“54-40 or We’ll Fuck Up Your Movie”: How the Senkaku Controversy (and Some Bad Business Decisions) Torpedoed What Promised to be a Fantastic Collaboration between Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Tony Leung Chiu-wai

Dear Octopus enthusiasts, I want to speak to you about the tragic scuttling of a promising film project.  I was on the Wikipedia the other day, trying to find out what Japanese horrorist Kiyoshi Kurosawa had been up to lately.  Following his 2008 masterpiece Tokyo Sonata, we in the United States had not seen any new films from him.  But it looks like 2012-13 have been busy years for him.  In 2012, he directed a TV miniseries called Penance, which, if the trailer is any indication, looks excellent.  Christ knows if/when we’ll get to see it in the U.S.  And then in 2013 he released a film called Real which (again, based on the trailer) looks like some kind of less bloody, more Salingerian version of Jurassic Park (I say this because A. the film is based on a book called A Perfect Day for Plesiosaur and B. there is definitely a plesiosaur in the trailer).  Now, the Wiki points out that Kurosawa’s films often feature characters obsessed with strange and unusual projects and I think this is especially the case in the less explicitly horror-y films in his oeuvre: the maintenance of the weird tree in Charisma (1999); the cultivation of the jellyfish in Bright Future (2004).  So engineering a modern-day plesiosaur in densely populated Japan fits right in.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

But 2013 was also supposed to see the production of a fucking amazing sounding film called 1905, which would feature Tony Leung Chiu-wai (in his first Japanese film role) as a loan shark who travels to Japan to collect debts from five Chinese students/revolutionaries.  These same Chinese expats are also being pursued by members of a Japanese ultra-nationalist organization.  This movie promised a fascinating depiction of the rich cultural and political ferment that saw hundreds of Chinese students and revolutionaries (including no less a figure than Sun Yat-sen) travel to independent, rapidly-industrializing Japan.  In 1905, the Japanese government was asserting itself on the world stage and waging an ultimately victorious war against the Russians in Korea and Manchuria.  While almost every other Asian state had either been colonized by Europeans/Americans (Indochina, Malaysia, Burma, Indonesia, the Philippines) or deprived of meaningful sovereignty by the imposition of unfair trade and extraterritoriality agreements (China and Korea, the latter of which was soon to be annexed into the Japanese Empire, which would eventually become just as much of a colonial threat as Britain or France), Japan remained free and powerful; for nationalists and revolutionaries throughout Asia, Japan was a model of modernization and resistance to Euro-American imperialism.  The Japanese—by brute force, if necessary—would force the Westerners (a term I dislike, but it’s convenient here) to treat Asians as equals.

So this is the scenario that would have been depicted in Kurosawa’s film.  And it would have had Tony Leung Chiu-wai, who’s just the best: I’ve never not liked him in every movie I’ve seen him in.  It also would have provided Kurosawa with another opportunity to branch out, Cronenberg-like, from the horror genre in which he made his name.  Now, I personally hold the horror genre in high esteem, so I don’t think a good horror filmmaker necessarily needs to make other films, but if a talented filmmaker wants to try other things, then I certainly don’t begrudge him or her that inclination.  And the unfortunate fact of the matter is that even the best filmmakers can become “pigeon-holed” within the genres they’ve mastered, and so it is always a victory for them to make great films in other genres. 

Let’s consider Cronenberg, for instance, who has already gone through the generic territory that Kurosawa is now exploring; twenty-five years ago, with Cronenberg about to release his adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, it would have been hard to imagine that he would eventually make gangster films like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises and period pieces like M. Butterfly and A Dangerous Method.  Now, Kurosawa has been fortunate in that he established that he could work outside of the horror genre much earlier on in his career than did Cronenberg.(well, once his career had taken off, that is; Kurosawa was directing pink movies in the early ‘80’s; it was only in 1997, with the release of Cure, his first film with leading man Koji Yakusho, that he became one of the respected pioneers in the revival of the Japanese horror film (which would soon be called “J-horror”)).  In ’99 he made Charisma, as I’ve already mentioned, which is weird as fuck but which I wouldn’t call “horror,” and 2004’s Bright Future is a realistic piece of bleak chic, and it’s horrifying in that respect, but it’s more like a British kitchen-sink drama (maybe Kes with jellyfish?) than Ju-On.  And with 1905, Kurosawa would have had the opportunity to make his first costume drama/period piece/and maybe noir (I don’t know how the double-headed pursuit of these Chinese revolutionaries would have played out).

