Party Without Honour or Humanity

Took time out from the busy schedule of Japanese films to throw a birthday party for my housemate Alexander's 25th birthday, although the theme was, none-the-less, Yakuza and i had to nip out for two hours just as it was getting off the ground to see School of the Holy Beast. There were red lightbulbs, a TV in the hall playing Yakuza films, Sake, and various Japanese snacks, although it turned out I was the only one dressed for the part with my overly ornate 70s shirt, suit and sunglasses. A list has been made of those who did not show up. The Yakuza do not easily forget. Fingers will be lost...

Wild Japan Day 7 - The School of the Holy Beast

I'd heard the name of Norifumi Suzuki's notorious 'nunsploitation' film spoken in hushed tones by cult film enthusiasts for a while, but nothing could prepare me for the experience of seeing The School of the Holy Beast on the big screen for the first time. It is quite simply jaw dropping in every respect. For one thing its almost impossible to make a more provocative film about Christianity, although Jasper Sharp's cautionary note regarding Japan's tiny and oft persecuted Christian community gives the film a very different shade then if it had been made in, say, Italy where the subject matter would carry a more relevant and politicised charge. But then I'm not sure that this makes the film necessarily conservative.

The film centres on Maya, a liberated woman of the sixties who joins St Clore's convent in order to discover the fate of her mother. The nun's are all lined up, like a military parade, and as Maya is introduced to them, the camera emphasises the rigidity of the life there by tracking between the lines of grim faces. The film is full of such striking compositions, which along with the sumptuous colour photography demonstrates the director's aesthetic talent, and the film's surprisingly high production values (the sexploitation film in the ailing film industry of the seventies wasn't merely a subgenre, but the bread and butter genre for studios like Toei and Nikkatsu, the latter of which moved its output exclusively to this area).

One of the film's alternative titles is 'The Transgressor', and this applies as much to the film's formal and generic transitions than it does to its protagonists. Beginning as a sex comedy with ample scenes of titilation, most notably the sequence in which Maya sneaks her over-sexed boyfriend and his sidekick into the nunnery to pleasure the frigid mother superior in her sleep, the film lurches into the horror genre, becoming increasingly dark in tone. Revelations are made concerning the death of Maya's mother, tortured to death at the hands of the Mother Superior after she was inpregnated by the priest Father Kukinuma, who bares the scars of Nagasaki on his back in the director's excurision into that most horrific of Japan's recent experiences. History seems to be repeating after another nun is found to be with child and is tried as a witch (she is forced to drink a bucket of salt water, then a crucifix is placed between her legs and the nuns form a circle around her, waiting for her to soil the lord and thus demonstrate her guilt). Such transitions also occur in individual scenes, such as the one in which Maya is punished by being whipped naked with rose stems whilst bound by thorned vines; starting in a fairly disturbing and sordid vein, it becomes increasingly poetic and beautiful with an impressionistic flurry of rose buds and tossed hair.

School of the Holy Beast takes the theme of sexuality in the convent, the subject of Michael Powell's excellent Black Narcissus and takes it to an extreme that is almost unthinkable in its capacity to shock. The truly astonishing thing is that whilst from the title and synopsis little would suggest a film of any depth, the end result is, somehow, utterly beautiful and sophisticated.

Wild Japan Day 7 - Funeral Parade of Roses

Funeral Parade of Roses perfectly integrates the disparate techniques of documentary, narrative and experimental cinema, whilst exploring the gay and transexual subculture of Tokyo. Director Toshio Matsumoto, couldn't have chosen a more subversive theme to comment upon his society, still struggling with the nationalism that had brought about the war and deeply patriarchal. Like his contemporary Hiroshi Teshigahara (Woman of the Dunes) Matsumoto also drew on influences from the French new wave and American avant garde, integrating them into a Japanese context and using them to deconstruct the dominant ideologies. Matsumoto incorporates and plays with the Oedipus legend, leading the film to a startlingly grotesque ending that has seemingly influenced Takashi Miike's attacks on the family unit such as Gozu (2004). The use of Oedipus is appropriate given that Nagisa Oshima has referred to the new wave as the 'fatherless generation, both literally (as a result of the war), but also as a symbolic act of defiance. A beautiful and disturbing masterpiece.

