{"id":7796,"date":"2010-04-10T11:21:27","date_gmt":"2010-04-10T16:21:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=7796"},"modified":"2010-07-23T19:39:08","modified_gmt":"2010-07-24T00:39:08","slug":"the-omnivoyeurs-dilemma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2010\/04\/10\/the-omnivoyeurs-dilemma\/","title":{"rendered":"The Omnivoyeur’s dilemma"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Otouto<\/em>.<\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

Any major film festival is really many festivals. You meet someone who tells you about all the films they\u2019ve been seeing, and the overlap with your dance card is virtually nil. You\u2019ve both been in the same town, and probably hit the same venues, but you’ve been to different festivals.<\/p>\n

Then there are certain syndromes. You convince yourself you need to see 3-5 films a day. Otherwise, what\u2019s the point of traveling all this way? Soon you realize, horribly, that after a couple of days of this regimen, you can\u2019t recall what you\u2019ve seen. Some early afternoon, Festival Amnesia will set in, and you can\u2019t remember what you saw that morning. Was it that ambitious but ultimately unsatisfying little romance from the Bosporus? Or the Chinese movie about moping teenagers trying to leave their dingy village? What were the names of those movies, anyhow?<\/p>\n

My own symptoms are getting acute. Twice in recent years, I have found myself in front of a film suddenly realizing that I had seen it at another festival. I had forgotten the title. At least I caught my mistake with the first shots, but I expect that in time I will obliviously sit through the whole movie twice\u2014probably liking it on the first pass and declaring it disappointing on the second.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Viewer\u2019s Remorse. Watching 3-5 titles a day, you inevitably encounter some stinkers. You take this philosophically until you meet someone else, who rhapsodizes about the string of masterpieces they\u2019ve seen. Suddenly you realize that you have backed losers. Your friend has had a transformative festival experience, and you might as well have been flossing. Worse, your carefully picked mediocrities swell in your mind, blotting out the good films you managed to catch by dumb luck. Panicked, you thumb through the schedule to see if the great things you\u2019ve missed are playing a second time.<\/p>\n

They aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

So film festivals aren\u2019t by any means the sweet deal they may at first seem. Even putting aside queueing, officious door staff, racing between venues, and projection problems, there are plenty of features to make people like me more neurotic than we already are.<\/p>\n

But I can\u2019t complain about my latest visit to Hong Kong. True, breathing problems put me out of commission some days and eventually forced me to return home early. My biggest regrets were missing the Zanussi films and the two Angelopolous films, The Weeping Meadow<\/em> and The Dust of Time<\/em>. (Watch: Somebody will tell me they are all masterpieces.) Still, I managed to see a fair amount in two mini-festivals I carved out of Filmart<\/a> and the festival proper<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Turning Japanese, yet again<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Golden Slumber.<\/em><\/p>\n

Parade<\/strong><\/em>, <\/em>from director Isao Yukisada, is an ensemble picture about Tokyo twentysomethings sharing a flat. Their love affairs and marathon viewings of soap operas are disrupted when Satoru, a male prostitute, crashes there one night and winds up hanging around with them. With his blank passivity and ambisexual good looks he arouses their curiosity and, as usual in such movies, winds up changing everyone\u2019s lives. The film was pretty good at portraying the way the kids keep life intriguing by conjuring up mysteries about their neighbors. (Is the man next door running a brothel?) The plot ran out of steam, I thought, but I enjoyed seeing a movie in that sober style that apparently only the Japanese can now pull off: only about 400 shots in nearly two hours, with an unassertive fixed camera that gave the characters room to breathe.<\/p>\n

Also about a young cohort, but more action-driven, was Golden Slumber<\/strong><\/em>, by Nakamura Yoshihiro. He directed Fish Story<\/em> (2008), a favorite of mine from last year’s festival<\/a>. This one is about a hapless young man pulled into a plot to assassinate the prime minister. Threaded with glimpses of his college days, when he and his pals worked in a fireworks shop and became connoisseurs of fast food, the plot follows his efforts to avoid arrest and find how he was framed. Like a lot of contemporary Asian films, Golden Slumber<\/em> sounds a note of nostalgia not only for long-lost innocence but also for kids\u2019 self-consciously retro tastes in popular culture\u2014in this case, the Beatles song \u201cGolden Slumbers\u201d (\u201cOnce there was a way to get back home . . . .\u201d). Less zany than Fish Story<\/em>, whose story pivoted around how an obscure album prepared for the end of the world, this seemed to me finally quite agreeable, thanks to its likably awkward hero and its lovelorn ending.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Longtime readers of this blog won\u2019t be surprised that one favorite of my personal Japanese mini-fest was Yamada Yoji\u2019s tear-jerker Otouto<\/strong><\/em> <\/strong>(aka Ototo<\/em>, \u201cYounger Brother\u201d), a remake of a 1960 Ichikawa film. A widow who ekes out a living as a pharmacist is about to marry off her beautiful daughter. But during the wedding dinner her ne\u2019er-do-well brother pops up and turns the ceremony into a catastrophe. Japanese movies are very good at evoking social embarrassment, and the disruption caused by Tetsuro makes you wriggle in your seat. He could have been simply a lovable loser, but he\u2019s not that likable, let alone lovable, and his waywardness brings misfortunes on his sister\u2019s family. In this movie about how you must love your relations no matter what, Yamada shows the classic resignation to family ties that has characterized the films from the Shochiku studio since the 1920s.<\/p>\n

