Waggish

David Auerbach on literature, tech, film, etc.

Tag: imamura (page 2 of 2)

Susan Sontag

Daniel Green is thoughtfully compiling notes and obituaries of Susan Sontag, who died today at age 71. I knew much of Sontag’s writing by reputation more than through actually reading it, and I never did get far into The Volcano Lover, so I can’t offer the most informed thoughts on her. But I want to salute a few particular things.

Sontag’s death comes as more of a surprise than most because I thought of her as being at a fundamentally restless stage of her life, before the period of old age where writers settle down and start repeating themselves. When I was younger and discovering writers through remainders at The Strand and small press reissues, Sontag popped up all over the place. Wherever I went–E.M. Cioran, Alexander Kluge, Roberto Bolano, Imre Kertesz, Bela Tarr–Sontag had been there first, writing introductions or analyses. At the Japan Society’s retrospective of post-war Japanese film earlier this year, she had made the selections, and they were hardly common choices: these were movies and directors I’d never heard of, even after having followed Japanese film for several years. And her appreciation of Shohei Imamura was spot on.

I disagreed with many of her enthusiasms (Cioran, for one, and certainly Peter Nadas), but this is an almost inevitable consequence of the breadth of her tastes. At a time when specialization and depth take precedence over exploration, Sontag’s eclecticism is something we need more of.

Update: Also see Professor Nightspore’s just-right memories of Sontag:

It’s strange though how she feels central but unimportant to my own sense of self and intellectual world.

Shohei Imamura, Pigs and Battleships

Shohei Imamura is one of my favorite directors, and it’s a recurring frustration that I haven’t been able to see more of his movies; many just aren’t available in the states, and his recent work is nowhere near as great as the amazing films he made from 1961 to the mid-80’s. The Ballad of Narayama is somewhere in my top five films ever, and wonderful flicks like Eijanaika and The Insect Woman are some of the most unsensationalistic, unblinkered views of brutality and poverty ever. And still I have yet to see the wonderfully named The History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess or The Profound Desire of the Gods.

But I did finally see Pigs and Battleships, and from the very start, the scope of the enveloping setting that he creates–in this case, post-war, occupied Yokohama–is stunning. The plot is discursive, difficult to follow, and eventually absurd: something about gangsters raising pigs for money. In the climactic scene, hundreds of pigs run loose in Yokohama’s red light district. Meanwhile, an inept, flunky gangster attempts to save his girlfriend from being sold off as a prostitute or as an American soldier’s wife. He dies, but the girlfriend defiantly escapes the hellhole to start a new life elsewhere.

(In Imamura’s words, “Self-sacrificing women like the heroines of Naruse’s Floating Clouds and Mizoguchi’s Life of Oharu don’t really exist.)

There are multiple layers of symbolism and allegory, mostly around the cultural impact of the loss of the war and the American occupation, but realism remains absolutely paramount. Even when pigs are running crazy, the characters themselves are driven by base motives that remain absolutely plausible because of their simplicity. After the film, I argued with a friend who said that the conflicts–young man trying to be successful for his girlfriend–were cliched, and the characters were not interesting in themselves.

I have no problem with this; it suits Imamura’s style, which needs a basis in the mundane to ground its panoramic grotesques. He does not dress up his characters in fancy psychological motives or extreme situations because it would detract from the sense of the world he is trying to create. I saw Closer the other night and got a kick out of it, but the characters were so artificially articulate and contrived that they bore no resemblance to the world that I know. Imamura presents a setting that I have never experienced, and makes the people and the cultural systems behind them seem as tangible as the people I see on the subway each morning.

Incensed at Peppermint

The South Korean film Peppermint Candy begins with a man gunning down some random person who’s ripped him off and then committing suicide, then traces his life backwards through his career as a dirty cop, a cowardly soldier, and a youthful innocent.

It’s not much of a film, but it did get me thinking back myself, before Irreversible, Memento, and Betrayal, to an earlier example of reverse chronology, George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s Merrily We Roll Along, a morality tale about a successful playwright who gives up his dreams for fame and cash. As you’d expect, Kaufman’s gags fit very uneasily into the contrived framework, and on paper at least, the thing doesn’t work. (It was also excluded from the new Library of America Kaufman collection.) Stephen Sondheim tried to retrofit it as a musical fifty years later, and it bombed.

(Okay, I admit, I usually ignore films I dislike, but I came up with the title for this entry and had to use it….)

Update: Brendan Wolfe (who, if you follow the link under his name, has himself written a good assessment of Aharon Appelfeld) has asked why I didn’t care for Peppermint Candy.

I thought that the film consisted of plot elements that weren’t in themselves distinctive: a despondent, broken, hollow man committing suicide; a corrupt cop losing his morality; the man trapped in a marriage while he pines after his symbolic first love; the tragic death of an innocent in a war zone poisoning the man forever; the innocent youth naively ignorant of the horrors of the world.

The film takes two approaches to justify these generic mechanisms: first, through (backwards) structure, and second, through context (of recent Korean history). The contextual approach fails because the corrupted everyman protagonist does not become a representative of a particularly Korean experience; the movie actually feels quite American next to, for example, Shohei Imamura’s remarkable Vengeance is Mine, which makes a much greater attempt to place one man’s life (a serial killer’s, specifically) into the context of modern Japanese society. The structural approach fails because it does not provide any revelation about the content of the film. Thematically, it’s not hard to see that the man has progressed from innocent to corrupt to despondent, and the suspense is muted because the protagonist is too representative to be seen as an individual.

I haven’t seen other films by Lee Chang Dong, and it’s possible that were I Korean, I would appreciate subtexts that I missed as a foreigner.

Another update: I had originally posted this in the comments, but since no links are allowed there:

Another perverse backwards-chronology exercise is Anne McGuire’s Strain Andromeda The, where Crichton/Wise’s film The Andromeda Strain is run with its scenes in reverse order, fencepost-style. Fred Camper says:

This somewhat playful “deconstruction” of mainstream Hollywood has its virtues: with narrative causality flipped, one looks for causes of events already seen, questions traditional forms of narrative organization. But while we often hear the dialogue reversed–many lines get only single shots–longer takes contain whole conversations that we hear in the original order, providing a confusing disruption of the film’s “backwardness.” It is unique, but the interest of this rather mechanical exercise exhausts itself after a half hour.

Waggish says check it out.

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