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Kurosawa

Monday, September 29th, 2008

Not long ago, I conversed with a very bright student who seemed very much into film criticism. When he asked who my favorite director was, I randomly decided to go with Kurosawa. He responded with his opinion that Kurosawa’s been overrated due to his western influence.

Phooie, I say. Kurosawa’s guilty only of spreading his horizons beyond his own culture to create works entirely his own; not Eastern, not Western, just himself.

In the last week, I was blessed to watch two of Kurosawa’s great masterworks on the big screen for the first time. They follow Rashomon and Kagemusha from previous weeks, and viewing all these films on the big screen have made it clear just what a visual genius Kurosawa was. Rashomon was a starkly formalistic and reverent work as real as anything Bergman’s made, and this viewing made Kurosawa’s Russian influences quite clear. Kagemusha, despite its loose-knit narrative, was a visual wonder full of Kurosawa’s brilliant use of color and framing. I’m glad to have seen both of these in a theater.

As for this week’s screenings, they rank among Akira Kurosawa’s most acclaimed work, and rightfully so. Seven Samurai has become the most popular film of his canon, endlessly remade and analyzed. Yet, though the film is highly entertaining and full of likable characters, what truly strikes a chord is its distillation of caste system politics, as a group of samurai are forced into contact with the peasants they’ve waged war against before. Compared to other samurai and action films, this one provides such rich mise-en-scene and characterization. At 208 minutes, Seven Samurai could not be a minute shorter.

Ran sees Kurosawa indulging in the darker side of himself. An adaption of William Shakespeare’s King Lear (with elements of MacBeth) and preserves all the fire and mania of the play. Like the text, Ran is about a man whose kingdom is built on lies and how his crimes catch up to him. Compared to Kagemusha, Ran is a more compelling story, and it boasts all the visual flourishes of the former. In addition, though each role within is superb, Tatsuya Nakadai gives one of the great film performances as the King Lear character, Hidetora. A tour de force of emotion and technical excellence, if I may so myself.

Also made possible by the Academy were screenings of the Oscar Winning documentaries Hotel Terminus, Night of the Johnstown Flood, and Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt.

Hotel Terminus was a documentary by Sorrow and the Pity arranger Marcel Ophuls that began as a film about Klaus Barbie’s trial and became a massive four-hour tangled web of concealed facts and lies. For all the confusion over multiple languages and jumping locales, we emerged from the screening with a realization that there remains much to be gleaned from this period of history. Pathetically, Hotel Terminus has yet to be released on DVD, owing to its runtime or its revelations or its undeserved obscurity or all of the above. Let’s hope Criterion or Kino gets their hands on this masterpiece of a documentary.

Last Monday was less impressive in comparison. Night of the Johnstown Flood proved to be an informative but clunky and dated work, ultimately revealing itself to be little more than an adequate History Channel special. Common Threads was a better experience, tracing the lives of several AIDS victims and their effect on the people around them. As a documentary, I found it very flawed. There was much praise for the score, but I found it rather dated, and the “human” element the filmmakers sought with vocals seemed superfluous and manipulative on top of the humanity of the people within. All the same, a chord was struck with several of my co-viewers, who vented tales related to those lost from AIDS in the Q&A afterward. Whatever I think of the documentary, I’m very glad it exists for me and these people.

As for viewings at home, attending these events made this a slow week. I did get a chance to view Chantal Akerman’s legendary 1975 experimental film, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Brussels. This defines a very literal “character study,” as we watch a widowed prostitute spend quite a bit of time peeling potatoes and depositing checks for the greater part of 200 minutes (this was a week for long movies, it seems), before a twist ending forces us to ask what the previous activities must have meant to the protagonist. Not for everyone, but hindsight has convinced me it’s a very difficult masterpiece well worth viewing by anyone serious about film.

Let’s get this on DVD along with Hotel Terminus.

Posted in Cameron's Movie Blog | No Comments »

Filmmakers: Terence Malick

Saturday, September 13th, 2008

Prolific, Terrence Malick is not.

Since 1972, Mr. Malick has directed a grand total of four films, and if we’re lucky he will die having made five. Much like Kubrick, Malick is a reclusive, thorough artist, but even Kubrick put out a number of films after his retreat from the public eye. Why such low productivity from Malick?

