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Apr 1, 2013 8:44 PM
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Kon Ichikawa 市川 崑 IMDB  Biography Kon Ichikawa is noted for a wry humor that often resembles black comedy, for his grim psychological studies?often of misfits and outsiders?and for the visual beauty of his films. He is noted as one of Japan's foremost cinematic stylists, and has commented, "I began as a painter and I think like one." His early films show a perverse sense of humor as they reveal human foibles and present an objective view of corruption. In Mr. Pu, a projector breaks down while showing scenes of an atomic explosion. In A Billionaire, a family dies from eating radioactive tuna, leaving only a lazy elder son and a sympathetic tax collector. In The Key, a group of rather selfish, despicable people are poisoned inadvertently by a senile old maid, who becomes the only survivor. The film is a study of an old man who becomes obsessed with sex to compensate for his fears of impotency. He becomes a voyeur, and through the manipulation of the camera, we come to share in this activity. Slowly, however, he emerges as being sympathetic while the other characters are revealed in their true light. Throughout his career Ichikawa has proven himself a consistent critic of Japanese society, treating such themes as the rebirth of militarism (Mr. Pu), the harshness and inhumanity of military feudalism (Fires on the Plain), the abuse of the individual within the family (Bonchi and Her Brother), as well as familial claustrophobia and the tendency of repression to result in perversion and outbreaks of violence (The Key). His films usually refuse a happy ending, and Ichikawa has been frequently criticized for an unabashed pessimism, bordering on nihilism. Two of his most important films, Harp of Burma and Fires on the Plain, deal with the tragedies of war. The former concerns a soldier who adopts Buddhist robes and dedicates himself to burying the countless Japanese dead on Burma; the latter is about a group of demoralized soldiers who turn to cannibalism. A third work, Tokyo Olympiad, provided a new approach to sports films, giving as much attention to human emotions and spectator reactions as to athletic feats. Ichikawa is a master of the wide screen and possesses a strong sense of composition, creating enormous depth with his use of diagonal and overhead shots. Often he utilizes black backgrounds to isolate images within the frame, or a form of theatrical lighting, or he blocks out portions of the screen to alter the format and ratio. Ichikawa remains fascinated with experimental techniques. His excellent use of the freeze frame in Kagi reflects his case study approach to characterization. He has also done much in the way of color experimentation. Kagi is bathed in blues, which bleach skin tones to white, thus creating corpse-like subjects. Her Brother is so filtered that it resembles a black and white print with dull pinks and reds. On most of his films, Ichikawa has used cameramen Kazuo Miyagawa or Setsuo Kobayashi. After Tokyo Olympiad Ichikawa encountered many studio difficulties. His projects since then include a twenty-six-part serialization of The Tale of Genji and The Wanderers, a parody of gangster films with a nod to Easy Rider, plus a dozen documentaries and fiction features, among which The Inugami Family, a suspense thriller, proved to be the biggest box office success in Japanese film history.?PATRICIA ERENES Miscellaneous Reviews Interviews Nihon Cinema Art By Joan Mellen (1972) Nihon Cinema Art Joan Mellen: Is the major theme in Japanese films still the struggle between one's duty and the individual desire to be independent and free of traditional values and ideas? Kon Ichikawa: That is a difficult question with which to begin. I don't know how to answer. Can't we work our way to that and start with the next question? Q: Sure. the next is an easy one. What is your educational background? What did you study at school and what was the major influence which shaped your ideas? A: I don't go to a university so I can't say in what I majored. After I left middle school [equivalent to high school] I was always painting and drawing. Q: Did you become a painter? A: No, later on, I switched to filmmaking. Q: How did you start making films? A: When I was a youth it was the time of the Western film world's so-called renaissance. There were so many great European and American films. They had a great impact on the Japanese. Japanese then began to pursue filmmaking seriously. This influenced me considerably. Q: Which European and American films or directors most affected you? A: I should mention the names of filmmakers who moved me very much rather than individual titles. Among them, in America, Charlie Chaplin stands out, as does William Wellman. In France René Clair. Nor can I forget Sternberg and Lubitsch. Q: Why have Japanese filmmakers been so interested in historical themes and period films? A: I don't think Japanese films lean particularly toward the jidai-geki, or costume drama. Some people are interested in episodes of a certain era, but I would not want to make the distinction between jidai-geki and gendai-geki. To me they are the same. If I may add my opinion, films which have modern themes and modern implications should