Taku Furukawa's Nice to See You (ナイス・トゥ・スィ・ユー, 1975)

Taku Furukawa is best known for his doodling style of drawn animation in films like Phenakistiscope (1975) and Tyo Story (1999) and his much loved contributions to the NHK’s Minna no Uta series.  He has also played with other techniques of making animation such as direct animation (painting directly onto the film stock) in Calligraphiti (1982) and Direct Animation (1987) and he was one of the first indie animators to experiment with early computer animation in Mac the Movie (1985) and Play Jazz (1987).

Nice to See You (ナイス・トゥ・スィ・ユー, 1975) is a silent film that Furukawa made early in his career.  At the beginning, it appears to be an abstract animation that plays with black shapes drawn on a colourful background.  Shaky black squares shot on 16mm dance on a green background, their blotchy edges occasionally blurring into one another.  The black squares then transform into green circles on black and then back again as if the two patterns were fighting against each other for control of the screen.  The movement of the shapes is such that it is hard to determine whether or not the shapes are moving across the screen or the camera is moving across the paper on which it has been drawn.  The patterns shift and move with the ease of a kaleidoscope. 

All of a sudden the shapes get smaller and the camera moves back to reveal that the pattern of dots and squares were not random, but together make up the image of an eye.  The message of the film is clear: how we interpret images – and by extension how we see the world – is determined by our perspective.  The closer we are to something does not necessarily mean that we see it more clearly.  Sometimes we need to step back in order to see the bigger picture.

Nice to See You appears on the Anido DVD Takun Films and can be ordered through their website.

Taku Furukawa re-made Nice to See You in collaboration with video game producer and CG animator Noriyuki Boda  and called it TAKU BODA (2009).

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

A Mother Should Be Loved (母を恋はずや, 1934)

In support of the BFI, one of the many companies to lose their stock in the Sony warehouse fire in Enfield, I ordered their dual format edition of Late Autumn / A Mother Should Be Loved last week. A Mother Should Be Loved (母を恋はずや, 1934) is one of the few extant Yasujiro Ozu films that I had not yet seen. Although the first and last of 9 reels that make up the film are missing, enough remains of the film to make it enjoyable viewing.

A Mother Should Be Loved is the type of family melodrama that was common at the time. It tells the story of two school-aged brothers from a wealthy home whose father (Yukichi Iwata) dies suddenly. Their mother Chieko Kajiwara (Mitsuko Yoshiwara), with the support of an old friend of their father’s whom they call Uncle Okazaki (Shinyo Nara) and his wife (Shinobu Aoki).

As the Kajiwara brothers grow up, it becomes apparent to them that their mother tends to favour the elder brother Sadao (Seiichi Kato/Den Obinata) over her younger son Kosaku (Shusei Nomura/Koji Mitsui). It is not until Sadao applies for college and sees his birth certificate for the first time that the family secret is revealed: he is the son of his father’s late first wife and Chieko is only his stepmother. Sadao’s bitterness over this well-intentioned family deception leads to a rift between the two brothers that the plot tries to resolve.

Visually, the film is unlike Ozu’s later style apart from a few favourite motifs such as clothes hanging to dry, factory chimneys, and trains. The house that the family lives in until the father’s death has a European furnishings which more resemble the set of an early Carl Dreyer film than an Ozu film. As the family’s financial circumstances become more difficult they move to a more modest Japanese-style home.

The most fascinating element of A Mother Should Be Loved that I would like to learn more about is Ozu’s use of poster art in the film. The mother is strongly associated with Christian imagery in the film in the form of a poster for the Passion Play Tercentenary in Oberammergau. In 1634, the residents of this small town in Bavaria made a pledge to God that if they were spared from the bubonic plague they would produce a play every ten years depicting the life and death of Jesus. With a few exceptions, the play has been performed every 10 years since. The event advertised in the poster in A Mother Should Be Loved was exploited by the Nazis as part of their greater anti-Semitic agenda and Hitler himself even attended one of the performances. It would be interesting to find out how much Ozu understood about the context of the event itself.  He certainly would not have know about Hitler visiting.  The film was released in May 1934 and Hitler saw the Passion Play in August 1934.  Without all the historical baggage, the cross on the poster merely functions metaphorically to suggest that the mother is adhering to the Christian principle of self-sacrifice.

