BottleGourdPlant Reviews

Akira (1988)

AKIRA and the Hibakusha

[1 August 2009]

Otomo Katsuhiro's AKIRA (1988) is an animated confrontation with various postwar anxieties that have remained repressed and forgotten in the midst of contemporary Japan. On a surface level it might be difficult to detect such anxieties in AKIRA; however, whence juxtaposed with a clearer understanding of "what happened" in the years following 1945, Katsuhiro's masterpiece can be realized as a vivid rendition of submerged history. AKIRA gives viewers insights into these postwar anxieties with a covert emphasis on the plight of the Hibakusha.

AKIRA opens with the destruction of Tokyo. A flashing white semicircle engulfs the city, an occurrence connected to World War Three. From the beginning of the film, war is placed at the forefront in remembrance of Hiroshima and Nagasaki preventing viewers from overlooking the destructive memory of the Atom Bomb. This powerful, lasting, and retrospective image introduces the viewer to the world of AKIRA.

The mutant children of AKIRA can be looked at in light of the fated Hibakusha (Hibakusha = "Atomic Bomb Victim"). The Hibakusha were grossly disfigured by the atomic blast and those not directly affected fell ill to latent radiation poisoning. Due to fears of infection, the Japanese masses rejected the Hibakusha as lepers, aberrations that should have died. It is interesting, though, in such a postwar environment, Japan took up the façade of The Victim of WWII, replacing the aggressive political overtone that previously dominated the country's attitude towards war due largely in part to the incredible nature of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. As The Victim, one might think Japan would have embraced the Hibakusha since the Hibakusha were the direct victims of the bomb; but no -- the Hibakusha were sloughed aside as nothing more then monstrous ciphers.

The understanding of the Hibakusha helps the viewer wholly understand the mutant children of AKIRA. The children are grotesque in appearance with white hair and purplish-gray wrinkled skin that looks as if it is dripping, resembling the keloid scars that plagued many Hibakusha. The children wield special powers and have special insights into the entity known as Akira, similar to the "special knowledge" of the Hibakusha given their experience of first-handedly witnessing the atomic blast, an experience the bulk of humanity can never entirely comprehend. What is more, the mutant children have an ambiguous social position -- on one hand they are embraced by the government, exploited for their powers, and on the other, feared and treated as Other. In like manner, although the Hibakusha were recognized as the true Japanese victims, living representatives of war-product, they were rejected, hated.

Near the end of AKIRA, the protagonist, Tetsuo, comes across the remnants of the entity Akira in a secluded spherical laboratory beneath the Olympic Stadium finding nothing more than dissected organs kept in jars -- no body, just parts. This image of the dissected Akira reflects the fate of the Hibakusha after they died as scientists dissected their bodies to better understand the effects of radiation poisoning. Although the affiliation with the mutant children as Hibakusha might not be readily apparent, the image of the dissected Akira as Hibakusha cannot be avoided. Katsuhiro draws from historic reality in constructing these images and does not allow the viewer to overlook a realization of the Hibakusha as the shameful treatment in which postwar Japan received the Hibakusha is confronted despite a collective social desire to forget and submerge such a treatment.

Animation imbues Katsuhiro with a forum that allows him to depict a fantastical reality with impossible individuals. His statements regarding WWII and the Hibakusha would not have been as pointed if depicted absent of animation. By using the unreality of animation to translate history, Katsuhiro successfully comments on the massive human error of 1945 and the years that followed.

***The history included in this analysis, alongside the specific insight regarding the mutant children, is taken from Professor Aaron Kerner's lecture on AKIRA which took place on 4/8/8 in CINE 401 (National Cinema Japan) at San Francisco State University.

Daughter Rite (1980)

Citron vs Bazin

[26 July 2009]

Michelle Citron manipulates home movie footage in DAUGHTER-RITE (1980) to get viewers to understand the narrator's inability to move past memories that continually loop in her mind. These looping images (memories), sometimes moving in reverse, but always in a sort of copped-up fashion prompts the viewer to contemplate the difficultly one encounters whilst remembering memories from one's childhood in an exact, photographic reminiscence. Eeriness dominates Citron's images despite the happy grins and playfulness of the children -- it is assumed, alongside the narration, that under the happiness there is much confusion and pain.