not be simply classified as jidai-geki, even if they are set before the Meiji era. They are indeed modern films although they may take the form of costume plays. Q: You don't think there are more historical films made in Japan than in the United States, although we do have the "Western", which may be thought of as similar to the jidai-geki? A: We probably have a few more and it may have some significance, in my case for one. It is true of course that there are more jidai-geki made here than gendai-geki. You see. film is an art which involves the direct projection of the time in which we live. It is a difficult point to state clearly, but my general feeling is that Japanese filmmakers are somewhat unable to grasp contemporary society. In your country, there seem to be many more dramatic current themes to portray. To render something into film art we really need to understand thoroughly what we want to describe. Unable to do this, many of us go back to history and try to elucidate certain themes which have implications for modern society. Q: Is it because Japanese society is undergoing great political and social change at the present time? A: Yes, that is correct. Q: Would you like to discuss problems of distribution, production, and financing of your films in Japan in relation to your own experience, for example with your Tokyo Olympiad? A: We are faced with the most difficult time for all the three problems. We have a very different system from yours. We used to have five major companies which monopolized all bookings. We never had a free booking system. Now the five companies have shrunk into three: Toho, Shochiku and Toei, and these companies still follow the old system of distribution. They don't want to change with the times; they are anachronistic. So groups are forming individual production companies and trying to survive. Financially it is a cruel struggle. Q: Have you personally formed your own company? A: At this moment it is an individual production, not yet a company. I am working right now to create a new company which I hope to start in November. This is my first independent attempt, and I have to raise the money by myself. Until now I worked with large companies like Daiei and Toho. I am working on television productions at present to raise money to start my own company. (Shokei no Heya, 1956) Q: Did you then make the Kogarashi monjiro episodes to make money rather than a serious works of film art? A: I would say for both reasons. I should like to make some money on them, but I made them seriously as well. I could never proceed aimlessly. Q: Are you interested in the theme of political apathy or indifference in the Kogarashi Monjiro stories? A: Yes, the protagonist is an outlaw and a loner, like an "isolated wold". He is like the character in many Westerns. He is always anti-establishment. Q: Do you suggest through this character that political action is fruitless, especially in the sense that an isolated individual attempeting to do away with evil would find it impossible? A: You might say that in terms of the political implications, although the political element is not the main theme. I am much more interested in the search for what defines human nature. Q: In general would you say that you are more interested in psychological aspects than political? A: Yes, generally so. Q: How do you account for the interest in pornography, or rather, the extreme desires of sexual life in Japanese films? I am speaking of the excessive sexual desire which appears even in the work of Imamura and in your own film Kagi (The Key)? A: I really don't know how to answer that question. I thought that in Japan sex was not given the prominence than the United States has given to it. In Japan, sex itself is not treated as a force able to change an entire aspect of social existence. I am referring to plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or A Streetcar Named Desire. These works face up to the problem of sexuality in the human being. Well, in Japan we don't have such plays. Sex is not as important a problem in Japan as it is in the United States. Q: Would you say that in Kagi the sex was treated comically or satirically rather than seriously? A: I used it as a criticism of civilization, of our culture. Q: In what way? Which aspect of civilization are you criticizing? A: The conlict between the soul or heart and desire. Q: I find that a difficult idea to grasp. A: It is difficult to explain in words, but Kagi is really not a movie about sex, at least not very much so. It is a story of human vanity and nothingness. It describes the humanness of the character through the vantage of sex. I should say that the sex is deformed to impart the struggle of human beings. Sex connects to one's search for humanity, one's true thoughts and position in society. Q: Then the true subject is not sexuality, but the sex functions as a symbol? A: Yes that is exactly it. Q: Why does the servant poison the three surviving people at the end of the film? This aspect of the plot was not used in the original novel by Tanizaki. A: These three people are representatives of the human without possessing human souls. They are not really human beings. The servant is going to annihilate them because the servant represents the director. I wanted to deny them all. Q: Then