Re: Eclipse Series 21: Oshima's Outlaw Sixties
Posted: Mon Jun 14, 2010 1:40 am
Death By Hanging / Three Resurrected Drunkards
I know I’ve gone on and on about the first of these films elsewhere on the forum – probably more than once – so I’ll try to limit my comments to how it relates to the films in the Eclipse set which surround it.
If you know that this is where Oshima is heading, then the two films that precede it make more sense to me. Violence at Noon and Pleasures of the Flesh could be considered as culminations of Oshima’s experiments with established genres, and the two films that follow, though both nodding towards genre at points, are really stepping beyond it, and stepping outside traditional narrative in significant ways as well. In them, Oshima is experimenting with different modes through which he can explore particular themes – specifically those of modern Japanese identity and Japanese youth – and he’s taking a risk in not tying those themes down to the provisional, disrupted narratives of the films. He’s juggling a lot of things at once, but for me (at first sight, it has to be noted) all of that stuff doesn’t quite coalesce into a coherent vision – at least not like it does in Death by Hanging.
This is the film where the ‘Japanese Godard’ tag really starts to look threadbare. I’ll try to put this in as uninflammatory manner as possible, but I don’t think Godard has ever been as intellectually focussed as Oshima is here. He’s tackling his themes on multiple fronts in a really audacious way, creating matrices of meaning that hang together as a solid structure, rather than the feints and provocations of the previous films.
I think another big factor in the success of Death by Hanging is that Oshima has realigned his theme of Japanese identity in a small but hugely significant way. In A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Song and Japanese Summer: Double Suicide, he’s exploring notions of Japanese identity in relation to American identity, which is sort of like shooting fish in a barrel. In Death by Hanging, he’s exploring it in relation to Korean identity, which is a much more challenging prospect, dredging up as it does the whole buried history of Japanese racism, imperialism and exploitation. And at the same time, he’s using those parallel explorations to interrogate the very nature of identity in a much more universal and ambitious form than he ever had before. The scope of his cinema effectively explodes in two different directions with this film, though you can also see very clear continuities with the two features that preceded it.
And then, with Three Resurrected Drunkards, Oshima revisits similar thematic material as absurdist comedy, before doubling back on himself and attacking, with Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, the sexual and gender material from Treatise and Summer with the same kind of redoubled fervour (and a fair bit more anarchy) as he had their identity politics with Death by Hanging.
Three Resurrected Drunkards may be the comic flipside of Death by Hanging (with its themes reimagined as a lost couple of episodes of The Monkees that make Head look sober as a judge), but that’s not to say that the preceding film eschewed absurdist comedy (one of my favourite lines is the doctor’s complaint that the medical literature on post-execution ailments is rather sketchy).
Oshima adds the Vietnam War to the mix for Drunkards, but the film is hardly ‘about’ the war. It’s using the circumstances and imagery of Vietnam to explore some favourite themes, in particular the nature of identity and Japanese / Korean relations. The film takes as its starting point the re-enactment of a real-life crime, an element borrowed from Death by Hanging (in Death it was R’s rapes / murders; here it’s General Loan’s notorious execution of an enemy officer), and then riffs up that whole idea of play-acting into the entire structure of the film, with a round-robin of impersonations, costume changes, identity thefts and mislaid nationalities building onto one another. And just as in Death by Hanging, when R’s mysterious sister (he has no sister) only becomes visible to certain characters at certain times, there’s a sense that if the players can’t figure out how to play the game, the game is quite happy to play the players.
Underlying all of this is the foundational idea that identity, specifically racial / national identity, is precisely this kind of game, and it’s only everybody else’s investment in the game that keeps us all playing. In the terms of Three Resurrected Drunkards, if everybody just agreed to call themselves Korean (as we see various people in the street, including Oshima, do in a faux verité sequence), there would be no narrative conflict. (And that pseudo-documentary sequence is another point of comparison with Death by Hanging, which opens rather like Bunuel’s L’Age d’or as a documentary – in which the execution facility is helpfully and pointedly compared with an ‘ordinary domestic house’ – before collapsing in on itself).
For all that I wanted to tackle Drunkards analytically this time around, it’s so much fun I was seduced by the film, which is pretty damn cuddly for something so Brechtian. The first half, where we’re frog-marched by titles through a perfunctory narrative that ‘goes’ to Korea and Vietnam much in the way that old Doctor Who episodes would go to various quarry-like planets, seems to be running out of ideas quickly, but this is part of the joke, and the second half of the film is the payoff. The first time I saw the film, I had the great pleasure of knowing nothing about where it was going, so no spoilers from me.
The Eclipse transfer of the film is superb, by the way. Some of you have no doubt seen what I was working with before, so I wasn't hard to impress, but I was still surprised and delighted.
Finally, a word about Masao Adachi. He co-wrote Drunkards and Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, and he also acts in Drunkards and Death by Hanging – in which film he’s temporarily elevated to the status of Oshima’s Unholy Trinity of Sato, Toura and Watanabe. Earlier in this thread there was talk about Kei Sato as Oshima’s key collaborator, but I think Adachi, at least during this concentrated run, is a more significant figure. He was collaborating rather intensely at the same time with Koji Wakamatsu (who would, in turn, collaborate with Oshima on In the Realm of the Senses), and there’s some sort of crazy overlap between their films of this period, if only in their manic intensity. Even more interesting is Adachi’s one-of-a-kind 1969 feature film A.K.A. Serial Killer, which makes Oshima’s oddest films of the era look positively mainstream, but which seems of offer his mentor the conceptual jumper leads he needed to get The Man Who Left His Will on Film up and running.
