Yes or No?

My proposal went something like this: "It looks as if we are going to lose the war, and if it comes to the point of the Honorable Death of the Hundred Million, we all have to die anyway. It's probably not a bad idea to find out what married life is like before that happens."

The answer was that she would think about it. To ensure that things would go smoothly, I asked a very close friend to intercede with her on my behalf. I waited and waited and no reply came. I got fed up with trying to keep cool. Finally I went to her and demanded, "Yes or no?" like General Yamashita Tomoyuki demanding surrender as he occupied Singapore in 1942.

She promised that she would reply very shortly, but the next time we met she handed me a thick stack of letters. She told me to read them and said, "I can't marry a person like this." They were all letters from the man I had asked to plead my case with her. I read them and couldn't believe my eyes. I was horrified.

All these letters contained were slanderous statements about me. The variety and caliber of the phrasing of these terrible things were positively ingenious. The fullness of the hatred for me expressed in these letters sickened me. This fellow, who had accepted the job of aiding me in my suit, had been doing his utmost to ruin my chances. And on top of that, he had frequently accompanied me to the Yaguchi home and sat at my side wearing an expression of sincerest concern and cooperation in my efforts to persuade Miss Yaguchi to marry me.

Apparently Miss Yaguchi's mother had observed all this and said to her, "Which are you going to put your faith in, the man who slanders his friend or the man who trusts the person who slanders him?"

Kurosawa, Something like an Autobiography

Eat this chair!

[Kurosawa has to undergo a directing test upon completion of Sugata Sanshiro; the examiners include the censors of the Ministry of the Interior, but also other directors, including Ozu.]

When the test finally began, it was horrible. In a room with a long table, the censors were all lined up on one side. Down at the very end were Ozu and Tasaka, and next to them an office boy. ...

The point of the censors' argument was that almost everything in the film was "British-American." they seemed to find the little incident of the love scene" between Sanshiro and his rival's daughter on the shrine stairs -- the censors called this a "love scene," but all the two did was meet each other for the first time there -- to be particularly "British-American," and they harped as if they had discovered some great  oracular truth. If I listened attentively, I would fly into a rage, so I did my best to look out the window and think of other things.

But I reached the limits of my endurance with their spitefulness. I felt the color of my face changing, and there was nothing I could do about it. "Bastards! Go to hell! Eat this chair!" Thinking such thoughts, I rose involuntarily to my feet, but as I did so, Ozu stood up simultaneously and began to speak: "If a hundred points is a perfect score, Sugata Sanshiro gets one hundred twenty! Congratulations, Kurosawa!" Ignoring the unhappy censors, Ozu strode over to me, whispered the name of a Ginza restaurant in my ear and said, "Let's go there and celebrate."

Something like an Autobiography, Kurosawa

mono-no-aware

Rereading Kurosawa's Autobiography.

(re editing Uma [Horses]):

There is one place in the story where a foal has been sold and the mare frantically searches for her baby. Completely crazed, she kicks down her stable door and tries to crawl under the paddock fence. I edited the sequence most diligently to show her expressions and actions in a dramatic way.

But when the edited scene was run through a projector, the feeling didn't come through at all. The mother horse's sorrow and panic somehow stayed flat behind the screen. Yama-san had sat with me and watched the film as I was editing it any number of times, but he never said a word. If he didn't say, "That's good," I knew it meant it was no good. I was at an impasse, and in my despair I finally begged his advice. He said, "Kurosawa, this sequence isn't drama. It's mono-no-aware."  Mono-no-aware, "sadness at the fleeting nature of things," like the sweet, nostalgic sorrow of watching the cherry blossoms fall -- when I heard this ancient poetic term, I was suddenly struck by enlightenment as if waking from a dream. "I understand!" I exclaimed and set about completely re-editing the scene.

inscrutable occidentals

Was watching Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More again for a piece I'm writing for The Believer on sequels. The DVDs have interviews with Christopher Frayling, Leone's biographer; Frayling talks about the acting style of Gian Maria Volonte, the bad guy. Volonte, he says, had had a distinguished career on the stage and had an extremely theatrical, flamboyant style which stood in sharp contrast to the laconic, understated style of Eastwood; by the time Leone made For a Few Dollars More he was starting to get irritated by the excesses of Volonte, to the point of having him make multiple takes of the same scene to wear him down. I'd always heard the same thing of Leone's method in directing Rod Steiger in Fistful of Dynamite: Steiger would put in an explosive performance and Leone would say: That's amazing, Rod, absolutely amazing, could you do that for me just one more time? And he would have Steiger do the scene again and again until he was worn out and the performance was what Leone was looking for.