As usual with Yamada, the direction is crystalline in a way you hardly ever see now: calm framings, unhurried pacing, longish takes (about 12 seconds on average), and lighting and composition that etch every object in relief. When Ginko the mother peels an apple, the skin curls off in a long ribbon, and it\u2019s as fascinating as a car chase in any other movie. In a film in which the camera seldom moves, a handheld shot regains some of its original power. \u00a0Maybe I\u2019m what Groucho called a sentimental old fluff, but like <\/a>Kabei–Our Mother<\/a><\/em>, Otouto<\/em> shows that some cinematic traditions are still worth something.<\/p>\n

For the real Shochiku flavor, experts will tell you, you need to return to the 1930s, and the festival did so with its small retrospective of Shimazu Yasujiro<\/strong>. A prolific director of comedies and dramas (he made over a hundred silent films), Shimazu built a reputation in the 1920s with family dramas like Father <\/em>(1923). Most of his films are lost, and he died in 1945, so he didn\u2019t benefit from the postwar revival of the industry and its growing renown in the West. His most famous work is probably the ingratiating Our Neighbor Mis Yae<\/em> (1934), which features in the retrospective.<\/p>\n

The remaining Shimazu films don\u2019t seem to me to reveal the stylistic consistency we find in Ozu or Mizoguchi or Shimizu. There are flamboyant pictorial touches in First Steps Ashore<\/strong><\/em> (1932), a drama of sailors and prostitutes with stark lighting and cluttered sets influenced by The Docks of New York<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A fight scene is rendered in a long-lens shot that looks very modern, though the technique had already been seen in Japanese swordplay films.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Perhaps most original are the variants Shimazu works on a picturesque divider in a waterfront bar, which becomes a fascinating grid that sorts out faces.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Having been trained by this cheese-grater divider, we are given the tougher task of spotting the seaman peering from the distance at our stoker hero and the taxi dancer he rescues. (Not so easy to see in my still: He\u2019s watching from the square and circle aligned horizontally behind the hero\u2019s lips and chin.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This \u201cgame of vision,\u201d where we must strain to see action that\u2019s blocked by bits of setting or furnishing, is characteristic of Japanese film then and since.<\/p>\n

Okoto and Sasuke<\/strong><\/em> (1935) and Lights of Asakusa<\/strong><\/em> (1937), the two Shimazus I caught during my stay, aren\u2019t as visually tricky as First Steps Ashore<\/em>, but they display Shimazu\u2019s characteristic interest in marginal characters (a blind woman in Okoto<\/em>, stage performers in Asakusa<\/em>). Both films close with a self-sacrificing retreat from the world. Later films, including the wonderful Brother and His Younger Sister<\/em> (1939), would give this retreat a positive ideological spin. Disgusted by office politics, a young man takes his sister and mother to Manchuria to start anew, and the finale shows a clump of earth clinging to the plane wheels, as if a bit of Japan\u2019s very soil would sanctify the empire’s new outpost.<\/p>\n

Fei Mu, Film Poet<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Nightmares in Spring Chamber.<\/em><\/p>\n

A second mini-festival during my Hong Kong stay centered on Chinese film history. I\u2019ve mentioned the Patrick Lung Kong titles in an earlier entry<\/a>. The other prime figure was Fei Mu<\/strong>, celebrated as one of China\u2019s best filmmakers. His Spring in a Small Town<\/em> (1948) is often considered the greatest of all Chinese films, and it’s not an unreasonable judgment.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, only about half of Fei\u2019s output survives. The earliest film we have is Song of China<\/strong><\/em> (aka Filial Piety<\/em>, 1935), a paean to Confucian virtues. Parents permit their son to move to the city, but the son falls prey to self-indulgence and a temperamental wife. Even when he holds a banquet to honor his parents it is merely an excuse for what the father calls \u201crevelry and gambling.\u201d Soon the daughter is being seduced by a city slicker and told that \u201cparental consent is a timeworn tradition.\u201d This lesson in traditional morality is filmed quite fluently, with telling use of tracking shots, especially during the banquet, and sudden bursts of angular montage.<\/p>\n