it is the moral judgment of the director on these three people? A: Yes. Q: What aspect of the original novel, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, were you interested in when you made Enjo? A: In this film, I wanted to show the poverty in Japan. Q: Who wanted to show the poverty especially, you or Mishima? A: No, I. Q: Is it a material or spiritual poverty? A: I started from the economic and naturally pursued the spiritual also, because it is the story of man. The economic side represents sixty per cent and the spirital forty percent. Q: Doesn't this indicate a strong political element in your words? A: Only for this film in which spiritual poverty is caused by economic poverty. Usually I don't consider myself a politically minded director. When I am making a film, I don't think of the political side of the film very much; it is not the main thing. Q: Maybe political is the wrong word. By "political" I mean social consciousness, the relationship between the individual and society, not in the sense of political parties. A: Then yes, that is important to my work. I am both aware of and concerned with social consciousness. Q: Is there any similarity between your private Mizushima in Harp of Burma and Goichi Mizoguchi in Enjo? A: They represent the youth in Japan. In the case od Mizushima the time was the middle of the war, and with Goichi it was just after the war. In this sense, both whether a soldier or not, represent Japanese youth. (Biruma no Tategoto, 1956) Q: What is the origin of their disillusionment with the world? Are they each disillusioned about in a general way? Although their behaviour is, of course, different: one leaves the world to become a Buddhist monk and decides never to return to Japan and Goichi in Enjo burns down one of the most famous shrines in Japan. A: Both are very young, and both are in search of something. Neither knows exactly what he is after, as they are still young. Both thrust themselves against the thick wall of reality and disillusionment trying to find out what they desire. Q: As in the burning of the temple. What do they desire? A: Truth. Q: Is it the truth of themselves or of the world? A: The truth of their own lives. Q: Is the meaning they seek in their lives similar to that of Watanabe in Kurosawa's Ikiru? Watanabe of course is an old man. A: Possibly so. I can say it is close. It depends on the viewer's interpretation. Q: What is the statement about the nature of war that you are making in Fires on the Plain? A: War is an extreme situation which can change the nature of man. For this reason, I consider it to be the the greatest sin. Q: Do you use a social situation like war as a device to explore the human character? The social situation would be a means of showing what the human being is capable of - as in Tamura's cannibalism, homicide, or the massacre in the film - as opposed to showing what happens in a society that leads to war? A: I use the situation of war partly for this reason, but also to show the limits within which a moral existence is possible. Q: Why do you have Private Tamura die at the end? A: I let him die. In the original novel he survives to return to Japan, enters a mental institution, and lives there. I thought he should rest peacefully in the world of death. The death was my salvation to him. Q: What he saw made him unable to continue to live in this world? A: Yes, he couldn't live in this world any longer after that. This is my declaration of total denial of war, total negation of war. Q: In Alone in Pacific you seem to be saying that determination is important, not what you do, nor the nature of the act. A: Yes. That was my precise conception. Q: Isn't what we do important? Wouldn't you say that there is some distintion between doing some useful thing and voyaging alone on the pacific? A: No, no difference. Q: In Japanese films and in yours in particular, much more so than in Western films, there seem to be mixtures of styles or rather varied methods of filmmaking which are combined sometimes even within a single film. Many of your films, and those of Oshima and Shindo for example, are so completely different from one work to the next. Is this a special characteristic of the Japanese film? I am thinking in particular of your segment of A Woman's Testament. A: [Laughs] Do you think so! Probably you are examining the films in great detail! We don't see this particularly. I believe that expression should be free, so this notion may affect the fact that you have just described. But I am never conscious of differentiating my methods or that I have one single special style. All depends on the story or the drama on which I am working. Q: This seems to be something unique about the Japanese film. In American films one director's works are generally similar, especially among the older directors. A: I think each should differ according to what is being expressed. As I am Ichikawa and no one else, even when I try to change the style according to the theme there is always some similarity from one film to the next. Right now I am working with an Italian director, Pasolini. I have really been influenced by him. I consider him one of the greatest filmmakers today. Do you know his work? Q: Which films of Pasolini do you admire the most? A: Oedipus Rex, Medea, The Decameron, The