Why are Japanese films so terrible?

Accrding to wiki Ichikawa made no films from '67 till '71, which is the period Matsumoto was active in as a feature filmmaker.

Not sure about scaling the er, greatness of FPR but there were few films made in '69 that were better. You can put it in another way: its a better adaptation of Oedipus Rex than that made by Pasolini.

Anyone seen 'Pitfall'? I want it but it's 'spensive on Amazon.

Pitfall is gd - excellent commentary track on the Masters of Cinema DVD by Tony Ryans - but a bit more socially realist than either Face of Another or Woman of the Dunes

is £12 here: http://www.moviemail-online.co.uk/film/dvd/Pitfall-Masters-Of-Cinema/

(which isn't dirt cheap, but also isn't the £50 it is on amazon)

It is not worth £50. Is it OOP?

You can rent it from I Love Film, of course.

yes, oop i think. Eureka were victims of the sony warehouse fire and lost a lot of their stock. i can imagine them not re-pressing the older titles in their catalogue (and this was one of the first 10).

(no guarantee that it's available from moviemail either tbh. they are quoting a 2 week delivery time...)

not seen pitfall but woman of the dunes is great, as is oni baba (all in a similar vein). thought Face Of Another lacked a certain something though. that said, the shots in the surgery were stunning...

am currently working my way through Eureka's 8dvd box of Mizoguchi films. Ugetsu Monogatari was latest. think i prefer his work to Ozu's (which is comparing chalk and cheese, i realise).

mizoguchi was better than everyone

think i'd take at least some of kurosawa's samurai stuff over the best of mizoguchi. they are just bigger in scope if nothing else.

idk

they have more extras & spectacular scenarism

nobody cld give you a tracking shot like mizoguchi, nobody

talking of whom, this looks p tasty, and a gd compliment to the MOC box:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mizoguchi-Collection-DVD-Minosuke-Band%C3%B4/dp/B004SXSRS2/ref=wl_it_dp_o_npd?ie=UTF8&coliid=I2VE3G809MNXZK&colid=J68FNACBJQ61

also, Eureka/MOC slowly seem to be transferring their titles to Blu-Ray, or Dual-Format editions, so maybe that will happen w Pitfall

awesome

ive been waiting to see those films for ages

have mizoguchi's "story of late chrysanthemums" queued up to watch soon

their end of 2011 editorial has a few words to say on the subject of BR only releases if you didn't see that. they do specifically say "Work immediately focused on getting our entire catalogue back in print." which is promising. (the late mizoguchi box was £100 on amazon for a time but has come back down to the previous price)

new AE mizoguchi box is on my wishlist, yes 8) and the early kurosawa (which was down to £14 earlier in the week) is in the post...

must also pick up Harakiri...

doc films is doing a naruse retrospective but it's really a pain to get there across town

Mizoguchi and Renoir are my blind spots! I mean, they've made some really good films but it hasn't hit me yet in a way that keeps me awake at night. Which happens, could be something to do with not seeing any of Mizoguchi's films on the big screen where you can never miss a great tracking shot.

A bit underwhelmed by Pitfall, although its possible one of the best attempts to do something Kafka-like, which is why I don't see much of a socialist realist dimension.

The ICA are running a ton of Japanese dramas in Feb, looking fwd to catching up on a couple of them by researching the terrific midnighteye webzine.

Saw Harakiri this weekend. Wow. Kwaidan was wonderful but this one really just worked me over, just powerful and satisfying on every level, from the tableaux to the politics to the final battle scenes

Eyes bugged out in the first ten seconds when the ronin introduces himself as belonging to the Fukushima Clan from Hiroshima.

Oshima's Death by Hanging is a film I'm still recovering from. Might be his best, although I have much to see.

Season of recent Japanese film coming up and I just didn't do it could be a good on, following from Oshima.

watch Akasen Chitai (Street Of Shame) yesterday, another of mizoguchi's brothel dramas (and his last film). was much of a muchness.

what do people reckon is the most famous japanese film? (i ask because someone accused me of being obscure by saying someone looked like kyuzo from seven samurai)(i think that must be in the top 3, along with godzilla and maybe ringu)

spirited away prob.

