Kiyoshi Kurosawa

[Mr Sausage]

To the Ends of the Earth

An intimate and loosely structured account of a television presenter in Uzbekistan confronting her isolation and dissatisfaction while experiencing culture shock. The familiar version of this story builds to some kind of spiritual awakening, with the people, events, and even the country itself forming the teleology of that awakening. That pattern is stymied here because there's no progression. We have a series of scenes which are in essence the same situation replayed again and again until the lead character registers something about herself and her attitudes. Basically: Yoko is trapped, often physically; she tries to escape that entrapment, finds herself bringing her entrapment with her either through ignorance or fear, and retreats in response. Repeat until credits.

The movie's seeming formlessness actually allows it to escape the teleological narrative with its tendency to reduce other countries and cultures to their usefulness to some tourist. What Yoko learns about Uzbekistan is mostly that she knows very little about it. What she learns about herself she learns by being confronted with her own behaviours, not from being led around by wise and kindly others. Uzbekistan is not especially available, it's not explained, it has no arc or narrative, it isn't shown off. It has pleasures, but they are often missed; its dangers are mostly imagined; its culture is poorly understood and the documentary team are apathetic about capturing it. It's a story about people failing to find any meaningful connection to a place or a culture, tho' one of them achieves in the end some recognition of this and finds a small amount of liberation, capped by a symbol and a song. So there are small transformations. An early moment of misogyny (seemingly cultural) is allowed a do-over at the end and becomes a moment of connection and helpfulness, implying that the earlier moment was probably less cultural than personal, the fisherman frustrated by the disappointment he felt directed and him and seeking to direct his frustration outward. Or the scenes with the goat, which start as a harmless cultural ignorance but prove to've had fewer negative consequences than suggested. Little things are refigured, but they take their weight from the repetitions and not a sense of progress or development. Things happen again, but they mean something slightly different the second or third time.

One of the best moments in the film is a seemingly uncomplicated paeon to Japanese values that's actually fraught underneath. The guide, Temur, relates a personal story of how a monument built in Uzbekistan by Japanese prisoners inspired him with purpose, a purpose dedicated to cross-cultural communication, to connection essentially. He gives a flattering portrait of Japanese values that might seem self-serving in a Japanese film ostensibly about Uzbekistan, until you reflect that the behaviour of the Japanese characters is at odds with the portrait painted of their country. The official Japanese character--hardworking, dedicated, responsible, committed to working for others--is missing from the Japanese characters in the movie, none of whom are bad or selfish or anything, but none of whom live up to these values either. Mostly they're doing a job to do a job, and feel little responsibility to Uzbekistan despite being ambassadors for it.

But this far from a pessimistic movie: while the Japanese characters no longer evince the values their ancestors used to take pride in, the Uzbekistanis, Temur especially, remember those values and take something from them. Connection is available if you don't let fear or isolation get in the way. The movie is a subtle satire on a Japanese quality that often goes unremarked on: isolation. Kurosawa usually explores the emotional landscape of isolation and uses it to produce fear and dread in an audience. Here, Kurosawa pivots deeper into critique. To put it as a generality: Japan's historical capacity for isolation gets in the way of the virtues through which it defines itself. The movie makes this generalization subtly, letting the context of the production--a commemoration of the 25 years of Japanese-Uzbeki diplomacy--carry the weight of the generalization while the film attends to the specifics. But Kurosawa is I think relating his vision of modern disconnection to the wider cultural isolation of Japan and urging against it.

A movie like this, quiet, uninsistent, and working from a familiar template, is easily underrated. But there's a lot more here than its surface might suggest.

[Mr Sausage]

Daguerreotype

A full on Gothic romance with a noir twist. This movie is working within a very old story-telling tradition. It's the figure of the dageurreotype itself more than pastiche or allusion that draws the movie into the past and brings out the sense of this old genre and its conventions. That sense you get with the dageurreotype of fixing people in place, a sense lost with the quick snap-speed of the modern camera, serves as a symbolic gateway into the petrified forms of the Gothic romance, where the long trail of family and even architectural history becomes fixed in time in the figure of a ghost, a house, or a haunted/wasted later ancestor (or all three). Recurrence and stagnation attend mouldering houses and the wasted ends of family lines, with old traumas metaphysically bonded to the environment and people. Everything is old and nothing seems to move, like a time warp. Or a daguerreotype photograph, with its uncanny, haunted images we associate with the past, something arch, posed, and unnatural seeming. Those vintage instruments that create ghostly windows into the past become the metaphor for gothic stagnation.