Andre Bazin argues in his essay, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," that photography frees the image from factors such as time and space, a theory challenged and refuted by Citron's approach in DAUGHTER-RITE. There is a moment in Citron's film when the figures walk down a sidewalk then are re-wound when they reach a certain point on the sidewalk into reverse motion, then forward, backward, perpetually like a pianist playing the same scale up and down cyclically. These figures are not freed from time, but tortured by its fluctuation: time becomes unnatural and the viewer's realistic connection to the imagery, tainted. This forward/reverse technique challenges Bazin's other essay, "The Evolution of the Language of Cinema" where he argues that the long-take/depth of focus filmic device amplifies realism due to the absence of cuts, granting viewers a choice to scan the screen and look at what s/he chooses absent of spoon-fed cutting. This yoyo-like forward/reverse sequence in DAUGHTER-RITE does not cut, thus rendering it a long-take; however, since reverse motion is not technically a representation of "reality," per se, the amplified realism Bazin insists should be present in such a long-take is cracked by Citron's surrealistic forward/reverse/forward/reverse technique. Despite choppiness, the cyclic image forces viewers to meditate on the same imagery in a prolonged interlude. Choices become limited and topical realism is diminished. Viewers become hypnotized after all such "image-scanning" choices are exhausted and relinquish the supposed free-choice to the repeated imagery.

Citron's film, although not widely known or recognized, is a fundamental piece in understanding several rudiments of film theory. DAUGHTER-RITE should be considered amidst the most basic strives to understand cinematic ontology.

Xala (1975)

Notes on Ousmane Sembene's XALA

[6 November 2007]

The protagonist of XALA, El Hadji, is a government official in Senegal and the living embodiment of what colonization has done to a modern post-colonial mind with a frame of reference revolving around how a French official would manage Senegal. Failing to realize, sadly, the specific needs of his country, El Hadji is caught in a self-destructive mentality that forces him to ignore domestic issues and exploit the people in an eerily similar fashion reminiscent of his French predecessors.

Mother France is no longer running the show, yet El Hadji continues to act as if his country were a colony. The residual effects of colonialism emit from every corner of Senegal as the "free" government continues to conform to a standard that has long decomposed as the men in charge focus on personal, self-seeking pursuits. It is like one of those horribly sad factory farm chickens that are given growth hormones to make it get big really fast. Its legs have not quite developed to support the unnatural growth and eventually it dies of starvation because it cannot walk to the food and water. What is more, the people that do this to the chickens do not care of their suffering, but are looking only to make a profit. The Senegal depicted in XALA is a "developing" country, with the mentality of the first world riddled with acute egocentric sentiments that have nothing to do with politics but everything to do with social starvation.

El Hadji is black, just like his people, yet continues to oppress and forget them like the whites that set the standard years before. But this similarity in skin color will not offset the modes El Hadji feels is appropriate in exercising his dominance. The common people are viewed as undesirable garbage that should be sloughed aside and forgotten. El Hadji's refusal to speak the native Wolof is his last insult to his people for Wolof reminds him that he too is African, like the "garbage" outside. In order to serve the people, which should be the emphasis of his job, El Hadji must communicate with them in a way they understand (Wolof) but his self-hatred is so acute, he does not care to reach his people and communicate -- his wealth and position have blinded him. This absence of effective government-people communication perpetuates neocolonialist marginalization of the native people whilst the men in charge thrive, laugh, and expand.

