CARTE BLANCHE TO DONALD RICHIE - Next -

Other reasons for remembering films include the sheer pleasure they give - their stories, to be sure, but also the transparent carpentry of their construction. Naruse's Repast is made of very little - a couple, a house, the entryway, the path outside - and from this is crafted a box which precisely fits our emotions. Kawashima's Not Long After Leaving Shinagawa makes us a larger box, a whole inn, but one no less expertly carpentered, and with many a secret drawer. And Kon lchikawa's Bonchi is series of boxes within boxes each containing dazzling images (the Japanese toilet gleaming like an antique vase, the family meeting in a composition so delicate one could watch forever).
Sometimes it is a character, an actor, an actress, who is unforgettable. l would probably still remember Sweet Sweat, no matter who played the lead, since Toyoda is such a fine director, but Machiko Kyo is in this film so riveting that she has been living inside my head now for over thirty-five years, since 1964.
(The only person living their longer is Mie Kitahara in Crazed Fruit, a picture too well known to warrent another festival showing, and in any event her place in my head was not based on her acting talent - as it is with Machiko Kyo - but simply her person itself.)
Something of the same is true of Ryuji. This is a genre film (rise and fall of small-time hood) pulled to unforgettable heights by its actor, Masaji Kanedko - also the script writer and the real power behind the camera, though the film had a perfectly good director, Hide Kawashima. That Kaneko died (cancer, age thirty-three) one week after the film opened, that the film was never widely shown, and now remains known only to aging enthusiasts adds considerably the memorability - but it is the electricity of this performance which defies its ever being forgotten.
And sometimes it is the way that a film encapsulates its era that preserves memories. In my list l notice that the majority of pictures are from the Sixties and early Seventies. This was a time of dissent, of experimentation, of questioned values. New directors were appearing, new themes, new freedoms.
Hani's The lnferno of First Love captures this era and its values, but so does a commercial film like The Hoodlum Soldier. They share the climate of revolt and unforgettable illustrate at - as in the fight in the bath-house in the Masamura film : cogs in the military machine, these naked, natural soldiers suddenly become human.
Teshigahara's still utterly unappreciated Summer Soldiers also showed the military in revolt - US Soldiers AWOL's from the Vietnam War. Directed by a non-commercial artist, written by translator and biographer (John Nathan), starring amateurs, the very integrity of the film worked against its being widely shown, but it can never be forgotten.
One of the last and one of the most perfect of the films of revolt was Yanagimachi's The Plan of a Nineteen Year-Old which shows what happens when a lowly newspaper boy goes off the social rails. Though the director went on to make more perfect film (Fire Festival for example) he never made a more memorable statement. The script and original novel were by the late Kenji Nakagami, from Japan's socially proscribed caste, the lead actor was an amateur, a hot-rodder, and the crippled woman was an actress who had crippled herself in just the way the story describes.
The result is a kind of strangeness. This is something that all these films share. A playwright (Shuji Terayama) makes his single commercial film (Boxer) for the most obtuse of the majors (Toei).
It sinks without a trace but its oddness, its privacy, means that whoever saw it will never forget it. A cinephotographer (Toichiro Narushima - Double Suicide, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence) makes his single feature film (Time with Memory) and it is so odd, so private that even its mistakes (Mother's bones are plastic) are memorable.
Actors, writers, photographers, commercial-film directors these all share, I now see, that quality which I have called memorable but which has other names as well : personal, honest, principled. What you remember forever is when you are addressed directly and told a truth.
We all have our truths and these twenty films contain mine. Returning to the dictionary, I just found that there is a second definition of carte blanche, one I had overlooked - in piquet, a hand containing no king, no queen, no jack. That doesn't apply to my carte blanche at all. My hand holds only winners.

Donald Richie
November, 2000

 

CARTE BLANCHE

Minato no Nihon Musume (Japanese Girls at the Harbour) by Hiroshi Shimizu - 1933 - 72 mn

Ukikusa Monogatari (The Story of Floating Weeds) by Yasujiro Ozu - 1934 - 90 mn

Gion no shimai (Sisters of the Gion) by Kenji Mizoguchi - 1936 - 68 mn

Ninjo kamifusen (Humanity and Paper Balloons) by Sadao Yamanaka - 1937 - 86 mn

Ukikusa (Floating Weeds) by Yasujiro Ozu - 1959 - 119 mn

Meshi (The Meal) by Mikio Naruse - 1956 - 146 mn

Bakumatsu taiyo-den (Not Long After Leaving Shinagawa) by Yuzo Kawashima - 1957 -
111 mn

Kasabana (Snow Flurry) by Keisuke Kinoshita - 1959 - 78 mn

Bonchi (Young head of Family) by Kon Ichikawa - 1960 - 105 mn

Amai Ase (Sweet Sweat) by Shiro Toyoda - 1964 - 120 mn

Heitai Yakuza (The Hoodlum Soldier) by Yasuzo Masumura - 1965 - 103 mn

Ningen Johatsu (A Man Vanishes) by Shôhei Imamura - 1967 - 130 mn

Hatsukoi jigokuhen (Inferno of First Love) by Susumu Hani - 1968 - 107 mn

Sama Soruja (Summer Soldiers) by Hiroshi Teshigahara - 1971

Seigen-ki (A time Within Memory) by Toichiro Narushima - 1973 - 117 mn

Bokusa (The Boxer) by Shuji Terayama - 1977 - 95 mn

Jukyusai no Chizu (A Nineteen-Year-Olds's Map) by Mitsuo Yanagimachi - 1979 - 109 mn

Ryuji by Toru Kawashima - 1983 - 90 mn

Byoin de Shihu to iu Koto (Dying in Hospital) by Jun Ichikawa - 1993 - 100 mn

Okaeri by Makoto Shinozaki - 1995 - 99 mn

 

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