But now let’s answer the big question: What prevented 1905 from getting made? One word: Senkaku.  Or really, maybe two words: Senkaku/Diaoyu.  Yes, just as 1905 was preparing for production, the Chinese and Japanese governments renewed their acrimony over the uninhabited South China Sea rocks known as Senkaku in Japanese (and it’s the Japanese who govern them, which they have done since 1894; hell, maybe that could have figured in the movie?) and Daioyu in Chinese.  And under these circumstances, it appears that Tony Leung Chiu-wai would have found himself under significant political pressure if he travelled to Japan to make a Japanese movie (portions of the film were also going to be shot in Taiwan, which probably wouldn’t have thrilled the Chinese government, but it’s more of an accepted practice for Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese actors to work in Taiwan and vise-versa).  Oh, also, one of the two co-distributors of the film, Prenom H, went bankrupt.  But the other distributor was Shochiku, which is the oldest studio in Japan and surely they could have gotten the money together to make this movie happen.  No, more than anything else, it looks like it was nationalism—stupid island nationalism—that sank this work of art.  Now, let me say that I think all nationalisms are stupid, but there’s something especially idiotic about the various conflicts over these uninhabited East Asian rocks, over not one of which would it be worth shedding even a single drop of blood.  In fact, let me resolve the disputes right now: Senkaku remains Japanese, Dokdo remains Korean, the Kurils are returned to Japan from Russia, and the Spratley and Paracels are divided up such that each island goes to which ever country it’s closest too; there solved.

The utterly desolate Senkaku islands are in the red circle. (Image courtesy of Wikipedia).

So, let us all take to heart this cautionary tale about the perils of nationalistic saber-rattling.  Nationalism isn’t just a killer; it’s also an arch-philistine, and, unless people change their mindsets and free themselves from the grip of the jingoists and demagogues, 1905 will not be the last work of art that it sabotages.

Darkness Visible; or, What’s the Deal With Japanese Ghosts?

Upon finally getting around to watching Takashi Shimizu’s seminal Ju-On, I find myself thinking about master horror auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s assertion that “Japanese ghosts don’t really do anything.” I’m sure we all have a good idea of what a typical Japanese ghost looks like, but just as refresher: the Japanese ghost is a woman, pale as death (which makes sense, because she’s dead), with long black hair (which makes sense, because she’s Japanese), dressed all in white.  Her eyes are creepy as fuck and there’s a good chance she can contort her body at weird angles (the constant breaking and re-breaking of the neck is a frequent feature of Japanese ghosts; they can also spider-walk like Linda Blair in The Exorcist).  And of course this basic ghost mytheme isn’t just limited to Japan: it has found its way into the horror cinemas of Korea, Hong Kong, Thailand, and, in the form of shitty remakes of horror movies from these Asian countries, the United States.

This is the quintessential Japanese ghost, from the poster for one of the numerous Ju-On sequels.

Now, Kurosawa isn’t exactly correct when he says that Japanese ghosts don’t do anything.  They can definitely kill you.  But the mechanism by which they kill is usually left ambiguous.  The Japanese ghost will creepily approach its victim, the victim will scream, and then we cut to the next scene, with the police investigating the mysterious death of the victim, whose face is frozen into a rictus of terror.  So it seems likely that the Japanese ghost kills by literally scaring its victims to death; it doesn’t need to physically attack the victim, because the implications of its very existence are enough to kill a person (or drive them mad, I should add; they don’t always die; sometimes they just go insane).

The best, most effective horror works by implication. H. P. Lovecraft knew this, as did the other practitioners of the so-called “weird story.” In many of these stories, the hero doesn’t have direct contact with the supernatural (ghosts or demons don’t leap out of the woodwork and tear them apart), but the characters find incontrovertible evidence that these monsters exist.  And this evidence defies the laws of nature; its very existence is obscene and an abomination against reality (in Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature, he explains quite astutely that the “weird” story only became possible once science had progressed to the point that universal laws of physics had been established; reality can only be obscenely violated once it’s been established).  As for what is being implied, besides the existence of various monsters and nightmares, I think it is best summed up in this analysis of the work of British fantasy/horror/”weird” writer William Hope Hodgson, which I found on Wikipedia, and which is so well-written that I’m assuming it was plagiarized from another source: “Hodgson achieves a deep power of expression, which focuses on a sense not only of terror but of the ubiquity of potential terror, of the thinness of the invisible boundary between the world of normality and an underlying, unaccountable reality for which humans are not suited.”

