading the book. At times he acknowledges as much, as in his discussion of shot lengths. Maybe I'm just inattentive but I felt somewhat vindicated reading Michael Sicinski's review of Norbert Pfaffenbichler's Mosaik Méchanique (2008)--"a grid like arrangement of every individual shot of a 1914 short film [...], each shot playing out as a loop within its place in the grid"--in which Sicinski writes: "Is this what it looks like inside the mind of David Bordwell when he watches a film? Now we can observe tonal and spatial differentials and anomalies imperceptible when actually viewing the film such as patterns of light and dark, or preferred gestures and directions!" My point is, if you have to analyze a film a shot at a time for something to be perceived, it might as well not even be there to begin with.

The Record of a Tenement Gentleman



The first film of Ozu's post-war period, The Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) is a didactic liberal message picture about social responsibility. Set in the poorest slums of Tokyo, the plot is surprisingly similar to that of Walter Salles' Central Station (1998). As the film opens, Kohei/Hohi Aoki, a young boy who's either lost or been deserted by his father, follows Tashiro/Chishu Ryu back to the tenement on the outskirts of Tokyo where he lives with Tamekichi/Sokichi Kawamura. Neither one wants to take responsibility for the boy, so they ask their neighbor, Otane/Choko Iida, a selfish curmudgeon, to take him in for the night which she agrees to do reluctantly. When Kohei's father can't be located, Otane becomes his permanent care giver. After Otane scolds him for repeatedly peeing the bed, Kohei runs away, and in his absence, Otane comes to realize how much she truly cares for him. Finally, Kohei's father/Eitoro Ozawa shows up to claim the boy, and Otane decides to adopt one of the many children orphaned by the war. The film ends with a sequence showing dozens of homeless children standing in a park that's designed to make us want to walk out of the theatre and adopt the first needy child we see. Though not a major work, the film offers a fascinating glimpse into post-war conditions.

Tokyo Twilight



Once you get past the shock of an Ozu film that deals with premarital sex and abortion, Tokyo Twilight (1957) is actually pretty conservative. It opens with Shukichi/Chishu Ryu, a 50-ish bank employee, coming home to discover that his eldest daughter, Takako/Setsuko Hara, has left her husband taking her infant son with her. Meanwhile, his younger daughter, Akiko/Ineko Arima, is trying to get in touch with her college-age boyfriend, Kenji/Masami Taura, who's been avoiding her. She goes to speak to his friends, who seem to spend all their time playing mahjong. Their favorite hangout is a mahjong parlor on the bad side of town that's run by Akiko and Takako's mother, Kisako/Isuzu Yamada, who they haven't seen since they were children. Takako thinks Akiko's problems are directly related to the fact that she never knew a mother's love (we learn through the dialogue that Akiko was a baby when Kisako abandoned them). Akiko herself remarks that her mother's "bad blood" is in her veins. Both literally and metaphorically, the poorer parts of Tokyo associated with Kisako and Kenji are polluted. Surgical masks are a recurring motif in the film, although they work symbolic overtime as both an indicator of contamination and as masks that conceal various characters' identities. A man who approaches Akiko in a tea room where she's waiting for Kenji pulls out a badge from his coat to reveal that he's a cop. When Takako confronts Kisako in the mahjong parlor, she takes off her mask only after telling Kisako her name. Takako also wears a mask when she goes to pick up Akiko at the police station, and before she arrives, there's a brief scene in which a pervert is interrogated by an off-screen police officer. Finally, Takako decides to go back to her husband because a child needs both parents to be happy. However, the film doesn't portray Kisako as a villain. After Akiko is killed in a car accident, Takako goes back to the mahjong parlor to tell Kisako that she's responsible for Akiko's death. After Takako leaves, the film lingers on Kisako's grief as she walks down the street to a bar where she spoke with Akiko in an earlier scene. Her current husband, Sakae/Nobuo Nakamura, comes to look for her and Kisako asks if his job offer in another town still stands. At the train station, she waits in vain for Takako to see her off. In the next scene, Shukichi tells Takako she should say good bye to Kisako before she leaves and that there's still time if she wants to, but Takako doesn't budge. Is she being unfair to Kisako? Is it wise for her to go back to her husband? The film ends, somewhat enigmatically, with Shukichi alone going to work, echoing the opening sequence in which he stops at a bar on his way home. (In between, he's so passive that he's almost irrelevant to the plot.) Neither scene advances the story or theme, and there are similar digressions throughout. When Akiko is hit by a car, a noodle vendor/Kamatari Fujiwara, waits with her until the family arrives at the hospital. When they do, the film follows him on his way out. In these scenes, Ozu moves towards pure observation without advancing a thesis.

