Donald Richie

Donald Richie at the Opening Ceremony of the 22nd Festival des 3 Continents

CARTE BLANCHE TO DONALD RICHIE

Even though Japanese cinema is still not well known by the general public, it has been the focus of many events, either through tributes to film-makers (Mizoguchi, Ozu, Naruse, Kurosawa, Imamura, Oshima, etc., to mention but the most famous ones) or genre retrospectives (cloak and dagger, fantasy, yakuza, etc.). We wanted to include a major Japanese section in our 2000 Festival but we were daunted by the wealth of Japanese cinema. We thought the best way was to give carte blanche to an authority on the subject. Only Donald Richie could take up such a challenge. American-born Donald Richie has been living in Japan for fifty years. A former director of the film department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a film-maker, writer and critic (he published two remarkable books on Kurosawa and Ozu), Donald Richie accepted our offer with great enthusiasm. The only restrictions we gave him were to include in his programme films which had not been shown in our previous festivals and to ignore the most famous films. Donald Richie's keen judgement led him to select twenty films which will enable us to discover or rediscover rare, amazing or previously unseen films, taking us on an initiation journey through Japanese cinema from Hiroshi Shimizu's Japanese Girls at the Harbour (1933) to Makoto Shinozaki's Okaeri (1995).

Alain Jalladeau

 

A signed but otherwise blank letter of authority upon which I could superscribe what l want : unconditionalterms, unlimited authority, full discretionary powers. This is what the dictionary told me a carte blanche was.
So, where to begin ? Well, Japanese film was my subject. l have lived in the country for our fifty years, had written a number of books about Japanese cinema, am considered an authority. But even within this limited space the problem of choice - one hundred years of film - was large.
It could have been larger, to be sure. But most pre-WWIl movies are gone - destroyed in the 1923 Kanto Earthquake, burned in the 1945 destruction of Tokyo, lost through decades of industrial neglect. Just a few titles remained from half a century of filming and this considerably simplified my choice.
Even so, what would my criteria be,I wondered. Artistic, the best ? But the best remaining Japanese films have now been seen by everyone, over and over again. Historical importance? All right, but so what. Socio/anthropological relevance ? My heart sank.
All right, then. My favorites ? But this not only meant showing what was already known (how could l leave out Tokyo Story from my favorites, or the final reel of Seven Samurai ?) but also introduced a certain ambivalence. To like something does not necessary mean to approve of it. And to approve of something does not always include liking it.
For example, I like seedy, stereotyped Nikkatsu roman-porno sit-coms, but l couldn't approve of them on any grounds but those of high bad taste. And l approve of the historico-intellectual musings of Yoshishige Yoshida but l don't really like them.
Finally, I decided that the only criterian l could trust was one over which l did not have control. l would pick pictures which l had - for whatever reasons - never been able to forget.
This category was also too large but at least it did not contain those examples which would not have fit it. l had already forgotten them. So, my blank carte blanche in front of me, I began to remember.
The result is compromised. Sometimes prints (Susumu Hani's A Full Life) were not to be found ; sometimes available prints (Shinoda's Assassination) were not in good enough condition. And, to be sure, many times those films l remembered best were just too famous to be shown again to an audience which had already seen them.
So, slowly, the choice narrowed. The remaining twenty films, those which now fill my carte blanche, gradually grouped themselves on the empty page and now stand there as testimony to something or other. Memory, certainly, for the Proustian quality of cinema is well documented - though Marcel did not think too highly of the movies. Beyond that one may glimpse some indications of a distant agreement between the means of the film and the ends of me.
I can trace some of these choices Sisters of the Gion and Humanity and Paper Balloons are there because l always admired (beside their brave, liberal attitudes) their unforgettable perfection of shape. The parallels with the stories and the parallels of the space and time in which they occured remain in the sharpest focus. In others, even if the content was a bit conventional (as in Japanese Girls at the Harbor), the form was so original that the sheer aesthetic pleasure of perceiving structure was never to be forgotten. When a perfection of formal narrative means is coupled with a narrative itself worth narrating, then the results are even more memorable. Among the many choices offered by Ozu I chose two versions of the same anecdote - the 1934 Story of Floating Weeds, and the 1959 Floating Weeds - because different answers were found for the same proposition. The very banality of the narrative required a narrative brilliance. That Ozu could make two pictures so similar, so different, so rigorous, and so right, made me want to compare them, and to commemorate them. (Which is why l am giving a lecture right in the middle of their successive showings.)
There is also the quality of difficulty. The more difficult a film is, the more you put into it ; and the more you put into it the more you remember it. Kinoshita's Snow Flurry famously lost its original 1959 audience with its abruptly non-chronological chronology. Seen now (after many more advanced narrative experiments) it does not lose its audience but those of us who first saw it forty years ago will never forget it. We may now find the subject sentimental but the narrative remains rigorous.
More difficult still is a film such as Imamura's A ManVanishes, a "documentary" which turns into a commercial feature film, which has no conclusion (it does not end, it stops) and which never completes the task it set for itself. Jun lchikawa's Dying at a Hospital makes no concessions at all. No close-ups, no "story", long, long shots intercut with lyrical sequences the protagonists will never see. Okaeri is difficult as well - its "story" is never stated. lt must be inferred, and the climactic scene is a fourteen-minute cut with only one person and a door in it. Yet these films are not only worth the effort they require (all have enormous emotional pay offs), they ensure that you will never forget them - as indeed l never have.

 

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