Humans are a profoundly vulnerable species.  Not only do we have weak, soft bodies (without claws, or horns, or venom) but we have the capacity to think, and with the capacity to think comes the capacity for madness and horror.  There is a thin, transparent membrane of logic and scientific reason stretched tightly over the amorphous, monstrous body of magical thinking with which primitive man first encountered the world.  This is where vengeful, super-powerful ghosts come into the picture; because, from a logical perspective, we know that the dead victim of an injustice is just that: dead; and he or she can no longer harm us.  But the magical thinking that animated the human genius for most of our history tells us that the blood of criminality is rank, and that it rises up to heaven and calls out for vengeance.  And so history becomes the proverbial nightmare from which Stephen Dedalus was trying to awaken.  Every horror, ever violation of the codes of morality can come back to destroy us.  To paraphrase William Faulkner, “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past; it is a pissed off Japanese albino from hell, with blood dripping from her eyes, come back to kill you in your bathtub.”

And so this is why Japanese ghosts don’t need to do anything.  They take that which has been effaced by time and criminal deception, and they bring it back into the light of day.  To steal a line from William Styron (who isn’t read anymore), who in turn stole it from John Milton: the Japanese ghost exists to render “darkness visible.” The ghost’s very presence constitutes an action, as it sets into motion the wheels of history and morality (albeit a brutal morality predicated on vengeance and terror).  The ghost is the conscience of the human race, gone mad and out for blood.  This ectoplasmic conscience holds up an appropriate mirror to the potential for psychotic violence and terror which exists in all of us.

I am Sick of these Motherfucking Burmese in my Motherfucking Ayutthaya: The Burmese Menace in Thai Nationalist Historical Epics

Yamada: The Samurai of Ayothaya (2010).

Burma today is one of the most tragically underdeveloped countries in the world.  Upon independence from Britain in 1948, Burma was mineral-rich and would seem to have had a comparatively promising future.  But the country almost immediately fell apart, with communists seeking to overthrow the nationalist government of U Nu and disaffected ethnic minorities in the East staging uprisings that rage to this day (the Burmese civil war is the world’s longest running conflict).  In 1962, General Ne Win staged a coup and ruled the country as a psychotic dictator until 1988 (among the signs of his insanity, a numerological fixation on the number nine, which led to the introduction of Burmese money in unites of 90 nyat (nine being an auspicious number)). 

In 1988, independence leader Aung San’s daughter, the much revered Aung Sang Suu Kyi, returned to the country from exile in Britain to lead its burgeoning democracy movement.  Her party won elections in 1988, but the military decided (a) not to recognize them and (b) that Ne Win was too fucking crazy and was an impediment to the maintenance of military rule.  And so the army overthrew Ne Win and slaughtered thousands of democracy activists.  The new regime called itself the State Law and Order Restoration Committee (SLORC, which has to be the worst acronym this side of the Filipino MILF (Moro Islamic Liberation Front)).  The SLORC renamed the country Myanmar, renamed the capital Yangon, and then moved the capital from Yangon (Rangoon) to a previously unknown village name of Naypyidaw, and continued to prosecute brutal wars of repression against the various ethnic minorities: the Shan, the Wa, the Karen, the Kachin, etc (emphasis on the etc.). 

In recent years, Burma has undergone an apparent transition to a more democratic form of government.  Power has been transferred to a civilian government (composed largely of former military officers who resigned from the army for the sole purpose of claiming to be civilians), Aung San Suu Kyi has been freed from house arrest and her party has entered parliament, and the government has now established cease-fires with most of the ethnic rebels (except the Kachin, whom the military continues to persecute in a war that gets very little international attention).  But the country’s still an underdeveloped mess and its future is uncertain.  In recent months, the predominantly Muslim Rohingya minority has faced pogroms from Buddhist mobs; Aung San Suu Kyi has refused to defend the Rohingya, an act of moral cowardice which has pissed off pretty much everyone.

I say all this as a preface to this post’s cinematic observation, which is that the Burmese menace that haunts so many Thai historical films becomes grotesquely ironic when you compare modern-day Burma and Thailand.  Thailand is a bastion of regional stability and economic power when compared to its impoverished, war-ravaged neighbors (specifically, Burma, Laos, and Cambodia).  In fact, one of the leading causes of instability in the post-WWII era in Thailand has been the near constant activity of Burmese ethnic rebels along the Thai-Burmese border.  Over the years, the Thai government has demonstrated varying degrees of tolerance for the different groups (much as they had a deeply inconsistent policy with the Khmer Rouge, who were dangerous and downright psychotic, but who provided a buffer between Thailand and the armed forces of Vietnam).