I suspect that its not so much you mentioned the film but that you named one of the characters from it.

I'd add some anime - can't say I care for any of it, but Miyazaki and the like wd be the black hole in this thread. xp

just saw a breakdown of Miyazaki's films by earnings & Spirited Away is by far the biggest - Spirited Away 32%, Totoro 13%, Howl's 11%, Mononoke 11% etc

i did have to look up the name...

think the real answer may also include Pokemon The Movie. various internet lists mention Akira, which i'd overlooked. and tokyo story, which i think way fewer people have seen compared to SS.

i will ask my mum 8)

also Miyazaki's films have generated nearly 4 times as much money as his nearest anime directing rival, including TV series - anime market outside Japan is lot smaller than internet nerdz would have you believe

Godzilla must be the most famous character but the Americanized version of the original film may be more famous.

watch Akasen Chitai (Street Of Shame) yesterday, another of mizoguchi's brothel dramas (and his last film). was much of a muchness. ― koogs, Sunday, February 5, 2012 11:17 PM (Yesterday)

Eyah. Would you be so condescending to another one of ford's western dramas? Most of Mizoguchi's films were geisha films not brothel films. The distinction is important, to both the characters and the film's vulgar/fresh execution, with Mizoguchi completely abandoning his long take style (contrast with his preceding Princess Yang Kwei-Fei) and foregrounding Toshiro Mayuzymi's perverse score (one of his best). Easy to see as proto-New Wave, and the last shot of the debutante prostitute nervously attempting to seduce passing men is as devastating as any of Mizoguchi's shots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGBNZizzY74

Gearing up to watch Kobayashi's Human Condition over the next two weeks, all 10 hours of it. Anyone seen it? Avoided finishing the slate article comparing it to Berlin Alexanderplatz as it was dropping too many spoilers

Xp that mayuzumi score is crazy! Carl Stalling-level disjunctiveness

Xpost tried getting thru it a couple of years back but there's something about Tatsuya Nakadai's unchanging bug-eyed "I'm about to cry" expression throughout the entire thing that really irked me.

Better not watch "The Sword of Doom" then.

Ha! Thing is I've watched him and thought he was great in a bunch of other films including "SOD" but he was just *too much* in "The Human Condition".

XP Yep, Stalling is a perfect point of comparison - it gives Street of Shame its cartoonish swagger* and provides a real statement of intent to the opening of the film.

* Cartoonish swagger by Mizoguchi standards obviously.

> Eyah

sorry to sound so dismissive. i've seen a few of them now and this just wasn't the best of those i've seen.

but yes, you did pick out my two favourite bits - the electronic score and that last shot, which was stunning

(there's another film where the debutante is paraded through the red line* district in her finery and that's my favourite scene of that film)

i didn't like machiko kyo's westernised Mickey, i think that's the reason for a lot of my dislike of the film. she's been great in everything else i've seen (oharu and rashomon especially. ugetsu most recently) but all those parts have been more traditional.

("red line district" being the literal translation of "Akasen Chitai", and a slightly different term to that we'd use in the west)

> oharu

gah! this wasn't her.

Street of Shame is really really good, I don't think I've ever seen any movie about prostitution (even among Mizoguchi's oeuvre) that would deal with the subject with such complexity and care, and it was made in the 1950s. Easily my favourite movie by Mizoguchi.

It's a pretty important detail (as Koogs) that then name of the movie was changed from "Red Light District" (the literal translation) to "Street of Shame". The English title actually misrepresents what the movie is about, as Mizoguci tried to present a broader, more understanding view on prostitutes than just the "shame" aspect, even if he was critical on the exploitation of women. In some of his earlier geisha movies (like the 1930s version of "Sisters of Gion") the shame aspect and straightforward condemnation of the profession are more obvious, but by the 1950s Mizoguchi's take on these issues had become more rounded and humanist. It's sad that he died after making his (in my opinion) best movie, I think he stull would have had a lot to say.