Maybe because more than what exists would simply be too good to be true. Though I’d heard quite a bit about his filmography, I was not entirely prepared for my first viewing of Days of Heaven. Expecting a well-photographed narrative film, I was shocked to find a work with very little narrative to speak of. There was story, to be sure, but nobody was interested in speaking it (aside from the narrator, who sounded exactly like a character from The Grapes of Wrath who had wandered into a recording studio to tell their life story). Days of Heaven, like Malick’s other work, is a film of two levels: what is seen (the reality) and what is thought (the soul behind the visuals). Few have attempted to imitate this style; perhaps owing to the fact that Malick’s methodology is so unique and insane that no one has dared to emulate it.

It’s nearly impossible to describe Malick the man. He was born in Waco, Texas in November of 1943 (or is it Ottawa, Illinois?). He went to AFI. He’s shy, and refuses interviews. Perhaps his reasons for his elusiveness (inviting comparison to J.D. Salinger) have to do with his wanting his work to speak for itself. Yet, why so few films in so many decades? Such questions have turned Malick into more myth than artist, to his detriment. Terrence Malick is not a tortured genius shunning the world for its unworthiness, but merely an introspective genius whose ambitions exceed what most filmmakers would ever dare for post-Erich Von Stroheim.

Though Malick directed a short film during his time at AFI and wrote scripts beforehand, his filmography before 1972 has either been locked away or is of little artistic value. Therefore, Badlands is the only film worth looking into until Malick decides to release Lanton Mills.

Narratively, Badlands is Malick’s most concrete and structured work, chronicling the true-life story of teenage cross-country murderers Kit Carruthers and Holly Sagris (Charlie Starkweather and Caril Fugate in real life). Played with equal degrees innocence and madness by Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in their greatest performances, what sets this apart is its unwillingness to judge its protagonists. Carruther’s is likable and charming, Holly sweet, and they maintain their personalities as they ruthlessly murder some people and politely persuade others.

There are several trademarks of Malick’s kick started here, most importantly a fascination with mythology. Badlands’s view of the subject is both romantic and dimensional, exuding a childlike tone while refusing to cast its characters as villains or heroes, opting for a little of both. Holly’s treated with more sympathy, as the story is told from her eyes via one of Malick’s trademark voice-overs (the first example of his use of narration to establish separate reality) and bright, stylized visuals that seem to notice the great wonders in the world that adults sometimes overlook. The most bizarre manifestation of this films mythic quality comes in a scene where Kit uses a car shield as if he were some crusading knight. Yet, there seems not to be any crusade for which he’s fighting. Badlands reaches no concrete points about these characters by the end, and the narration goes off on tangents not directly related to the events at hand. Terrence Malick is to be commended for taking such risks, and leaving us to fill in the blanks.

Days of Heaven was Malick’s next film, and, as with all sophomore efforts, it would define his filmmaking style for every work to come. There are many similarities to its forerunner, such as a fascination with historical mythology (in this case, a family seeking life and opportunity on a wheat farm in the 1910s) and the Kubrick-esque use of classical music, but there are many technical ways in which this improves upon Badlands. Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler are superior cinematographers to Tak Fujimoto, and Malick is able to use work from Ennio Morricone and Leo Kottke in his soundtrack. However, one cannot properly call it superior to Badlands because of Malick’s radical shift in storytelling.

The legend goes that Malick started shooting with a script, but scrapped it and opted to improvise the entire film. The result is a very loose, dreamlike narrative that prefers to tell its story with shadows, colors, tones, and faces than with dialogue or plot. Narration is once again provided, but even more so than in Badlands it rambles quite a bit. More poetry is found in the hope of the people who work tirelessly for the harvest than more expositional motivation could have conveyed, but in fact it’s hard to accomplish the latter in such a context when the characters themselves seem so unsure of their fate. Yet, there are those who disagree with such storytelling methods and, thus, Days of Heaven marks a point where Malick’s passionate non-fans seem to diverge from his work.