Interesting because so radically different from Kurosawa's use of Mifune (star of Yojimbo, the film which inspired Fistful of Dollars). When Kurosawa first saw Mifune's audition for the studio's talent search Mifune was hurling himself around the stage in a frenzy, like a wild animal; Kurosawa knew he would offend the studio aparatchiks and made a personal appeal to the jury to give this extraordinary talent a chance. When he used Mifune in Drunken Angel, with Shimura Takashi, he commented that Mifune's performance threw off the balance of the film - Shimura, as the alcoholic doctor, was excellent, but Mifune was completely overpowering.

And yet a film director can rejoice over a marvelous asset only to have it turn into a terrible burden. If I let Mifune in his role of the gangster become too attractive, the balance with his adversary, the doctor played by Shimura Takashi, would be destroyed. If this should occur, the result would be a distortion of the film's overall structure. Yet to suppress Mifune's attractiveness at the blossoming point of his career because of the need for balance in the structure of my film would be a waste. And in fact Mifune's attraction was something his innate and powerful qualities pushed unwittingly to the fore; there was no way to prevent him from emerging as too attractive on the screen other than keeping him off the screen. I was caught in a real dilemma. Mifune's attractiveness gave me joy and pain at the same time.

Drunken Angel came to life in the midst of these contradictions. My dilemma did indeed warp the structure of the drama, and the theme of the film became somewhat indistinct. But as a result of my battle with the wonderful qualities called Mifune the whole job became for me a liberation from something resembling a spiritual prison. Suddenly I found myself on the outside.

The drunken-doctor performance Shimura gave was a superb 90 percent, but because his adversary, Mifune, turned in 120 percent I had to feel a little sorry for him.

(Something Like an Autobiography, p 162)

Suntory Reserve

Mithridates has unearthed an amazing YouTube clip of a series of whisky commercials starring Kurosawa Akira and Francis Ford Coppola. I could embed it here, but then you would miss out on M's comments on Kagemusha. Here.

¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿¿Qué???????????!!!!!!!

An extract from J M Coetzee's new book, Diary of a Bad Year, appeared in the NYRB for 10 July.

The Seven Samurai is a film in complete command of its medium yet naive enough to deal simply and directly with first things. Specifically it deals with the birth of the state, and it does so with Shakespearean clarity and comprehensiveness. In fact, what The Seven Samurai offers is no less than the Kurosawan theory of the origin of the state.

The story told in the film is of a village during a time of political disorder—a time when the state has in effect ceased to exist—and of the relations of the villagers with a troop of armed bandits. After years of descending upon the village like a storm, raping the women, killing those men who resist, and bearing away stored-up food supplies, the bandits hit on the idea of systematizing their visits, calling on the village just once a year to exact or extort tribute (tax). That is to say, the bandits cease being predators upon the village and become parasites instead.

One presumes that the bandits have other such "pacified" villages under their thumb, that they descend upon them in rotation, that in ensemble such villages constitute the bandits' tax base. Very likely they have to fight off rival bands for control of specific villages, although we see none of this in the film.

The bandits have not yet begun to live among their subjects, having their wants taken care of day by day—that is to say, they have not yet turned the villagers into a slave population. Kurosawa is thus laying out for our consideration a very early stage in the growth of the state.

[For those unfamiliar with the film in question, what actually happens is this:

A group of bandits gallop to the top of a hill overlooking a village. One says something like: Let's attack! The leader says: No, we raided them in the autumn. There's nothing there. Let's come back after the rice harvest.

The bandits gallop off. Two peasants who have been hiding in the bushes go back to the village to share the bad news.

At the risk of stating the obvious, not only do we see nothing in the film of the bandits fighting rival bands for control of specific villages, we also see nothing of the system of "pacified" villages descended upon in rotation. The political philosophy is the product of Mr Coetzee's unfevered imagination.]