The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice



Like Early Summer (1951), the film Ozu made immediately before it, The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) is fairly relaxed in terms of plot, and accordingly has a light, comic tone. Both films have reluctant brides, but here Setsuko/Keiko Tsushima's refusal to let her family choose a husband for her isn't the focus so much as the rift it helps to exacerbate between her aunt, Taeko/Michiyo Kogure, who's a bit of a diva, and her husband, Mokichi/Shin Saburi, an executive with a fondness for the simple pleasures of riding third class, smoking Rising Sun cigarettes and eating green tea over rice. His groundedness is confirmed by his friendships with his maid's brother, Noboru/Koji Tsuruta, a younger office worker, and an old war buddy, Sadao/Chishu Ryu, who now runs a Pachinko parlor. Setsuko's family arranges for her to meet a marriage candidate, but she spends the day playing hooky with Mokichi and Noboru instead. When Taeko discovers the deception, she has a fit. The closing scenes spell out the message in no uncertain terms, but Ozu's patient observation of his characters' behavior can't be reduced to simply advancing a thesis.

Ozu! Ozu! Ozu!

Monday was the beginning of Cinémathèque Busan's Yasujiro Ozu retrospective which runs until the 21st. As with the Taiwanese New Wave program a few months ago, both screenings I attended so far have attracted sizable crowds. This wasn't the case with the Ernst Lubitsch and Douglas Sirk films last month, which raises some questions. Are Korean audiences more interested in Asian films, even ones from Taiwan and Japan, than films from Europe and North America? It's worth noting that Hou Hsiao-hsien's A Summer at Grandpa's (1984) got bigger laughs than any of the commercial films I've seen since coming here with the single exception of Kung Fu Panda (2008). In fact, there was quite a bit of laughter at City of Sadness (1989) as well. Although one can find DVDs of Charles Chaplin's Gold Rush (1925) and Modern Times (1936) for sale at newsstands in some subway stations, few American comedies open here. So why on earth does the Cinémathèque keep programming old Hollywood films, let alone old comedies? Are prints of old American films simply more readily available (all the Universal-era Sirk films had Spanish subtitles on the prints), or is this some subtle form of cultural imperialism?

I Was Born, But...



The first film I saw was I Was Born, But... (1932), Ozu's second-last silent film, which was projected without music. In Japan at that time, a benshi would've explained the action to the audience, but as David Bordwell writes in his book "Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema," silent films from Japan don't require any outside commentary to be understood. The film has very few intertitles but that's only because Ozu doesn't need them. What the benshi added was an emotional overlay similar to music. The absence of any kind of sound puts one in a solemn mood, but despite this, there was quite a bit of laughter at the screening I attended.

The only other film I've seen from Ozu's silent period is A Story of Floating Weeds (1934), which in style is a lot closer to Ozu's celebrated late works. (For starters, it was his first film in which the credits appeared over a burlap background.) Ozu would remake both films in colour as Good Morning and Floating Weeds (both 1959). But while the plot of Floating Weeds is basically the same as in the original, I Was Born, But... and Good Morning are rather different, both in terms of style and story. One difference is Ozu's approach to constructing space. In his later work, a scene might begin with an exterior pillow shot followed by a long shot of the characters sitting on the floor inside, one facing the camera, one turned away. Ozu will cut 180 degrees to a close-up of the person with their back to the camera, followed by a close-up of the first person. Then Ozu will cut to a second long shot facing the second person with a third character entering in the background. Here, he adopts a constructive approach to montage. In one scene, isolated shots of the two brothers in one room, their mother in the kitchen, and a gang of bullies waiting for the brothers outside are connected through matching eye lines. In terms of plot, the principle connection between I Was Born, But... and Good Morning is that in both films the brothers go on a hunger strike, but the reason for it differs from one film to the next. In the latter film, it's because they want their parents to buy a TV set so they can watch sumo wrestling. Here the brothers see their father, Yoshi, making silly faces in a home movie by the director of the firm Yoshi works for, which the brothers find degrading. When they confront their father, he says he degrades himself so they can have food. The brothers decide they'd rather not eat. Although Jonathan Rosenbaum claims to have found "radical implications" in this story, as Bordwell points out, the hunger strike doesn't last and Yoshi never for a moment considers quitting his job (to say nothing of a full-scale revolution). The films resigns itself to the world as it is.

