Japanese Girls at the Harbor, 1933
My first impressions of Hiroshi Shimizu's films during the Shochiku At 100 New York Film Festival sidebar were the agility of his camera movements that favorably compared to Kenji Mizoguchi's tensile dolly shots, and a lightness of touch in the development of the narrative that, like Yasujiro Ozu's cinema, converges towards gravitas without being abrupt or contrived. In hindsight, these early observations would also hold true for Shimizu's Japanese Girls at the Harbor, a film that, like his early masterpiece, Ornamental Hairpin, is propelled by a moment of carelessness that would have far reaching consequences for its characters. Set in Yokohama, Shimizu illustrates the ebb and flow of life in the port town through the opening montage - an establishing shot of an international passenger ship docked on the harbor that cuts to a pair of high school students, Sunako (Michiko Oikawa) and Dora (Yukiko Inoue), who stop by an overlook every afternoon on their way home from school to watch ships go by, daydreaming of exotic destinations as they wait for their life to begin, even as they resign to the mundanity of their own probable futures. "Watching ships make me feel sad. Maybe I belong here", remarks Sunako. But Sunako's destiny would lie elsewhere, away from her devoted childhood friend, as she vies for the affection of a fickle-hearted neighborhood boy, Henry (Ureo Egawa), who has fallen under the spell of a worldly temptress, Yoko Sheridan (Ranko Sawa). Driven to despair after losing Henry to her rival, Sunako's metaphoric fall from grace begins, not coincidentally, at a church - an impulsive act that would lead to her self-imposed exile. Drifting from Nagasaki to Kobe in the company of a penniless artist, Miura (Tatsuo Saito), Sunako seems destined to lead a disreputable life away from home until a fellow prostitute, Masumi (Yumeko Aizome) convinces her to make a new start in her hometown, and soon faces the ghosts of her unreconciled past. Shimizu visually reinforces the idea of resurrected ghosts by using dissolves to indicate ellipses (of exiting characters) during the latter half of the film, first in the image of the brothel patron, Harada (Yasuo Nanjo) who leaves when Sunako gives her undivided attention to Henry, then subsequently, Henry, who is chased away by Miura when he accompanies Sunako to the door of her apartment. The convergence between past and present is also reflected in the recurring, stationary shot progression - both as close-up and zoom out - that punctuates Sunako and Yoko's fateful encounters, reinforcing both the tension in their confrontation as well as their parallel destinies (a connection that is also suggested in a linear tracking shot of the two women looking out the windows of their apartments). Concluding with Ozu-like, pillow shots of mooring and discarded portraits in the harbor, the tranquil images reflect Sunako's newfound liberation and transformation, a moral redemption enabled by sacrifice, compassion, humility, and self-forgiveness.
Posted by on May 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Filed under 2008, Hiroshi Shimizu
While shadows and empty spaces pervade Naomi Kawase's search for her absent father in 
Naomi Kawase's Embracing is both an evocation of, and disjunction from, Jonas Mekas's diaristic memory films, a journey in search of a lost past through the empty spaces and resigned silence of an unreconciled - and incomplete - present. This sense of absence and longing is revealed in the film's opening sequence: the sight of a traditional Japanese domestic setting (and reinforced by a shot montage of meal preparation), prefaced by a lighted sign for a restaurant called "Bar Happiness", that is juxtaposed against an audio recording of Kawase's unseen maternal relative who expresses her resistance at Naomi's intention to search for her biological father who had abandoned the family, briefly alluding to Naomi's separation from her mother following her parents' divorce and adoption by her great uncle and aunt, Kaneishi and Uno Kawase. By framing her well-intentioned aunt's argument for the integrity of the extended family support system that has nurtured Naomi throughout her entire life (and the potential fissures that may unwittingly be introduced into that fragile network by dredging up the past) through the image association (and dissociation) of happiness, home, and absence, Kawase metaphorically illustrates her essential disconnection with a lost, untold history. Incorporating alternating images of nature - flowers in bloom, insects in the field, and verdant landscapes - with contemporary images of her adoptive mother as the two look for information on her father's identity through family archives and photo albums, Kawase introduces