Kazuo Miyagawa

Kazuo Miyagawa was one of Japan's foremost cinematographers, active from the 1930s to the 1980s (he died in 1999). He photographed several of the highlights of Japanese postwar cinema, and worked with, among others, Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa and Kon Ichikawa. He said that he was inspired by classical Japanese painting, and he had a unique feeling for the material and the chemical processes, and he could do most anything. For some directors he had to follow their lead, while others gave him a free hand to experiment and do what he liked. He once said that "A director and cameraman are like husband and wife. Even though they may fight, all their films are their offspring." In short, he deserves our attention.

Here are some images from his films.

Rashomon (Kurosawa 1950)

Ugestu Monogatari (Mizoguchi 1953)

Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi 1954)

Floating Weeds (Ozu 1959)

Yojimbo (Kurosawa 1961)

Another exceptional film Miyagawa photographed is Conflagration (Ichikawa 1958), and here is a clip from it.

Christmas in Tokyo

In the 1950s Akira Kurosawa was, even by his high standards, impressively inspired: just think of Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952) Seven Samurai (1954) and Throne of Blood (1957). Scandal (1950) though is decidedly less impressive. It is a drama about press ethics and personal morality, and one of Kurosawa's weakest films, but, as it has a scene where Toshiro Mifune drives around town with a big Christmas tree on his motorcycle, it still has some merit. So in this, the last post of the year, that scene is what you will get.



The blog will return on January 9, 2015. See you then!

Rain

Once when I saw Kurosawa's Rashomon (1951) in an auditorium some people arrived late, a few minutes into the film. I felt sorry for them because they must have been soaking wet considering there was such a heavy rainstorm. Then I remembered that it was a sunny day, and that the rain was only on the screen, commandeered by Kurosawa. But such was the intensity of the film, and my absorption in it, that its weather became the real weather. That is the cinema of Kurosawa; no other filmmaker has used nature and weather with such force, precision and impact, and not only rain.

 Seven Samurai (1954)

As with everything else that appears in films, rain can either just be there or it can mean something. In Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese 1976) it is what Travis Bickle hopes to become, something that washes away all the filth and garbage. In Lean's A Passage to India (1984), big, heavy raindrops start to fall on the dirty ceiling windows when Dr. Aziz is cleared from all charges of rape, washing away the lies and the rumours. In Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982) and Se7en (David Fincher 1995), the constant rain instead signifies the rotten and corrupt state of the nation (or perhaps mankind). It also sets the mood for when bad things happen. An assassination of a statesman in Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940), the killer disappearing in a flock of umbrellas, or another killing, barely visible in the pouring rain, that opens the thriller The Mob (Robert Parrish 1951). 

In Black Narcissus (Powell & Pressburger 1947) Mr. Dean says at the beginning that he will give the nuns until the rain comes and for sure, in the last scene, as the nuns abandon the convent, the rain starts to fall. As the title of Robert Mulligan's exquisitely photographed film (shot by Ernest Laszlo) has it, Baby, the Rain Must Fall (1965). Exquisitely photographed is also Road to Perdition (Sam Mendes 2002), by Conrad Hall of course, and the rain pours there too.

When American cinematographers a decade or so ago voted for the best photographed film of all times another film shot by Conrad Hall won, In Cold Blood (Richard Brooks 1967), and the scene several mentioned was the one where one of the killers is standing by a window on which it rains and the water running down the window is reflected on his face, making it look like he is crying. Some ten years earlier Hasse Ekman, working with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, did something even more elaborate in Egen ingång (Private Entrance 1956) when the feverish main character, played by Maj-Britt Nilsson, is lying in bed and the water on the window makes it look as if she is drenched.

Rain can also be a joyous occasion. Gene Kelly, as Don Lockwood, sings in it, and Durga, Apu's sister, dances in it in Pather Panchali (Satyajit Ray 1955). Sometimes it is the setting for a great kiss, as in Breakfast at Tiffany's (Blake Edwards 1961). But that is less common. It is more likely to appear, as in For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone 1965), when a killer comes to town.