But if Burma is an irritant in modern-day Thailand, it’s hardly an existential threat (the existential threat to Thailand comes from its turbulent and often bloody party politics).  It is hard to imagine that there was once a time when mighty Burmese armies rampaged through Thailand, waging destructive campaigns that eventually annihilated the great Ayutthaya Kingdom in 1767.  The conflicts between Burma and Ayutthaya (often with special attention paid to its heroic founder-king Naresuan) provide the subjects for such nationalist cinematic epics as Naresuan (the first three parts of which run to about eight and a half hours), The Legend of Suriyothai (three hours), the blood bath Bang Rajan, and Napporn Watin’s Yamada: The Samurai of Ayothaya, an awful movie (which I watched this evening) about the nonetheless fascinating subject of Japanese adventurers in Thailand, circa-1610. In all of these movies, the Burmese are the most evil bastards to ever walk the earth (and the Thais are peaceful and virtuous, and their kings are virtually gods incarnate (may they be ever venerated!).  These representations of Burmese people and the xenophobia they give rise to are so over the top that D. W. Griffith himself would have looked at them and said, “Whoa, dudes, tone it down a little.”

Now, if you want to see a Thai movie with good, humane portrayals of Burmese people, I strongly recommend Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2001 film Blissfully Yours, which depicts the gentle (and gently surreal) romance between a Thai woman and an undocumented Burmese immigrant, all done up in Apichatpong’s beautiful, sui generis style.  It will certainly prove a welcome relief if you’ve watched too many Ayyuthaya chauvinist propaganda films.

How to Depict a Miracle on Film: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet

*THERE ARE SO MANY SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW.  If you haven’t yet seen Ordet, consider yourself warned.*

Before I start to talk about Carl Theodore Dreyer’s great religious film Ordet (1955), I should remind the reader that I have not been a religionist of any sort for many years.  Furthermore, my religious education as a child was indifferent, and all I’ve come to know about religion subsequently has been the result of auto-didacticism.  And so when I see profoundly religious people, like those who populate Ordet, I sometimes find myself perplexed.  Why are these people doing what they’re doing, I wonder?  But then imagination kicks in and I can figure it out.  As the great Catholic writer Graham Greene famously wrote, “Hatred was a failure of the imagination.” And he could have said that of all sorts of misunderstandings; hatred is merely the most extreme example.

Here’s the plot of Ordet in a nutshell: An old, deeply religious Danish farmer, Morten Borgen, living in 1925, has three sons:  The eldest, Mikkel, has a wife name of Inger and two daughters.  Inger is pregnant with their third child.  Mikkel has grown disillusioned with his father’s faith, and although he’d like to feel it again, he can’t bring himself to sustain it (and God help you when a Scandinavian struggles with his faith; Mikkel is like the eponymous hero of the Swede Par Lagerkvist’s Barabbas, who has born witness to Christ but can’t bring himself to believe in Him).  The youngest son, Anders, is in love with Anne, Peter the tailor’s daughter, but the tailor subscribes to a different denomination of Danish Protestantism than the Borgens!  And he won’t let any daughter of his marry a heathen Borgen (interestingly, Dreyer lays out very little of the distinctions between the two sects, although Morten asserts that the tailor’s is gloomy and death-worshipping, whereas his is optimistic and life-embracing).  And then finally there’s the middle son, Johannes, who has gone insane after reading too much Kierkegaard (no, seriously) and is now convinced that he is Jesus Christ.

Most of the action takes place over the course of a single, really dramatic day and night.  As evening passes into night, Inger goes into a difficult labor, her baby dies, and she herself becomes dangerously ill.  The sickly Johannes intones to his troubled father, “Did you see him?” “Who?” Asks the father. “The man with the hourglass and sickle.  He came to take Inger’s baby away.” And then Johannes prophecies that Inger herself will die, and that he, Johannes, will resurrect her from the dead, if only his father and brothers believe in him.  Well, sure enough, Inger dies.  Johannes, not feeling the faith that he thinks a messiah like him deserves, flees the house.  Then, just as the family is about to bury Inger, Johannes returns, apparently restored to sanity (when he thought he was Jesus, he spoke in a sick, grating kind of voice; apparently he thought Jesus was an affectless invalid?  Well, now he speaks clearly).  So he may be sane, but he still thinks Inger can be resurrected, if only the so-called believers would actually believe.  And of course his father and brothers don’t believe in him, at least.  Following Inger’s death, old Morten can only repeat, “The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away.” But wait, what about Inger’s daughter?  Yes, surely the faith of a child can save the day! And she says to Johannes, “Hurry, before they put the lid on her.” And Johannes says, “If it is possible, she will be restored to life when I say the name of our Lord.”