The main action of the film starts when the villagers conceive a plan of hiring their own band of hard men, the seven unemployed samurai of the title, to protect them from the bandits. The plan works, the bandits are defeated (the body of the film is taken up with skirmishes and battles), the samurai are victorious. Having seen how the protection and extortion system works, the samurai band, the new parasites, make an offer to the villagers: they will, at a price, take the village under their wing, that is to say, will take the place of the bandits. But in a rather wishful ending the villagers decline: they ask the samurai to leave, and the samurai comply.


Having seen how the protection and extortion system works??????? The new parasites????? offer, at a price, to take the village under their wing???????

The bandits started out with a band of 40. The samurai start out as a band of (the title of the film is a useful aide-memoire) 7. 4 die. 7 - 4 = 3.

During the recruitment of the samurai Kurosawa goes to a great deal of trouble to emphasise that the band is really too small for the job; 7 is not enough. Given that premise, it would have been ludicrous for 3 to propose themselves as protectors against any further marauding bandits who might happen to come along. Emphasis is also placed on the fact that the farmers are unable to pay: they can offer nothing but food. It would have been equally ludicrous for the samurai to offer to stay "for a price" when the point is made repeatedly that what the farmers have to offer is not worth the risk. If Kurosawa had introduced the development proposed by Coetzee he would have thrown away the moral and practical difficulties which he had placed at the centre of the film. Unsurprisingly, he did nothing of the kind.

2 of the 4 killed die in the final battle, a last stand in the mud and the rain. The master swordsman is killed by a bullet from a hidden bandit. The impostor, Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), tracks the bandit down; he is shot in the stomach but manages to kill the bandit. The young aristocrat, Katsushiro, rushes wildly through the rain, shouting Where are the bandits, where are the bandits -- and is told they're all dead, there are none left to kill. He sinks to his knees, howling, in the mud. This is, of course, a splendid opportunity for Kurosawa to share with us his thoughts on Hobbes, but he passes. For reasons best known to himself, he, um, cuts to a scene of the villagers planting rice shoots. Kambei: We lose again. The remaining 3 samurai look up at the mound where their comrades are buried.

Coetzee is ascribing to Kurosawa an artistic practice which is, in fact, highly characteristic of his own work: a propensity to substitute philosophical discourse for attention to plot and character. This is the sort of thing that goes down well with the Nobel Committee, who do dearly love worthy books that tackle Big Issues -- but it is not Kurosawa.

Coetzee's summary ("band of hard men", "unemployed samurai") misses out precisely the resistance to stereotype through attention to detail which is one of Kurosawa's hallmarks. Kikuchiyo is not a samurai; he's a farmer's son who picked up a sword and decided he liked swaggering around with it. Katsushiro comes from an old samurai family, but he has never killed a man. Heihachi is found chopping wood; he attributes his survival to the fact that, "since you can't kill them all, I usually run away." Kyuzo, the master swordsman, "isn't interested in killing people, he just wants to perfect his art." Rikichi, the farmer who first wants to fight the bandits, is as brave and reckless as Kikuchiyo -- but he doesn't force his way into the band of samurai. The question of what it means to be a warrior, of who is entitled to fight, is explored in one episode after another. (It would be easy to go on at very great length.)

This is an example which shows exactly what an editor might contribute to a book, and why the common practice of selling books to editors with no relevant knowledge is so damaging. The Last Samurai was acquired in the US and the UK by two editors who had never seen Seven Samurai, and who saw no need to do so before commenting on the manuscript. It's possible, of course, that Coetzee's editor knew the film well, objected to this nonsense, and was stonewalled by the author. It's more likely, I can't help feeling, that the editor hadn't seen the film and assumed Coetzee knew what he was talking about. When I was discussing possible publishers of Your Name Here with my last agent, Warren Frazier, I said I would like to talk to editors who knew at least some of the films and books that had inspired it (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, 8 1/2 and La Dolce Vita were the most important films, there were rather a lot of books); he either didn't know or wouldn't tell me.

Well, well, well. There's a book by Agatha Christie of which I remember nothing but the title: Why Didn't They Ask Evans? What can I say? Why didn't you ask Evans, Mr Coetzee? Why didn't you ask Evans?