And, as it happens, the best of Joris Ivens's early short films is called Regen (1929), the Dutch word for rain. Here it is:

----------------------------

The subject of rain was not randomly chosen by me but one of those challenges that I have done before from a group of Swedish film bloggers. Here are the others who wrote about rain:

The Velvet Café is in English, the rest in Swedish: Rörliga bilder och tryckta ord, Fiffis filmtajm, Jojjenito, Fripps filmrevyer, Har du inte sett den, Mackan.

One final treat, the trailer for Robert Hamer's excellent It Always Rains on Sunday (1947).

Thoughts about acting

When I was a young boy I used to act in school. Not in plays necessarily but in comic sketches, and sometimes in what might be described as soap operas. Me and a classmate would come up with the idea and then ask a couple of other classmates if they wanted to participate, under our direction, such as it was. We put up a little show every Friday, or at least every second Friday, for years. The other year I was in a Swedish film, Ego (Lisa James-Larsson 2013) and I had two lines, as a travel agent, in a scene with the leading actress. It certainly was not method acting but I was pretending to be something I was not, or somebody other than myself. My question is this: was I acting then? Or does acting involve more, must for example emotions also be involved? There were emotions in my scene. I was laughing and my "character" took an interest in the well-being of the customer. I was pretending not only to be a travel agent but also a fictive person who cared about another fictive person. Is that want acting is all about? I often wonder about that, although rarely with reference to myself. But here are some other thoughts regarding acting which does not involve me.

***

Sometimes after I have seen what I think is a marvellous performance I will see the actor again in an interview, or occasionally even on the tube, and being startled by the fact that they are exactly like they were in the film. What I thought was a great performance was only them being more or less themselves. This happens more frequently with local actors but one more famous example is Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola 1979). This is part of what makes acting and actors so intriguing. We might assume that a particular thing the actor is doing adds nuance and depth to a part and congratulate the actor for it, not knowing that this is not part of the act but a natural habit that the actor does all the time, whether on set or alone in the car. They might not even be aware of it. So it is something that is always there, and not unique for this particular performance for this particular part. But if what they do is something that is part of their natural behaviour it feels peculiar to regard it as great acting.

It is different with people like Kevin Costner for example. When I have seen interviews with him he comes across as rather stiff and dull. But in films he is not like that at all, he can be very likeable, or very scary, even an action hero, which is very far from how he appears in those interviews. Whereas Clint Eastwood, who directed Costner, and acted against him, in what might be their finest achievement, A Perfect World (1993), does not differ all that much from how he appears to be in private from how he appears in films. That would suggest that Costner is a much better actor, because he can believably transform himself into somebody whom is very different from who Costner is in person.

But there is more to it than that, because you must also come across as alive, present, believable, even if you are not a great actor you have to blend in with the film. In Crossroads (Tamra Davis 2002) three young women go on a road trip and they are played by Britney Spears, Zoë Saldana and Taryn Manning. Neither of them do their parts well, they all stumbled on their lines and come across as uncertain and unfocused. Whereas Eastwood come across as natural in his films Spears, even though she is playing a person close to herself, does not. It might be a question of being comfortable in front of the camera, which none of the three women succeed in being.

Here is when direction becomes vital. A recent article by Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian about Lauren Bacall and her performance in To Have and Have Not (Howard Hawks 1944) did not once mention the name of the director. Bradshaw mentioned the studio, the writers and other actors but it was as if he thought that directors are irrelevant as for as actors and performances are concerned. This is not unique for Bradshaw but a more general tendency, to talk about direction and acting as distinct from each other. But they are of course the opposite of that; directing to a large extent specifically means working with the actors. In creating a good atmosphere, in getting the right performance and getting a good performance. If an actor performs badly the director is partly to blame. (I have seen episodes of Next Top Model where the young would-be models are criticised by the jury for their performance on a photo shot, but that is unfair because the models do not know anything, they only do exactly what the photographer tells them to, so if they do badly it is not their fault but the photographers.)

