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Reviews

Kinuyo Tanaka Retrospective at Lincoln Center

Sandakan No. 8

At the Walter Reade Theater, from March 18th to the 27th, Film at Lincoln Center presented a retrospective devoted to the great, extremely prolific actress—and one of only a handful of genuine Japanese female motion-picture stars like Hideko Takamine, Isuzu Yamada, Machiko Kyo, Setsuko Hara, and Ayako WakaoKinuyo Tanaka, who also directed six features, of some repute, which are all being screened in new digital “restorations”—I look forward to seeing these shown some day in their original format, i.e., 35-millimeter. Of likely much greater interest to serious local cinephiles, however, is the presentation, in 35-millimeter, of six classic films in which the actress only appeared. Remarkably, she collaborated with such notable Japanese directors as, for example, Hiroshi Shimizu, Yasujiro Ozu (one of his unused scripts was filmed as The Moon Has Risen in 1955, which was Tanaka’s second work as a director), Heinosuke Gosho, Mikio Naruse, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujirō Shimazu, Keisuke Kinoshita, Daisuke Itō, Hiroshi Inagaki, Akira Kurosawa, Kon Ichikawa—he also made a memorable, biographical film about her, Actress, in 1987Kaneto Shindo, Yasuzo Masumura, and Kei Kumai, among others.

One of her most astonishing performances was in Ozu’s magnificent, profoundly moving A Hen in the Wind from 1948, about a wife and mother who resorts to prostitution to pay for the medical expenses incurred when her young son falls gravely ill. The film is unusual in the director’s œuvre for its melodramatic subject and the concomitant overt physical and emotional violence it depicts but it nonetheless conforms to the rigorous, idiosyncratic, mature style that Ozu pursued with exceptional single-mindedness for decades. A Hen in the Wind is also noteworthy for its relevance to Robin Wood’s powerful argument, in his brilliant essay—in his important book, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond—on what he calls Ozu’s “Noriko Trilogy” of masterpieces—the first film of which, Late Spring, was released the following year—that the director should be read as a feminist critic of the traditional Japanese family rather than as an upholder of that institution—I think the plangent ending of this work might well be read as ultimately affirmative. Tanaka receives excellent support here from several other actors who were associated with Ozu, such as Shuji Sano, Chishu Ryu and Takeshi Sakamoto.

Melodrama, although here in a period story—the setting is the feudal world of 17th century Japan—is a hallmark too of Mizoguchi’s incomparable The Life of Oharu, the sad tale of a lady at court who becomes a courtesan and falls into prostitution, the first in a series of films adapted from classics of Japanese literature—it is loosely based on Sailaku Ihara’s The Life of an Amorous Woman—that the director undertook with the intention of winning international prizes—and indeed he won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival three years in a row. (Mizoguchi, like Shimizu, was Tanaka’s lover and she made fifteen films with him; he subsequently opposed her decision to become a film director.) The bitter feminist critique throughout Mizoguchi’s work—which Wood also championed—and strongly visible in this film—which was co-scripted by his regular collaborator, Yoshikata Yoda—also invites comparison with A Hen in the Wind—Tanaka is here too an icon of victimhood—but the director’s approach to the material—with abundant long takes in depth and many elaborate tracking-shots—is formally very different, although the eminent critic Noël Burch famously contended that both filmmakers were paragons of a distinctively Japanese mode of representation—Roland Barthes defended a similar thesis in his book, Empire of Signs. Tanaka’s performance dominates The Life of Oharu but it is worth highlighting the compelling brief appearances of the Kurosawa regulars, Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura.