Tokyo Story



Tokyo Story (1953) is about grown siblings who are too busy with their own lives to entertain their aging parents during a visit. Their eldest son, Koichi/So Yamamura, a doctor who lives in the suburbs, plans to take them out but at the last minute has to attend to a patient. (When his wife, Fumiko/Kuniko Miyake, suggests she go instead, he tells her some one has to stay in the house.) Their daughter, Shige/Haruko Sugimura, a hairdresser who lives downtown, scolds her husband, Kurazo/Nobuo Nakamura, for buying her parents expensive cakes. Shige makes a call to Noriko/Setsuko Hara, the young widow of another brother who died during the war, to ask her to take them out. Noriko, who works in an office, asks her boss for the day off and tells Shige she'll do it. After taking them on a bus tour of the city, they return to Noriko's apartment for saké. Ozu establishes the setting with a shot of a cluttered hallway. A stray tricycle occupies the foreground on the left side of the frame. Noriko knocks on her neighbor's door to ask for saké. The neighbor invites her in, and in the foreground on the right is the woman's young son. Noriko goes back to her apartment, where her in-laws, Shukishi/Chishu Ryu and Tomi/Chieko Higashiyama, are looking at a picture of their dead son. Noriko then goes back to her neighbor's apartment to ask for saké glasses. In Japan in the 1950s, audiences would expect a woman of Noriko's age to be married and having children, and by highlighting the tricycle and the neighbor's baby, Ozu is prompting viewers to notice that Noriko isn't a mother. Shige, the most selfish of the couple's children who functions as Noriko's mirror image, isn't a mother either, presumably because she's too much of a penny-pinching businesswoman. (Although Noriko is financially independent, she's not particularly ambitious.) When Noriko returns with the saké glasses, Tomi tells her about the trouble Shukishi's drinking caused her, and asks Noriko if her son was the same way. Noriko tells Tomi that her husband and his friends used to show up at all hours of the night, but that now she misses it. This forecasts a later scene in which Shukishi and Tomi return early from a spa (a ruse of Shige's to get them off her hands for a few days) and find themselves without a place to spend the night. Shukishi pays a visit to an old friend of his, hoping he'll have an extra room. He doesn't, so the two men and another friend drink saké until closing time. Shige is furious Shukishi and one of his friends turn up at her house in the middle of the night, needless to say, drunk. The contrast between the two women is reinforced when Noriko happily lets Tomi spend the night at her apartment and gives her a back rub. The next morning, as Tomi is packing her bags to go to the train station, she tells Noriko that she must visit them in Onomichi. Noriko says she can't because it's so far away. Although neither one says it, both women know they're saying good bye.

Tokyo Story was the first of Ozu's films to become well known in the West and it's still his most highly regarded work. As great as the film is, I find that it lacks drama, which may help to explain the characterization of Ozu by some critics as a serene, "transcendental" filmmaker. My own favorite Ozu film, Late Spring (1949), screening later this month, is about the conflict between two irreconcilable positions. (Similarly, Roger Ebert has expressed a preference for Floating Weeds and it's easy to see why.) Even if Ozu's late films are more or less settled in terms of style and content, one film shouldn't (and can't) stand for the whole.