Another job for the director is to see to it that there is harmony between the various actors, that they do not go off in different directions. Some directors care more than others about such things. Some are content with letting the actors do their thing, others control and modulate them, just as they do with the design, the editing and the imagery. Ernst Lubitsch played all the parts himself beforehand to show his actors how they should do it. Two directors closely associated with MGM, George Cukor and Vincente Minnelli, had very different ideas of what kind of acting they wanted. For example, in Minnelli's films the energy of the actors is directed outwards whereas in Cukor's films it is directed inwards. Likewise, Akira Kurosawa's preferred style of acting is different from Yasujiro Ozu's and Hasse Ekman's is different from Ingmar Bergman's. This is an important aspect when considering the director as auteur, and it brings nuance to the often simplistic idea of a "studio style".

Hepburn and Holliday in Adam's Rib (George Cukor 1949)

Then there are different kinds of actors. There are those just playing a type and there are character actors, a term often misunderstood or at least used in different ways. A character actor sometimes refers to somebody who does not play a particular type, but varies from film to film. Sometimes it refers to an actor who plays eccentric characters, distinct or flamboyant. Walter Brennan was a character actor. Takashi Shimura played a tough samurai, a natural leader, in Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa 1954) but in his previous film for Kurosawa, Ikiru (1952), he played a meek old man, sick with cancer, and almost the antithesis of his part in Seven Samurai. But often it is not that easy to distinguish. Look at Toshiro Mifune or Al Pacino for example. They are often stylised and eccentric, but not always. They can be subdued too. Sometimes they play more generic roles, other times they create deep and rounded characters. But none of this necessarily mean that one is better than the other. Meryl Streep changes a lot from part to part, Judi Dench less so, but that does not mean Streep is automatically a better actress.

Al Pacino is by some regarded as the greatest actor for the last 40 years or so, other finds him too flamboyant and loud. Although there is no contradiction between the two of course, being loud and flamboyant does not mean that you are not a good actor. With Pacino, his low-key performances such as in Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell 1997) or Insomnia (Christopher Nolan 2002) are all the more impressive. And in Heat (Michael Mann 1995) where he alternates between low-key and overly expressive, depending upon the situation and what it requires (I mean what it requires of his character Vincent Hanna), he might have given his best performance. But it is hard to say what good acting is, other than perhaps to say "I know it when I see it." Sometimes when people say that they disliked a performance what they mean is that they dislike the actor, which is not the same thing. It is sometimes a question of what kind of acting style a person prefers. Some like extravagant actors like Jack Nicholson, others prefer the more low-key acting style of someone like Daniel Auteuil. But one might require as much skill and effort as the other. Acting is not just showing up, there is a lot of work and technique involved, regardless of acting style. There are of course also those who dislike actors and think that amateurs are much better, in some quest for as much realism as possible. But to consider realism as the main goal and purpose is to have a limited view of cinema, and art,

When I was growing up in Sweden, British TV was all the rage and people were saying "And the actors are so good!" It was an axiom that British TV series had the best actors. But it was rather peculiar because what was it actually based on? How were they better than actors in series from other countries? It was just something one said, rather than something one had actually experienced. And I feel that is often the case when the quality of acting and actors are discussed. It is hardly ever based on a real study and evaluation of the acting in question.