"as Koogs points out"

the whole geisha thing itself changes so much between 30s and the 50s though. in the 30s it was transitioning from the courtesan to the more deregulated prostitution. and the american control in the postwar period was trying to move it into the shameful (which the japanese people weren't really feeling). i think he captures this well in his various films. (i think his sister was involved, which is why he feels such an affinity)

i did think the action of the women in this film, specifically how they were dragging people in from the streets, was a bit o_O

^ all this gleemed from several short intros on the MoC dvds i've been watching, is not a very detailed knowledge, i admit.

not seen sisters of gion, but it's part of the new box that's out at the end of the month so i'll see it soon. it also appears on amazon that those 4 double packs of later films are out soon on dual format bluray. oddly the secondary titles aren't shown in the cover shots but "Number of discs: 3" would suggest they are still pairs of titles.

(actually, the second film is mentioned on the cover, on a simulated sticker, in white on grey, easy to miss in the thumbnail) (and the one that's paired with Sansho is, i think the one with the debutante i mentioned above in it, Gion Bayashi (Gion Musical Festival? / just "A Geisha" according to imdb))

His sister was sold into geishadom - partly to help pay for his education. But he still patronised geishas and, as I think Rayns points out, one of his geisha's scandalised him by slicing him from neck to his lower back after discovering he was a patron of another geisha.

In other words he understood the moral horror of geishadom, but he also lived in a society that normalised them - geishas fascinated him, he picked at them like a sore.

And yes I was equally irritable. I do think Akasen Chitai is one of his greater films, and it is frustrating to know he died just as he was striking out in a new direction away from the ossification of Princess Yang Kwei-Fei (which I like, but I can't deny it has the qualities you'd expect of a film made mainly to see how a particular film stock handles plum purple).

> Princess Yang Kwei-Fei

watched this tonight but probably need to revisit the last 30 minutes again. so many pastel colours... was pretty, but slight.

and tony rayns points out in his introduction that it's not Princess in the title but Royal Concubine. and it was called 'Yokihi' on the Moc dvds.

think the MoC booklets that come with the films are almost an encumbrance rather than an extra. don't think i've managed to read a single one. must get around to that next time i'm between books.

Watched The Crucified Lovers last night. So great.

(i asked my mum, she had nothing. told me about having talked to someone in the pub who'd watched 'the last samurai' recently. and did recognise 'seven samurai' when i mentioned it.)

Sisters of the Gion — excellent.

(the new mizoguchi box set with that in has been delayed a couple of weeks)

but i watched Equinox Flower, ozu's first colour film, and it was obvious he was playing with it a bit - bright red objects in nearly every frame. story all very familiar though.

Don't think any documentaries have been mentioned:

Kazuo Hara - Extreme Private Eros

Noriaki Tsuchimoto - Minimata: The Victims and Their World. This one is something - follows the victims 10+ year fight to have a chemical company bought to account for their pollution and destruction of lives, families and communities leading to the victims storming the shareholders meeting. It is VERY cleverly put together - Tsuchimoto actually isolates the woman's distressed cries and speech and scream at the president of the company and it totally works - one of the most manipulative and yet powerful sequences in cinema I can think of, an effective (to say the least) climax to all the testimonies of physical pain, mental anguish, social discrimination and government's failure to act.

Never has the traditional bowing motion been cast in a more disgusting light - its all these suits want to do!

I speak of Tsuchimoto's manipulation, but just in the sense that all film/documentary is a manipulation in the first place - and how you can harness that. Aesthetically its quite striking; the print I watched was awful but a restoration will surely bring back the elegance of those sunsets and fishing scenes. He is overall exemplary when leaving scenes of burnt and severely crippled flesh, insanity, paralysis he is truly unflinching as the best of 'em; but also respectful and he never stoops to the personal observation or (god forbid) Micheal Moore style clowning.

The Kazuo Hara is v barmy - just talked about it on some other thread. Seeing these back-to-back you think 70s cinema really was the most incredible thing. That is said of film, but rarely of documentaries.

I'll be hunting for some Shinsuke Ogawa.

The New God also looks p good.

More Japanese doc recommendations would be welcome.

Kazuo Hara - Extreme Private Eros

^^ thanks for recommending this, really can't say I've ever seen anything like it. profound film.

No probs: The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On is also incredible btw (saw it on TV years ago).