Exaberating the situation is El Hadji's overt willingness to cling to so-called primitive and non-European traditions when they best fit him, satisfy his appetites, or fix a problem. Only for these brief, selfish interludes does El Hadji connect with his repressed past. As Frederick Ivor Case writes in 'Ontological discourse in Ousmane Sembene's Cinema' the Senegalese government depicted in XALA "rejects their own language, and value only those customs -- polygamy, for example -- that satisfy their need to dominate and indulge in themselves" (98). Doesn't El Hadji realize that French men (usually!) have one wife? What happened to his obsession with everything French? Further, due to his materialism and greed, a curse is put upon El Hadji rendering him impotent. Once again, solely for personal benefit, he "resorts" to African shamanistic traditions to reverse the curse. At the close of the film, El Hadji must undergo a humiliating ignominy at the hands of the forgotten townspeople, the very people he has subjugated in order to regain his manhood.

The treatment of El Hadji resonates in heightened overtones for the African audience that consumed the film. Francoise Pfaff notes in 'The Uniqueness of Ousmane Sembene's Cinema' that "XALA's theme of punishment of greed, selfishness, vanity, and waste is highly popular in African folktales, and so are topics of the lowly rebelling against the powerful" (17). A genius way to reach the masses and allow them to identify with his film, Sembene interweaves contemporary issues with familiar African themes to speak in a (cinematic) language people would readily understand. Such an audience would realize that El Hadji's impotence is representative of a certain refusal to "get up" and address pending needs through a lens that focuses on Senegal, not France.

At what cost could a country, tainted for so many years, break away from displaced truths and standards another country forced down its throat for a period that retrospectively seems like an eternity? What makes the neocolonialist model unique is the absence of a foreign, colonizing country and the subsistence of a previous foreign, colonizing country's ghost. The Senegalese government is confused by this ghost as the citizens wallow in ignorance, acceptance, and misery. It is a reverberating cycle that can only be broken when extreme reconstruction and rebirth is perused, not only by the government, but by the people. XALA's open-ended closure depicting the people spitting on El Hadji leaves the audience with a keen realization that power ultimately resides with the people. It is the people that can undo the "curse," the ghost, and bring things back to a place where their lives are not whitewashed with foreign culture and ideology.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

Experimental Revelation

[12 May 2007]

Postwar American experimental cinema was primarily founded on the creative endeavors of Maya Deren. Her psychodramatic narratives highly influenced works of the era and continue to influence contemporary filmmakers.

Deren and her husband, Alexander Hammid, collaborated in making MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943, written by Deren), the preeminent experimental film of the day (and arguably today). With a "nonrealistic spatial and temporal continuity"* and an innovatively skewed narrative, Deren and Hammid produced a film radically different from the traditional Hollywood narrative, forcing viewers to defamilarize themselves with perceptions of what movies "should be" and delve into the vast unexplored terrain of unconventional cinematic expression.

Unlike most surrealist or avant-garde films that present many unconnected images and non-linear strings of events, MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON wields a solid narrative despite repetitions, temporal lapses, and ambiguity. While the images and events in the film are indeed subjective, the film unfolds whilst producing cumulative meanings.

Topically, the film might appear pretentious and self-indulgent; however, when looked at closely, it presents rich commentaries on the duplicity of persona, self-reflexivity and the constraints of femininity as a nameless woman (Deren) travels through various subjective interludes. These interludes build off each other and are understood in their entirety when juxtaposed with what was seen previously (like a narrative). For example, two props are continually displayed, a knife and a key. Upon deeper (psycho)analysis, one might see the knife-like phallus as a symbol of power, and the key – an object that is "stuck" into a hole to "open" something – a symbol of discovery. The woman's manipulations of these two objects can be seen as her frustrations with her reality as a wartime woman where the privileges of power and discovery were limited by the default of gender. The eventual death of the woman at the end of the film is her penalty for experimenting with forbidden masculine privileges, a scenario reminiscent of the systematic exclusion of women from the work place after men returned from the war. Deren's almost prophetic understanding of this situation is brought to light in MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON.

Deren's experimental narrative approach to film-making is arguably one of the most commonly explored facets of cinematic experimental possibility. When it is realized that these types of films were virtually non-existent in the United States prior to the 1940s, the magnitude of influence Deren imposed upon American avant-garde film-making is understood in its entirety.

*Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin. Film History: an Introduction. New York, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.