Two of my favourite performances happen to be British, Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter (David Lean 1945) and Michael Redgrave in The Browning Version (Anthony Asquith 1951), but I would have a hard time explaining why. Why in the sense "What makes them different from other performances, by themselves and by others". One reason though is the conflict between the reserve (and the stiff upper lip that is required) and their, Laura's in Brief Encounter and Andrew's in The Browning Version, struggle with it, and ultimate inability to adhere to it (they both have breakdowns, crying uncontrollably), It is great acting, but part of the power comes not from the actual acting but the societal context, which is not part of the performances but help make the performances what they are. Another favourite performance is Clu Gulager in The Killers (Don Siegel 1964). Siegel often encouraged his actors to be quirky and odd, or cool, and none succeeded more than Gulager. It is a rather mannered performance, and he is always fussing around with something, at one point doing push-ups during a scene. It is a great performance. But whether it is great acting is another question all together.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Andrei Tarkovsky, who would have been 80 this year had he still been alive, was not necessarily a cerebral filmmaker.  He said once that "All art, of course, is intellectual, but for me, all the art and cinema even more so, must above all be emotional, and act upon the heart." Images, feelings, dreams and memories, the one effortlessly melting in to the other, was more his way of making films and they have a logic of their own, and with recurring visual motifs such as horses and people apparently being weightless, floating in the air, reaching for the sky, or the ceiling,

I am not convinced that he was a great filmmaker, and all of his films are flawed, to varying degrees. But he was also a fiercely passionate and personal artist, a poet who was more interested in putting his visions on the screen, in a pure state, than mind about rhythm, editing, framing or timing. The one film which is perhaps in this sense different is The Sacrifice (Offret 1986), since it is unusually controlled and rigid. This though is not to the film's advantage. The green parts of the film (i.e. the beginning and the end) are very good, but that which is in-between I find tedious and faintly ridiculous. Somebody once suggested that it was meant as a parody of a Bergman film but I do not think that, I think Tarkovsky was sincere.

I do like Ivan's Childhood (Ivanovo detstvo 1962) and Andrei Rublev (1966). They are powerful and especially Andrei Rublev is inspirational. The sequence when the boy is casting a bell is a mesmerizing piece of filmmaking, beautiful and transcendental. They are both filled with images of great beauty, and a certain kind of lyricism. But they are also different. Ivan's Childhood feels more similar to other Russian films of the time. Andrei Rublev on the other  hand feels more personal, and at the same time it resembles the films of Akira Kurosawa, albeit not with the same mastery and calm confidence. Tarkovsky has himself said that he was influenced by Kenji Mizoguchi. I also feel that there is something of Sam Fuller in both these films, especially since the camera work has a similar kind of restlessness, and a restless camera is after all something of Fuller's trademark. (Tarkovsky's adaptation of Hemingway's The Killers (as Ubiytsy 1956), which he co-directed with Marika Beiku and Aleksandr Gordon, shows that he was not antithetical to hard-boiled American fiction, and this short film is actually rather good.)

Then there was a remarkable change of pace and style, because the next film he made was Solaris (Solyaris 1972), which feels neither Russian nor Japanese, nor like Fuller. This is more European alienation in space, and I have to admit I find the film annoyingly boring and meaningless. There is a tendency to overrate slowness, as if the very fact that something is slow makes it more artistic or profound. This is not so, sometimes slowness is just slowness, and I do not think that the themes or ideas expressed here is weighty or interesting enough to warrant all the boredom. But then, in his defence, Tarkovsky was not so much interested in meaning, but feeling. "If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it." But if the film arouse no feelings, then what is left? Especially when Solaris looks somewhat pedestrian, as if Tarkovsky had been influenced by William Friedkin rather than Kenji Mizoguchi. If in his earlier films Tarkovsky had been a natural, now he felt like somebody desperately trying to make "art", and the resulting film is creaking under its own self-importance. I much prefer his next film The Mirror (Zerkalo 1975), which is weird but haunting, and again beautiful. A film with little narrative but a lot of poetry.

People, when discussing Tarkovsky, invariably focus on his themes and ideas, about man, art, religion, existentialism and the suffering of humanity, but for me I cannot look at these things independently of the actual films. The question, as Anthony Asquith put it, is whether it "comes off". With Tarkovsky I feel that often it does not. So yes, I am torn when it comes to Tarkovsky, but there is enough passion and beauty in his films to warrant much of the love and affection he has received from critics and artists over the decades.