Funeral Parade of Roses has just been released by Eureka, which has recently emerged as one of the best DVD labels in the world and is particularly strong on releasing pivotal but neglected 1960s Japanese films. An essay on the film by me is forthcoming on www.firecracker-magazine.com

Wild Japan Day 6 - Yakuza Graveyard

Kinji Fukasaku is best known for his iconic and boat-rocking Battle Royale, but in the early seventies he was just as infamous, for directing a series of Yakuza films entitled Battles Without Honour or Humanity, which thoroughly drained any modicum of romantic allure from the gangster genre, presenting the tawdry, harsh and brutal world in unrelenting detail. Yakuza Graveyard, made slightly later, continues the theme of the loss of honour in the post war period, this time focusing on the character of a cop whose relationship with the Yakuza allows him a supply of information, but results in his identity becoming increasingly indistinguishable from the gangs he has infiltrated. As a summary of the plot suggests, this film must have been a huge influence on the burgeoning gangster genre that emerged in Hong Kong a decade later, which often features stories of undercover cops whose identities and loyalties have become confused through prolonged association with the enemy. As in these films the resulting moral ambiguity is the subject of the film as much as a product of the narrative.

Tetsuyo Watari plays the wayward cop, Kuroiwa, whose violent impulses earn him the criticism of his superiors, not for any moral reason but because its damaging their public image. But Kuroiwa, it turns out, is not an exception as it seems the majority of the police have business relationships with the Yakuza; they are just as corrupt and morally righteous to boot. This is borne out by Kuroiwa's discovery of the involvement of some high level detectives in a money laundering scheme and the fact that the police are operating a policy of cooperating with one of the gangs in an attempt to avert a gang war. In such a dog eat dog world, morality is the proverbial horse flogged to death. Alienated from the police Kuroiwa is drawn further into the seedy world of the Yakuza, which is itself experiencing an erosion of its code of honour; taking the wife of a man he has killed as his mistress and becoming blood brothers with a Korean crime lord, who leads the gang that the police have decided to persecute. The fact that he is criticised for his actions only serves to emphasise the hypocrisy with which he is surrounded.

Meiko Kaji (Female Convict Scorpion, Lady Snowblood), who surely deserves the accolade of queen of exploitation, plays a half Korean moll, whose alienated sense of self and encounters with racism have lead her to heroin abuse. These two damaged, divided human beings are drawn to one another, and together form a precarious unit somewhere outside both Japanese society and the Yakuza underworld. Hardly romantic outsiders, however, their brief and violent relationship is ended when Kuroiwa is gunned down by the police, after he kills a Yakuza with whom they are doing business. If his death in the arms of Meiko Kaji is something of a cliche, stretching right back to Jean Gabin's performance in Quai de brumes, it is certainly given more spice with Kuroiwa, defiant to the last, raising his fingers in rage at his killers and to death itself. Kuroiwa's increasingly schitzo actions make the film an interesting but confusing ride, but the its ultimate point is unescapably clear: in this world honour is dead and buried. Fukasaku's cynicism is immaculate, as always.

Wild Japan Day 6 - Branded to Kill

Finally saw Seijun Suzuki's classic Branded to Kill (1967) a brilliantly abstract gangster film and perhaps the closest Japanese cinema has come to the playful abandon of Godard's early experimental pieces - before he lurched into Maoist didacticism. No. 3 Killer Hanada, played by chipmunk faced Joe Shisido who had surgical implants in his cheaks to increase his star appeal, has returned to town with a wife in tow. Despite his marriage he is soon recruited by the Yakuza and then by a beautiful femme fatale Misako, on a series of missions that will ultimately see him taking on his rivals for the spot of no. 1 Killer. To be honest the story is rather impregnable on first viewing, but the film's visual style and inventive set-pieces make up for any lack of clarity. Suzuki's studio, Nikkatsu, however didn't feel the same way and famously fired the idiosyncratic director on the basis that his films made no sense (Branded to Kill was apparently his last chance to make a 'normal' film, and the chaotic result amounts to the director giving the studio the finger in defiance).