Kei Kumai’s absorbing Sandakan No. 8 from 1974, which he co-scripted, is an even harsher tale of exploitation, female suffering, and degradation, and also a work of feminist, sociopolitical critique, here again with a focus on prostitution—it tells the story of a pretty young journalist that befriends an elderly Japanese woman that was coerced into sex work in British Borneo in the 1910s and 1920s—but the technique here is less refined and more sensationalistic—the use of the zoom lens, for example, is not inexpressive but is nonetheless inelegant, however the film does feature some attractive color photography. Ozu and Mizoguchi, by contrast, despite their significant stylistic divergences, both proceed largely by indirection but Kumai’s more expressionistic approach does have its emotional rewards. Sandakan No. 8 is the least of the movies that Tanaka did not direct in this series but it is a worthwhile one, and Kumai is a filmmaker with an international reputation whose work regrettably is rarely shown. Tanaka won the Best Actress Award at the 25th Berlin International Film Festival for her extraordinarily poignant performance.

More impressive is another seldom screened title, Shunkinsho: Okoto to Sasuke from 1935 by Shimazu, from his own screenplay, an adaptation of a classic novella by Junichiro Tanizaki, A Portrait of Shunkin, which in 1961 was filmed in color by Teinosuke Kinugasa—he is especially known for works like a A Page of Madness and Gate of Hell—and recently effectively staged by Simon McBurney with the Théâtre de Complicité. The film, set during the Meiji era, tells the story of a beautiful blind koto player who inspires an overwhelmingly passionate devotion in her male servant and student. The now underappreciated Shimazu—his films are inordinately difficult to see in 35-millimeter and he directed more than 140—does not emphasize the source’s perverse, masochistic eroticism as McBurney did so memorably, but he does display considerable subtlety and a certain mastery of the main elements of the classical style—although this fine work does not evidence the enthralling formal eloquence of Ozu, Mizoguchi or Naruse—especially composition, editing, and abundant camera movement, but as in many Japanese studio films of the period, here there are many unorthodoxies in technique and scene construction of the kind that impelled Burch’s interesting perspective—indeed a sudden deployment of subjective, handheld camera very late in the film is almost avant-garde in its departure from established norms. Tanaka is again marvelous, here less characteristically cast in an imperious role, although ultimately she too becomes the object of shocking violence.

Several major Japanese filmmakers began their careers as Shimazu’s assistants, including Gosho, Shiro Toyoda, Kozaburo Yoshimura, and the undervalued Kinoshita—the latter was the subject of a terrific Film Society of Lincoln Center retrospective in 2012, and he scripted Tanaka’s first work as a director, Love Letter from 1953. His early film, Army, from 1944—like Kinoshita’s others, is not often shown—is the multigenerational story of one family’s relationship to militarism, from the dawn of the Meiji era to the invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s; it demonstrates a similarly accomplished classical mise-en-scène to that of his master, with complex long takes and many compositions in depth, but this admirable work’s genuine originality and most unforgettable episode lies in its amazing, extended, final sequence—in which Tanaka’s character runs toward a procession of marching soldiers to see off her son who is departing for war—its strategic employment of arresting long-shots, use of a highly mobile camera, and intricate montage combine to stunning effect. This scene is also striking for its ambivalence, with Kinoshita’s ineradicable pacifism subverting the propagandistic nature of the story—it ended his career as a director until the close of the war. Tanaka’s inimitable performance is complemented by that of Ryu, who is also striking here.

Naruse’s supremely touching Mother of 1952—Tanaka is just tremendous as the eponymous heroine who struggles to sustain her family and her husband’s laundry business after both his death and her teenage son’s—was for many years the only film by this magisterial director available in the West although it is relatively atypical—despite its domestic tragedies, it lacks the fatalistic pessimism of a work like When a Woman Ascends the Stairs from 1960 and, with its comic elements, it has a lighter tone than any of the other titles under review—although some of the simplicity of his late style is already visible here and indeed there is something mysterious about how the exquisite mise-en-scène produces its unexpected emotional effects. The découpage of Mother is, like most of the other films in this series, broadly in accord with classical norms—Ozu is the director whose film is under review here that is most unorthodox in his approach to constructing a scene—but the narrative structure has affinities with neorealism—it is episodic rather than linear in its momentum, even if there is an exemplary economy in its conception and execution. This work is also notable for a charming early appearance of the handsome Eiji Okada, who later gained international fame for starring in Hiroshima, Mon Amour by Alain Resnais (1959) and Woman of the Dunes by Hiroshi Teshigashara (1960).

