My Response to Paul Shrader's Film Canon

So, I finally read this attempt at creating a film canon by Paul Schrader.

I thought I had read it years ago, but hadn't. Once I sit down to read it, it's like this verbose, yet erudite confirmation of everything I'm tired of in academia and film criticism.

Schrader parrots up all the old musty names from the Catholic Church, even goes back to definitions by Dante, Plato, and Kant as to what art is.

Not that there's a problem to that, but... Really, the old school again?

He then strangely enough, bashes Marxists and feminists, repeating another scholar's view of them as the "School of Resentment."

Following this he throws up all his heroes, the ones you were forced to watch in film class--Ford, Welles, Renoir, and Hitchcock.

These guys are certainly masters, no one rejects that. But isn't it curious enough, that Schrader spending so much time to construct a rubric by which to judge films, and then only repeating the most hallowed, widely known, "acknowledged" masterpieces of the 20th century, kind of reek of exclusion and privilege.

To me, this also ties into the exclusion of the film industry. He may categorize my comments as the "school of resentment," but what other response can there be to an industry that did and still, continues to reject authentic views of minorities?

Does Schrader, who fails to mention a single title made outside the rigid demands of the studio system (Masculin, Feminin is a close exception, but not really) even stop to think of the system of privilege that IS studio filmmaking, yet also how this system rigidly stifles personal expression as a capitalist enterprise?

He kind of follows that French theory of auteur--that the studios sucked, but there were a few guys--Wyler, Wilder, Hawks, etc... who were successful in pushing some sort of personal vision, hence the auteurs.

But the period following the collapse of the studios, or rather, the weakening of their influence, DID SEE artistry return with the art film.

The art film was present since festivals such as Cannes and Venice since the 50's, but some of my favorite works were by those who were given full creative expression such as Angelopoulos, Eustache, and Tarkovsky, just to name a few.

Anyway, I really feel this is a marker of Schrader's age and his conservative upbringing. But then again, it's not. Because in the article, he even slams Jonathan Rosenbaum, who has done so much to promote overlooked films, by saying that Rosenbaum doesn't explain why they're good.

So, in turn, he presents a very unoriginal list, preceded by lots of bloviated talk about the "masters" and "classic aesthetics," but why does this not show up in his own cinema?

Why is a film like Light Sleeper fairly sleep-inducing?

Granted, there's some value to that film, but it hardly reaches the halcyon levl that Schrader's talking about.

Instead, let's think of the words of an artist who did live up to his expectations. Not an obscure name, by any means, but one who fits: Andrei Tarkovsky.

Shortly before his death, while location scouting for Nostalghia, Andrei filmed a documentary with Italian scriptwriter Tonino Guerra called 'Voyage in Time'.

There are many great lessons from this interview film, but one of the best, and one which I try to remember (paraphrased) is this:

Tarkovsky: "My problem is, I keep meeting directors who are nothing like their films. Your film should be an extension of yourself."

I'm not projecting this as a rule for film. Star Wars: A New Hope is a great movie, but George Lucas was never a jedi in real life. But I'm sure Lucas, in his fantasy, was that film.

Tarkovsky preaches for simple honesty in expression. I try to always remind myself of this while I'm making shorts, and some of the ones that turned out better are the ones where my ego, or some "idea" didn't get in the way. The ones where I was just trying to represent a personal experience or emotion were much better than anything intellectual.

And intellectualism is all Schrader has to offer. Why are his films so different from what he has to say in this article? That's the only question I pose. I think the answer is obvious.

Walter Hugo Khouri - Men and Women (Noite Vazia, 1964)

Men and Women (1964)

I'm really in pure disbelief that something this definitive in its subject matter (the old battle of the sexes) could have been made 50 years ago. It's one of the strongest statements on society's deeply rooted sexism and the complicity on both sides that perpetuates it.

In it, two married men prowl the streets of Sao Paulo looking for sex. They turn down some advances at a couple of bars, preferring something "unfamiliar". They finally find two prostitutes at a teahouse, and bring them back to a 'communal apartment'.

The two men, one a little older, fatter, insecure, and ragingly sexist, the other, younger, more handsome, and reluctant, then begin the game with the women. They swap partners, watch porn, even pay the two women to have sex with each other, ever seeking the more out-of-the-ordinary thrill.

The drama progresses as both parties, so strongly willed, engage in a game of progression and resistance/acceptance.

This is the first film by Walter Hugo Khouri, and something that I could only imagine would have had its actors and director alike arrested in the United States if it were even attempted to be filmed here when it was made. It would certainly never have been approved within the Hollywood system, and judging by the reaction to the tame Lolita by religious groups, surely, the Right's collective head would have exploded if it were ever shown here. And on top of that, the sex and nudity that's present isn't even explicit, but just too . . . honest.