the idea of nature as an eternal, but mutable representation of human cycles. This intersection is further reinforced in a picture of Kawase's biological parents, Kiyonobu Yamashiro and Emiko Takeda as a young couple that cuts to a shot of a flower in bright sunlight, that is subsequently contrasted to the image of a similar row of flowers against the darkness of forming rain clouds as her great aunt remembers the unpleasantness of her parents' break-up. Moreover, using high contrast to frame an episode featuring a little girl playing with a tadpole in a puddle of water, Kawase not only illustrates this symbiotic relationship between nature and human history, but also conveys the sense of rupture intrinsic in the idyllic image - the apparent absence of the child's mother. Revisiting her biological father's life by tracing his residential registration records over the past twenty years, Kawase places corresponding photographs from her own childhood, initially, as a figurative bridge between past and present within a depopulated landscape, then subsequently, as a reflection of the physical and emotional separation between father and daughter (a distance that is also symbolized by the recurring images of shadows against the landscape). Restless, curious, and impulsive in its fractured images, Embracing becomes an integral representation of Kawase's own search for identity: told, not through loosely interrelated pieces of an obscured personal history, but in the unarticulated silence of a brief, but transformative connection with the living present.
A muted, yet provocative composition on the changing face of the labor movement - or more appropriately, its immobility - in Western Europe in the 1970s, Johan van der Keuken's Springtime: Three Portraits articulates the struggle of the working class under the protracted climate of an austere, stagnant global economy (stemming in part from the OPEC oil crisis) and industrial recession through first person testimonies and quotidian observations of society's increasingly fragile and economically vulnerable middle class. This sense of work time as stasis is prefigured in the opening shot of an impressive wall clock in the suburban home of unemployed garment factory foreman, Joop Uchtman in Den Helder who, despite his productive working relationship with the factory seamstresses under his supervision, was laid off during company downsizing, as local industries sought to shrink their higher waged domestic workforce in favor of overseas outsourcing as a means of reducing operational costs and retaining global competitiveness. Threading through Uchtman's alternately expressed pride at his work (and implied humiliation at having to become dependent on the state and his wife) and anxiety over the repercussions of his inability to find a new job on his young family, with his all too familiar daily routine of reporting to the labor office in person to confirm that he has not secured a job and is eligible to receive unemployment benefits, and seeking advice from a friend on the merits - and illusion - of enrolling in state-sponsored vocational retraining, the recurring image of the clock becomes, not only a metaphor for the bureaucratic rituals of his vain search to find a job, but also reminder of his expiring state-assisted benefits, the dream of a comfortable middle class life being slowly swept away with the swinging of the pendulum. 
A subtly interconnecting mosaic of staged vignettes, non-fiction footage, archival prints, and found film excerpts, Alexander Kluge's The Power of Emotion is an organic, densely layered meditation on the intangible (and often irrational) essential mechanism of human emotion. At the core of Kluge's exposition is the interrelation between two disparate observations: 1) that objects, in their materiality, are the opposite of emotion; and 2) that emotions, by nature, search for a happy ending. The illogical nature of emotion is wryly illustrated in a chapter entitled The Shot in which a woman, Frau Bärlamm (Hannelore Hoger) testifying at an inquest over the apparent shooting of her husband, trivializes the gravity of her actions as an unmotivated compulsion, thereby frustrating the judges' attempts to find some psychologically motivated, extenuating circumstance that could help thread together the gaping holes in her story and resolve the case. Similarly, the disconnection between logic and emotion ironically plays out in In Her Final Hour..., when the victim, still harboring wounds from a badly ended love affair, refuses to condemn her attacker and unintentional rescuer following her opportunistic violation in the midst of suicide attempt, arguing that the emotional damage she suffered from her lover's rejection inured her from the trauma of the subsequent attack.
