Clive James, on film criticism:
On American Movie Critics | clivejames.com:
Or, to put it less drastically, in the movies there are no later impressions without a first impression, because you will have stopped watching. Sometimes a critic persuades you to give an unpromising-looking movie a chance, but the movie had better convey the impression pretty quickly that the critic might be right. By and large, it's the movie itself that tells you it means business. It does that by telling a story. No story, no movie. Robert Bresson only did with increasing slowness what other directors had done in a hurry. But when Bresson, somewhere in the vicinity of Camelot, reached the point where almost nothing happening became nothing happening at all, you were gone. A movie has to glue you to your seat even when it's pretending not to.
Blue Book undergraduate essays are a relic of my past - those hyper-caffeinated expositions possibly answering the asked question, possibly skirting the question with wry irony, filled with asides to the all-powerful Teaching Assistant who soon would be skimming my spidery scrawl for signs of intelligent life. The trick was to write in a stream of consciousness style, without revision, yet manage to hit the high notes. A forgotten skill, yet the muscle-memory is still there, buried, fattened with complacency. Could I convince you to watch a film, solely with the persuasive power of my dulcet keyboard-sounds? Doubtful. You have to be interested already, perhaps having heard other positive comments, read other reviews, be open to the indulgence of my suggestion.
That's the thing, and in my increasingly lazy writing/blogging style, I never sustain work long enough on any particular entry to approach the magic (magick) number of one thousand words when making my point. Or more precisely, I cut and paste other's writings until my point is either obvious, or obscured. Blogging encourages the quick cut - the short slice of information standing for the whole - but this isn't always (usually) the best writing.
I also give myself a bonus for the most obnoxious use of parenthetic expression, and a double bonus for the use of two words, one enclosed in parentheses and/or strike-out.
“Ikiru - Criterion Collection” (Akira Kurosawa)
Last night, I wept.
So is that enough encouragement for you to rent this film? I could go on. I know, I know, idle threats. Ok, you asked for it. Blog writing is similar to Blue Book writing in that, for me at least, there isn't much evidence of polish - blog writing is off-the-cuff, like conversation more than an extended essay. So, tomorrow when I groan my aging carcass out of bed, I might delete all the verbiage that follows.
Technorati Tags: Criterion_Collection, Film, film_history, Japan, review
Takashi Shimura plays Kanji Watanabe, a middle aged bureaucrat who has worked in City Hall without respite or vacation for 29 years and several months. The opening shot of Ikiru, before we even meet the main character, is of his stomach x-ray, revealing his terminal cancer. Shimura holds such a poignantly pathetic face for so long in the film, I started to worry for him. (here's the famous parenthetical aside: am reading, finally, Blink, and there is extended discussion of Paul Ekman's Facial Action Coding System, and how making certain faces, and holding them, bring comparable emotion to the maker of the expression. See, I should remove this aside, and work it into another entry, but I'm too lazy, and I don't get graded anymore.)
“We only realize how beautiful life is when we chance upon death!” proclaims Watanabe's Mephistopheles, a novelist character who is empathetic to Watanabe's plight. The novelist (Yûnosuke Itô), resplendent with jaunty scarf, leads Watanabe on a whirlwind tour of post-war Japan's nightlife, drinking and gambling and dancing to hot jazz, purchasing metaphorically significant hats. Whoa. I would be hard pressed to emulate or recreate a night like that in 21st C.E. America. There just isn't that much publicly inhabited decadent space these days, dance clubs perhaps, strip tease joints, perhaps, but not with the same jazz spirit, nor with live musicians, nor so much of it that one could visit 15 different kinds of hotspots in an evening. Maybe I'm just an old fogey. Sure you could visit 15 different bars, but after the 7th, isn't there a deadening similarity?
Akira Kurosawa (and his screenwriter, Shinobu Hashimoto) create a marvelously non-obvious narrative structure. Watanabe is doomed, but there is hardly a trace of melodrama as death looms. We know Watanabe has months to live, but Kurosawa doesn't linger on scenes of physical pain (as opposed to Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Illyich, the loose basis of Ikiru). Two-thirds of the way through the film, suddenly, after Watanabe's moment of satori, we fast forward five months to Watanabe's wake, attended by the weasely Deputy Mayor in his jacket with tails, his estranged son, his daughter in law, his brother and his wife, and dozens of Watanabe's peers and underlings. From here, the tale of the triumph of Watanabe's final months is slowly unwound, layer by layer, especially as the midlevel functionaries who remain (after their bosses slink away) get progressively more intoxicated. Wonderful, wonderful scene (for lack of a better word - takes about 40 minutes in total), working backwards and forwards in time depending upon who is talking.
I am surprised there is not more filmic theft of this narrative structure. The Seven Samurai was copied to death, almost to the point that watching The Seven Samurai is like watching 25 movie clichés at once, but I cannot recall a film that borrows the deliciously convoluted time structure of Ikiru.
Finally, it is too bad the print of the film stock is worn, even with the Criterion Collection's usually deft touch, this is obviously not taken from a pristine negative. Too bad, because the cinematography and framing composition is just spectacular. Not that the film is unwatchable (as some other Kurosawa films I've seen, like Drunken Angel, for instance), just that such a magnificent piece of work deserves to have been treated like royalty, and obviously it wasn't. The film wasn't even released in the US for several years because it was deemed, “too Japanese”, as if such transcendent art can be contained by mere borders.
Hey, according to ecto's word count tool, I'm at 1181 words for this entry (not including this paragraph, doh!), and even after subtracting Clive James' quote, am still over 1,000 words (1,036). Whoo hoo, bring out the wine! Errr, too late.
Ikiru made me cry, too. Nothing compares to it.
I can't recommend the idiotic commentary on the Criterion disk. Steven Prince should watch fewer movies and live a little more before he can comment on a film like Ikiru (or any Kurosawa film, for that matter, except maybe Sanjuro).
PS. I know you're in Chicago, but if you were in LA, I'd invite you to my collage show. You can at least see the announcement here http://lacollage.blogspot.com