This is a story of a past-haunted man fixated on an outdated photography technique as the only way to capture the true essence of his subject, that subject being of course the dwindling family he cannot save. First his wife, dead before the start of the movie, then his daughter. But of course it's the very attempt to capture and possess the essence of his family members that ruins them, robbing them of the basic energy of life as they turn into fixed objects on a flat surface. Daguerreotype photography requires the subject to remain immobile for long periods of time, but as the film goes on, the exposure time the daughter must endure grows longer and longer, spanning hours as she remains affixed to a metal instrument designed to help models remain immobile but which mostly resembles a torture device. The process seems to suck the life right out of the daughter, no doubt as it did to the mother, until she becomes a lifeless doll in a tumble so sudden and brilliantly constructed that it outdoes the jumper from Pulse. Essentially, in attempting to preserve the souls of his loved ones, the father, Stephane, destroys what he loves. His control is absolute and lifeless, his art the ultimate selfish imposition.

Stephane comes from a long line of patriarchs in old houses who through madness and obsession drain the life of their loved ones. His character is all externalization; he's emblematic. There's no trouble reading him. What he does chiefly is provide context for Jean. Jean has his own lineage in the doomed, self-deluding lover of both Gothic romance and noir--but it's a lot more complex here. Jean is not possessive and controlling like Stephane, because who could be? Stephane wishes to freeze the very souls of his subjects for eternity. But Jean is cut from a similar cloth. Jean, without realizing it, has a specific vision of reality that he's willing to sacrifice others to. In the prosaic physical world, this means sacrificing Stephane, his health, and his art for a measly 50 000. But metaphysically it goes so much deeper, to the point of sacrificing not only basic reality, but even the spiritual autonomy of his loved ones for a little domestic happiness.

The ending leaves it open whether Jean was seeing ghosts or hallucinations, but I think the repeated visions of the mother draw us toward the (richer) interpretation that Jean was seeing a real ghost. And it's the nature of this ghost that's interesting. It's less a spirit than a shade, a kind of flat representation of its former human. It lacks much of the personality and interests of its human self. Mostly it exists entirely for Jean, cooking, cleaning, loving, providing unwavering support for every decision. Kurosawa shoots every scene with this ghost brilliantly: it's never the first thing seen in a location, it never seems to occupy any coherent space within a scene, it never announces its presence through noise, it's often kept off screen to the point where it seems to've disappeared--the ghost gives no indication of its presence until Jean consciously needs it to appear. This is some of the most brilliant use of formal devices to depict a haunting I've ever seen, both for the subtle lingering sense of unreality it creates and the sheer thematic weight it lends everything. Jean's ghost is another version of Stephane's daguerreotype photographs: a flat, captured, ghostly image of a human meant to serve the petty needs of one person and otherwise with no life of its own.

Stephane, tho' outwardly monstrous in ways Jean isn't, at least is burdened by conscience. The repeated visions of his own wife's ghost (herself an even flatter shade) are a projection of his guilt. Not enough guilt to get him to stop, but he has a self-awareness Jean lacks. Jean retreats from self-awareness, first in his apartment when he ignores an unplaceable feeling that nothing is quite real, and at the end when he retreats into literal fantasy after the ghost leaves.

One of the film's central symbols is entropy. There are two closed systems in proximity: the greenhouse, which symbolizes life and is associated with the daughter, and the chemical containers, which symbolize death and are associated with the father. Jean moves between the two states. He's enjoined to keep them separate, but of course through entropy the two systems inevitably equalize just by their proximity. The plants are rare and fragile, and death inexorable however carefully everything's tended to. That's a point neither Jean nor Stephane can handle, and each fights it in his own way: Stephane through the refuge of art and the selfishness of brute control; Jean, through schemes and fantasies that substitute for reality. Poor Marie, who aligns herself with life and yet is bound to these men through death.

One of the special pleasures of the movie was realizing something I'd initially thought a flaw, the lack of any proper chemistry or romance between the leads, is actually a plot clue. It's ingenious. I didn't buy the romance progression at all...because there isn't one, deliberately. That's clever in a way that's pleasurable. Terrific misdirection, playing on predictable forms of critical awareness.

Kurosawa's airless, controlled style is perfect for a Gothic romance, isn't it? Gothic stories always have a stifling and oppressive atmosphere where death and history conspire and progression is hindered. Kurosawa's slow, careful camera moves and stark or inky interiors pull you deeper and deeper into morbid fantasy. It's impossible to get out. This kind of story is ideal for his talents.