In Reel 2 of Lost, Lost, Lost, the first volume of Jonas Mekas's diary film, Diaries, Notes, and Sketches, Mekas's commentary of his early life in Williamsburg, Brooklyn as an immigrant and refugee drifting from factory to factory, accepting a series of temporary jobs as an assembly worker is presented against a typewritten letter that poses the instability of his employment history within the broader question of his true character: "Is it in my nature, or did the war do that to me? [A]m I a born D.P. (Displaced Person) or did war make me into a D.P.?" For Mekas, the rootlessness and transience not only expresses an immigrant's homesickness caused by his physical separation from his native country and family (for reasons that are broached in 
The second film in Mrinal Sen's thematically connected "absence trilogy" (along with 
Perhaps the most overtly Bressonian of Pedro Costa's body of work (albeit suffused with the brooding shadows of a Jacques Tourneur film), Costa's first feature, O Sangue, nevertheless bears the characteristic imprint of what would prove to be his familiar preoccupations: absent parents, surrogate families, unreconciled ghosts, the trauma and violence of displacement, the ache (and isolation) of longing. The thematic convergence is insightfully revealed in an episode that occurs near the end of the film, when the older brother Vicente (Pedro Hestnes), having been held captive by his father's nefarious associates on New Year's Eve in a half-baked attempt to collect his father's unpaid debt from him, awakens in the darkness of an unfamiliar apartment to the sight of a restless silhouette on the balcony - the shadow cast by his father's mistress (Isabel de Castro) that has been made spectral and incandescent by the transient glow of exploding fireworks and the sweep of wind against translucent curtains (a sense of otherworldliness that also reinforces a captor's earlier idea of conducting a séance in order to contact Vincente's missing father (Canto e Castro)). Costa establishes this sinister atmosphere of sudden, erupted violence in the film's opening sequence: the prefiguring sound of a slammed door and scurrying feet that subsequently reveals a frontal shot of Vicente on a muddy road as he is suddenly slapped by his wayward father while intentionally blocking his path, trying to prevent him for leaving by imploring him to show consideration towards his younger brother Nino (Nuno Ferreira) who has been left home alone in the middle of night in pursuit of him. Cutting to the image of Vicente riding his scooter through the empty streets at twilight, and subsequently, the schoolteacher, Clara's (Inês de Medeiros) realization that a student, Rosa (Sara Breia) has run away from school with Nino, the image of dislocation and fugue also becomes a resurfacing idea, a reflection of the characters' own desire to reinvent and transform in the aftermath of loss that is reflected in Nino's impulsive attempt to rearrange the furniture, and his subsequent request to similarly dress Vicente in his clothing while accompanying him to school after their father's disappearance (a longing for change that is also implied in Clara's selection of a new haircut for Nino). However, when Vicente and Nino's skeptical uncle (Luís Miguel Cintra) pays a visit and finds the brothers home alone on Christmas Eve with Clara, his heavy-handed, if well-intentioned decision to take Nino away from home and form a new family with his fragile son Pedro (Miguel Fernandes) would lead the brothers into their own journeys of self-discovery in their isolated quest to return to their broken home. 
Part social realism in its searing depiction of the plight of the underprivileged against the transforming economy of an increasingly modernized Turkey, and part poetic essentialism in its psychological portrait of a desperate man succumbing to the mania of a delusive, blind faith, Yilmaz Güney and Serif Gören's Umut (Hope) captures the precarious atmosphere of a nation at a political and economic crossroads. The cultural climate of transformation and renewal is prefigured in the film's opening montage - an impromptu city symphony created by the early morning rituals of road washing trucks, sidewalk sweepers, street vendors, billboard gazers (not coincidentally, all advertising banking institutions), and waiting taxicabs that play out against a dozing Cabbar (Yilmaz Güney), an uneducated cart driver waiting in the wings of a station for commuters to arrive at the terminal. Immediately, the passengers' selected mode of transportation reveals an intrinsically bifurcated society, as people wearing modern, Western attire make their way towards a row of idling taxis, while people dressed in traditional clothing invariably board horse-drawn carriages lining the front of the station...that is, all except for Cabbar's shabby and woefully old-fashioned cart. Already leading a hardscrabble existence as the family's sole provider - one that includes five children whose financial demands for school expenses and playful whims are often weighed against the more fundamental needs of having enough food to eat and proper health care for an elderly parent - and plagued by compounding debts that have accumulated in the course of establishing (and maintaining) his out of fashion livelihood, his situation takes a further turn for the worse when a roadside accident delivers a tragic, final blow to his already struggling enterprise. Left without a means of earning a living, Cabbar follows the advice of his unemployed friend, Hasan (Tuncel Kurtiz) and seeks guidance from Hüseyin Hodja (Osman Alyanak), a mystical imam and village faith healer who would soon lead him away from his family in search of an elusive, ever-shifting panacea amidst the desolation and rubble of a parched, forgotten land.