Two Lubitsch Message Films

Some odds and ends to wrap up the Lubitsch-Sirk retrospective:

Ernst Lubitsch's The Man I Killed (aka Broken Lullaby, 1932) is a heavy-handed message picture that's partially redeemed by what we might describe as the Lubitsch Touch, although in this regard, his direction is inseparable from the script and performances. The film opens in Paris on the first anniversary of the end of World War I. A former soldier, Paul Renaud/Phillips Holmes, is wracked with guilt over killing a man in the trenches and decides to go to Germany to ask the forgiveness of the man's family. The man's father, Dr. Holderlin/Lionel Barrymore, is a physician in a pre-industrial village where the sentiments of the townspeople are fiercely nationalist and anti-French. When Paul shows up at his home, even before he can explain what he's doing there, Dr. Holderin freaks out. "The French killed my son!" he shouts, shoving a framed picture in Paul's face. "As far as I'm concerned, every Frenchman is the murderer of my son!" Not exactly subtle. But then, he takes a breath and asks, putting his hand on Paul's shoulder, "What seems to be the problem?" Lubitsch is too intelligent to simply bludgeon viewers with his message. Still, the film is prone to impassioned speeches, wild overacting (especially from Holmes), and expressionistic montage sequences with two or three layers of images superimposed on top of one another. In one such sequence, quickly edited images of trench warfare are placed over a shot of Paul sitting on a bed looking tortured. On the film's IMDb page, one user praises the film for its "human content and inspiring message of love and dignity." That the film is as watchable as it is speaks to Lubitsch's finesse as a filmmaker, not the profundity of the message he delivers.

Made ten years later during World War II, Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942) has a very different social agenda. Like Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (also 1942) and Fritz Lang's Hangmen Also Die (1943), its focus is on the plight of those living in Nazi-occupied countries. Here, however, none of the characters are members of the resistance but are, for the most part, actors in a Warsaw theatre troupe. The film begins just before the German invasion of Poland where the troupe is rehearsing a play about the evils of Nazism. The Polish government, which fears the play might offend Hitler, decides to censor it. When the country is occupied, the theatre is closed indefinitely. At this point, the characters become involved in a plot to intercept a spy before he can reveal the names of those fighting in the resistance to the Gestapo, which involves a great deal of role playing. The film is explicitly about how artists can help the resistance.

Given the film's ideological project, it's hardly surprising that some parts are heavy-handed. The film establishes the setting with a montage sequence of signs bearing Polish names. Later, when the Germans invade, the film returns to the same signs which have all been damaged in the bombing. The over-enthusiastic off-screen narrator breathlessly cheers on the never-seen resistance and the Polish division of the RAF. No fewer than three times, Greenberg/Felix Bressart, the only Jewish member of the troupe, recites a monologue from "The Merchant of Venice." However, more often than not, the film works splendidly as a comedy and a thriller. Lubitsch's light touch is apparent in the way he guides the viewer's direction through his mise en scène rather than the editing. In an early scene, we see Maria Tura/Carole Lombard, the star of the show, sitting next to Stanislov Sobinski/Robert Stack, a young admirer of hers, in a frontal two-shot. Although Stanislov is the one talking, Lubitsch prompts the viewer to focus on Maria's reactions by having her brush her hair so that the eye is drawn to the movement of her hands. Additionally, Stanislov is turned away from the camera slightly, and the light is much stronger where Maria is sitting. If the characters are broadly conceived, Lubitsch's tendency towards longer takes with fewer close-ups helps to dial down the performances and pushes them towards greater realism.

Magnificent Obsession



In my previous entry, I had to address Chris Fujiwara's recent essay on Douglas Sirk, "Tears Without Laughter," which can be read online at Moving Image Source, in which he compares audience reactions to Douglas Sirk's 1950s melodramas in the United States and Japan. He found that during a recent retrospective of Sirk's films in Tokyo, audiences tended to regard them more solemnly than in the US where the films are routinely laughed at. I argued that the juxtaposition of realistic acting and heavy-handed symbolism in All That Heaven Allows (1955) created a kind of push-pull effect between emotional identification and analytical distance. It seems to me that images like Marylee Hadley/Dorothy Malone fondling a model oil derrick in Written on the Wind (1956) are obviously meant to be funny, which is fully in keeping with the film's lack of sympathy for her (as I discussed in an earlier post). So it was gratifying that, during a screening of Magnificent Obsession (1954), a South Korean woman sitting in front us was laughing as hard as we were.

