Two Films by Kaneto Shindo

Kuroneko (1968)/ Kaneto Shindo

Kuroneko is a work of remarkable significance. Its director, Shindo, is not interested in philosophical insinuations – in that, he looks at characters as being merely skin deep. At best, his most noble aim is to confirm the depth to which humanity will relegate itself to when confronted with a dire situation. Existence in a Shindo film is invariably a state of crisis: it’s a civil war, a nuclear holocaust, or a cast-away family. The situation becomes Shindo’s excuse to present his characters as machinery – devices of blunt survival that conduct their livelihood like one may conduct commerce. As such, the characters in his symptomatic Onibaba are involved in pursuits that are blatantly material: they are looking either to get fed, or to get laid. The latter film’s emphasis on its characters’ antediluvian animalism is so strong that when one of the characters climbs down into a pit whose bottom is populated by around forty human skeletons, it comes across as perfectly ‘normal’ – a sequence one would otherwise look at as being grotesque, or repelling.

Shindo is not interested in endearing any character to the audience; instead, presenting them as cardboard cutouts – one dimensional executioners of a single motivation. Despite this peculiar approach, however, Shindo is a humanist. His approach is of revelation, not of obscurity. In that, his direction of cinema functions in a manner completely opposite to Kubrick’s : Kubrick locates the one-note in a three-dimensional human being, Shindo locates the three-dimensionality in a one-note machine. In effect, Shindo’s cinema functions in the particular faith that even within the assigned social roles and thus, the accompanying quality-code – a ghost will be evil, a samurai will be brave, a peasant will be hungry, a young woman will be a nymph - there are flourishes of unexpected ‘humanity’. The schism where the machines tire of their pretense and divulge a human motive. 

The headiest moment in Onibaba is its final : when a demon-faced mother, who has hitherto been presented as a single-minded, battle-ram of greed, jealousy and lust, leaps and yelps at the camera : ‘I am a human being!”. Such sudden revelation of humanity happens much earlier in Kuroneko, perhaps the most ‘atmospheric’ of all Japanese films (notwithstanding Kobayashi). At around the half-way mark, the mother-daughter duo, who have until that point, devoted themselves to being cat-vampire ghouls who like to bite into samurai necks, suddenly reveal a side of them that is very ‘human’ : they fall in love (maternal and romantic, respectively) with a samurai assigned to get rid of them. The samurai is the son, and the husband they were waiting for while they were alive, but has returned only now, when they are dead. Such metaphysical distinctions, however, do not stop them from relinquishing their statuses as evil spirits and indulging in more human desires. One is punished with Hell for such violation, the other chooses to retract to her status as a vengeful spirit. The point is, however, that Kuroneko is a relevant film. Why? Because it is poignant while largely being about machinery; because it is perceptive without being philosophical.

The Performer

Outrage (2009)/ Kitano Takeshi

Kitano is sometimes a circus comedian, sometimes a yakuza gangster. The eventual ambitions of the two vocations vary a great deal: the first makes people laugh, the second kills them. But the method(s) they employ to reach that end are very similar – both of them are primal, direct and confrontational. The practitioners of circus-comedy or yakuza-crime don’t precisely employ subtlety; the success of their performance depends on how much they overwhelm their audiences. As such, there is an element of the bizarre in both, of a certain type of outlandishness that can bludgeon its receiver into submission. Both are also marked by a pressing need to project a particular effortlessness in their performance, regardless of how strictly they have to adhere to a specific list of rituals to sustain the vitality of their performance. It is in these zones of overlapping between crime and comedy that Kitano’s filmography lies. A lot of viewers misunderstand him as a director of unrestrained violence, but that’s only a critical cliché, and one that obscures more than it reveals. He is essentially a director of performance, and as such, likes to put on a show all the time. Therefore, much like anyone else with a thing for showiness ( like the comedienne or the criminal), his first target is to elicit a response; he doesn’t care if it is a loud guffaw or an extended grimace as long as he provokes some sort of a reaction. He is vulgar, because he is gunning straight for the most pedantic of human tendencies, i.e. to enjoy humour or perversely, enjoy violence. In Outrage, violence is funny precisely because it is so exaggerated. It assumes the form of a vaudevillian, Grand Guignol performance – with chopsticks piercing ear-cavities, dental drills ravaging through disagreeable mouths and necks getting snapped. Like the circus comedian or the yakuza gangster, Kitano’s idea of cinema is to batter the audience into immediate capitulation, even while feigning decency through it all. Therefore, the images of a Kitano film are always very strong and provocative, and all of them pass by with great urgency (even when characters stand on beaches, they await a shootout). Which is why, Takeshi’s is the most prototypical Kitano film (imagery at varying levels of vulgarity) that passes by quickly, and Zatoichi (except the ending) is the least. With Kitano, crime and comedy are no longer acts of any implicit moral value – so there is no immediately evident difference between killing people and making them laugh. Both are just performances, meant to be carried out at amplified levels of intensity. Outrage is actually the best Kitano film title, because it so briefly sums up what each Kitano film is. Crime and comedy are interchangeable quantities in a Kitano film, because he shoots his crime like others shoot their comedy, and he shoots his comedy like others shoot their crime.