In narrative terms the film fluctuates between bizarre set-pieces showing Hanada's escapades as a hitman and various bedroom scenes with his new boss Misako and his wife, who is eventually recruited by his enemies as a spy. I use the term 'bedroom' advisedly, because Hanada and his frisky wife (who wanders around much of the film naked save for a rather contented fox fur) seem to have a penchant for screwing anywhere but the bed. In what must be one of the most brilliant sex scenes ever filmed Suzuki alternates shots of the immaculately crisp white sheets of the bed and shots of the newleyweds fucking on the stairs, on the floor, in the kitchen etc... At one point the camera tracks from the bed and prowls around the house, checking all the likely locations, eventually finding the couple screwing in the rain outside the window. These scenes sum up the ethos of the film, which does anything but what is expected of it. Hanada, for instance, has a rather random fetish for boiled rice and can often be found in a corned, a rice cooker wedged between his thighs, inhaling the smell and muttering 'it doesn't get any better'.

The scenes with the wife are in sharp contrast to those with the morbid and ice-cold Misako, who is always shot in the pouring rain (even if she is indoors), indeed she enters the film driving a convertible with the top down in a storm, picking up Hanada at the road side after an early mission goes awry. Our first insight into her character is the dead starlings that are nailed to her rear view mirror in the place of the more conventional fluffy dice. Her bedroom is a dark, surreal space decorated by thousands of butterflies and entomological specimens, one of which Hanada is destined to become.

This is a film that recalls Godard's famous statement that 'to make a film all you need is a girl and a gun', and not necessarily even a plot. As Hanada makes love to the two women he is never far from a firearm - call it a professional precaution - indeed he often makes use of his pistol as a sexual aid, caressing smooth naked flesh with the metallic barrel in a juxtaposition that hints at the violent nature of his sexuality, or the sexual nature of his violent career, and explores the lack of boundaries between these two parts of his life.

The final sequences, in which Hanada is besieged in his apartment by the seemingly omnipresent Killer no. 1, leads to a hilarious Billy Wilder-esque episode of the pair eating, sleeping and living together at gunpoint. No. 1 is so unwilling to let Hanada out of his sight that he urinates down his own trouser leg and then casually takes off his shoe and empties a cascade of water onto the floor.

Wild Japan Day 5 - The Great Melee

Having never been released anywhere before this is the rarest film in the Wild Japan Festival, and deserves a slightly longer entry.

Virtually unknown in the West Eiichi Kudo has been linked to Masaki Kobayashi (Hara Kiri, Kwaidan) and Kihachi Okamoto (Sword of Doom) for producing jidai-geki that contain in allegorical form lucid commentaries on the political climate of 1960s Japan. Set in 1678 against the political intrigues of the Edo period, The Great Melee (1964) has thus been read as a commentary of the student movement of the sixties, which was also subjected to scrutiny in Yasuzo Masumura’s A False Student (1960). But quite apart from its social relevance The Great Melee, which follows the efforts of a group of reformists to assassinate the corrupt official Sakai who is gunning for the throne, deserves recognition as one of the great Samurai films (chanbara).
The film opens with the intimate scene of Jinbo, a high-ranking retainer, taking a relaxing bath with his wife Kayo. However their idyll is rudely disrupted by the arrival of Nakajima, a friend of Jinbo’s on the run from the Shogun’s inquisitors, who are zealously purging the country of dissidents. His decision to shelter his friend implicates him and he is arrested, but as he is led away his wife runs after him and is brutally slain. Jinbo barely has time to cry her name before his captors are themselves attacked. Managing to escape in the confusion he is taken in by a self confirmed wastrel, a ronin who lives by gambling and has sold everything but his sword. This man, though utterly apolitical, gives a fine speech critiquing the samurai class rejecting their code of honour and insisting instead that it is bribery and corruption that perpetuates the system, his words echoing many a student's. Jinbo drifts back out onto the street only to be recruited into a radical reformist group by a mysterious and beautiful robed woman named Miya.