In contrast, the brothel that Sadao moves into when he runs away from the family home has its walls papered with Hollywood and European movie posters.  The most striking of these is a stylized poster of Joan Crawford in Lewis Milestone's Rain (1932). Here is a screencap from the film alongside the original full colour poster:

This is quite appropriate for a brothel as Joan Crawford plays a prostitute on a path to redemption and a life on the straight and narrow.  Many critics complain that A Mother Should Be Loved is "marred by melodrama" (Donald Richie, Ozu, p. 219), but it is really quite tame in comparison to the over-the-top melodrama of Rain (a film which I coincidentally saw for the first time in Japan - I picked it up in a 500 yen bargain bin several years ago).

Another poster in the brothel is for the G.W. Pabst epic Don Quichotte (The Adventures of Don Quixote, 1933) starring the wildly popular Russian operatic bass Feodor Chaliapin (spellings vary in different European countries).  It was the first sound film adapation of Miguel de Cervantes's novel and three versions were shot - French, English,and German - with Chaliapin singing in all three versions.  I couldn't find the poster used in the film but to get an idea of how it looked in colour I have found a different poster for the film as well as a poster for a theatrical version that uses a similar graphic design:

Alexander Jacoby, who wrote the introductory essay in the BFI booklet, remarks upon the thematic similarities between a A Mother Should Be Loved and the Julien Duvivier classic Poil de carotte (The Read Head, 1932) about a boy who is unloved by his parents.  Like the Passion Play poster, the poster for Poil de carotte is made all the more poignant from the perspective of today because the child star Robert Lynen, in the title role of François Lepic was executed by the Gestapo for his role in the French Resistance in 1944.

The final movie poster that I recognized in A Mother Should Be Loved is for the film Die Tochter des Regiments (The Daughter of the Regiment, 1933).  The film was directed by Carl Lamac and stars his wife (or ex-wife - they divorced sometime in 1933) Anny Ondra (most famous for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail) and Werner Fuetterer.  This is the most rare of the films referred to in A Mother Should Be Loved.  I do not know if a copy of it is extant, but it most certainly has never been released on DVD.  I would presume that the film is an adaptation of the Donizetti comic opera La fille du régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment, 1840)

A Mother Should Be Loved sparked my interest in learning more about the kinds of films Ozu was watching in the 1920s and 1930s and what he thought about them.  Such a shame that so many of his early films were lost as I am sure they would shed even more light onto craft of this endlessly fascinating film director.  

The Water Magician (滝の白糸, 1933)

Last Friday night at Shinsedai, I had the great pleasure of watching Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Water Magician (aka Cascading White Threads, Taki no Shiraito, 1933) with live accompaniment by the experimental pop band Vowls.

The Water Magician is one of a handful of Mizoguchi’s surviving silent feature films. It is a significant film historically, for it was at a screening of the film in 1972 that Midori Sawato (澤登 翠) first heard the benshi Shunsui Matsuda (松田春翠, 1925-1987) perform. Sawato became his pupil and has worked diligently ever since to keep the benshi (silent film narrator) tradition alive in Japan. The film that was projected at Shinsedai is one that Matsuda Films helped preserve and is available through Digital Meme. 

The Digital Meme DVD includes the choice of two benshi performances with English subtitles. For this performance, there was no benshi, only the subtitles and the emotion and narrative tension were supplied by the musical performance.

The video transfer of The Water Magician runs quite quickly as it was not shot in 24 fps. Silent films were shot at variable speeds of between 16-23 seconds and it is likely that The Water Magician screened at 2 hours originally instead of its current 90 minutes. The Japanese title cards flashed by at a speed too fast to read, but a Japanese audience would rely more heavily on the benshi narration than the title cards for plot information.

The Water Magician tells the story of a 24 year old woman who makes a living performing a water act as part of a travelling ensemble which includes a knife thrower and other amusements. Her age is significant for in Japan it was a commonly held belief that if a woman were not married by the age of 25 she would be considered an old maid or, as it is known colloquially, “Christmas Cake”. Taki no Shiraito is considered the most beautiful woman in the region, but she dreams of one day marrying and having a family.

Fate throws into Shiraito’s path a young coachman by the name of Kinya Murakoshi. Kin-san is only a year older than Shiraito, and has endured much tragedy in his life. When Shiraito hears his story of losing both of his parents and having to quit school in order to earn a meager living, she offers to pay for his education. In return, he promises her that when he has become a great man, of who his samurai family would be proud he will return to make her dream come true.  Fate again intervenes, this time with tragic consequences.