Sono Sion, the lampoon

Suicide Club(2002)/ Sono Sion

 

IIt would not be unfair to call Sion Sono a distant cousin of Kubrick himself, who inherited the contempt for authoritative figures and a similar wit from the great American, but failed to inherit the tenets of his meticulous method. For while Kubrick realised the potential of a satire to quickly become a self-parody, slip off the thin line it walked and become a farce; Sion Sono does not. Therefore, even as Kubrick painstakingly constructed each of his films, so as to preserve the curious balance between a satire and a farce, Sono’s impulsive filmmaking makes him fail that test quite often. It is for the same reason that even as Kubrick made a light-hearted black comedy with Dr. Strangelove, the undercurrent of livid sarcasm and anger remained undeniable; but with Suicide Club, Sono suffers from a tendency to be so fickle-minded about his own film, that the anger is prone to being diluted, purely because it is spread over so variable a schema. Suicide Club’s opening scene is much similar to the engaging climax of Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, with scenes of horrifying and endless destruction (54 school girls jump under an oncoming metro in the former, and the world goes up in nuclear flames in the latter), played to the tune of a comforting soundtrack – as if mocking our own inability to laugh at ourselves, while consistently challenging us to laugh at the grotesque splatter – seen through not the conventional prism of sympathy, grief or tragedy, but through ridicule, and even, derision. It would not be wrong to say that Suicide Club is a Tarantino spoof of the brain-splatter genre; the only difference being that the there is a greater point than the spoof itself.

Kaneto Shindô: Images of Excess - I

Kaneto Shindô

Shindô’s images are full of glut of the most literal sort. He shoots human bodies as a director of a war film may shoot ammunition: objects that are as vulnerable to destruction as they are capable of it. As such, Shindô separates the purely corporeal nature of a human body from its spiritual one – much like directors of pornography or slashers – and thus, identifies them purely as material articles (and later debris).  Therefore, human bodies in a Shindô film do not belong to (or in Shindô’s case, are controlled by) a human being who initiates/performs an action, but are often, centers of action themselves – as such, much like ammunition in a war film, they are battered, they batter, involved in fornication, destroyed, and in some cases, left to crumble – just like they are caressed, repaired, or manufactured. But through all of these, they can never relinquish their status as first and foremost, things with no greater purpose than mere existence (and whatever they can get in the course of it). In Shindô films, characters eat not to sate hunger, but to feed their bodies and keep the mechanism of the bodies functional. The characters in a Shindô film, ugly and always sweating profusely, look as if they belong to the machine yard – not as the workers who run the machines, but as the machines.

Some Shindo bodies, starting with Children of Hiroshima (1952)

 

 

And from Kuroneko (1968),

Also, of course, from Onibaba (1964)

While one may equate his treatment of human bodies as a sly form of objectification or even an aesthetical (perhaps moral) precursor to the torture porn that is peddled as horror in the cinema of today (Hostel and Saw, yes, but also the first six minutes of Saving Pvt. Ryan; gratuitous viscera as spectacle), he shoots faces like living entities. Thriving, blooming and flourishing entities. For Shindô, the cut between a long-shot of a human body and a close-up of a human face is not merely a perfunctory or a liturgical exercise, but almost a complete change of scene – as if the two shots on either side of the cut contain two different entities altogether – as such, the cut from a long-shot to a face does not alter just the camera-subject distance, but Shindô’s entire human approach towards the subjects of the two different shots. For while the long-shot contains the body that Shindô has nothing but vulgar disregard for, the close-up contains the intimidating face of a human being. It is in the long-shot that the ghost in a Shindô film lives; it is in the close-up that it becomes a horror. Fortunately for Shindô, there is at least something that he finds worthy of regard (a human face). Unfortunately for him, he shoots it in a state of eternal suspicion.

Below, some of Shindô’s faces - one from Kuroneko and the rest, Onibaba.

 

Shindo Face

Kurosawa's Scope

The Bad Sleep Well (1960)

Kurosawa understood the nature of cinema or a motion picture at its most plastic and molecular level - as an assembly of pieces of film. As a result, a Kurosawa film may often resemble the most basic device of film itself : the film strip. More than anyone else's, it is easy to envision his films as moving 'horizontally' (i.e., the assemblage of the pieces of film, and not the chronology) The horizontal nature of his films is compounded by the infamous usage of the 'horizontal wipe' transition - wherein one image would be pushed into oblivion  another, oncoming one, that would slide in from the right. More than that, however, he lent his film a strictly horizontal quality by composing in the TohoScope - the Japanese comeback to the Cinemascope. 

While the American understanding of the 'Scope was rather businessman-like, and focused  on 'scale' (like Americans often are), Kurosawa's reception of the aspect-ratio was that of the mountaineer faced with a greater height. If the American approach was that of accommodation, his was one of placement. The West took to the Scope as a bigger boat - one that can fit in more people (the method of quantity), directors in the east sought to fit in the same number of people as earlier, but arrange them on the frame area in a manner that created more 'points of action' in the frame - a quality of the Scope that Tati brought to consummation with Playtime.

Following are a few images from one of the earlier Kurosawa works shot on a TohoScope - The Bad Sleep Well.  The final image is that of Mifune standing in the background of the image (the Japanese graphic art is composed often in three planes) on a garbage heap as two characters converse in the fore. Mifune was a beast of a man - one of the few who could suggest more than just the presence of a  human body when placed in a cinematic long-shot - Kurosawa used this quality in all the films he made with Mifune.

 And the 'beast'.