The Gleaners & I (2000)

The Gleaning Mode

[29 April 2007]

The modes of documentary film-making, as brought out in Bill Nichols' INTRODUCTION TO DOCUMENTARY, evoke sensations that frame the viewer's connection to the subject. Some documentaries cause the viewer to come to his/her own conclusion, some prompt him/her to sit back, relax, and enjoy spoon-fed information given by the "voice of god." Others freely mix these modes, creating an approach that cannot be classified within the confines of one specific mode. Agnes Varda's THE GLEANERS AND I, a concoction of several documentary film modes, explores the reality achieved when various techniques are used to bring together a coherent whole.

Referring to expository documentary film, Nichols deems it "ideal… for conveying information… (adding) to our stockpile of knowledge." Varda presents viewers with paintings by Van Gogh and Millet of women in fields gleaning wheat, a reminder of the historic nature of the practice. Discussion of the Bible book Ruth is included where Ruth, an alien resident in the land of Israel benefits from the Mosaic Law's provision of gleaning. Although GLEANERS isn't a typical expository documentary, it holds true to many of the mode's characteristics. Interviews, narration, facts -- Varda allows viewers to walk away with a sense of enlightenment about gleaning. The sole purpose of expository documentary is to educate an audience on a subject, a purpose Varda employs by "educating" viewers about gleaning alongside related subjects of homelessness and art.

Expository documentaries have one characteristic not present in Varda's film: the nonexistent relationship between the audience and filmmaker. This absence achieves a greater emphasis on the material and retains a sense of detachment between the filmmaker, the subject, and the audience. Varda does indeed add to ther viewer's "stockpile of knowledge," and her commentary is along the same vein of the expository -- the only difference in her case is the viewer's active relationship with her voice.

GLEANERS exhibits aspects of the expository documentary while intermeddling a personal overtone that resonates with another mode -- the participatory mode, defined by Nichols as giving the viewer "a sense of what it is like for the filmmaker to be in a given situation and how that situation alters as a result." The filmmaker shows himself participating in the construction of the film. He tells viewers it is he who is filming, it is his voice narrating, and it is him who has put the film together. Likewise, as she relates factual information, Varda reminds viewers it is her presence that shapes the documentary. Nichols continues: "The first-person becomes prominent in the overall structure of the film… It is the filmmaker's participatory engagement with unfolding events that holds our attention." Subjectivity predominates due to Varda's participation and is amplified by her use of the performative mode. Defined as "a deflection of documentary emphasis away from a realist representation of the historical world and toward poetic liberties, more unconventional narrative structures, and more subjective forms of representation" (Nichols) Varda presents viewers with information, actively participates in the film's development, and includes her own bias. While these elements do not detract from the factualness of information she presents, one must remember it is presented in a way that serves Varda's purposes and reflects her opinions.

The performative aspect of GLEANERS is highlighted in intensely subjective moments Varda entertains. Another theme in her film is that of being thrown away like left-over food. Varda, an aging woman, does not want to be thrown away and forgotten like scraps in a field. Coupled with her commentary, viewers get to know Varda as a real person who feels. She is seen in her flat looking at her aging face in a mirror alongside forgotten heart-shaped potatoes she herself gleaned. In another interlude, we see her hand "glean" passing cars, plucking them from the air, symbolically alluding to herself as a gleaner of images and moments -- one who remembers and collects. Her strive to gather moments points to her desire to be remembered. Far from an invisible, faceless narrator, Varda is an active entity in her documentary, the central figure.

Varda uses yet another mode: "Instead of seeing though documentaries to the world beyond them, reflexive documentaries ask us to see documentary for what it is: a construct of representation" (Nichols). Viewers are highly aware of the camera in GLEANERS. Varda comments on her little video camera during a contemplative aside, shown looking into a mirror filming herself. Within this filmic self-consciousness, the viewer is forced to ask: Does the awareness of the film as "a film" detract from its message? What does documentary film-making as a mode of representation achieve? Evocative of Dziga Vertov's MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (1929), Varda, by blatantly revealing what we are watching is a film, causes viewers to ascend to "a heightened form of consciousness about (our) relation to a documentary and what it represents" (Nichols). Varda reflexively poses viewers with questions, unavoidable and penetrating. Viewers become players in her film, decision-making agents striving to make sense of the themes she presents, stringed together by the gleaning motif while searching for a correlation to how this information is conveyed through the film medium.