Now, I want to stop right here and say that the whole episode of Johannes’s return at the funeral is deeply moving.  In many ways, Johannes’s flight and subsequent return parallel the death of Christ and His resurrection, for it is only by returning that each can complete H/h-is respective mission.  And, my atheism aside, my eyes glistened with tears and I said, “You can do it, Johannes!” I like to think that I’m not one of those sneering atheists; in my reaction to Dryer’s work, I am reminded of a line by the Romanian-French aphorist E. M. Cioran: “Were it not for Bach, God would be entirely second rate.” Cioran seems to have completely missed the profound dignity of individuals’ engagement with issues of faith; now, granted, there’s not much to be said for the faith of the American evangelical snake-handler or the Salafi misogynist, but think of figures like Simone Weil and Dostoevsky.  But perhaps I’m guilt of aestheticizing religion; my general take on the matter is that religion makes for great drama, as long as you don’t take it literally.  Now, that said, Dostovesky probably would have been happier if he hadn’t been hung up on religion.  And, as long as we’re discussing Russian writers, it was religion that seriously undermined the literary output of Lev Tolstoy and destroyed the work and eventually the life of Nikolai Gogol.  Oh, and it killed Simone Weil who, like Gogol, starved herself to death.  Jesus.

Ok, where were we? Ah yes, Johannes was going to say the name of our Lord.  It is a moment of great high drama.  I would even say it is sublime.  And he says his prayer, and he says the name of Christ, and Inger begins to stir within her coffin.  And then Hulu decided that it needed to stutter to a halt and take a few moments to buffer, and the spell of the sublime was broken, so bear that in mind when I say that the rest of the movie seemed painfully banal and emotionally dishonest to me.  Because once Inger comes to, she embraces her husband, Mikkel, and she asks, “Where’s the baby?” And Mikkel says, “At home.” And then he adds, “With God,” and tells her that he’s now regained his faith.  And that now they will continue with life.  And Inger seems ok with this.  Inger just found out that her son has died, but he’s with God, so it’s fine.  And what’s this “life” of theirs going to look like, anyway?  It certainly seems to me that Inger is just going to go on being a housewife and helping her husband’s family maintain their farm.  She has just been the subject of a miracle, she has returned from the land of the dead, and soon she’s going to go back to scrubbing the floors and feeding the pigs.

I don’t know, I feel like returning from the dead should lead to dramatic changes.  Not just for her, but for everyone.  Because now the Borgens have proof that miracles can still happen, even in the modern world, and that Christ is still working among us.  And maybe there will be some of that (there are numerous witnesses to the resurrection, including the Godless doctor who let her die to begin with).  Dryer never made an Ordet II; he basically ended his movie with the miracle which, from a dramatic perspective, was probably the reasonable thing to do.  But it’s unsatisfying.  The sublimity of the miracle (and what Johannes had to do to make it happen) is eclipsed by its own practical implications: the woman is no longer dead, so she can go back to her day-to-day business.  But as far as miracles go, this is probably the best cinematic representation of them that I’ve seen thus far (unless one considers the telekinesis in Tarkovsky’s Stalker to be a miracle; some critics do).  I guess I want to conclude by saying that even if the religiosity of Dryer’s Ordet is somewhat alien to many of us, it still has much to offer, even to the atheist, just as one need not be a Christian to enjoy Bach.

Brief, Highly Subjective Divagation on Nick Cave

So what do we make of Nick Cave?  He looks rough and ugly, but he sounds like Leonard Cohen.  To call him “post-punk” implies that there’s something punk about him.  I don’t think there is.

Now, I’m rather new to his music.  The first Nick Cave album that I encountered was his latest, Push the Sky Away.  It was chill as fuck, except really sinister at the same time.  Although actually, my first exposure to Cave came years ago, long before I knew who he was.  This was way back in the day (I mean in my adolescence, which I’d rather forget), when I watched Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), in which Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds perform at a Berlin bar.  I don’t know what the song is called, but the refrain goes like this: “La la la la, a murder of crows, la la la, no one saw the carnie go” (the la la las are filler, I don’t remember much of the lyrics).  It sounded wonderful creepy. And the female lead—a trapeze artist—dances moodily in the audience, while Bruno Ganz—and Thomas Bernhard asserted that Ganz was the greatest German actor of his time, in his novel The Woodcutters—Burno Ganz is an angel and the humans can’t see him, but he loves the trapeze artist and gawks at her while she dances.