I know I’ve gone on and on about the first of these films elsewhere on the forum – probably more than once – so I’ll try to limit my comments to how it relates to the films in the Eclipse set which surround it.
If you know that this is where Oshima is heading, then the two films that precede it make more sense to me. Violence at Noon and Pleasures of the Flesh could be considered as culminations of Oshima’s experiments with established genres, and the two films that follow, though both nodding towards genre at points, are really stepping beyond it, and stepping outside traditional narrative in significant ways as well. In them, Oshima is experimenting with different modes through which he can explore particular themes – specifically those of modern Japanese identity and Japanese youth – and he’s taking a risk in not tying those themes down to the provisional, disrupted narratives of the films. He’s juggling a lot of things at once, but for me (at first sight, it has to be noted) all of that stuff doesn’t quite coalesce into a coherent vision – at least not like it does in Death by Hanging.
This is the film where the ‘Japanese Godard’ tag really starts to look threadbare. I’ll try to put this in as uninflammatory manner as possible, but I don’t think Godard has ever been as intellectually focussed as Oshima is here. He’s tackling his themes on multiple fronts in a really audacious way, creating matrices of meaning that hang together as a solid structure, rather than the feints and provocations of the previous films.
I think another big factor in the success of Death by Hanging is that Oshima has realigned his theme of Japanese identity in a small but hugely significant way. In A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Song and Japanese Summer: Double Suicide, he’s exploring notions of Japanese identity in relation to American identity, which is sort of like shooting fish in a barrel. In Death by Hanging, he’s exploring it in relation to Korean identity, which is a much more challenging prospect, dredging up as it does the whole buried history of Japanese racism, imperialism and exploitation. And at the same time, he’s using those parallel explorations to interrogate the very nature of identity in a much more universal and ambitious form than he ever had before. The scope of his cinema effectively explodes in two different directions with this film, though you can also see very clear continuities with the two features that preceded it.
And then, with Three Resurrected Drunkards, Oshima revisits similar thematic material as absurdist comedy, before doubling back on himself and attacking, with Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, the sexual and gender material from Treatise and Summer with the same kind of redoubled fervour (and a fair bit more anarchy) as he had their identity politics with Death by Hanging.
Three Resurrected Drunkards may be the comic flipside of Death by Hanging (with its themes reimagined as a lost couple of episodes of The Monkees that make Head look sober as a judge), but that’s not to say that the preceding film eschewed absurdist comedy (one of my favourite lines is the doctor’s complaint that the medical literature on post-execution ailments is rather sketchy).
Oshima adds the Vietnam War to the mix for Drunkards, but the film is hardly ‘about’ the war. It’s using the circumstances and imagery of Vietnam to explore some favourite themes, in particular the nature of identity and Japanese / Korean relations. The film takes as its starting point the re-enactment of a real-life crime, an element borrowed from Death by Hanging (in Death it was R’s rapes / murders; here it’s General Loan’s notorious execution of an enemy officer), and then riffs up that whole idea of play-acting into the entire structure of the film, with a round-robin of impersonations, costume changes, identity thefts and mislaid nationalities building onto one another. And just as in Death by Hanging, when R’s mysterious sister (he has no sister) only becomes visible to certain characters at certain times, there’s a sense that if the players can’t figure out how to play the game, the game is quite happy to play the players.
Underlying all of this is the foundational idea that identity, specifically racial / national identity, is precisely this kind of game, and it’s only everybody else’s investment in the game that keeps us all playing. In the terms of Three Resurrected Drunkards, if everybody just agreed to call themselves Korean (as we see various people in the street, including Oshima, do in a faux verité sequence), there would be no narrative conflict. (And that pseudo-documentary sequence is another point of comparison with Death by Hanging, which opens rather like Bunuel’s L’Age d’or as a documentary – in which the execution facility is helpfully and pointedly compared with an ‘ordinary domestic house’ – before collapsing in on itself).
For all that I wanted to tackle Drunkards analytically this time around, it’s so much fun I was seduced by the film, which is pretty damn cuddly for something so Brechtian. The first half, where we’re frog-marched by titles through a perfunctory narrative that ‘goes’ to Korea and Vietnam much in the way that old Doctor Who episodes would go to various quarry-like planets, seems to be running out of ideas quickly, but this is part of the joke, and the second half of the film is the payoff. The first time I saw the film, I had the great pleasure of knowing nothing about where it was going, so no spoilers from me.
The Eclipse transfer of the film is superb, by the way. Some of you have no doubt seen what I was working with before, so I wasn't hard to impress, but I was still surprised and delighted.
Finally, a word about Masao Adachi. He co-wrote Drunkards and Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, and he also acts in Drunkards and Death by Hanging – in which film he’s temporarily elevated to the status of Oshima’s Unholy Trinity of Sato, Toura and Watanabe. Earlier in this thread there was talk about Kei Sato as Oshima’s key collaborator, but I think Adachi, at least during this concentrated run, is a more significant figure. He was collaborating rather intensely at the same time with Koji Wakamatsu (who would, in turn, collaborate with Oshima on In the Realm of the Senses), and there’s some sort of crazy overlap between their films of this period, if only in their manic intensity. Even more interesting is Adachi’s one-of-a-kind 1969 feature film A.K.A. Serial Killer, which makes Oshima’s oddest films of the era look positively mainstream, but which seems of offer his mentor the conceptual jumper leads he needed to get The Man Who Left His Will on Film up and running.