Even at this early stage of his career, Mizoguchi already demonstrates a keen eye for poetic framing. The scenes of Shiraito on the bridge in the moonlight, the key metaphor of the film, are so beautifully rendered that one could image each still framed on the wall of a gallery. The emotion of the film is carried on the faces of Shiraito and Kin-san. For a silent film, it does rely quite heavily on the benshi perfomance, which meant a lot of reading at this screening.

Before the performance, I asked Naomi Hocura of Vowls (limited edition 7" available via website) about how they prepared the accompanying music. Brandon Hocura had composed some themes specifically for the film, and they had cues marked for certain moments when sound effects or particular emotions needed to be brought to the fore. Apart from this skeletal framework, their performance was mainly improvisational. The group played a wide variety of instruments including electric guitar, keyboards, harmonium, drum and a wide variety of other percussive instruments. One of the more innovative effects, used to emphasize the water theme, was a PET bottle half-filled with water with a mic taped to it. During some of the more lyrical passages, Naomi Hocura also sang in a wordless, haunting way that reminded me of Loreena McKennitt.

The music complemented the film and for me emphasized the sensuality of the film --- Takako Irie's performance as Taki no Shiraito in particular. The entire audience seemed mesmerized by the performance which I hope becomes a regular feature at Shinsedai Cinema Festival – the music truly made the silent film very relevant for a young generation of spectators. One sign that the music was effective was the amount of weeping in the audience during the final scenes of the film.

Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

Written by Kyōka Izumi

Cinematography by Minoru Miki

Starring

Takako Irie as Taki no Shiraito (aka Tomo Mizushima)

Tokihiko Okada as Kinya Murakoshi

Bontarō Miake as Shinzo

Suzuko Taki as Nadeshiko

Ichirō Sugai as Gozo Iwabuchi

3-DVD "Saikaku Ichidai Onna," "Gion Zoshi," 

"Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain)"

Japanese Movie

3-DVD "Yuki Fujin Ezu (Portrait of Madame Yuki)," 

"Musashino Fujin (The Lady of Musashino)," "Oyusama"

Japanese Movie

Akasen Chitai

Japanese Movie

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

Jyōkyō Monogatari (上京物語, 1999)

Japan-Woche Mainz 2010 gave me the opportunity to watch Taku Furukawa’s Jyōkyō Monogatari (aka Tyo Story, 1999) for the second time. I first saw it at Nippon Connection in 2008, but as it does not appear on Takun Films, Anido’s DVD of Furukawa’s collected works (1968-1990), one has to rely on festival screenings to see it again.

‘Jyōkyō’ means ‘to go to Tokyo’ and Jyōkyō Monogatari is an animated adaptation of Yasujiro Ozu’s famous Tōkyō Monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953). Furukawa employs his familiar doodling style drawn animation, which is influenced by the style of his mentor in the 1960s Yōji Kuri and the New Yorker caricaturist Saul Steinberg, to depict an older couple on the train to Tokyo to visit their children. In addition to being a humorous take on an Ozu story, Furukawa also gives a nod to silent film comedies, but using a rollicking score similar to that played during silent movies and using bilingual (Japanese / English) title cards to impart story information.

During the train ride, Furukawa gives us the back story of the family through the techniques of flashback and montage. The father looks at the wedding photo of his daughter, which triggers a photo montage of her life from birth through to the present. The same is repeated with the couple’s son. The memories are bitter sweet, and Furukawa employs visual gags to elicit laughter from the audience.

Once in Tokyo, the story follows its expected path with the parents finding, as they did in Tokyo Story, that their children’s lives are too busy to fit any quality time in with their parents. The modern distraction is of course the keitai denwa (cell phone). There is an amusing sequence in which every time a keitai goes off, the character whose phone it is buzzes just like their phone. Other modern touches include the grandsons playing violent computer games and ignoring their grandparents, and instead of making a home cooked meal their daughter-in-law orders in pizza. 

Tokyo is shown to be a much noisier place than the seaside town where the couple live. The noise culprits include traffic, people, crows, and even a noisy jidouhanbaiki (vending machine) that calls out ‘arigatou gozaimasu’ after every transaction. For a laugh, Furukawa even has the Roadrunner call out ‘meep meep’ before being chased along the overpass by Wile E. Coyote.  Just as in Tokyo Story, the grandparents eventually are left to fend for themselves going on a tour of Tokyo. But then being modern grandparents they also go bowling, rock it out at a Rolling Stones concert (Furukawa’s exaggerated caricatures of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger are particularly amusing), and go to Tokyo Disneyland.