Meanwhile the captured samurai are tortured for information by Satai and his inquisitors in a sequence shot in a style that is very almost cinema verité, which lends it a sense of immediacy and links the material more closely to the real life events of the time, the aftermath of the student’s violent run ins with the riot police – who, with their wooden batons, were the closest thing to the Samurai in modern, demilitarised Japan. Just as a trace of 1960s politics has entered the genre film, so too has some of the filmmaking techniques of the period. In particular the film alternates between the gorgeous static compositions and fluid tracking shots typical of the chanbara, and the spontaneous hand held camera-work that was emerging within the aesthetic of the new wave directors. Used almost exclusively in recording the chaotic scenes of arrest and the final epic battle sequence from which the film derives its name, this violent change in aesthetic lends these scenes a force of impact that is lacking in more classical renderings of the genre.

But if this is an allegory of the student movement it is certainly not a morally clear-cut one. As in Masumura’s A False Student, the anti-authoritarianism of the student movement, Zengakuren communists in its most radical manifestation, is also found wanting. The reformist group that the largely sympathetic Jinbo finds himself connected to is made up of a colourful cast of characters, which includes Kasaka, a mad monk who believes Buddha has requested him to assasinate Satai; Hayao Bessho, an impoverished samurai whose large family lives in a cramped, tumble-down house; and Okabe, an official who is prone to bouts of drunkeness. It is Miyo, however, who is the centre of the group, its chief recruitor and the only one who makes an effort to reassemble its members after the Shogun’s crack down. It is clear that they would be lost without her leadership, although she herself is loosing faith in the movement, most probably because the majority of its male members see her more as a comfort woman than a collaborator. In one of the films many brilliant set-pieces Kasaka rapes Miyo in a Buddhist temple, to the sound of monks chanting, and dissuades her from screaming by tearing a hole in the paper wall so she can witness the Shogun’s men who have the area staked out in search of her.

Eventually the reformists hatch a plot to assassinate Tsunashige, the heir to throne and the man through whom Sakai seeks to weild power, during a formal ceremony, demonstrating beyond doubt to the bombed-out postwar generation that traditions can only lead to trouble. The narrative is brilliantly paced, with the screw of tension turning tighter than one of Satai’s torture devices until all hell breaks loose in a closing battle that is both horrific and farcical; wading through paddy fields and fighting outside the gates of the town, which are opened and closed and then opened again in a gesture of futility, the assassins are seemingly incapable of bringing the death blow to their target although they do manage to finish off a few innocent bystanders in the process.

The film is profoundly concerned with death and the meaning of life in death. In an earlier scene, when one of the reformists broaches the possibility of turning in their comrades for clemency, his comrade pulls him over to the coffin of his dead brother and knocks of the lid to reveal a mangled corpse captured in a striking overhead shot, to remind him of the consequences of such a decision. Miya recruits Jinbo on the verge of suicide over his wife’s death, convincing him to lay down his life for a worthy cause instead. However after the plot is laid down and Okabe announces that ‘our deaths will bring peace to the land’, several close-ups of the conspirators’ morose faces indicate that life is not so easily squandered. In the calm before the storm Kudo takes time to gauge the reactions of his assassins, one of many moments in the film that contribute to the excellent characterisation and ensure the success of the complex plot. The poor samurai enjoys the company of his family for the last time before killing them, so that they don’t starve after he has died, and lays their bodies out carefully upon the tatami. We don’t see the act of murder, rather the film marks the transition between a happy family and a mausoleum with a single cut; the sound of the children laughing still lingering on the soundtrack and in the man’s ears as he walks away for the final time. The film reminds us that the divide between life and death is a blink of the eye. Later he will carve into a wooden post the words ‘Hayao Bessho lay down his life for justice’ in a final bid to be remembered, before erasing the words himself.