I was able to keep a straight face for most of the picture, although the opening sequence depicting Bob Merrick/Rock Hudson, a callous playboy, driving his motorboat at top speed is pretty hilarious both for its phallic associations and because Bob is dressed like Speed Racer. When Bob crashes the boat and winds up in the hospital, his no-nonsense nurse, Nancy Ashford/Agnes Moorehead, tells the uncooperative patient that she's going to take his temperature one way or another. In the hospital, Bob learns that the piece of equipment that saved his life belonged to a local doctor with a heart condition who had an attack while the paramedics were attending to Bob. At the same time, the doctor's widow, Helen Phillips/Jane Wyman, learns from Edward Randolph/Otto Kruger that her late husband's obsession was secretly giving money to those in need. After leaving the hospital, Bob gets drunk at a country club and accidentally winds up at Edward's house in the woods. A 50-ish unmarried painter who's forever smoking a wooden pipe, Edward gives Bob a place to sleep and cooks him breakfast in the morning. (At best, his character is a celibate homosexual if not totally asexual.) Edward initiates Bob into the Pay it Forward program of Helen's dead husband. As he warns Bob that the first man who tried it was nailed to a cross, choir music plays on the soundtrack. Not longer after, there's a shot of Bob smoking a pipe. He eventually becomes Helen's lover and a surgeon. Late in the film, Helen slips into a coma and Bob decides to operate. But when he enters the OR, he's overcome with sudden last-minute doubts until he looks up and sees Edward looking down from the auditorium at which point the choir music returns. That's when I lost it.

Is this supposed to be funny? Audiences in the 1950s apparently didn't think so. I think Sirk is being deliberately ambiguous. Perhaps it's not an accident that mirrors figure so prominently in his films. More than any director I can think of, what one sees depends a great deal on who's looking.

Three Sirk Melodramas

In a new essay at Moving Image Source, Chris Fujiwara contrasts audience responses to Douglas Sirk's 1950s melodramas in the United States and Japan. He argues that Sirk was sincere about his characters' emotions while remaining detatched from the assumptions of the society he depicted. Yes and no. I'm astonished that people would find The Tarnished Angels (1958) funny, but Written on the Wind (1956) has such an ambiguous tone that, when it came time for me to write about it for the blog, I was too intimidated by it to do more than analyze its structure a little. However, I don't see any evidence of Sirk's detatchment from, say, the conservative sexual politics in All I Desire (1953), in which Naomi Murdoch/Barbara Stanwyck is triumphantly restored to the family she abandoned ten years earlier in order to pursue a career on the stage. If this makes Sirk an idiot, then by default so are millions of people who went to see his films in the 50s, the vast majority of whom no doubt believed in their messages.

Seeing All That Heaven Allows (1955) again, I was especially impressed by the subtlty of Jane Wyman's performance. Consider the scene where Cary Scott/Wyman, a suburban widow, is Christmas tree shopping when she runs into Ron Kirby/Rock Hudson, a much younger tree farmer, for the first time since calling off their engagement, and they realize they still love each other. They only make small talk ("I didn't know these trees were yours." "No, they're Mick's"), and yet Wyman has such an expressive face that she's able to convey an emotion without over-playing it. Sirk's restraint as a director is crucial. A master of group stagings and of moving his actors around the set, he's able to direct the viewer's gaze much more subtly through his mise en scène, only going in for close-ups when he needs to. When Mona Plash/Jacquelin de Wit, the town gossip, first sees Cary getting into Ron's car, the reaction shot of Mona and the butcher is too much by half, but this is a rare lapse rather than typical. I find the film so moving precisely because it doesn't bully the viewer with heavy-handed effects.

However, the movie really lays it on thick with the symbolism equating Cary with a freightened deer. The deer first appears outside Ron's home in the woods. When Cary pulls up in her car, Ron's feeding it out of his hand in the snow. He and Cary step inside the old mill, which Ron has renovated so that the two of them can live there. At the end of the sequence, Sirk cuts back to the deer who scurries away. After Ron falls off a cliff and suffers a concussion, Cary, who hasn't seen him since the night she went shopping for a Christmas tree, comes to his sickbed. In the morning, she opens the improbably large shutters of the improbably large window that Ron installed for her in the old mill. As Ron wakes up, the camera moves to the window where the deer reappears. The pastoral setting and innocuous deer offer such a kitschy image of nature that I can't help but laugh at it.