On the surface, Furukawa’s film appears to be a tongue-in-cheek critique of the superficiality of modern urban lifestyles. Yet, unlike Tokyo Story, the story has a surprise twist at the end which is very amusing.

Japan-Woche Mainz 2010 is also screening Furukawa's recent work Paper Film (image above) on Wednesday evening, but unfortunately  I will not be able to attend due to scheduling conflicts. 

Taku Furukawa (古川タク, b. 1941) is one of the best known independent animators in Japan and has worked as an experimental animator, teacher, and mentor for over 40 years. His films range from an intricate tribute to the 19th century animation device the Phenakistiscope to early computer animations on the Mac, to humorous narrative shorts like his contribution to Tokyo Loop in 2006. Over the years he has contributed numerous animated shorts to the NHK’s Minna no Uta series. He won the Special Grand Jury Prize at Annecy in 1975 for Odorokiban and his manga The Takun Humor won the Bungeishunjū Manga Award for 1978. He lectures regularly at universities and art schools.

Filmography

1964 Zuraw (16mm, time)
1966 Red Dragonfly (Aka tombo, 35mm, time)
1968 Oxed-Man (Gozu, 16mm, 4‘)
1970 New York Trip (16mm, 5‘)
1972 Head Spoon (16mm, 5’)
1975 Nice To See You (silent, 3’)
1975 Beautiful Planet (Utsukushii Hoshi, 35mm, 5’)
1875 Phenakistiscope (Odorokiban, 35mm, 5’)
1977 Coffee Break (35mm, 3’)
1978 Motion Lumine (Mōshon Rumine, 16mm, 3‘)
1979 Comics (Komikkusu, 16mm, 3’)
1980 Speed (35mm, 5’)
1980 Sleepy (35mm, 6’)
1982 Calligraphiti (Karigurafitii, 35mm, 5‘)
1983 Portrait (16mm, 5‘)
1985 The Bird (Tori, 16mm, 3’)
1985 Mac the Movie (16mm, 3’)
1987 Play Jazz (16mm, 5’)
1987 Direct Animation (35mm, 1’)
1990 TarZAN (35mm, 6’)
1992 From Heart to Heart (Ishidenshin, B-cam SP, 5’)
1999 Tyo Story (Jyōkyō Monogatari, 35mm, 13 min.)
2003 Winter Days, part 31 (Fuyo no hi, collaboration, 40’)
2006 Hashimoto (contribution to Tokyo Loop, 2’57”)
2009 Takuboda (video, 3’, Noriyuki Boda adaptation of a Furukawa film)
2010 Paper Work

Tokyo Loop

Animation

"Tokyo Loop" Soundtrack

Animation Soundtrack

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2010

Passing Fancy (出来ごころ, 1933)

While in Canada, I picked up Criterion’s Eclipse Series 10: Silent Ozu – Three Family Comedies. Watching Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro, 1933), I was reminded how one can always count on Ozu to serve up a perfectly balanced mixture of pathos, humour, and human interest. Passing Fancy has enough slapstick to make the audience laugh, but not so much that it falls into the realm of an unlikely farce (à la the Farrelly brothers). Ozu adds just enough sentimentality to warm the heart without causing the audience to feel nauseous (J-dorama directors take note!). The film is also filled with many moments that the audience will recognize in their own lives.

Takeshi Sakamoto stars as Kihachi, a single father of a boy called Tomio (Tomio Aoki aka Tokkan Kozo) who is just barely able to look after himself and his son because he is illiterate and has a weakness for sake. One night as he stumbles home from a drinking binge with his friend and co-worker Jiro, he happens upon a jobless girl called Harue who is desperate for help. He takes Harue to Otome, the woman who runs the local eatery/izakaya. Otome takes Harue under her wing and soon a three way love triangle develops. Kihachi fancies Harue, although she is much too young for him, but Harue likes Jiro, who keeps his own feelings hidden out of loyalty to Kihachi.

Passing Fancy is the first of a series of films Ozu made featuring the working poor. As movies during the pre-war period were cheap entertainment, the nagaya-dwelling characters likely represent a large swath of the viewing audience of Ozu’s films during this time, in contrast to the post-war middle-class families of his later films like Late Spring (1949) and Tokyo Story (1953).