On Stage and Backstage<\/strong><\/em> (1937), from a Fei Mu script, is a 37-minute comedy. A troublesome diva refuses to come to a performance unless she\u2019s paid, but the manager can\u2019t afford it. So a street performer is brought in to substitute for the star in a performance of Farewell My Concubine<\/em>. While the production is shot frontally and with little depth, director Zhou Yihua contrasts that area of action with the backstage milieu \u00a0by means of layered compositions and lateral tracking shots through tangles of ropes and props. I enjoyed this charming film when I saw it during my first trip to Hong Kong, and its appeal held up well for me.<\/p>\n

I came home too soon to catch Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain<\/em> (1936), usually considered a strong work, and the little-seen Children of the World<\/em> (1940).\u00a0 Other films in the series included The Show Must Go on<\/em> (1952) from a Fei script and Romance in the Boudoir<\/em> (1960), from Fei\u2019s brother Louis; I already discussed the latter here. There were also two Chinese Opera films. A Wedding in the Dream<\/strong><\/em> (1948), China\u2019s first color film, stars the legendary Mei Lanfang<\/a>, the Peking Opera performer best known in the west who became friends with Chaplin and Eisenstein.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This image from Wedding in the Dream<\/em> is a posed production still; the film itself, a straightforward record of Mei’s performance, survives\u00a0in dreadfully worn condition. I found Murder in the Oratory<\/strong><\/em> (1937) more intriguing. A man is urged by his mother to murder his wife, the daughter of the man who killed his father. From the start, when an opera stage dissolves into a fully three-dimensional space, you realize that this will be an experiment in creating something halfway between canned theatre and \u00a0a \u201cfilmic\u201d treatment. So we get all the trappings of an opera performance, including stylized movement and singing, but with the camera weaving among the characters and furnishings, finding unusual angles, and even assuming characters\u2019 optical viewpoints.<\/p>\n

Far different is another title I enjoyed on my first visit to Hong Kong in 1995. Nightmares in Spring Chamber<\/strong><\/em> (1937) is an episode in the portmanteau film Lianhua Symphony<\/em>. This 13-minute allegory of Japan\u2019s imperial ambitions shows a maniacal frock-coated Japanese pursuing innocent Chinese girls through a vast bare villa. He cackles over a spinning globe and captures one girl, but she\u2019s rescued by the other, a surrogate for the Chinese soldier we glimpse occasionally. Full of canted angles, hallucinatory visions, under lighting, looming shadows, and other trappings of German Expressionism, and accompanied by snatches of Debussy and the Danse macabre<\/em>, it\u2019s a far cry from the other items in the series, and it suggests a director of considerable versatility.<\/p>\n

Last year the Festival premiered the restoration of the rerelease of Fei\u2019s 1940 Confucius<\/strong><\/em>, which I wrote about then<\/a>. This year a second restoration inserted titles to cover the gaps and put some scrappy scenes into their proper order. In addition, a very informative book, Fei Mu\u2019s Confucius<\/a><\/em>, accompanied the screenings. The essays explicate the film from several angles, including its relation to Confucian doctrine, to classic poetry and painting, and to other Fei Mu works.<\/p>\n

Thanks to retrospectives like this one, we can see how much Fei\u2019s official masterwork owes to his earlier efforts. There are touches of lighting and staging in these films that are more subtly developed in Spring in a Small Town<\/em>, and the stately pacing of Confucius<\/em> is here put to more mundane subject matter. Still, nothing I saw matches the quiet erotic boldness of this milestone of world cinema, which anticipates so much of what we find in Antonioni and other postwar European filmmakers.<\/p>\n

So much to see, and even less time than I\u2019d planned: Film festivals somehow manage to leave you unsatisfied and yet feeling full. A nice dilemma to have.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Spring in a Small Town.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Otouto. DB here: Any major film festival is really many festivals. You meet someone who tells you about all the films they\u2019ve been seeing, and the overlap with your dance card is virtually nil. You\u2019ve both been in the same town, and probably hit the same venues, but you’ve been to different festivals. Then there […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,136,9,17,1,5,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7796","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asian-cinema","category-directors-fei-mu","category-festivals","category-festivals-hong-kong","category-film-comments","category-film-technique","category-national-cinemas-japan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7796"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7796\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7835,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7796\/revisions\/7835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}