------------------------------------
Another thing that can be held against Tarkovsky is women. They are not prominent in his films, and when they are there is is often in some kind of metaphorical or submissive part. He also had old-fashioned views of women in general, which ties in with his conservatism and religious beliefs perhaps. He once said that "For me there is nothing more unpleasant than a woman with a big career." and while this in itself has no relation to his films, and stills suggest that he had limitations. But then, in a lot of so called European "art cinema" of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s there was a lot of conservative views of women, and Tarkovsky is not unusual in that respect.

All the Tarkovsky quotes are to be found in the collection Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews

Thoughts on cinema and radiation and the disasters in Japan

Our fear of nuclear power seems to go deep. Or rather, our fear of radiation. It is sometimes irrational, and often based on misconceptions and misunderstandings. But it is there, and even though there has been only one horrible accident, Chernobyl, the fear of another like it is often on people's minds when nuclear power is discussed. The shock of Chernobyl has perhaps forever altered our perception of nuclear power in general, at least among those that were old enough at the time to see the news flashes. (For a recent assessment of Chernobyl, see the website of UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation) here.)

Films have long been expressing our fears of both the bomb and nuclear power. New York Times had an article yesterday about the Japanese films about the monster Godzilla, and the message of those films. The first of those films, Godzilla (Gojira) came out 1954, and dealt both with the atomic bomb released over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also the nuclear tests at the Bikini atoll that the Americans made in the 1940s and 1950s (that's where the name of the bathing costume comes from). It's a surprisingly powerful film, and much different from the American version from 1998. But all over the world, films were made about this fear. Bergman's The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet 1957) has sometimes been seen as an allegory about the fear of the bomb. More directly outspoken is his later film Winter Light (Nattvardsgasterna 1962). In France, Alain Renais made Hiroshima mon amour in 1959. In the US all sorts of films, but primarily horror films and film noirs, were made with an atomic subtext. Even before Godzilla came out, Gordon Douglas directed the low key and eerie horror film Them!, about ants that had been exposed to the fallout of a nuclear test in New Mexico, and grown extraordinary large. What's remarkable about it is how realistic it is, in its settings and tone, and that it has a Foucault-like view of those that society lock up as criminals and mentally unsound (or crazy).

Another example is the nihilistic noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955), with an apocalyptic ending. Pay particular attention to the sound effects. The radiating light in the box sounds like a monster, it's definitely something that is alive:

On the Beach (1959), set in Australia, about a group of people waiting for the nuclear cloud that has killed the rest of the world, is another example. A later example, and more fitting for the present crisis, is The China Syndrome (1979) about an accident at a nuclear power station. Here Jack Lemmon is playing the manager of the station, desperately trying to control a potential meltdown. The strange thing about the film is that it was released just days before the real accident at Three Mile Island power station, near Harrisburg, until now the world's second most dangerous nuclear accident.

But to return to Japan. In 1989, Shohei Imamura made Black Rain (Kuroi Ame), about the after effects of the bombings of Hiroshima. The following year Akira Kurosawa wrestled with his own fears of radiation, and nuclear power. In one of his 'dreams' from his late film Dreams (Yume 1990), Mount Fuji turns red, after a nuclear accident. It's yet another apocalyptic imagining of the horrible effects:

With the increasing fears of a disaster in Japan, the ghost of accidents past are back to haunt the world. Although scientists assures us that it won't be as bad as Chernobyl, even in a worst-case scenario, that is not much of a consolation since even something half as bad would be unspeakable enough. What would that do to Japan? A headline in a newspaper the other day said "Japan is fighting for its life", and even though it first sounded very much exaggerated, now I'm not so sure anymore. Japan will eventually prevail, but at what cost? Whatever happens at Fukushima now, the combination of the earthquakes, the tsunami, and the complete breakdown of so many nuclear power plants is enough to make the most resilient country go down on its knees. I hope that all of those that I have met there are safe.