The film's gender politics haven't aged well. Although Ron and his friends, Mick/Charles Drake and Alida/Virginia Grey, enjoy an alternative lifestyle avant la lettre (Ron doesn't read "Walden," he just lives it), Mick and Alida's marriage is strictly conventional. Mick, a former advertising executive turned tree farmer, is the breadwinner and Alida takes care of the housework. I don't see any evidence here of Sirk's detatchment from the assumptions about the roles of men and women in the society he depicted.

Imitation of Life (1959) even goes so far as to equate being a woman with motherhood. Lora Merideth/Lana Turner is a single mother whose career as an actress prevents her from spending time with her daughter, Susie/Sandra Dee. According to the film, she would've been better off had she married, Steve Archer/John Gavin, an aspiring photographer whose dreams of having his work exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art lead to a steady job in the advertising department at a beer company. In an early scene, she runs out on a lunch date with Steve to see a talent agent, Allen Loomis/Robert Alda, but when Loomis advises her to sleep her way to the top, she tells him that she doesn't want to make it that way. A few months later, Loomis calls her about an audition for a new play by David Edwards/David O'Herlihy, a thinly-veiled parody of Noel Coward. Steve, who's just sold one of his photographs to the beer company, tells Lora not to go because he doesn't want to see her get hurt again and gives her an ultimatum: "If you leave, it's over between us." She decides to go. Although the play leads to a career on the stage, once Lora makes it on Broadway, she finds that fame isn't everything she dreamed it would be. Eventually, Lora's inability to lock that down causes a rift between her and Susie, who develops an Oedipal hang-up on Steve when he reenters their lives after a ten-year absense. The choice offered to Lora is one between something real--namely, Steve--and chasing her dreams on the stage, and although she's right in the short run (she gets the part without having to compromise herself), she ends up paying for it in the long run.

Although Lora's black maid, Annie Johnson/Junita Moore, is a devoted single mother, her fair-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane/Susan Kohner, resents her for her race and tries to pass for white. Eventually, she too goes into show business but not on Broadway. The first time Steve (and the audience) sees the grown-up Sarah Jane, he remarks, "The last time I saw you, you were all legs." "I've still got them." Shortly after, we see Sarah Jane in her bedroom in a low-cut nighty in order to prove the validity of her claim and to foreshadow Annie's discovery that she's been working in a sleazy cabaret. When she runs away, Steve hires a private detective to find her. In the film's most heart-breaking scene, Annie travels to California where Sarah Jane is working at a more upscale cabaret, not to bring her home, but to look at her one last time. When Sarah Jane's white roommate drops in, Annie says that she used to look after Sarah Jane, recalling the film's first scene in which Lora asks Annie, "How long have you taken care of Sarah Jane?" As Annie leaves, Sarah Jane whispers, fighting back tears, "Goodbye... Momma." In both sets of mothers and daughters, acting comes between them, preventing Lora from giving love and Sarah Jane from accepting it.

There's Always Tomorrow (1956) was Sirk's second film with Barbara Stanwyck after All I Desire, and in both movies, like Lora in Imitation of Life, her character chooses her career over a family only to regret it later. Here, Clifford Groves/Fred MacMurray is a family man going through a mid-life crisis when an old flame from his youth, Norma Vale/Stanwyck, now a successful fashion designer, shows up at his house one night out of the blue. He bumps into her again at a resort in the desert, but when his son, Vinnie/William Renyolds, shows up unexpectedly with his girlfriend, Ann/Pat Crowley, and sees them together, Vinnie begins to suspect they're having an affair. It's all quite innocent and soon after Clifford invites Norma to their house for dinner so she can meet his wife, Marion/Joan Bennett, who never suspects a thing. Afterwards, Marion tells Clifford that she feels sorry for Norma who so obviously wants to have a family. It's to the movie's credit that Norma isn't a home wrecker or a femme fatale, but once again the film reflects the assumption of post-war American society that the man is the head of a household and a woman's place is in the home.