Nichols' modes come together in GLEANERS and form a fresh representation of documentary film-making. This nexus forces one to question the act of labeling films under a given "mode." A jumble of gleaned styles becomes a new style, a new mode, Varda's mode, and cannot be classified other than a creation of the generalized modes Nichols presents. Does another mode exist? Varda shows the product that can be achieved when these modes are fused into one. She shows how these modes are in fact derivatives of each other that seamlessly interweave to achieve a certain taste truth.

*See Bill Nichols' INTRODUCTION TO DOCUMENTARY

Bums' Paradise (2003)

The Subject-Reflexive Mode

[25 April 2007]

Tomas McCabe and Andrei Rozen seek to study the lives of homeless people who have taken refuge on an abandoned island-like landfill in Albany, California in BUMS' PARADISE (2003). The film tracks the individuals who reside on the landfill, develops their personalities and displays their shack-like homes, artwork, thoughts, and concepts of community. As this information is conveyed, viewers watch footage directly taken by one of the residents of the landfill, Rabbit. Viewers hear his voice and form a relationship with him and it is assumed that what is seen is Rabbit's perspective, given the intermingling commentary he provides from behind the camera. It is Rabbit's interaction with his fellow "residents" and his observations that jump-start the viewer's interest and keep it running. Within a mishmash of performative, reflexive, and participatory documentary film-making,* Rabbit compiles a document of what life is like for homeless people on an abandoned landfill. He documents what life is like for HIM on an abandoned landfill.

Yes, the film is about homeless people, but it is also about what happens when these people tell their own stories. What if people who lived in Nazi concentration camps were given cameras to document their experiences? Would the perspective be the same if, say, German (Nazi) filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl took the footage? Probably not. When the opportunity of articulation is extended to people other than the filmmaker, the viewer can expect a great deviation from what might be portrayed if the filmmaker shot the footage himself. Obviously, Riefenstahl never lived and suffered behind the fence of a concentration camp; her perspective would be radically different from the actual prisoners that might have taken this footage.

Similarly, in BUMS' PARADISE, McCabe and Rozen, as far as the viewer knows, have not lived lives of homelessness and are thus incapable of honestly exacting the essence of homelessness. McCabe/Rozen can sympathize and try to understand but will always fall short of ENTIRELY understanding. The film would have been how McCabe and Rozen, two non-homeless filmmakers view homelessness, versus how Rabbit, a homeless man, views himself. We clearly see the benefit of the latter: the audience is completely brought into Rabbit's realm, an act that transcends Rabbit from passive subject to filmmaker. It might be compared to a home video taken on a family camping trip. The "filmmaker" is mom, dad, or big uncle Jerry -- reality is captured as it unfolds. The camera, in this case, is not used for the purpose of presenting a deep, ethnographic study on the life of a family and the unraveling of a camping trip, but is simply filming. Likewise, Rabbit is simply filming, pure, unadulterated and free-flowing. Although McCabe and Rozen might have a preconceived agenda in making a film on homelessness (prompting the viewer's awareness of the suffering, injustice and poverty of these individuals) the viewer must remember McCabe/Rozen have not directly captured all of the images. They are nonexistent in their film and remembered within the glimmer of a fly's eye as it crawls up the wall of an adjacent bum's shack (albeit the editing room).