First Look 2022: A Review

Mr. Landsbergis
 
First Look 2022
March 16-20, 2022
Museum of Moving Image, 36-01 35th Avenue, Astoria, NY
movingimage.us
 
 
I doubt it was by design, but Ukraine and Russia hover over this year’s First Look series at the Museum of Moving Image in Queens. Sergei Loznitsa, the Ukrainian director of some of the most memorably individual narrative films of the last decade—including My Joy and A Gentle Creature—is also an impressive documentarian: his two latest forays into historical non-fiction are included in the series.
 
Babi Yar. Context.
 
Mr. Landsbergis is a massive, 4-1/2 hour exploration of Lithuania’s independence movement as the Soviet Union came apart in 1989-91, centered around a new, penetrating interview with Vytautas Landsbergis, who became president of the Lithuania parliament when it declared independence. Babi Yar. Context. (opening at Film Forum on April 1) is another thing entirely, a sobering, 2-1/2 hour retelling, through voluminous archival footage, of the massacre of thousands of Ukrainian Jews at the hands of the Nazis—with the help of Ukrainian police. In both films, Loznitsa uses found film images that have rarely been seen to ghostly—and, in Babi Yar, ghastly—effect.
 
Reflection
 
Another Ukrainian director, Valentyn Vasyanovych, has made Reflection, a brutally visceral recreation of how Russians treated Ukrainians during their 2014 war. With long, mainly static takes that keep the viewer off-balance by being simultaneously at a remove from, and an unblinking look at, the action—notably some extremely graphic torture sequences that are nonetheless impossible to look away from—Vasyanovych’s extraordinary drama makes for a powerful indictment of war’s inhumanity. 
 
Petrov's Flu
 
From Russia comes Petrov’s Flu, Kirill Serebrennikov’s free-flowing adaptation of a novel by Alexey Salnikov, in which reality and fantasy—both tinged with blackness and fatalism—are interwined in an unshackled, unsettling narrative, a fever dream both literally and figuratively. As Serebrennikov puts his strong cast through its difficult paces, it’s all completely and intentionally disorienting, shot by Vladislav Opelyants as if the entire film was a hallucination, jumping from bleached color to jumpy 4:3 home movies to gorgeous B&W for flashbacks to a supposedly happy childhood.
 
Zero Fucks Given
 
Two bracing character studies of young women navigating difficult lives, anchored by unforgettable performances, are series highlights. In Zero Fucks Given (streaming on MUBI starting March 30), debut directors Julie Lecoustre and Emmanuel Marre follow Cassandre, a flight attendant at a budget European airline whose life is as disconnected as the interchangeable airports and planes where she spends much of her time, punctuated by an occasional drunken party or Tinder fling. Adèle Exarchopoulos—so breathtaking in Blue Is the Warmest Color some years back—has become a formidable performer and finds the humanity and complexity in the isolated Cassandre.
 
Murina
 
Similarly, Murina (Kino Lorber, summer 2022 release)—writer-director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s sensitive study of Julija, a 17-year-old who responds to friendly attention from her dad’s old friend in a way that surprises everyone, including herself—stars the remarkable Gracija Filipović (as Julija) in mature, fearless but delicate portrayal that, along with Hélène Louvart’s glistening camerawork soaking up the sunny atmosphere of coastal Croatia, help gloss over Kusijanović’s unfortunate turn toward melodrama in her movie’s final scenes. 
 
The Balcony Movie
In The Balcony Movie, Polish director Pawel Lozinski stands on the balcony of his Warsaw apartment and talks to passersby for 100 minutes—and that’s really the movie, folks. There are moments when it’s more than a merely self-indulgent project: for instance, when a homeless man returns a few times to discuss his predicament (he works but does not have any place to live), a young woman sings a song beautifully, or a middle-aged woman admits it’s her birthday but doesn’t feel particularly happy about it. But the overall effect is of an interesting idea with only intermittent insights into the uniqueness of the human comedy. 

