The Briefest of Reviews from 1970

Dodes'ka-den (どですかでん) is Kurosawa's first color film. I thought it was ok. Sad, but with lots of lovely parts. It's intended as a kind of Chekhovian story, with comedy, love, tragedy, fantasy, etc. The title Dodes'ka-den means, apparently, "clickety-clack", and the metaphor here is the train, which rolls by the lives of the poor people that this film describes. The characters are beautifully sketched here. Dodes'ka-den was also produced by the great director Kon Ichikawa. In any case, this is not the place to start with Kurosawa, but it is very good nonetheless.

War-torn Countries

Kon Ichikawa's 1959 war film Fires on the Plain may be the bleakest film I've ever seen. It's certainly up there with unbelievably depressing fare like Dancer in the Dark. Fires on the Plain (part of my current mini-obsession with cinema from J-pan) is a grim story told in the very last days of World War II. It's set on a Philippine island and follows three Japanese soldiers as they walk from one end of the island to another part of it and try to survive. Well, sort of. It's really just this long, endless march of doom. The thing is, the film is absolutely brilliant. It's magnificently shot and beautifully composed. The acting is wonderful and the script is pretty damn near genius: Kon Ichikawa's wife is the screenwriter, and she pares down the novel so that at least fifty percent of the film proceeds without dialogue. It's great writing. The outlook of this film, though, is relentlessly dour, and though it's never oppressive or boring, it's a hard film to watch (but definitely worth it.) The last Kon Ichikawa movie I saw I moved to my all-time favorites list. Fires on the Plain doesn't have the hope that The Burmese Harp has, so I didn't love this film as much as the last one, but it's undeniably powerful.

I also saw Víctor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive (El Espíritu de la Colmena), which is a quiet film about a young girl confronting a monster in war-ravaged Franco-era Spain. It's lyrical and beautiful and completely compelling. It's also beautifully shot, with a hexagonal beehive motif running through the film. I loved this film (and I am very grateful to Criterion for putting films like The Spirit of the Beehive and Fires on the Plain out so that I can see them. Watching these Criterion DVDs is like attending film class. It's so awesome.)

Door-to-door Sales

A man came to my door today and knocked quite loudly. Truth be told, he woke me from a nap I had just settled down to about ten minutes prior And Ma in her kerchief and I in my cap... Anyway, he was hocking security systems. They do that door-to-door nowadays, doncha know? Maybe it's because I was off-guard (having just awakened), maybe it's because he was so darn persistent, maybe because it really is about time I got a security system for this house before I have to leave it all by itself again for an extended period of time, but I took the bait and signed on the dotted line with this guy. The contract—get this—is for a whopping thirty-six months! I don't think I've ever committed to anything for thirty-six months. I mean, even college doesn't count. You can change majors or cut classes or drop out, even. Three whole years of security monitoring, paid monthly. It's a long (gay) marriage.

Today, I'm reading a book called The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities. I like it, for the most part. The author, Robert McRuer does this thing—a lot of intellectuals do it—where he makes up a word by combining two words. It drives me crazy. People do it all the time in academic prose and you've probably seen me do it once in a while (shame on me). Like this, from page 39 of the book:

A Boy's Own Story and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name were both published in 1982, when the cultural phenomenon I call "the Queer Renaissance" had only just begun. Through an examination of these two very different coming-out stories, I want to flaunt the ways coming out has been reinvented in the Queer Renaissance as a myth of queer (op)positionality.

See what he's doing there with (op)positionality. He is able to discuss the queer subject's positioning of him- or herself at the same time he is able to call to our attention the fact that this position is created in opposition to an already present normative (and contrary) position. Writers do it all the time. (This same writer keeps saying "an/other" too.) I'm not sure why this device bugs me so much. Anyway, it does bug me. Maybe because it feels like a kind of pun: something the writer thinks is funny or clever but at which I can only groan.

I took this book to the coffee shop with me to read today, but I also took a book of plays because I get so tired of reading only scholarship all the time. I need some plays in my life to help me swallow all of that difficult theorizing. So I took this book Fruit of Your Loins by Carl Morse with me to the coffee shop. And I turned it over just in case a passerby might happen to glance over at the table and see the book. I didn't want anyone to freak out if they saw the cover. It was rather closety of me, but I couldn't help it. The coffee shop is with the lord and I don't want to upset anyone innocently reading The Screwtape Letters. Sheesh! Maybe I'm regressing.

This afternoon I watched Ugetsu, a Japanese ghost tale from the 1950s. I liked it fairly well. It didn't have the fun technical flourishes to which I've become accustomed from clever 1950s filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Melville and Satyajit Ray, so I have to admit I was a little bored. Or maybe it was the story, which is a kind of conventional lesson-learning tale about greed. It was no Kon Ichikawa movie, that's for sure. (Have you rented The Burmese Harp yet? If you want a good 1950s Japanese film, go for that one.)

Kon Ichikawa #1

I'm adding a movie to my favorite movies of all time list. I saw it today. It's Kon Ichikawa's 1956 Japanese film The Burmese Harp. It's about the ravages of war and it's a beautiful piece of cinematic poetry. I had decided after twenty minutes that I thought it was brilliant, but I had no idea just how much I was going to love this film. Check it out!