When this "subject-reflexive" mode of documentary film-making is juxtaposed with the traditional documentary that solely relates visuals from the perspective of the filmmaker, we see the great benefit of McCabe and Rozen's approach. For example, in Robert Flaherty's NANOOK OF THE NORTH (1922) a depiction of an Inuit family doing normal Inuit things is highlighted. Flaherty does not hand the camera to the father of the family and protagonist of the film, Nanook, but remains behind the camera capturing each shot himself. The viewer's perspective is Flaherty's and the subjects are seen as Flaherty sees them. While there could be great value in Flaherty's rendering of Inuit life, viewers must remember the images were taken and put together by Flaherty -- a living, feeling soul with a unique viewpoint. This viewpoint will inevitably trickle into the viewfinder, reflecting Flaherty's view of the Inuit life. His view might be correct, or it might be false, but one thing is for sure: it is Flaherty's (this viewpoint is also seen in Flaherty's covert manipulation of the shots and the settings he placed Nanook in). What would have happened if Nanook, like the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp, took the camera? Would NANOOK OF THE NORTH be the same film as we know it today? Would the audience's relationship with Nanook change?

When the filmmaker chooses to give her subject the camera, she allows the audience to understand her film in a completely different light. It is not entirely her film, but her subject's. In this case the subject is our guide who forms our understandings. Watching documentary film causes viewers to displace their viewpoint with the filmmaker's as it is subconsciously accepted that the way things are shown might not have been the same if the viewers themselves chose to make a film on the given subject. But when what is seen is viewed from the perspective of the subject, our growth and understanding as individuals achieve a new height in relation to what is seen. Not only do we see it from another perspective absent from the filmmaker, we see it standing in the very shoes of the ones we are watching, peering through a vantage point riddled with much human familiarity. If documentary film-making is a mode used to convey a certain conception of truth, then, by all means, let us give this truth a voice, a life and ability to form a perspective. Let us give it a movie camera, a place in the credits and the power to observe, criticize, and comment on itself as an observation.

*For a discussion of the various modes of documentary film-making, see Bill Nichols' Introduction to Documentary, 2001

Tokyo Story (1953)

Style in TOKYO STORY

[19 April 2007]

Yasujiro Ozu's TOKYO STORY, while unappreciated by Western viewers during the time of its birth, is today viewed as an influential masterpiece. Taking from the gendai-geki, or "modern story" tradition in Japanese film, Ozu aims to emphasize the mini-actions of daily life, absent from drama, emotional complexity, and spectacle, conventions most intrinsic to Hollywood. With deceiving simplicity and genius technicality, TOKYO STORY is a timelessly important film, especially within the realm of cinematic style.

Most interesting is Ozu's treatment of narrative time in TOKYO STORY. The display of several dramatic events are withheld from the viewer and replaced with mundane, everyday activity. David Desser refers to this elision in "The Space of Ambivalence"* as a sort of "dailiness" that serves as the preeminent force in moving the film. Desser notes that Ozu systematically elides everything except dailiness, forcing the viewer to fill in the gaps, or the drama, taking place between what is seen, a process calling for an active part on the audience versus the spoon-fed phenomenon seen all to often in classic Hollywood cinema. Ozu's simple approach to cinematic storytelling has cut deeply, clearing the way for the implementation of new possibilities on the global film scene. Today, many filmmakers use dailiness to emphasize importance, bridge moments in the narrative, or, simply, to give a sense of authenticity.

Ozu couples his elision of dramatic narrative action with his usage of 360-degree space by ignoring the looming 180-degree rule that forces the camera to remain on one hemisphere of an imaginary circle dictated by the placement of the actors -- if the camera ventured to the other hemisphere the characters would appear to "flip" (and, to the horror of Hollywood, confuse the audience!). By ignoring this rule, Ozu continues in his rejection of traditional cinematic practices. He strives to move away from the Hollywood aesthetic and give viewers something fresh and interesting to look at. Desser, regarding Ozu's 360-degree space in TOKYO STORY, writes: "Space, then, is not reducible to narrative needs, but exists as a playful and attention-grabbing component." Ozu wants these flips to stand out and does so with seamless blatancy unencumbered by a need for spatial continuity.

TOKYO STORY is an important addition to the kaleidoscopic understanding cinematic style. Ozu's far-reaching resonance has touched the creativity of many contemporary filmmakers and is a fundamental piece of film history.

*Desser, David. "The Space of Ambivalence." Geiger, Jeffery and Rutsky, R.L. Film Analysis: A Norton Reader. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.