DOC NYC 2021 Roundup

DOC NYC 2021
Online streaming and in-person screenings in New York City
Through November 28, 2021
docnyc.net
 
The annual documentary series DOC NYC returns to actual movie theaters after being relegated to online only last year. Of course, the online selection remains, so those who can’t get to the in-person screenings in Manhattan can access the films from anywhere through November 28. As always, there are scores of features and shorts to choose from; here are the baker’s-dozen features I saw.
 
Julia
 
Three outsized celebrities are the subjects of a trio of entertaining if not explosively illuminating portraits. The grand dame of TV cooking shows—not to mention her groundbreaking French cookbook—Julia Child broke through so many glass ceilings and other barriers throughout her decades-long career (she died two days before her 92nd birthday in 2004) that it’s surprising that Betsy West and Julie Cohen’s Julia is able to pack so much information into its 95 minutes. 
 
Dean Martin: King of Cool


Similarly, Tom Donahue’s Dean Martin: King of Cool tells the crooner/actor/notorious lush’s rags to riches story, with a pit stop at his long partnership with Jerry Lewis—the clip from Lewis’ 1976 Labor Day telethon when they reunited after an acrimonious split is a highlight—and glimpses at his varied showbiz friendships and fraught personal life. It’s telling, however, that only one of his eight children discusses dad on camera.
 
The Real Charlie Chaplin


Then there’s The Real Charlie Chaplin, a two-hour journey through the extraordinary life of who remains cinema’s most iconic genius several decades after his death at age 88 on Christmas Day, 1977. Although Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s film provides the facts in chronological order and contains few new insights—it does mention Chaplin’s predilection for very young women, if only in passing—it does have a surfeit of classic scenes from Chaplin’s indelible oeuvre, especially Chaplin’s still moving speech at the end of The Great Dictator.
 
Alien on Stage


For a glimpse of a truly bizarre theater adaptation of a movie, check out Alien on Stage, which is exactly what its title promises: an adaptation of Ridley Scott’s monster-in-outer-space shocker, which thrilled moviegoers in 1979, created as an annual fundraiser for local bus drivers in Dorset in southwest England. Directors Danielle Kummer and Lucy Harvey are unabashed fans of the intrepid cast and crew, who after a bumpy start manage to amass a cult following with their low-budget, tongue-in-cheek but surprisingly faithful stage version, even bringing it to London’s West End, where it plays to happy sold-out audiences. 
 
A Tree of Life


Two imposing events in recent American religious and racial history are recounted in a pair of impressive films. The 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting is the focus of Trish Adlesic’s A Tree of Life—Tree of Life was the name of the synagogue—which has emotionally wrenching testimony by survivors scarred by what they lived through, especially because friends or family members were murdered right next to them by a white supremacist in Donald Trump’s America.
 
Attica


In Attica, director Stanley Nelson and his co-director Traci A. Curry pointedly explore the infamous uprising at the western New York prison in 1971, in which mostly black and brown prisoners took guards hostage and held them for several days, until the state troopers called in by Governor Rockefeller retaliated at the cost of many lives (post-mortems showed that several dead hostages were shot indiscriminately by the “rescue team”). The slanted nature of news coverage at the time—this was during Nixon’s “law and order” period—is taken to task in this account of how racist attitudes are to blame as much as the horrible conditions of Attica itself.
 
The Automat


The story of one of the most peculiar restaurant chains in America is recounted in The Automat, Lisa Hurwitz’s breezy doc that follows the history of a place (known to anyone over a certain age, especially in New York) where one could buy fresh meals, dessert, and coffee for mere nickels, whether factory workers, salesmen, performers or businessmen. Interviews with fans of the format—like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Colin Powell, Carl Reiner (all RIP!) and the irrepressible Mel Brooks, who even wrote a catchy end-title song—former employees and the owners’ family members make for an engaging portrait of a small but valuable slice of Americana.
 