Gospel According to St. Mathew, Teorema. I consider Pasolini the finest director making films today. Among American directors I was impressed with Peter Fonda, not with his Easy Rider, but with The Hired Hand. He seems to be very young, yet he has a very good grasp of his subject. He understands love so beautifully. How old is he? Q: He is about thrity-five. Whom do you admire among the younger Japanese directors? A: None among the young ones. I don't know any of their films. Q: How about among the older ones? A: Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, of course. Q: In connection with Mizoguchi's Oharu I visited the Rakanji Temple in Tokyo. Didn't he film one of the main scenes there? A: But it could be that he made that movie in Kyoto. Is Oharu the American title? The title in Japanese is Saikaku Ichidai Onna. You know, there are several Rakanjis. (Otouto, 1960) Q: Is there a contradiction in the fact that you seem to praise the family system in Ototo (Her Brother) but attack it in Bonchi? Or were you criticizing the matriarchal family in particular in Bonchi? A: "Attack" is a strong word, but yes, I have criticized the family system in Ototo and yes, in Bonchi I attack the matriarchy. Ototo takes place in the Taisho era, before the war, about forty years ago, but today we still have much the same problem in our family system. I hold the opinion that each family should be accustomed to respecting the individuality of every member. This is what I wanted to say. Q: What is your viewpoint in Hakai (The Outcast)? A: The theme is racial discrimination. Japanese discriminate against burakumin. Originally when the Koreans emigrated to Japan, they brought their slaves with them; these were segregated and called burakumin. Q: Were you then treating the great discrimination against the Koreans by the Japanese? A: I think all human beings should be equal. Q: Did you see Shinoda's Sapporo Winter Olympics? Did you like it? A: Yes, I liked it, but I thought that there might have been more insights into the psychology of the individuals competing. Visually it is extremely beautiful. Q:Could you say something about how you used the visual details of the architecture in Enjo to reveal the psychology of the boy? A: Yes, I sought to do this. This beautiful structure was simply nothing but old decayed timber, no more than that. The boy didn't think so at first, but he gradually realized it. Q: What is the relationship bewteen his feeling about himself and his feeling about the building? A: Let me add this. It doesn't have to be the Golden Pavilion. It can be any one of the so-called great monuments in our history. They are so fine. Nobody questioned their greatness because many generations were taught to revere them. Well, in actuality some people think the particular monument, in this case the Golden Pavilion, is great, but some think it is not. Varying opinions should be accepted because excellence is solely dependent upon the viewer's conception. Q: Does he hate the building and burn it down as an act of self-hatred? A: Yes, he hated himself and destroyed himself. Q: The building represented everything which oppressed him? A: Yes, that expresses it. Q: Is that why people are shown as very small and the building huge in some scenes? They are individuals very vulnerable to and unable to control outside influences which dominate them, of which the Kinkakuji stands as a symbol. A: Yes, that's right. One further thing, I wish to stress is that Goichi was handicapped. He stutters and cannot express himself well and in a sense he closes himself off from society. He has a sense of inferiority in relation to that magnificent building and he suffers from his isolation. I myself did not think the Golden Pavilion so great or beautiful a structure. I may be wrong but my point here is that the presence of this great structure does not secure the well-being of human beings around it, or make them happy. Q: Are you also thereby criticizing the feudal values associated with the Kinkakuji? A: Somewhat. Q: Indirectly? A: Yes, not overtly. It is implicit. Q: Then the temple itself would be a symbol of the feudal system? A: Yes it is. Q: Has there been any influence in your work, or in Japanese film over all, of the impact of the women's liberation movement internationally and in Japan? A: I believe so. The consciousness of women is surfacing and it affects us all. Q: There is of course a strong femininism in the work of Mizoguchi, Hani, perhaps Kurosawa too? A: Mizoguchi and Hani, yes, but Kurosawa hasn't been so influenced. Q: Why in the recent Japanese film has the conflict between the "civilized" and the "primitive" been a prevalent theme? A: What do you mean by "primitive"? Q: The "primitive consists of people and society before industrial technology unnaffected by capitalism or competition, a society living by ancient paterns. I am thinking of Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes and Imamura's Insect Woman. A: The question is very abstract, and I'm not sure I agree. In Japanese films the primary conflict between two antagonistic forces is the large theme. I am saying as well that Japan as a whole is a very poor society, and economically poor society. Q: What did you mean when you said that your films were influenced in an important way, by Walt