This is a quick note that Nicolas Klotz's La Blessure will be 
"One should remember", reflects a somber, elderly Carlos Galván (José Sacristán) at the beginning of Voyage to Nowhere as he listens to an old recording by popular folk musicians, the Trío Calaveras. Commenting on the melancholic lyrics of denial and abandonment of a shared history in the aftermath of lost love, Carlos, too, seems to betray traces of his own uncertain memory in his tentative identification of the song's title. Alternating between past and present, Carlos recounts his former career as a comedian in the family's road theater variety show in 1950s Spain, a difficult, but beloved vocation that even briefly held the possibility of becoming a family tradition when Carlos's estranged teenaged son, Carlito (Gabino Diego) unexpectedly arrives to stay with him for an extended visit, much to the consternation of Carlos's lover and fellow performer, Juanita (Laura del Sol). But Carlito's introduction into the life of itinerant actors would prove to be far removed from the workings of divine providence. Showing little interest in the flamboyant costumes and spectacle of variety theater (calling their exaggerated performance "ridiculous") in favor of the austerity of neorealism that infused the New Spanish Cinema of the 1950s, Carlito also proves to be unsuited for a career as a stage actor with his awkward poise, poor memorization skills, and self-consciousness over his Galician accent. Faced with an uncertain future of continued government censorship, non-committal, short-term contracts, and last minute cancelled engagements (including one unwittingly sparked by Carlito's flirtation with an impresario's daughter), the troupe's manager, Maldonado (Juan Diego) convinces the actors to follow the advice of an erstwhile rival turned successful filmmaker Solís (Simón Andreu) and capitalize on a film crew's forthcoming location shooting in the village to solicit work as extras in order to make ends meet. However, when family patriarch and veteran stage actor, Don Arturo (Fernando Fernán Gómez) is fired from the set after repeatedly delivering his lines with the conscious theatricality and emotive gestures all too familiar in his old-fashioned craft, the troupe is forced to confront its own continued viability in a livelihood that is quickly becoming a cultural relic in the reality of ever-dwindling audiences, separation, and insolvency.
While not as overtly political as contemporary filmmaker Mrinal Sen, Satyajit Ray's early 1970s films similarly capture the volatile climate of geopolitical unrest, profound social transformation, and domestic crisis stemming from the introduction of Naxalism into an increasingly radicalized Calcutta student movement. In a way, The Adversary represents this fomenting cultural revolution in its bracing idealism and cruel desperation. The film prefigures this atmosphere of destabilization and turbulence in its disorienting opening sequence: a high contrast, monochromatic negative image that follows a group of pall bearers making their way through the hallway and down the stairs of an apartment building, as a newly widowed woman, her face made unrecognizable by the transposition of black and white, laments her uncertain fate in the aftermath of her husband's death. Rapidly tracking towards a lone, seemingly luminescent figure made even more ethereal by the wafting of smoke, the image then reverses to reveal a somber Siddhartha (Dhritiman Chatterjee), the widow's son, standing near the edge of a smoldering funeral pyre. Siddartha's figurative embodiment of the commutation between darkness and light, life and death, individual and doppelgänger becomes a reflection of Calcutta's - and more broadly, the country's - bifurcated, postcolonial society as well.