Another cheap form of entertainment, naniwa-bushi storytelling takes place in the opening scene of Passing Fancy and provides conceit on which the film is based. Tomio's jokes are a running gag throughout the film, Kihachi tells a lot of tall tales, and Kihachi twice cites the the traditional story of Ohan and Choemon as evidence that Harue might be persuaded to marry him. Although the story is not told within the film, Ozu’s audience would have known the story of forty year old man, Obi-ya Choemon who falls in love with a fourteen year old girl called Ohan who loves him in return. Her family opposes the relationship which ends in elopement and double-suicide. Based on a true story, the tale of Ohan and Choemon has appeared on woodblock prints and was a popular oral tale throughout the Meiji period.

One has to admire the subtlety Ozu employs in order to give nuance to the story. Ozu is known for his use of a static camera, so when a camera does move it acquires an added significance. I noticed two tracking shots in the film. The first occurred at the very beginning, tracking slowly along the floor to reveal the extent of the audience watching the naniwa-bushi performance. I recall identical shots of a theatre audience being used in Ukigusa Monogatari (1934), which also featured Kihachi and Tomio, and its remake Ukigusa (1959). The second tracking shot was of Kihachi's meagre possessions laid out on the floor as he looks for things to pawn to pay for Tomio's medical treatment. This scene, and the scene when Tomio's teacher visits him at the medical center, are perhaps the two most humbling moments for Kihachi in the film.

The seasonal setting of the film is also referred to through subtle visual hints. Kihachi spends much of the film in his underwear and is often scratching himself: a sure indication that it is midsummer in a humid, mosquito-ridden Tokyo. The fireworks that are intercut with the dramatic climax of the film confirm the fact that the story takes place during the month of August. The repeated shots of Kihachi undressing from the legs down also act as a foreshadowing to the end of the film, when he undresses for the last time and makes his final rash decision. The title Passing Fancy refers to the whims that Kihachi makes throughout the film. I like that the original Japanese idiom used in the title – 出来ごころ (Dekigokoro) - contains the word for `heart` (kokoro), because the decisions that Kihachi makes on a whim always come from the heart and are full of good intentions.

Passing Fancy is truly a delight to watch. Even my six-year-old son enjoyed it, laughing out loud at all the slapstick humour. It also reminded me that Ozu is often unfairly put into a box labeled `traditional`, `Japanese`, and `minimalist` when his films are much more complex than meets the eye.

Yasujiro Ozu DVD Box Vol.3

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2008

Repas en famille (家族の食事, 1897）

The National Film Center (NFC) has a number of fascinating film clips available for viewing on flatscreens throughout the exhibit, many with stools available for comfortable viewing. The most fascinating of these for me are the Lumière shorts just inside the exhibition gallery entrance.

The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, are of course famous film pioneers who invented the cinématographe, a camera that acted as both a recorder, printer, and projector of images. Not only did their early short films, or actualités travel all over the world, but they also sent their cameramen far and wide to capture exotic images of far away places such as Russia, Mexico, Australia, and Japan.

Repas en famille (Louis Lumière, 1897) is the first of more than two dozen Lumière films screening at NFC. Ostensibly, the Lumière actualités were meant to capture documentary footage of real life but there is a staginess about many of the films set shot in Japan. For example, the family in Repas en famille has clearly been positioned around their ‘meal’ (repas) in a photogenic manner, without anyone’s back to the camera, apart from the father who often turns to look at the camera.

The film might have more aptly been called ‘A family has tea’, because I doubt that a Japanese family would eat their food off the ground. It would be more likely that they would eat from a low table. From the assembly of accessories I would imagine that they are actually watching the grandmother make green tea for them, not their family meal.

The mother fusses with her two children while the grandmother fusses with the kettle. The father’s glances at the camera tell of an awkwardness of situation. He is clearly aware of the camera’s presence and gives me the impression that he is wondering how long they must keep up this charade. However, there is an authenticity to this kind of behaviour. If they were ignoring the camera’s presence altogether it would turn the film into a complete fiction. The ‘realism’ or documentary nature of this actualité can be found not only in the clothes the family are wearing and in the custom that they are performing for the camera, but also the awkwardness of the subjects relationship with this new technology that is recording their actions for posterity.

Although most on-line sources for this film credit Louis Lumière with direction, the NFC credits コンｓタン・ジレル as the cameraman. Constine Gilles? I will update when I discover the proper Roman script for his name.

Les Film Lumiere DVD Box

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2007