Disney? A: At the time I was still painting and trying to be an artist I saw "Mickey Mouse" [probably Steamboat Willie]. It made the connection for me between picture drawing and filmmaking. I was very impressed by Disney's skills and methods. No doubt there were many who drew the pictures for him, but he organized the whole thing. Later came Fantasia and Bambi and so on. I entered the staff of a small cartoon-making film company around that time. The early works of Disney influenced me greatly. Q: Do you consider the Disney films an example of abstract art? A: Not really; it's a little different from abstract art. The early Disney films were done authentically. Not in the same language as regular films. He had created his work in such a way that he could translate his material into the terms of the general public. Everyone understands him. I mean this favourably. Disney's innovations, his methods of revolutionizing filmmaking deserves a Nobel Prize if we had such a prize for film. Q: In his later films he turned to praising the American system and existing values, completely ignoring the suffering and despair in our society. A: Yes, I understand that. He became very conservative. Especially in the eyes of younger people, he must have seemed very, very conservative. But you should not forget the fact that he, at one point of his career, provided dreams and hopes for children all over the world. He still should be remembered for his great contribution to the film industry. Q: He was, of course, enormously popular when I was a child. But the dreams he offered were ones that could never be fulfilled. A: Yes, probably so. The times have changed. Today young people probably don't go for him anymore. However, in those days we received much from him. Q: We can't deny him either because his world remains with us, in our minds. He is part of our childhood. Can you tell me something of your future plans? A: After Novemeber, our production company and the Art Theatre Guild will start Matatabi (The Wanderers). It is about a tragedy of a very young outlaw. Then I will go to Munich and film the Olympic Games [Visions of Eight]. The movie itself will be made in the United States, but eight directors all over the world were selected to shoot the formal version of the Olympic Games. Q: Who are the others? A: Arthur Penn from the United States, Claude Lelouch from France, John Schleisinger from England, Franco Zeffirelli from Italy, and others. Each director can choose the event he wants to film. I choose the 100-metre dash. Senses of Cinema by Alexander Jacoby Senses of Cinema Of the few Japanese directors who command an international reputation, Kon Ichikawa remains perhaps the least known and the least well understood. The handful of his films which received widespread international distribution in the 1950s and 1960s – The Burmese Harp (1956), Fires on the Plain (1959), The Key (1959), Alone on the Pacific (1962), An Actor’s Revenge (1963) – testify to that trait which has ironically proved his greatest critical stumbling block: an eclecticism of both theme and style which seems to defy auteurist notions of consistency. Many have dismissed him as “just an illustrator”, though there is another irony in the fact that the source of that comment was Nagisa Oshima, a director whose films are similarly eclectic in style and content. In any case, the criticism is hardly fair. While Ichikawa’s work lacks the obvious integrity of Ozu’s, Mizoguchi’s or Kurosawa’s, its outward variety belies an overall unity, revealed as one probes (in Tom Milne’s phrase) “beneath the skin”. In fact, Ichikawa worked under somewhat different conditions from the other acknowledged masters of Japanese cinema. The commercial pressures he faced appear to have been rather stronger: it is on record that several projects (including one of his most famous, An Actor’s Revenge) were imposed on him by the studio in revenge for the failure of his more personal works to make a profit. Yet he managed, at the same time, to stamp his personality on diverse material. An obvious comparison is with Howard Hawks, whose comedies, which focus on the battle of the sexes, are often described as the thematic obverse of his action films, about camaraderie in an almost exclusively male world. Ichikawa, similarly, divided his films into “light” and “dark”, a division which has some justice – though my own preferred categories would be “ironic” and “sentimental”. Still, since most critics have stressed his versatility, it is worth concentrating instead on the recurrent features of Ichikawa’s cinema. Though he did not always write his own scripts (most of his major films were in fact based on scripts written by his wife, Natto Wada, only sometimes with his official collaboration), his background and experiences still demonstrably shape the abiding concerns of his films. A native of the Kansai region, he set many films (The Key, Conflagration [1958], Bonchi [1960], The Makioka Sisters [1983]) in its major cities of Osaka and Kyoto – the latter of which was also the subject of a short documentary he realised in 1969. Likewise, his early interest in painting and his training as an animator continued to shape his visual style. James Quandt has discussed Ichikawa’s “use of manga-like storyboards”, his preference for “the control