And I subsequently always associate Nick Cave with the grimy Berlin nightlife, and with David Bowie in Berlin, and especially with the Weimar scene.  Not that I know much about the Weimar “scene,” it’s probably a series of clichés.  But there are images that one associates with Weimar:  expressionist movies, expressionist movie posters; cabaret; weird sex; Woody Allen’s Shadows and Fog; Brecht and Weil; Dada; weird androgynous singers like Klaus Nomi (who wasn’t from that period, but he doesn’t have to be, these are just images); and finally poor goddam Amanda Palmer.  Jesus, the obscenity of millionaires on Kickstarter.  Do they not see themselves? Have they no self-awareness?  Kickstarter is theoretically a good idea: let poor artists with ideas go online and get money to make their ideas into reality.  I don’t object to that.  But Amanda Palmer is not poor (her husband, Mr. Gaiman, certainly isn’t poor); and Zach Braff isn’t poor; and whoever’s involved in Veronica Mars (this was not a thing that I followed when it was on TV), I say, they’re certainly not poor.  And why do people who can’t write poems attempt to write poems (cf. Amanda Palmer’s “Poem for Dzhokar”)?  First off, they’re not even trying to write poems.  They’re writing free associative prose with line breaks.  They’re like fucking adolescents who think that poetry is just supposed to be a pseudo-mystical (or mystifying) outpouring of feeling; now, it’s painful enough when adolescents do this, but Christ, Amanda Palmer’s 36.  Also, she’s a song writer, she’s written songs, a song is a poem with music attached, she should know something about meter at least.

Thanks for screwing up the Weimar aesthetic, Palmer.  Now we can only wait for the inevitable Cabaret remake (presumably starring Lady Gaga) to come along and revive it.

How Prurient Sexism Undermines the Careers of Talented Actresses: The Cases of Lena Nyman and Tang Wei

Dear reader, have you ever found yourself wondering, “Whatever happened to Lena Nyman?” No? Well that’s ok, because I’m happy to do the wondering for you.

Lena Nyman was a Swedish actress, born in 1944 and deceased in 2011, when she appears to have died of all sorts of things (or at least Wikipedia makes it sound that way), both COPD and Guillen-Barré Syndrome, a terrible mishmash of illness.  She first appeared on the scene in the 1960’s, when she acted in several films directed by Vilgot Sjöman, including the controversial 491 (1964), which I’ve never seen because, as I have continuously repeated throughout the history of this blog, international film distribution is dominated by greedy philistines, may God damn them all.  So I only know that it’s “controversial” by hearsay.  I don’t think anyone in the U.S. got to see it.  But in 1967, Sjöman came out with his international taboo-shattering masterpiece I am Curious (Yellow), with Nyman in the lead.  The film (along with its companion film, I am Curious (Blue) (these are the colors of the Swedish flag)), presents a digressive and genre-mixing exploration of politics (particularly sexual politics) in the post-war Swedish welfare state.  The premise of the two films is that Sjöman has cast Nyman to appear in a film about sexual politics in Sweden.  This is the same film-about-the-making-of-itself approach that would define virtually every post-Maoist Godard movie.

Lena Nyman, with Olaf Palme (l).

So what does I am Curious (Yellow (and Blue, while we’re at it, they’re basically the same movie)) look like?  Well, we have documentary footage (Sjöman interviewing Martin Luther King when he came to Sweden to accept his Nobel Peace Prize and Yevgeny Yevtushenko—or Jevgeny Jevtushenko, as the Swedish titles render it—speaking to students); we have Lena Nyman doing on the street interviews with random Swedes, in which she asks them about political, economic, and sexual questions in a manner reminiscent of Jean Rouch’s and Edgar Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (1960) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Comizi d’Amore (1965); and we have Lena Nyman having sex with various partners while trying to avoid her controlling mother and trying to spite her father, who joined a volunteer regiment to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War but mysteriously returned to Sweden a few weeks later, for which Lena has never forgiven him.  In Yellow, she has a large portrait of Franco on her bedroom wall, to serve as a reminder of her father’s treachery (in Blue, it has been replaced with a picture of Karl Marx… or possibly Martin Luther King, I don’t remember, it’s been a while since I saw these films).

Now, when you watch these movies nowadays, the general impression is of an innovative, Brechtian kind of political film, in the best tradition of the French New Wave.  It’s very playful and freewheelingly digressive.  Alas, his is not how the movie was received in the U.S.  When Barney Rosset of Grove Press brought the movie to America (winning an obscenity case in the process), the good people of America weren’t interested in Swedish politics; rather, they were interested in dicks.  And tits.  And buttocks.  All of which can be found in this movie, where the actors have (or at least simulate) sex without hiding under a blanket or waiting for the camera to respectfully pan away. 