[Michael Kerpan]

My recollection is that lots of critics pretty much blew off Daguerrotype. Then again, it's not clear to me that most western critics have ever really made much attempt to "understand" KK.

[Mr Sausage]

Dagguerrotype and To the Ends of the Earth are easy films to blow off. They're deliberately paced, they don't underline their effects, the plots are thin, the emotional palette is limited and the emotions muted or underplayed, and the themes and ideas are often communicated through symbols, metaphors, and other figurative devices instead of drama or dialogue. If you focus only on the immediate viewing experience, they're likely to come across as flat and limited. Dagguerrotype for example is an old house gothic melodrama with no theatrics to speak of. That easily makes it seem slight to anyone familiar with the genre and its tendency towards overstatement. It's only if you let yourself sink into the very specific emotion Kurosawa is going for that the thing comes to life and you can appreciate the unusual ways he's constructing gothic themes and exploring his characters' mental worlds. There aren't a lot of heady intellectual themes in the movie. It's more about watching Kurosawa construct illusions, like how he slowly transforms the modern world into a gothic period piece without resorting to pastiche or explicit allusion, or how he uses the titular camera to conjure up themes of abuse and control and the supernatural without fetishizing the object or turning it into another character (which would make the movie as guilty as Stephane). He exploits our cultural relationship with vintage objects like old-timey cameras to generate the atmosphere of a vintage story with its old conventions. He makes things seem slightly other than they are.

What Kurosawa's going for is so exacting and specific that I'm not surprised his less showy or situationally weird movies are going to hit a wall with critics. Kurosawa comes at things slant-wise. If you don't catch the slant, you'll think the movies aren't up to much or that what they're up to isn't presented well. Sometimes that's true, but Dagguerrotype and To the Ends of the Earth reward engagement. What Kurosawa's doing is weird and interesting.

[Michael Kerpan]

I think it is precisely KK's slant-wiseness that makes me enjoy so many of his films so much. I still need to figure out if I just failed to catch the proper slant for Tokyo Sonata (despite 2 tries).

[therewillbeblus]

Oddly enough, it was only after seeing (nearly) all his films that Tokyo Sonata took a plummet for me, and Loft didn't ascend the ranks because I caught something 'new' but rather appreciated his form and more typical (less 'slant-y') Hitchcockian approach in relation to other films, but the main reasons I loved it I had caught right away. However, I do think one needs to acclimate to his approach- which I had done by the time I saw Loft- but, for example, didn't before seeing Pulse, Cure, or Creepy for the first times, which are such deeply enigmatic films that only grow on me more the more I see from KK and the more I watch them. I feel like so many people seek out Cure because it's so hailed, don't like it, and then stop with KK, when visiting just a couple more of his works and returning back to it could add such rich context and completely change that initial impression.

[Mr Sausage]

...it's not clear to me that most western critics have ever really made much attempt to "understand" KK.

You know, I'm not sure I understand Kiyoshi Kurosawa's movies, actually. There's something about them that evades the grasp. I still have no idea what's going on in Cure. It's as baffling to me now as when I first watched it. I know I've been writing these over-long posts purporting to analyze his movies, but I think the biggest flaw in what I'm writing is that I'm posing fewer and fewer questions in favour of these endless statements. But the only reason I'm even making all these statements is to work through my impressions and try to find some foothold. My posts are just me trying to convince myself that I know what's going on. I mean, I'm sure what I've written about is actually there, but I'm giving the impression I understand the films more than I do. I'm not doing a good job of showing the groping process, the wading through uncertainty that happens when I watch one of his movies. Through habit I've landed on this "here's what it all means" tone, but honestly who knows with Kurosawa. Why do any of the things in his movies happen?

[Michael Kerpan]

Mr. Sausage -- You are right, of course. I guess I was using "understand" in a more general and "fluid" sense than "comprehend in a reasonably logical fashion". Accepting the bafflement and floating along with it (and ultimately enjoying/appreciating it) is what I meant by "understand" in this context. Not sure what a better word might be ("grok" -- from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, perhaps?).

[Mr Sausage]

Mr. Sausage -- You are right, of course. I guess I was using "understand" in a more general and "fluid" sense than "comprehend in a reasonably logical fashion". Accepting the bafflement and floating along with it (and ultimately enjoying/appreciating it) is what I meant by "understand" in this context. Not sure what a better word might be ("grok" -- from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, perhaps?).