I could never, ever recommend a film more highly than this one.

Bring Back Cinema!

Please share on social media or something similar if you agree:

When will cinema come back? More and more, the masses of people are being sucked into television and the most routine genre pictures. These are nothing more than scripted dramas, a simple logical unfolding of events that bores in its predictability. When will we get back to something more subtle and abstract . . . i.e. the universal, the metaphorical? How much more beautiful is the face of a woman from the countryside or a certain sunrise than another formulaic celebration of the careers of lawyers, junior executives, or stockbrokers? Audiences are so submerged in these topical dramas that they are taught to hate cinema, and love the most rushed, poorly crafted entertainment. 'As long as there's a story, and it has a surprise!' some say. I hope the art won't die along with its audience.

The Girl Who Picks Flowers and the Girl Who Kills Insects (2000)

When I first heard of Hitoshi Yazaki, I, as usual, perused his filmography on iMDb. I think it was Strawberry Shortcakes that was the first film of his I had seen, then March Comes in Like a Lion (aka flat-out masterpiece), and later, Sweet Little Lies.

The one elusive feature that seemed to stray away from me was the one that had the longest running time, The Girl Who Picks Flowers and the Girl Who Kills Insects, a feature of roughly four hours.

It wasn't until yesterday that I once again thought about this film. It's still on my list of must-see's from 90s/2000s J-cinema masters, including Makoto Shinozaki's Okaeri, Kaizo Hayashi's Circus Boys, and Naomi Kawase's Hotaru. All four have completely eluded attempts to locate them, despite what seems to be some rare VHS copies in the University of California System.

After being reminded of it yet again, I decided to dig up some information, if possible, on this very long Yazaki film. Searching the film's title in kanji, and then using Google Translate to decipher whatever info was written, proved fruitful indeed.

According to one website, the picture is about a group of people whose lives intersect around a ballet school in London. Two of them love a central character, a dancer, and there is also a Japanese visitor, as well as a black Londoner, in this tale that turns out to be a love triangle, or parallelogram of sorts.

That was about as much as I could decipher from the machine translation, but it was enough to keep me going. Other websites claimed that it was screened once at Keio University, with the director present. I'm also aware that the Japan Society had Yazaki present at a screening of Sweet Little Lies once, during which he wore his trademark shades and hat (this video is available on YouTube).

The other film by the director that is difficult to locate is Afternoon Breezes, but I have a hunch there is a copy floating around somewhere. Independent films from Japan are particularly hard to find because like America, there is hardly any distribution channels for them. The studios there are more interested in spewing out these below par manga adaptations that seem to be flooding the film radar, instead of taking a shot on unofficial talent

Experience also tells me that longer films tend to be better. This isn't always the case, but I have certainly found that films exceeding the 3-hour mark have the time, and therefore the ability, to get into all those details of character that I find interesting. One reviewer referenced it to The Mother and the Whore, but in running time and pacing only. There are a few films, of course, that manage to get into such depths as the ones that take their time, but I've only found this with the most precise and sparing of directors. Rohmer and Bresson come to mind as an example.

Regardless if this will ever turn up or not, I'd like to think it should something of an important film, maybe even a gem, because Yazaki is very talented. In one translation, a person likened something to "the masterpiece . . . " and referred to Flowers/Insects, so it leaves me hopeful.

I also feel that in putting info out there, or at least trying to dig up info, on films that haven't yet come to the English-speaking world, will help them to do so. After writing about how much I wanted to see them, several of Jissoji's Art Theatre Guild features became available online, with subtitles, no doubt. So in short, I think I'm helping.

Hana-bi (Takeshi Kitano, 1997)

It took some time for me to catch up with Takeshi Kitano. For the past five years now, I've been an avid fan of Japanese cinema. The first works which grasped me were the radical visions of the Japanese New Wave, the most inventive directors of which were Shuji Terayama, Susumu Hani, and Yoshishige Yoshida. It was these works which planted my feet in that country's cinema and culture. Like most Americans, I had been first exposed to Japan through their electronic exports, mostly in the form of Sony and Nintendo products. Then the early 2000's came, and a flood of new anime and manga titles came with it. Though I had been familiar with anime from some of the Saturday morning releases on the Sci-Fi Channel, which introduced me Akira.

So here come the 1990's. At first glance, there seems to be little from the 90's in Japan to be desired from, at least cinematically speaking. Even for a hunter like me, I cannot come up with a bevy of works to boast the strength of the 90's. While the work then was strong, it was not the steady torrent of mind-bogglingly good features from the 60's which seemed to end as the Art Theatre Guild caught on commercially and studio directors like Kaneto Shindo and Yasuzo Masumura were invited to produce features for it (Kokoro and Ongaku). Of the 90's pictures I have seen, the ones which immediately stand out are Hitoshi Yazaki's March Comes in Like a Lion, Ryu Murakami's Tokyo Decadence, Kohei Oguri's The Sting of Death, and of course, Hirokazu Koreeda's Maboroshi no hikari. These are all spaced about three or four years amongst each other, so it seems as if the early 90's had something of a force behind it. And while I do count Shunji Iwai as a favorite, his film Swallowtail Butterfly, the favorite of mine, did not leave as much of a strong impression upon me as the ones mentioned above.