It’s quite shocking how, despite the entire film having been literally made up on the spot, the visuals are so impeccably composed and photographed. Most of shooting was accomplished at the magic hour (dawn and dusk, when the sun baths the landscape in red and orange), which explains how Almendros and Wexler were able to get such naturalistic and lush color in their final product. However, such a schedule could not have been a quick process, and, so, Malick spent two years editing his behemoth to a mere ninety minutes, but the result is one of the most beautiful examples of visual storytelling in all of cinema.

Perhaps the strain of creating such a work is what caused Terrence Malick to go into virtual retirement afterward. Years passed, during which Malick taught in France and turned down an offer to direct The Elephant Man.

Then, after a troubled years-long production, Malick finally released his third film in 1998: The Thin Red Line. The film’s timing could not have been worse. Coming around the same time as Spielberg’s crowd-pleasing Saving Private Ryan, comparison was immediately invited despite huge tonal differences. What’s more, there had been considerable controversy regarding Malick’s editing the film from six hours to three, scrapping Billy Bob Thornton’s original voice-over in favor of shorter narration from several individual characters, dropping such actors as Viggo Mortensen and Mickey Rourke on the cutting-room floor, and reducing Adrien Brody’s role from the central character to a non-speaking supporting role. It’s not hard to see why many critics found the film uneven.

Yet, although there are sections in which the film drags, I ultimately consider the film a slightly messy masterpiece of cinema. Though Ebert complained it was too similar to Days of Heaven, I find it reminds more of Badlands with its stronger focus on character. Though many feel the film is merely pretending to have depth, I feel that, as with Badlands and Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line merely presents a reality and leaves us to do with it as we wish. Were I to place an interpretation upon the film, it would be much like Casy’s speech in The Grapes of Wrath about humanity possessing “one big soul.”

Otherwise, I don’t think anyone could fault the production values. Often underused, John Toll was utilized to his full potential in this work. Hans Zimmer, a composer I rarely consider great, here gives one of the great cinematic scores, second only to his work on The Dark Knight (which belongs as much to James Newton Howard). Performances are uniformly excellent from everyone, though there are some who criticize Nolte’s work.

But whatever merits or faults were contained within The Thin Red Line, The New World received even more mixed responses, though not nearly as much controversy. Arguably Malick’s most ambitious project, The New World chronicles the first contact with American natives that led to the establishment of the Jamestown colony. First written in 1970, Malick essentially grabbed his crew, shot what they could, and cobbled together the story as he did in Days of Heaven.

Mythology is at the forefront of this film, namely the mythology of the “noble savage.” Whether realistic or not, the makers focused on the idea of these natives living in harmony with nature like children. Realism is not the point; rather, the film examines the romanticizing of this new land as a place of opportunity. Pocahontas is the prime manifestation of this. Unnamed through the entire running time, the character is portrayed as impossibly beautiful, wise beyond her years, and perhaps less than real. Examining the genocidal implications left out of Disney’s mediocre treatment of the material and finally getting Pocahontas’s relationship with John Smith right: she never married him, instead going to England to live with John Rolfe only to die shortly after. Her death is quite symbolic of the loss of native culture, making The New World a definitive account of the myths, legends, and truths about America’s birth.

Some saw this as Terrence Malick’s return to form…others saw his first genuine failure. Whatever the stance, it cannot be denied that The New World is an impressive achievement that signals Malick’s unwillingness to compromise.

Three years later, it may be shocking to learn that Malick has already completed his fifth feature, The Tree of Life. What’s even more shocking is that nobody knows what it’s really about. Rumored premises range from an autobiographical tale of growing up in the Midwest to an epic story of the fountain of youth. What is known is that it marks the first time Malick has reused celebrated cast and crewmembers: star Sean Penn and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (though he’s employing production designer Jack Fisk for the third time, and there may be lesser known workers who have also been in his employ repeatedly). Some people say it will be released this year. Others insist next year. Who can know with Terrence Malick?

I can tell you one thing, however, and that is that I will be there when it reaches theaters, and I will expect an experience unlike any other, and I’m confident I will not be disappointed. A great director comes rarely, but Terrence Malick has only come once, and never will come again.

Love him or hate him, you’re never disappointed.

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