of a studio shoot” over the uncertainty of location work, and the way in which he himself “designed sets, adjusted the lighting, touched up actresses’ make-up [and] went to music school so he could write scores” (1). Such total control approaches the techniques of the cartoon, and it is significant that his career in film began, in 1933, as an assistant animator, while his first project as director was an adaptation of a doll puppet play, The Girl at Dojo Temple (1945). As late as 2000, in his mid eighties, Ichikawa returned to the medium with his animated period film, Shinsengumi. Mr Pu (1953) was adapted from a popular cartoon strip, and certainly the exaggerated facial expressions and twisted bodily postures of his early comedies are more reminiscent of Frank Tashlin than of the nuances of Hollywood screwball. But the influence of the cartoon, and of painting, is visible throughout his career, in the artificial mise en scène of such films as Ten Dark Women (1961) and An Actor’s Revenge, the former intensifying the stylistic tropes of film noir into a manga-like pastiche, the latter iconoclastically blending influences from animation, ukiyo-e and the traditional theatre among whose practitioners its story unfolds. An Actor's Revenge Thematically, too, Ichikawa’s work displays a remarkable consistency. His abiding concern is with the recent history of his country, and his oeuvre comprises one of the more acerbic examinations of Japan’s development in the twentieth century. His treatment of that theme is more wide-ranging than Ozu’s (which focused more narrowly on the disintegration of traditional Japanese family values) and more direct than Mizoguchi’s, which, while always politically incisive, often achieved its impact under cover of melodramatic convention and historical distance. Ichikawa’s forays into the distant past were occasional: with a few exceptions (An Actor’s Revenge, The Wanderers [1973]), his non-contemporary films were set within living memory, from the late Meiji period (around the turn of the century) to the Second World War. Novels of those years furnished his plots, while on occasion he remade films from the same era, such as Yutaka Abe’s The Woman Who Touched the Legs (1926; Ichikawa’s version appeared in 1952), Kenji Mizoguchi’s Nihonbashi (1929, remade in 1956) and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s An Actor’s Revenge (1937). The gesture expressed in concrete form his admiration for the pre-war masters of the Japanese cinema, and Ichikawa’s taste for satiric ironies and absurdism can be traced to such models as Mansaku Itami’s witty deflation of feudal mores, Unrivalled Hero (1932), which the younger director acknowledged as his favourite film. Ichikawa’s own critique of his country’s sacred cows and dark secrets was, at its best, as witty as it was merciless. It was at its worst when solemn; thus, the leaden sentimentality and clumsy didacticism of The Outcast (1962), which labours for two hours with much verbose rhetoric to convince us that prejudice is a Bad Thing. The potentially interesting subject – the continuing oppression, under the allegedly enlightened Meiji dispensation, of the Japanese burakumin, or underclass – is thrown away, and the film is distinguished largely by the cosmetic beauties of its widescreen snowscapes. Nor, regrettably, was Ichikawa able to find an adequate response to the defining trauma of his generation, the Second World War – in which, due to illness, he did not serve. The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain differ in approach – the one sentimental, the other visceral, rather in the manner of the American Vietnam movie of later years. The comparison is telling: just as Hollywood has largely failed to deal with the politics of US involvement in Vietnam, preferring to focus on the individual sufferings on American soldiers, so Ichikawa’s war films make only a token acknowledgement of wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese, and largely buy into assumptions of Japanese victimhood in World War II – assumptions which to this day remain too widespread in the country. By contrast, Ichikawa’s examinations of his nation’s peacetime foibles achieved a crucial detachment. Often, the war was a discreet but necessary background, or an anticipated threat: as early as his first solo feature, A Flower Blooms (1948), he examined the impotence and hypocrisy of the more or less liberal pre-war middle class, whose passivity aided the triumph of militarism. In Conflagration, the destruction of Kyoto’s famed Golden Pavilion is seen in the context of the confusion of a defeated nation, while in Bonchi, a story of the merchant class in pre-war Osaka, only the apocalypse of war can destroy the oppressive family structures of that social group. Likewise, the potential sentimentality of Her Brother (1960) – a Taisho-period story about a family’s response to the slow death of the delinquent brother from TB – is deflected by Ichikawa’s incisive direction, which draws out the irony that only when the boy is dying can his family bear to live with him. The film is very moving, but its subtext is, again, a sardonic critique of the Japanese family. Tokyo Olympiad In the 1950s, Ichikawa’s contemporary films undermined the pillars of post-war Japanese society: the