So all across the land (from sea to shining sea), the word went out: “There’s a sex movie! With sex!  But it’s also an art movie, so you don’t have to be embarrassed to see it!  All the cool kids are seeing it! Norman Mailer says it’s cool!” And the people came out in droves to feast their depraved eyes on liberated Swedish flesh!  And Christ, were they disappointed.  Because, while there’s certainly sex to be had from time to time, Nyman and co. spend far more time protesting the Vietnam War than they do exposing their genitals.  And according to America’s frustrated connoisseurs, the sex wasn’t even that hot.  Nyman, they argued, was weird looking (I think she’s lovely, but I also don’t want to engage in the argument over her looks at all; there’s a similar argument afoot over another Lena, the American Lena, Ms. Dunham, whose frequent on-screen nudity would probably be a lot less provocative to people if she were skinnier; and there’s another argument I don’t want to get into, about actresses’ weight, it’s disgraceful, it’s insulting, it’s rank philistinism, God damn you all for even making me bring it up; even in the Criterion essay for Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, the respected essayist Philip Lopate finds it necessary to refer to her “zaftig body,” and I didn’t know what “zaftig” meant, I looked it up, it’s Yiddish for plump or full-bodied).

And so after making a licentious splash, I am Curious (Yellow) just ended up pissing people off.  And when Blue was brought out here shortly thereafter, nobody bothered to see it (and its sexual content was rapidly becoming par for the course). And so what happened to Nyman?  Now, I don’t want to trivialize her subsequent achievements (she apparently had a successful career on the Swedish stage), but her film career seemed to fizzle (at least in terms of what got released internationally).  Her only major film after I am Curious (Blue) was Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978), where she has a supporting role as Liv Ullmann’s handicapped sister (and maybe it’s a small world in the Swedish film industry, because Vilgot Sjöman’s first major work was Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie, which is a feature-length making-of (avant la lettre) about Bergman’s Winter Light).

So Nyman’s star turn in the I am Curious movies ended up screwing her over in the long run.  She shattered taboos about the depiction of sexuality in cinema, but once everyone had moved on, she was left behind (the same with Sjöman, by-the-by, I can’t tell you anything about his subsequent career).  And now, if they remember her at all, it’s as that girl who made the sex movie, not as the woman who made the political/avant-garde art movies.

There’s still a strange dissonance over sex in cinema today.  People clearly want to see it, but they don’t know how to feel about the people participating in it, especially the actresses.  As an example, let’s look at Ang Lee’s 2007 film Lust, Caution, which features graphic sex scenes (or the simulation thereof, it’s unclear) between Tang Wei and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. 

Now, while Leung was already an established star at this point, this was Tang’s first big role.  And everybody in the Sinosphere loved it (it was rated NC-17 in the U.S., so of course nobody here saw it), and everyone was “cool” with the graphic sexuality on display (or at least the ticket sales suggest they were cool with it).  But what happened to the main actors afterwards? Leung continued on as one of Hong Kong’s most beloved leading men—it didn’t matter that we’d seen his balls flopping around—while Tang, who was based in Mainland China, essentially found herself blacklisted, because the establishment there didn’t feel comfortable with the kind of nudity and sexuality that she’d displayed.  Now, there are certainly other factors at play in the discrepancy between the reception of Leung and Tang: Leung was already an established star, Tang was freshly arrived on the scene; Leung was from Hong Kong, Tang was from Mainland China.  But the key difference between their post-Love, Caution careers comes down to the simple fact that Leung is as a man and Tang is a woman.  His sexuality is somehow less threatening than hers.  And so even if they’ve both participated in a provocative film, Tang is going to receive far worse treatment than Leung, because female sexuality is still shocking (part of it may have to do with the fact that Lee depicted the couplings between Tang’s and Leung’s characters with style and seriousness; he neither played it for laughs nor made it look vulgar and depraved, which is what I suspect a lot of people are used to).

Well, unlike Nyman, Tang’s career looks to be getting back on track.  In 2011, she had a prominent role in Peter Chan Ho-sun’s Donnie Yen vehicle, Dragon (a Hong Kong production, so maybe that’s where her future is).  So hopefully, as Tang Wei continues to make films, people will become less awful, and then she won’t end up like poor Lena Nyman.

Meta-Film Comes to Rwanda: Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Grey Matter

Kivu Ruhorahoza

One of the tricky aspects of looking at art films from developing countries is that they tend not to be terribly popular at home.  For instance, do Iranian crowds flock to see the films of Abbas Kiarostami? Goodness, no.  In fact, according to a piece in The Believer, most Iranians would much prefer American blockbusters, like Shrek.  In fact, Shrek has such a goddam following in Iran that people will go to see different dubbings of it and then compare them to see which dub did it best.