What does this proove? That Sirk, working in popular genres (primarily melodrama), made films whose messages flattered the attitudes of their audience--primarily middleclass white housewives. Certainly one can find evidence of ideological tensions in his films. In Imitation of Life, although Annie talks about hitting Sarah Jane, we never see Annie do it as it might complicate our sympathy for her. Although viewers in the 1950s probably thought nothing of it, seen today even the fact that she brings it up to reassure Lora is troubling. However, it does seem to me that there are moments when Sirk is being knowingly ironic. In Written on the Wind, when Kyle Hadley/Robert Stack, upon learning he's sterile, walks out of the pharmacy and sees a boy riding a mechanical horse, the image is so over-loaded with symbolism that it gets a laugh. In All That Heaven Allows, the mix of the subtle acting and over the top symbolism creates a push-pull effect, at once drawing us into the characters' emotions while keeping us outside the film by calling attention to its own artifice. Mirrors and windows are two recurring motifs that literally frame the characters. When Cary plays the piano in one scene, the shape of the reflective surface has the same dimensions as CinemaScope. (That said, the symbolism in A Time to Love and a Time to Die [1958] doesn't strike me as funny, intentionally or otherwise.) Since All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind and Imitation of Life are all overtly critical of post-war American materialism, Sirk's critical distance might reflect the original audience's ambivilance about the subject, condemning and celebrating it at the same time.

Silent Light

In my most recent entry on Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, I noted that the consensus among English-speaking reviewers was that 2007 was a pretty great year for the movies. Writing about this year's Toronto Film Festival line-up, Michael Sicinski confesses that he's still catching up with films from last year. Personally, if I were back in the 'Fax, I'd play it cool and wait for the films to come to me, confident that most--though certainly not all--of the year's important releases would turn up at Video Difference on Quinpool Rd. eventually. But seeing as I'm in Busan, I've decided to take matters into my own hands and started torrenting. I've even drawn up a far from exhaustive list of nineteen must sees (plus the one I watched on Tuesday): Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra, Eric Rohmer's Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon, Eran Kolirin's The Band's Visit, Cristian Nemescu's California Dreamin' (Endless), Christophe Honoré's Les Chansons d'Amour, Claude Chabrol's La Fille coupée en deux, Ulrich Seidl's Import Export, José Luis Guerín's In the City of Sylvia, Michelange Quay's Mange, ceci est mon corps, Lee Chang-dong's Milyang (Secret Sunshine), Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely, Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, Naomi Kawase's The Mourning Forest, Jacques Rivette's Ne touchez pas la hache, John Gianvito's Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, Jiang Wen's The Sun Also Rises, André Téchiné's Les Témoins, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Le Voyage du ballon rouge and Roy Andersson's You, the Living. Obviously this list is slanted against American films since I saw most of the worthwhile titles back in Canada.

Silent Light



I wasn't a fan of Carlos Reygadas' first two features, Japón (2002) and Battle of Heaven (2005), although both won passionate admirers. Without seeing them again, it's difficult to say whether Reygadas' third feature, Silent Light, represents a breakthrough or whether I simply missed the boat on his earlier work. Japón was obviously influenced by Bruno Dumont and Abbas Kiarostami, which is fine, but it didn't--or so it seemed to me at the time--bring anything new to the table. (When Battle of Heaven premiered at Cannes, Reygadas started citing Werner Herzog as an influence, which only seemed to endear him more to some reviewers. In any event, I was disgusted and bored by the film's celebration of religious masochism.) Silent Light lifts even more liberally from the art movie canon than its predecessors, but its sounds and images are too wondrous for it to be dismissed as a mere knock-off.