Finally, and ironically, it is not either of the assassins who kill Tsunashige, but the gambling wastrel, who happens upon his friend Jinbo’s body and, taking his broken sword, launches a singlehanded attack on the heir, who, having only just recovered from the last attack, is walking with Sakai, both of them engaged in relieved laughter. The film closes with a stunned Sakai, sent mad by the realisation that he has lost his opportunity to gain power, he places the corpse of Tsunashige back in his palanquin and sets about attempting to convince his men that he is still alive and they should carry on with the ceremony as planned.

Wild Japan Day 5 - Hausu

This running commentary on the Wild Japan Film Festival has become more of a staggering commentary. However i think i have caught up with myself, until the double bill tonight that is...

Imagine, if you can, a combination of Sailor Moon, The Wizard of Oz, Scooby Doo and The Evil Dead. Then imagine that this bizarre hybrid was shot on the cheap with special effects and backgrounds applied directly onto the frame in gaudy primary colours (by director Nobuhiko Obayashi personally), with a saccharine sweet soundtrack that occasionally descends into incongruous sections of funk, the whole thing being shot with pop art visuals so wonderfully and excruciatingly kitsch that they would make Andy Warhol pale in shame. The strange image that is now pirouetting in your brain is still a million miles off the synaesthetic madness of Hausu, which is quite frankly beyond the capabilities of language to describe.

Six Japanese Schoolgirls, who are introduced with cheesy poses as Melody, Mac, Sweet, Fantasy, Scholar and Kung-fu, take their school vacation in a mansion owned by the wheelchair bound aunt of one of their classmates. It soon transpires (to the audience at least – the girls, though cute, are far from bright) that the house is possessed by the bitter spirit of the aunt, who actually died waiting for her husband to return from war - his departure is shown as a flashback in silent movie footage, which in any other context would seem stylised. She has now taken it upon herself to kill all virgins dreaming of marriage who have the misfortune of wandering, like Goldilocks or Hansel and Gretal, into the imposing crooked house on the hill.

The film’s humour lies in the girl’s utterly naïve worldview, which is expressed by the film’s twee visual style and consciously cheesy acting, being very slowly hacked away by the schlock horror unleashed upon them by the house and an evil white cat named Blanche with glowing green eyes. One girl is electrocuted by a light, the screen flashing white with yellow lightning bolt sparks in the fashion of a child’s drawing, another is decapitated, her head levitating around the screen biting backsides until it is finally turned into a melon and served for dinner. But the film’s most triumphant, silly and grotesque set-piece occurs when Melody is eaten by the grand piano shot from above as her mangled limbs fly around the room and the piano fills with blood, painted on the screen in bright scarlet. The only things that remain are her severed fingers, bouncing up and down on the blood-spattered keys.

Trapped in the house the girls dream of their prince charming Mr Togo, a man with far too large sideburns to ever be a reliable hero, coming to rescue them. However after he is turned into a pile of bananas(!) after an argument with an insane melon salesman, the rescue mission falls on the new stepmother of one of the girls, eager to demonstrate her maternal worth. This is a woman who is so perfect that her scenes are shot like 70s haut-couture adverts, with her silk scarf and preened hair billowing out behind her by an industrial fan that seems to follow her wherever she goes. In short she is too perfect, too oblivious to the violent reality of the world that she spontaneously combusts on entering the house, an image of flames superimposed onto her petite silhouette.

If you thought that A Chinese Ghost Story (Siu-Tung Ching) was strange, with its incompetent stop-motion zombies and break dancing monk, then this will take you to a new transcendent realm of strangeness. It is quite simply the essence of cinematic innovation, or in the words of someone I met outside the screening ‘I feel like I never need to go to the cinema again’.