[A reader comments that the views appear in essays by a character and may not be Coetzee's; that C would be unlikely to make such mistakes about so well-known a film. Yes; it may be that the views of the JC in the book are not those of JC. On the second point, though, people often seem to allow memory to rewrite SS long after they've seen it, sometimes influenced by better familiarity with The Magnificent Seven. (JC's comment about the band of hard men, for instance, makes better sense if we think of TMS, which simply gets rid of the character of the young aristocrat who has never fought before, transferring his love interest to the Horst Buchholz character based on Kikuchiyo. My own memory of TMS is a bit vague, but I also seem to remember that it keeps the wood-chopping episode but transfers it to Charles Bronson, getting rid of Heihachi's line about usually running away. [Could be wrong about this.]) So it may be, in fact, that the mistakes mentioned are not JC's; on the other hand, they are not unimaginable as misrememberings of a film seen long ago.]

Kurosawa on Mifune

After hearing O'Toole on watching Rashomon for the first time and seeing Toshiro Mifune, I went back to the section in Kurosawa's Something Like an Autobiography where he describes how Mifune got his first break as an actor

On the day of the interviews and screen tests I was in the middle of the shooting of No Regrets for Our Youth, so I couldn't participate in the judging. But during lunch break I stepped off the set and was immediately accosted by actress Takamine Hideko, who had been the star of Yamamato Kajiro's Horses when I was chief assistant director. "There's one who's really fantastic. But he's something of a roughneck, so he just barely passed. Won't you come and have a look?" I bolted my lunch and went to the studio where the tests were being given. I opened the door and stopped dead in amazement.

A young man was reeling around the room in a violent frenzy. It was as frightening as watching a wounded or trapped savage beast trying to break loose. I stood transfixed. But it turned out that this young man was not really in a rage, but had drawn "anger" as the emotion he had to express in his screen test. He was acting. When he finished his performance, he regained his chair with an exhausted demeanor, flopped down and began to glare menacingly at the judges. Now, I knew very well that this kind of behavior was a cover for shyness, but the jury seemed to be interpreting it as disrespect.

I found this young man strangely attractive, and concern over the judges' decision began to distract me from my work. I returned to my set and wrapped up the shooting early. Then I proceeded to look in on the room where the jury were deliberating. Despite Yama-san's strong recommendation of the young man, the voting was against him. Suddenly I heard myself shouting, "Please, wait a minute."

The jury was made up of two groups: movie-industry specialists (directors, cinematographers, producers and actors) and representatives of the labor union. The two groups were equally represented. At that time the union was gaining in strength daily, and union representatives appeared wherever something was happening. Because of them, all decisions had to be made by voting, but I felt that for them to voice their opinions on the selection of actors was really going too far. Even the expression "going too far" doesn't do justice to the suppressed anger boiling in me. I called for a time out.

I said that in order to judge the quality of an actor and predict his future capacities you need the talents and experience of an expert. In the selection of an actor it isn't right to equate the vote of an expert and the vote of a complete outsider. It's like appraising a gemstone; you wouldn't give a greengrocer's appraisal the same weight you would a jeweler's. In evaluating an actor, an expert's vote should have at least three if not five times the weight of an amateur's. I emphasized that I wanted a recount of the votes with more appropriate weight assigned to the experts' opinions.

The jury was thrown into an uproar. "It's anti-democratic, it's monopoly by directors!" someone shouted. But all of the production people on the jury raised their hands in approval of my suggestion, and even some labor-union representatives nodded their assent. Finally Yama-san, who was head of the jury, said that as a movie director he would take responsibility for his opinion for the quality and potential of the young actor in question. With Yama-san's pronouncement the young man squeaked through. He was, of course, Mifune Toshiro.


***

62 copies starting at $3.02 on Amazon. Even if you have no interest in Japan, no interest in Japanese film, it is STILL worth reading if you have ever cared about anything you knew a lot about and found yourself outvoted by people who know nothing and care less. I ordered a copy of the Japanese edition from the Japan Centre at Piccadilly Circus, and I worked through this passage in Japanese when I knew no Japanese, because I had to see what Kurosawa said. Better News for Modern Man than the Gideon Bible, I think.