family, again, but also big business, government and the education system. His heroes are often “little men”, powerless against the mechanisms of their society, like the tax collector of A Billionaire (1954), whose attempts to combat official corruption end in dismal failure. That film was disowned by its director after studio interference, and the ending as it stands is curiously inconclusive, yet this remains characteristic of Ichikawa. The limitation, as well as the realism, of his satires lies in the way that they expose the dark underside of Japan’s post-war economic miracle – its corruption and its pressures to conform – without proposing any convincing solution. In this sense, Ichikawa is a pragmatist, rather than an activist. His endings tend towards despair: thus, the eponymous hero of Mr Pu with his closing remark, “How simple to go mad”, or the mass poisonings which conclude A Billionaire and The Key. The melodrama of teenage alienation, Punishment Room (1956) and the caustic satire of the rat race, The Crowded Streetcar (1957), both star the same lead actor, Hiroshi Kawaguchi, and form a diptych examining rebellion and conformity: the anti-hero of the former rejects the morality of his elders, while the hapless protagonist of the latter strives unsuccessfully to fulfil parental expectations. Both films end bleakly: Punishment Room with the boy enduring a brutal revenge from the outraged friends of a girl he has raped; The Crowded Streetcar with the hero prematurely grey and reduced to menial work. Ichikawa saw in audience displeasure at his dark conclusions the proof of his assumptions about society: he famously asked, “Doesn’t this desire for a happy ending show how unhappy they really are?” (2) Given such attitudes, it is unsurprising that many of Ichikawa’s protagonists are outsiders – in Max Tessier’s words, “individuals pursuing an absurd goal, often alone” (3). Examples include the soldier turned monk in The Burmese Harp, scouring the beaches of Burma for the remains of dead Japanese servicemen; the athletes in Tokyo Olympiad (1964); and the 23-year-old Kenichi Horie, who sailed single-handedly from Osaka to San Francisco, in Alone on the Pacific. There is a note of existentialism to the way in which such characters justify themselves through fulfilment of self-imposed tasks. Yet Ichikawa is careful not to glamourise his outsiders – rather, he stresses their humanity, hence the focus on the physical fragility of the athletes in Tokyo Olympiad. Also, he admits the limits of their rebellion, as in the Defoe-like moment in Alone on the Pacific where the hero, stripped to the waist, is embarrassed enough to go below deck to remove his underpants, even though he is miles from any other human being. Even Ichikawa’s outsiders, it seems, feel the pressure to conform. Ichikawa’s sceptical attitude to his country’s traditions and institutions ties in with another recurrent theme of his work: his interest in the young, and in the gulfs between the generations. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, his regular male lead was Raizo Ichikawa, whose good looks, rebellious yet sensitive demeanour and early death combined to make him something of a James Dean figure. His adaptation in Punishment Room of Shintaro Ishihara’s seminal novel of youthful discontent linked him briefly to the taiyozoku (sun tribe) movement, characterised by accounts of the violent amorality and sexual promiscuity of modern youth – that the film was picketed by housewives anxious to prevent students from seeing it only serves to demonstrate the reality of the generational divide which it examines (4). The hero of Alone on the Pacific has little common ground with his parents, and the film ends on a curiously bleak note as he sleeps through their congratulatory phone call. The most extreme example of Ichikawa’s concern for the experience of youth is I am Two (1962), an examination of the little difficulties of family life narrated in the first person by a two-year-old child. Here the differing perspectives of the boy and his parents are contrasted, while the film also examines the gulf in attitude between the parents – members of the generation who reached adulthood after the Second World War – and the more socially conservative grandmother. The most emotionally intense sequences of the film revolve around her death, which implicitly exposes her attitudes as outdated. An Actor's Revenge The deaths of parents are, indeed, another recurrent motif in Ichikawa’s work. The protagonist of An Actor’s Revenge seeks to avenge the deaths of his parents; Punishment Room and Bonshi contain weak, ailing fathers, who later die; in The Wanderers, one boy is forced by the warrior code to kill his father. The motif acquires a particular resonance in The Heart (1955), which probes a young man’s relationship with his older mentor, a surrogate father figure who ultimately commits suicide, against the backdrop of his biological father’s death, and the death of the Meiji Emperor, father of the nation. The film becomes an examination of the conflict between duty and affection: the hero abandons his dying father to return to Tokyo at the news of his mentor’s suicide. The implication here – that family loyalties might become secondary to freely chosen bonds of friendship – clearly