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imdb.com wrote:Orin, a blind traveling musician who is expected to remain celebate, is sexually violated and is expelled from her group. An outcast, she ultimately links up with a young man who is opposed to Japanese militarism. Although she is "available" to him, he will not take advantage of her, as he resists a culture where hypocrisy reigns and where women (and men, also) are expected to yield to superior force.

peerpee wrote:The MoC Series (UK) will release Shinoda's ASSASSINATION later this year.

peerpee wrote:The MoC Series (UK) will release Shinoda's ASSASSINATION later this year.

Annie Mall wrote:So, does that mean that #19 will be Pale Flower?

yoshimori wrote:There's a Kohei Oguri box set now listed at cdjapan. It has all four of his films: Muddy River, Kayako no tameni, Sting of Death, and Sleeping Man. Unfortunately, no sign of English subs. Dang!

Michael Kerpan wrote:Oguri's "Sting of Death" is an absolutely _dreadful_ film. I have the Panorama DVD -- and can't even bring myself to finish this. (I skipped through to the end -- and it didn't seem to get sany better). Some nice cinematography, though.

In Search of a Uniquely Japanese Technique

Film was born about a century ago in Europe, in a way of looking at things that drew mainly on the traditions of western culture, and carrying the weight of the modern rationalism and humanism that most influenced the thought of that time. Films were thus conceived in correspondence to a human scale, and a story would develop in terms of the conversation exchanged among the characters in it.

What Oguri tells us, however, is that perhaps in Japan, with its different cultural roots, there is a completely different way in which it can be done. Looking in the past for filmmakers who have searched for such a way, one finds the names of Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi.

While in an Ozu film the story does move through conversation, says Oguri, there is not much emotional movement or uplift that comes from it. The conversation does nothing more than hover at the surface while the two people in it maintain their own separate worlds. Thus Ozu was able to make film after film on essentially the same story, and what is important is what sort of contemplative world can be constructed.

Mizoguchi, on the other hand, sought in camera work something unique in Japan. His technique, moving in one sweep out of a house into the garden, beyond that into the landscape beyond and back, would never have occurred to European filmmakers who considered interiors and exteriors as two different worlds. Oguri explains that it was because of this technique that Mizoguchi was able to capture the emotion of the classical Japanese heroine so wonderfully.

"This technique influenced foreign filmmakers," he says. "You can see it in the way people like the Greek director Theo Angelopoulos will have a setting change a hundred years with one long camera pan. But the reason he doesn't handle inside to outside the way Mizoguchi does lies in modern Greek history. I think how you seek out an individual way of doing things is the task of a filmmaker."

But leaving aside the quests of Ozu and Mizoguchi, how does one portray our own era, Japan of the late 20th century? Oguri searched for his own approach, and the result is SLEEPING MAN, in which the conversation does not have one particular direction, and in which the line of the camera is one that abandons a 'human point of view'.

An Oriental Sense of Life and Death

"It's been 50 years since the end of World War II," says Oguri. "The tempo of things has increased over the last century, and people now find themselves feeling short of breath from running to stay up with it. After the war Japan gave priority to economics as it set out to catch up and pass other countries, but now we find ourselves stopped dead both economically and politically. You can't use conventional methods to portray a time like this. I don't know where this film will lead, but I feel that it's a necessary first step."

The climax of the film, in a grove of trees in full leaf, is an outdoor noh drama performance. The play being one in which the dead speak to the living, symbolizes an Oriental feeling of life and death, and at the same time is a unique Japanese cultural expression of abstraction and stylization with six centuries of history.

"People say that Japanese today are completely cut off from the sense of life and death, and the sense of nature, that was formed from noh, but that's not true," he says. "While noh may be further from real life than film, it still holds its own ground!"

Perhaps this contributes a tiny bit to the understanding of the different value sets, that lead to completely different approaches in narration. To see every Japanese film through Ozu's glasses, might be misleading.
Ozu's main masterpieces portray the changes of the Japanese family during the 50s. They contain a very friendly (non-radical) form of social critique of the Japanese society. That's my over-all reading of his films. And, he found a perfect form to achieve this.

But then came the 60's social upheaval, which brought a radicalization of narrative techniques. The less secure "Japanese identities" became, the more shattered the narrative became as a consequence of a quest for new solutions. That�s what Hani & the New Wave stands for. (Remember, that parts of the script (the dream-sequences & the flashbacks & the pornographic photo-session, especially) of "Inferno" were written by Terayama Shuji, one of the most radical innovators of Japanese theatre & cinema of the 60s and 70s.

And now, Oguri is working in the 90s. He�s looking for new, fresh forms of narrating, and IMHO he�s one of the most successful director's in doing so.

Michael Kerpan wrote:Oguri's "Sting of Death" is an absolutely _dreadful_ film. I have the Panorama DVD ...

kazantzakis wrote:I was not too keen on Buraikan. I found it a bit over the top. Havent gotten to Petrified forest or the others yet.

David Desser wrote:In the aborted revolution of the Tempo era, one is tempted to see a comparison to the student protests of the 60s. The humor of the film, dark though it is, offers up a vision of hope, of liberation, precisely by its outrageousness. In place of ideology, the film offers up instinct; in place of high culture it offers up popculture; in place of giri, it puts for ninjo, but ninjo without guilt, without the shinju of the traditional culture-- the ninjo of sex and violence, of politics, of youthful rebellion, of play. (italics his)