And now comes Kitano. With this background in J-film (excepting the pre-war, 30's films, which I'm not well familiar with), I may have had something of a bias against Kitano, who I knew frequently delved into the world of yakuza, and held immense popularity in his country. The yakuza aspect must have inferred that he used violence as a cheap thrill, which had been a firm no-no in my book. And being American, and having to suffer under Hollywood, I was always suspicious of a filmmaker who seemed to get too much critical and popular praise.

Well, now here comes Hana-bi. It was a great film, of course, and shattered all my prejudices. Like Violent Cop, which Hana-bi is something of a reworking of, it is a meditation on the effects of violence. My biggest problem with some filmmakers, and this especially goes to Sam Peckinpah, is the lenient handling of violence, often to a titillating, near pornographic effect. This is the great flaw of Hollywood as well. No maturity in handling life-altering actions.

I recall something Alfred Hitchcock said in an interview, that if you filmed a man walking down the street, and ahead of him was an open manhole pit, that if you showed him fall into the sewer, and cut to the next scene, then it would be funny. But if you showed him fall, then cut to him inside the pit, screaming in pain with a broken leg, then it would not be funny. So the director's attitude can be surmised from what details he is willing to omit.

The whole course of Hana-bi follows the suffering of a few people after a random violent act. When a stakeout goes wrong, Horibe (Ren Osugi) is paralyzed from the waist down, and Nishi (Takeshi Kitano) quits the force. The two go their separate ways, Horibe taking up pointillist illustrations from his wheelchair (as Kitano did three years prior when he was in a motorcycle accident), while Nishi takes care of his sickly wife, Miyuki (Kayoko Kishimoto), and deals with his creditors, who happen to be yakuza. The two men try hard to rebuild their fractured state of their affairs, and only time will tell if these new lives of peace are salvageable.

The thing that elevates the picture above that of Kitano's previous six are a resolution, maybe a compromise, of two driving forces within his cinema. One, is clearly the legacy, the emotional baggage and societal engineering that growing up in poverty in Japan must have placed on him. This manifests itself as hyper-masculinity, violence, aloofness, and anti-social behavior (like the youths in Kids Return). This burden has been transformed by Kitano into the cold, stone-faced policemen and yakuza characters that we see in his oeuvre. And because he has been able to master it, to fictionalize it, it has become a tool of the artist.

The second current is the inner, Kitano's artistic sensibility and his sensitive nature, also an influence of the Japanese culture, but here being the calming effect of its arts heritage. This operates in his narrative work as a close attention to detail and an acute eye for composition. This impulse came fully realized in his first film, Violent Cop, as it was a strangely lyrical yakuza shoot-em-up piece.

Some critics have said that Japan constantly struggles between these two poles, the militaristic impulse, the masculine, and the love of nature and beauty, the arts, the feminine. The former drove it to war against the Allied Powers, and the latter is responsible for world-famous representations like The Tale of Genji and woodblock paintings. It was the first impulse, which unfortunately, drove Yukio Mishima to suicide, unable to cast away or master that burden.

Kitano, however, is under full control of it. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have an artist who he admires, like Nobuyoshi Araki, who has completely thrown himself into the feminine artistic current and produced the beautiful, erotic, sometimes death-like photographs that he is known for. A man like Araki, to his credit, holds no guilt whatsoever, and this explains his rambunctious, charming, dirty-old man personality. Yet, unfortunately, this persona cannot operate within society the way Kitano has to. Araki does not hold the rational impulse that is expected of men, and especially of film directors, being stewards of millions of dollars of financiers' investments. And while I once strayed away from Takeshi because of his popularity, I now realize that part of it is dependent upon the burden which he has consciously chose to uphold, working in the commercial industry, something of a proper face that he must have to parrot around for the moneyed class.

Araki, I think, can more devote himself to his artistic pursuits, as he is usually just dependent upon models, lighting technicians, and costume/makeup girls, and not a studio infrastructure. In an interview about Araki in Travis Klose's Arakimentari, Kitano said something to the effect of this, "My art is painful, while he just seems to be having fun."

-mmxii

Johnny Depp: Fail.

Scene from The Ninth Gate: Corso gets hungry so he takes a TV dinner from the freezer, and what??? Puts the whole thing, box and all, in the microwave, and then walks away like nothing happens? Who put that in the script?