subverts traditional expectations. The choice between two father figures acquires a more direct political implication in The Outcast, where the hero, who has sworn to his dying father always to conceal his status as a member of the underclass, breaks his oath in loyalty to a surrogate father, also by then dead, also a member of the burakumin class who had sought his protégé’s help to publicise their cause. Here, pursuing the path of filial duty would sustain the oppression of his class; political change requires a rejection of traditional loyalties. In Conflagration, the protagonist’s father, who died as Japan moved towards defeat in World War II, is associated with the Golden Pavilion; the young acolyte’s destruction of the structure is a metaphoric assault on the father, representative of the dead weight of Japan’s obsolete customs. As such, it runs contrary to the retro-fascist nationalism of the story’s original author, Yukio Mishima, who portrays the assault on the temple as a fanatic’s attempt to preserve its purity from the sullying influence of post-war commercialism. Ichikawa himself remarked that he “did not think the Golden Pavilion so great or beautiful a structure,” and argued that “the presence of this great structure does not secure the well-being of human beings around it, or make them happy” (5). In his film, arson becomes an act of rebellion against traditions which have lost their meaning, but which still exert an oppressive influence. Given this pervasive criticism of the traditions of his country, it is ironic that Ichikawa’s own career suffered as the nation modernised itself. His realisation in 1964 of a documentary about the Tokyo Olympics had its own uneasy symbolism: Japan’s hosting of the event demonstrated to the world its emergence into modernity, and coincided with the collapse of the old studio system in the face of growing commercial pressure. After a few unproductive years in the late ’60s and a flirtation thereafter with independent production, Ichikawa was eventually able to return to regular filmmaking, albeit on the studios’ terms. The complex thriller, The Inugami Family (1976), was the commercial success which enabled him to go on working through the ’80s, when even so eminent a figure as Akira Kurosawa was reliant on foreign backing, and the other major directors of his generation had mostly retired, died or gone into television. His later films often self-consciously recall his status as a veteran: he remade a past success in The Burmese Harp (1985), and, with Actress (1987), recreated the Golden Age of the Japanese cinema in a biopic of its greatest actress, Kinuyo Tanaka. Dora-Heita (1999) was a realisation of a 30-year-old script co-written with Kurosawa, Masaki Kobayaski and Keisuke Kinoshita, originally for the independent production company bankrupted by the failure of Kurosawa’s Dodeskaden (1970). Even at that remove, its story, about a lone hero’s battle against widespread corruption, was a fairly obvious metaphor for those veterans’ distaste for the explicit violence and overt sexuality of modern Japanese cinema. In the hands of Ichikawa, such conservatism seems a little incongruous; his best films, despite the tighter restrictions on filmmakers at the period of their production, were willing to deal with most aspects of life, and are as unembarrassed by sex as they are unexcited by violence. The precision of observation is their great virtue. If Ichikawa, alive and still working at this writing, remains, along with Kaneto Shindo, one of the last tangible links to the rich heritage of Japanese film, his best work is not that of a heritage filmmaker. Rather, his acerbic account of tradition, modernisation and alienation in twentieth century Japan will remain one of the more eloquent examinations of how his country came to be as it now is. Wild Grounds Wild Grounds has a link to an interview from the Kon Ichikawa book edited by James Quandt, starting on Page 89. Don't hit back on your browser like I did or you will have to reset your IP to read it again. Filmography A Girl at Dojo Temple (1946) A Thousand and One Nights with Toho (東宝千一夜 Toho senichi-ya) (1947) The Lovers (1951) Mr. Pu (1953) The Heart (1955 film) (Kokoro) (1955) The Burmese Harp (1956) - black and white film Punishment Room (1956) Bridge of Japan (1956) The Men of Tohoku (1957) The Hole (1957) Enjo (1958) Odd Obsession (1959) Fires on the Plain (1959) A Woman's Testament (1960) Her Brother (1960) Ten Dark Women (1961) The Sin (1962) Being Two Isn't Easy (1962) An Actor's Revenge (1963) Alone across the Pacific (1963) Money Talks (1963) Tokyo Olympiad (documentary) (1965) The Tale of Genji (1966) Topo Gigio and the Missile War (1967) To Love Again (1971) Visions of Eight (documentary) (1973) The Wanderers (1973) I Am a Cat (1975) The Inugamis (1976) Rhyme of Vengeance (1977) Hi no Tori (The Phoenix) (1978) The Devil's Island (1978) Koto (1980) The Makioka Sisters (1983) Ohan (1984) The Burmese Harp (1985) - color remake Princess from the Moon (1987) 47 Ronin (1994) The 8-Tomb Village (1996) Shinsengumi (2000) Dora-heita (2000) Kah-chan(2001) Yume jûya (2006) Inugamike no ichizoku (2006) Availability Criterion.com Amazon.uk Amazon.com Amazon.jp Netflix US |
Orion1Apr 1, 2013 9:48 PM
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