The film's similarities with Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955) are inescapable. Both are about isolated religious sects--in this case, Dutch Mennonites living somewhere in Mexico--and both end with religious miracles. However, the style of Silent Light isn't very Dreyeresque. For starters, Dreyer's film was adapted from a play by Kaj Munk and is essentially an actor's film. The director's mobile long takes maintain a unity of time and space. It's set mainly indoors and was shot on a soundstage. Reygadas' is scarcely a narrative film. (The opening shot, slowly panning across the night sky with the sound of crickets on the soundtrack, recalls Bill Viola's The Passing [1991].) His static set ups regard the characters, all played by non-professionals, as painterly subjects, placing them in the exact center of the 'Scope frame as a Wes Anderson might. When he does move his camera, it's often a smooth dolly that moves slowly in on the characters or just as slowly away from them. Reygadas favors a constructive approach to montage, rarely (if ever) giving the viewer an establishing shot of the entire space. In a funeral sequence near the end of the film, we never see the whole congregation together, but isolated medium shots of two or three people at a time. Much of the film is set outside, and Reygadas' talent for shooting landscapes is stunning. For the first time in a Reygadas film, one senses the emergence of a unique sensibility.

There are a lot of striking images in the film but I want to talk about one in particular that occurs maybe forty minutes into the film. Up to this point, the narrative has seemingly maintained a close temporal unity. The first time we see the film's protagonist, Johan/Cornelio Wall, he's having breakfast with his wife, Ester/Miriam Toews, and their six children. In the next sequence, he pays a visit to his friend, Zacarias/Jacobo Klassen, a mechanic, and speaks frankly about the fact that he's having an affair. This is followed by a brief scene in which he meets Marianne/Maria Pankratz for some midday neckin' in the desert. Later, Johan and his family visit an outdoor bath. All of this could've happened in a single day, so when the next sequence showed Johan's father/Peter Wall and mother/Elizabeth Fehr milking their cows in the early morning hours, I assumed this was the next day. After Johan tells his father that he's having an affair, the two men step outside to talk about it. In a shot reminiscent of the opening scene of John Ford's The Searchers (1956), Johan's father opens the barn door to reveal that the ground is covered in snow, retroactively signaling an ellipsis in the narrative. Additionally, this calls into question the apparent temporal unity of the earlier scenes. Reygadas is obviously paying homage to Ford with this shot, but given its placement in the film, its function is radically different.

For some time now, Roger Ebert has been championing what he's termed the "New Mexican Cinema" of Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro. (Who is the old Mexican cinema?) Unlike Reygadas, all three have made films in Hollywood with varying degrees of success. Del Toro has made three Spanish-language films, one in Mexico and two in Spain. I haven't seen Cronos (1993) or The Devil's Backbone (2001), but I was sufficiently impressed by Pan's Labyrinth (2006) that I sought out Hellboy (2004) to see what del Toro brought to the material, which turned out to be very little. I haven't seen Cuarón's first feature, Sólo con tu pareja (1991), but his fourth, Y tu mamá también (2001), while not the best Mexican film I've seen, runs a close second after Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel (1962). I loved A Little Princess (1995) and I liked Great Expectations (1998), but Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) is indistinguishable from the first two films in the series, and Children of Men (2006) was wildly overrated when it came out for being nominally more challenging than most Hollywood fare. (One wonders if the rumors about the studio not wanting to release it at Christmas time because it was too bleak were actually cooked up by the publicity department in order to lend the film an aura of artfulness.) I liked Iñárritu's Amores perros (2000) when it came out for its style and dark humor, but his subsequent two films make me wonder if the over-generous response from reviewers hasn't gone to his head. 21 Grams (2003), his first English-language film, is such a humorless dirge one might think it was a Canadian film if not for the non-linear plot which makes the story slightly challenging to follow. With Babel (2006), one wonders if the filmmakers were trying to confirm every ethnic stereotype they could think of: the film gives us ass-hole gringo millionaires, their Mexican maid (an illegal alien, natch) and her drunk ass-hole son, a slutty Japanese schoolgirl, and Innocent Arab Children Literally Caught in the Crossfire of International Conflicts. Although Reygadas is fluent in English (see the interview included on the DVD of Battle in Heaven), he has no apparent desire to make a film in Hollywood. This doesn't make him more Mexican than the other three--Silent Light, after all, was filmed in Dutch--but it speaks to the vast difference between filmmakers trying (and often failing) to do good work inside the studio system and an uncompromising independent. As talented as Cuarón, Iñárritu and del Toro are, Reygadas is in a different class altogether.