Grandpa Was an Emperor


The eventful history of the family of Haile Selassie, leader of Ethiopia for more than four decades, is at the heart of Grandpa Was an Emperor, Constance Marks’ intimate profile of Yeshi Kassa, whose painful memories of her great-grandfather Hailie and other relatives are marked by the 1974 military coup that overthrew the emperor, followed by his death the next year. Although she was apart from the events that occurred because she was sent to boarding school in England at the time, Yeshi returns to Ethiopia and discovers that young people don’t know anything about their country’s recent history; at this late date, she struggles to come to terms with such a fraught personal history. 
 
Torn


Another agonized family chronicle, Torn was made by Max Cole, whose father Alex—an avid and celebrated mountain climber—was killed in an avalanche when Max was only 10. This affecting, powerful film is not only an homage to Alex but also a sign of hope that time can at least heal some wounds: Max’s mother Jenni has been happily married for 20 years to Alex’s good friend Conrad, and Jenni and Alex’s three grown sons (adopted by Conrad) have made peace with their fated family legacy. Torn’s climax, showing Alex’s frozen remains found on the mountainside 17 years after his death, is as heartrending a sequence as anything I’ve seen onscreen.
 
End of the Line
 
The COVID-19 pandemic informs two films that dive into the long-term problems of two fabled institutions. First, there’s End of the Line, Emmett Adler’s insightful investigation into how the New York City subway system—its infrastructure neglected for decades—is literally crumbling, thanks to rundown and out-of-date equipment. When a multi-billion-dollar capital program for fixing the rotting infrastructure (along with the subway’s 24-hour service and the city itself) is upended by COVID, Adler shows how easily something millions of New Yorkers count on can grind to a halt.
 
Inhospitable


In the same way, Inhospitable peeks into the big business of American health care, in which profits have it all over patients—even in so-called nonprofit facilities. Director Sandra Alvarez zeroes in on western Pennsylvania, where the battle is joined between the healthcare behemoth Highmark and UPMC hospitals, with the former threatening to not accept UPMC patients once its takeover goes through. Of course, the pandemic then arrives and further erodes our teetering healthcare system, creating more difficulties for those who need the most affordable care.
 
The Business of Birth Control
 
Since the 1960s, the pill has given many women agency over their own bodies, but director Abby Epstein displays how, in The Business of Birth Control, that same miracle drug has become the go-to for doctors to prescribe for reasons other than avoiding pregnancy, and how such a one-size-fits-all regimen has been the source of depression, suicidal thoughts, and even undiagnosed fatal ailments. With necessary candor, women and family members of victims discuss attempts to bring such clear and present dangers out into the open.
 
We Are Russia
 
Finally, the eye-opening We Are Russia is director Alexandra Dalsbaek’s brilliant exposé of the farce that is Russian politics under the thumb of strongman Putin—apparently with the blessing of many ordinary citizens. But Dalsbaek introduces young activists who have rallied behind opposition candidate Alexei Navalny—now serving time in a Russian prison for ostensibly being the anti-Putin—and bravely hold protests for their candidate, knowing they will be harassed, or even worse, by unamused authorities. With rigor and empathy, Dalsbaek displays the frightening world of authoritarianism—but also, through these heroes’ actions, some light at the end of the tunnel.

DOC NYC 2020 Roundup

 The Day After

DOC NYC 2020
Online streaming through November 19, 2020
docnyc.net

Due to the ongoing pandemic, this year’s edition of DOC NYC—which comprises dozens of new documentaries—is streaming online, so in a way, it’s a blessing in disguise: the festival can reach a larger audience than ever before.

As always, the selection comprises a rich array of films exploring such topics as contemporary politics and the Nazis’ legacy, Mars simulation and the fashion industry, and helicopter parents and crooked cops. Then there’s Television Event, which explores the making of the seminal 1983 made-for-TV movie, The Day After, which dramatized the aftermath of a nuclear bomb destroying an American city. Through interviews with local townspeople who worked on (and acted in) the film, the film’s director Nicholas Mayer—who was fired and had the film taken out of his hands—ABC network executives and others, this is as informative as the best DVD featurettes, with director Jeff Daniels providing the necessary Cold War context, which includes the revelation that the movie was even shown in the Soviet Union—once.