Oh, sorry Kerpan, I wasn't correcting you or anything. Just reflecting on how little I actually get Kurosawa. That's different from what you were talking about, with critics not really trying.

[Michael Kerpan]

I think you "get" Kurosawa in (more or less) the way he wants us to get him. I'm pretty sure I've read interviews/articles in the past where he expressed dismay as to attempts to distill very specific "meanings" in his films.

(I wasn't feeling "corrected -- in any event, I probably am incorrigible)

[therewillbeblus]

You know, I'm not sure I understand Kiyoshi Kurosawa's movies, actually. There's something about them that evades the grasp. I still have no idea what's going on in Cure. It's as baffling to me now as when I first watched it.

The only thing I'm relatively sure of is that there's a satirical horror allegory in how Mamiya asks socially-inappropriate questions that disarm shelled disconnected people into vulnerable states they are unprepared for with his incessantly-naive "why?"s. The irony that curiosity as an ingredient to forge connection winds up shocking people into antisocial and disoriented states is just one reading (there's a veeerrryy grey area between curiosity and manipulation here), but it's too apparent not to be a clear connotation or even basic blueprint for what's "going on" in that film's thematic skeleton. There's definitely so much more underneath though- and to your point, the film is so rich it demands bafflement. I don't even want to "know" all there is. I think that would ruin the film, and disregard one of its (and KK's) greatest sensory-themes of unknowability

[therewillbeblus]

I watched all six Suit Yourself or Shoot Yourself films, which are dependably (mostly-)mindless crime programmers, yet vary in their degrees of effectiveness. I didn’t find much to like or enough to hate about episodes two, three, or five (The Escape, The Loot, The Nouveau Rich) to say anything about, but they are all more or less the same in that they never dip into terribleness or rise high above their formulaic structure.

Anyways, the “good,” relatively speaking: The first installment, The Heist, is unspectacular overall, but infuses the tone with wry humor well. There are a lot of hangout scenes- the best of which involve characters lazing around making apathetic observations on critical incidents, and some scenes of violence with quirks of broad humor such as one where a baddie pauses to take a drink to suddenly ignite his aggressive temperament, or a spacious, meandering bit where a group of characters nonchalantly remove a bullet. I just wish these irreverent slices of absurdist social engagement were more consistently woven into the film. This vibe is present in the next two, but not to the same levels.

The fourth chapter, The Gamble, implemented unexpectedly effective forward narrative momentum that was fun and engaging despite the story being familiar crime-mishap fluff. The comedy bits worked much better here than the last two- particularly a foot chase scene between two guys in the final act, where line deliveries of “why are you running/because you’re chasing me!”- you know, the kind that have been used many times before- work because of the way they’re shot and acted, and made me genuinely laugh. Also, the use of score seems to be stretched just a taddddd longer and louder than comfortable at times, which may just be an accident, but something tells me KK is milking the rote aspects of these films by tweaking their elements to create subtle comedy that would go over the head of most of the producers. The last example of the score's function took me out of the film in a great way, forcing an insightful juxtaposition between the self-seriousness of dramatic expressions on the characters' faces staring off into the distance, normally pulling us into the world of the film, and the baldfaced artifice in mise en scene. The “dramatic” exchanges too are played sincerely - by characters taking themselves very seriously - before a punchline will come in that soils their ‘cool’ demeanors. The whole series kinda operates this way, but the broad comedy works better here than most of the films. Unfortunately the specific strengths nearly all come at the end, so it’s hard for me to see the whole composite as elevated above the rest..

The last film, The Hero, is quite different though. It drops a lot of the dry (anti)social comedy, its narrative is more sprawling, and the ending is darker, with an ominous and enigmatic final scene that feels like a Cureesque approach to a routine TV movie and perhaps a Fuck You I'm Out exit... Though KK has gone on record stating his fondness for this series, it's unclear whether or not this was with the benefit of hindsight or in the moment (it's quite possible KK was eager to get out of TV and back to film at the end there in '96, but now looks back with rose-colored glasses, but I digress).

I can't really "recommend" this series to anyone who's not going for completism, and even for fans of KK's style, the bulk of that stamp is absent. Though if you're looking for a serial of stock crime films with some deadpan comedy to watch while you're sick on the couch, you could do much worse than these.