The question often faced by the makers of art films in places like Iran or India is: are you making these films for domestic consumption, or are you making them for the international festival circuit? The great Indian auteur Satyajit Ray faced domestic criticism for his unflinching depictions of Indian poverty in films like Pather Panchali.  It was alleged that this was the sort of depiction of India that Westerners wanted to see; the Indian elites had similar issues with the Western filmmakers that they imported; for instance, when Nehru invited Roberto Rossellini to the country to make a film about post-independence India, he wanted the Italian to depict scenes of modernization and industrialization.  Rossellini, by contrast, was much more interested in filming mahouts with their elephants and scenes of pre-industrial rural life.

Now, we could get into a big ol’ clusterfuck about Orientalism and exoticism and what the “Western gaze” of someone like Rossellini was looking for in India, but we should also bear in mind that what Nehru wanted him to make was essentially a propaganda film.  So if we consider these cases to be representative, it seems that the filmmaker in developing countries is torn between producing crowd-pleasers like Shrek or rose-tinted propaganda films of the sort that Ray refused to make and Rossellini failed to make.

The Rwandan filmmaker Kivu Ruhorahoza confronts this issue head-on in his 2011 movie Grey Matter, a meta-film whose frame-story depicts the troubled circumstances of its own production.  The film opens with a filmmaker name of Balthazar, clearly Ruhorahoza’s stand-in, as he struggles to secure funding for his upcoming film about the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide.  Balthazar doesn’t want to pull any punches: he wants all the brutality and squalor and sex that are guaranteed to turn off a conservative audience (or just an audience seeking a lighthearted film).  In a conversation with his lead actress, Balthazar explains that he wants a graphic rape scene, “like in Blue Velvet, when Dennis Hopper rapes Isabella Rossellini [the Rossellini clan is apparently going to be ubiquitous in this post] and Kyle MacLachlan watches from in the closet.” The actress points out that (a) nobody wants to see that and (b) it will create a huge hassle with the censors and he’ll be sabotaging his film from the get-go.  No, no, it’s not like that, he insists.  Has she seen Irreversible? Yes, she sighs, she’s seen Irreversible. (Your bloggist has not seen Irreversible.  He also hasn’t seen Takashi Miikie’s Audition.  He’s theoretically been desensitized to most movie violence, but he can’t bring himself to see these films).

Anyway, I’m getting off-track here; what’s important is that Balthazar goes to a meeting with a representative for the government’s cultural wing (unlike the United States, many other countries like to subsidize the arts).  And the government representative says to him, Well, it’s a great script, we think you’re a very talented writer, don’t get me wrong, but… Well, is this story [the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide] really… relevant? Is it really that important? What we’d prefer—and we’d be willing to give you funding for this—what we’d prefer is a movie about AIDS prevention, or about combating violence against women.  You know, a movie with a good, strong message that reflects the government position.

So Balthazar doesn’t get his money from the government (and maybe that’s for the best; the current Rwandan government is appalling) and decides to fund the movie himself.  And then the frame story ends and we get to see the movie that Balthazar makes, which is divided into two parts: (a) a génocidaire in a mental institution carries on a psychotic dialogue with a cockroach and (b) a brother and sister whose parents were killed during the genocide try to deal with the brother’s severe anxiety and hallucinations.  In order to pay for her brother’s anxiety meds, the sister provides her brother’s doctor with sexual services and we see her disgustedly spitting out his semen just as Balthazar had proposed during the frame-story (Gaspar Noé would surely be proud).

Now, I don’t know what the Rwandan reaction to Grey Matter was like.  Maybe they loved it; maybe they’re not philistines like their American (and apparently Iranian and Indian) counterparts (I am referring here to “the masses,” I’m sure there are individuals in these countries who like art films and hate Hollywood).  But I can’t imagine the government was very pleased with it (or maybe they just didn’t see it.  American presidents don’t watch the documentaries made against them, anymore than they read the poetry denouncing them).  But Grey Matter did the international festival circuit and won prizes at Tribeca and the Warsaw Film Festival.  Perhaps, in the end, philistinism is an international problem, and Kivu Ruhorahoza will join the ranks of auteurs like Abbas Kiarostami and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose films don’t attract much attention or make much money in their countries of origin.  But neither do films by Europeans like Pedro Costa and Aleksandr Sokurov, or even big, established names like Jean-Luc Godard (this is based on the assumption that Film Socialism didn’t make a lot of money).  But fuck movies that make money.  Michael Bay’s films make a lot of money.  Godard’s and Apichatpong’s don’t and Ruhorahoza’s probably won’t either.  But they’re much more vital than all the bullshit in Hollywood (or Bollywood or Nollywood) and as long as there are festivals and endowments to support them, cinema in general will remain a vital art form.