Red HeavenTwo political documentaries explore part of what’s causing the seemingly unbridgeable divide in the U.S. right now. Yael Bridge’s The Big Scary “S” Word breezily but effectively dissects how the term “socialism” became such a bogeyman in America as it details the many socialist programs, like social security and Medicare, that work for so many Americans. In The Place That Makes Us, director Karla Murthy visits Youngstown, Ohio, to record the devastating effects of bad policies that have turned once-thriving communities into boarded-up ghost towns as well as enterprising local residents who are the catalysts of an economic turnaround.

A 2015-6 Mars simulation experiment is documented in Lauren DeFilippo and Katherine Gorringe’s Red Heaven, which takes footage from the video cameras of the six “astronauts” while spending a year in a remote location in Hawaii to discover the effects of isolation on their psyches and bodies. Although endlessly fascinating, the film is almost unavoidably choppy since it has to condense so much footage into 90 minutes. But it is also, in the final analysis, quite touching in its depiction of how relationships can start or fracture while in such an isolated state.

Germany’s recent troubled past rears its head in two sobering films. Estephan Wagner and Marianne Hougen-Moraga’s Songs of Repression focuses on Colonia Dignidad, a religious cult of Germans living in Chile since the 1960s, and the horrifying sexual and physical abuse of children and adults (and assisting General Pinochet’s regime in wholescale genocide) that has been part and parcel of their time there from day one. In Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker’s especially relevant The Meaning of Hitler, historians, writers, Nazi hunters and others illuminatingly discuss how such a hateful and murderous ideology still survives 75 years after Hitler’s death.

Calendar GirlThe remarkable Ruth Finley, who published the yearly calendars for the New York fashion industry’s events for several decades, is lovingly profiled in Christian D. Bruun’s entertaining Calendar Girl. This delightful and colorful woman (who died at age 98 in 2018) is, in a very real sense, a walking talking history of fashion in Manhattan, and it’s great to see her immortalized on film.

Helicopter parenting, the subject of Margaret Munzer Loeb and Eden Wurmfeld’s impactful Chasing Childhood, is dissected in a way that makes one wonder how anyone ever thought it was a good idea. Along with showing how kids are being deprived of their childhood, the movie raises other red flags, like how giving youngsters so many extracurricular activities not only overloads their schedules but also bankrupts their parents, and how parents’ fears—and laws that punish those parents who allow their children some sort of independence—prevent kids from taking on personal responsibilities.

Blue CodeWhen Sidney Lumet made his 1981 epic, Prince of the City, it made crooked cop turned informant Bob Leuci into a hero of sorts. Magnus Skatvold and Greg Mallozzi’s Blue Code of Silence explores the background of Leuci’s career in the NYPD and how his actions not only shone a light on widespread corruption in the department but also made life difficult for many of his fellow cops—including one who killed himself. If Lumet’s film erred on the side of Leuci, this documentary gives equal voice to Leuci’s backers and his many detractors, making for a considered, warts-and-all portrait of a conflicted man who was equally disgraceful and heroic.

In Los Hermanos (The Brothers), directors Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider tell the poignant story of Ilmar and Aldo López-Gavilán, musically talented brothers who grew up in Cuba but were separated after Ilmar was sent to the USSR. He eventually settled in the States while Aldo stayed in Cuba and both brothers forged their own, very different music careers. The Brothers records their reunion, performing and recording together as well as their personal reckoning with the decades-long U.S. embargo, which was pulled back by Obama before being reinstated by trump. But the joy in their music making is what makes the strongest impression, whether playing with superstar violinist Joshua Bell and Aldo’s own conducting wife or just Ilmar and Aldo alone which, appropriately, is how the film ends.

 

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