[Quote Perf Unquote]

I was revisiting "Charisma" (my second favorite after "Cure") and its attendant reviews, and found many references to the screenplay being written a decade earlier, and most surprisingly being used as entrée to the Sundance program. I hadn't recalled hearing this before, and it's curious for a couple reasons. Was the script written in English, and is it available anywhere (I have not been able to find it)? And if so, why hasn't Kurosawa made any English language films or done work in America or the UK? Having already had many years of filmmaking under his belt, I wonder what the value or tangible benefits of the Sundance experience was for him?

I currently have a copy of Jerry White's "The films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa : Master of Fear" on the way, but the reviews of that book are uniformly poor, suggesting there's no real or novel information to be gleaned from it.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

From the way he talks about it here, the Sundance experience (which happened in 1992) actually convinced him that he shouldn't try to make American films, since the Sundance people were wedded to the Robert McKee model of carefully-structured plots with clear motivations and all that—a criticism I've read from other veterans of the Sundance Labs. He also said the only person there he felt any connection with was L.M. Kit Carson and that they spent a lot of time talking about Tobe Hooper.

And it's true Kurosawa already had a decent number of films under his belt, but his name was mud in the Japanese film industry after the trials of The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl and Sweet Home, The Guard from Underground wasn't released until mid-1992, and the only other work he'd done since the turn of the decade were a couple of short pieces for television. It also wasn't his idea to apply to Sundance in the first place—the production company he was attached to at the time had the screenplay translated into English and submitted it on his behalf, without bothering to inform him in advance. Perhaps they thought the Sundance name would help the project out of the pre-production hell where it was apparently mired (it was first mentioned in the Japanese film press in 1990, and it's discussed in a book of film criticism Kurosawa brought out in 1992 called The Charisma of Cinema). I'm guessing that didn't pan out given how long it took to get the film properly off the ground.

That said, a couple of things definitely came out of it: Kurosawa kept a diary of his time at Sundance that was published in a couple of Japanese film magazines and a later collection of his writings, and he got to film two scenes from his script, with Brian Wimmer in the Yakusho Kōji role and David Jensen as the botanist (played in the final film by a woman, Fubuki Jun). Someone who attended a screening of this footage in 1993 has written up their partial recollections here, and it's a fascinating read even through Google Translate.

[Quote Perf Unquote]

That is great info, thanks very much.

I'm even more perplexed that the submitted screenplay was translated. Granted, the most stylish and idiosyncratic screenplays I've read are still more linguistically perfunctory than the average novel, but it must have been something to impress the Sundance people, however conventional their tastes... which has never been in doubt, and it's not surprising to read Kurosawa's disappointment at that.

Would love to see the initial test footage he shot for "Charisma" there, no doubt different in almost every way than the end result.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Kurosawa's next is a French remake of Serpent's Path

[therewillbeblus]

Hope it improves upon the original

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Turns out Kurosawa also has a new Japanese film coming out next year, about "a schoolteacher whose life is disrupted by a chime that brings with it an increasing sense of dread." In Japan the film will be distributed via a frankly ludicrous-sounding "digital video trading" platform, but given it'll be getting a traditional festival rollout I doubt that will keep it from getting more conventional distribution elsewhere.

[diamonds]

Turns out Kurosawa also has a new Japanese film coming out next year

“When we were making Wife Of A Spy, I simply asked Kiyoshi Kurosawa to make a film set in Kobe. This time I told him he was free to make whatever he wanted, which is as simple an instruction as you can get. What resulted is unmistakably a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film that is not science fiction or horror, but a whole new genre.

Very exciting news!

[diamonds]

In addition to Serpent's Path and Chime, Kurosawa now has a third(!) film set to premiere this year: a thriller titled Cloud.

Written by Kurosawa, the story centres on Ryosuke Yoshii, an enigmatic young man who tries to make money by reselling shrewdly obtained goods on the internet under the pseudonym ‘Ratel’.

Reflecting on the inspirations behind Cloud, Kurosawa said: “In the obscure corners of modern-day Japan, violent incidents sometimes occur for seemingly no reason whatsoever. When the causes are investigated, it becomes apparent that a system of sorts exists through which petty grudges and frustrations are accumulated and blown out of proportion by the internet. I wondered if such a phenomenon would serve as subject matter for an action film and began developing this project.”

[therewillbeblus]

That sounds like a really interesting project for KK, retooling his approach to simultaneously tangible but mysterious motivations and occurrences, by playing with genres and cultural ideas he has before but seemingly in a new way. I'm in

[Finch]

Third Window Films submitted this early Kurosawa film, Bumpkin Soup (1985), to the BBFC as part of their Director's Company series.