Tonight is the first Thursday of the Fall Semester at CSUN, and for the first time since late August 2008, I was not at the Armer Theater watching the first movie of a semester-long retrospective on a world renowned director. Just as important as the films was the curator and host of our retrospectives, Professor Tim, who always gave an informative and interesting introduction to every movie, often including relevant documentary material such as an interview with the director or "making of" footage.
Professor Tim was the heart and soul of the CSUN Cinematheque. I saw close to 250 movies at the Armer, over a period of nine years, every Thursday night that school was in session, and the Professor and his presentation and knowledge of international film was one of the main reasons I rarely missed a week.
As you know, we lost our beloved Thursday night Cinematheque to a stupid and deliberate CSUN political agenda, and so that is why I was not at the Armer tonight as I have been for the past nine years.
So I decided to do a Cinematheque of my own, inside The Tiny Apartment for an audience of one. You can call it The Tiny Theater. I am the audience, still occupying my front row seat, and I am doing it - at least for this one semester - to honor Professor Tim, who gave us film fans so much for almost a decade.
I am also doing it because I love movies and I watch truckloads of them as you know, but for this semester, we are gonna do The Cinematheque every Thursday night at my pad, and we are gonna watch as many Mizoguchi movies as we can get our hands on. Kenji Mizoguchi was going to be the director we were going to feature this Fall. It wasn't to be, at CSUN at any rate, but I got a hold of a four pack of early Mizoguchi films from the Eclipse label, an offshoot of Criterion, and I can get four or five more from the Libe, so we will have a fair retrospective of our own.
I began tonight with the first film from my four pack, entitled "Osaka Elegy". I will start by saying that I expected Mizoguchi to be at least somewhat Ozu-like, very Japanese with stationary camera shots and sedate conversations between characters that slowly build to high dramatic situations.
Instead, I think that Mizoguchi - at least on first view of his early work - is more like Kurosawa and not immune to American motion picture influences.
"Osaka Elegy" is very hard-boiled, almost Noir-like, and I was surprised to discover that it was made in 1936, years before Noir came into the mainstream. In fact, this film was almost like a combination of a pre-Code Hollywood style morality drama with the look of a film noir, photographed as it is in shadows and foggy nighttime streetscapes.
Actress Isuzu Yamada, only 19 here but later to go on to prominence in Japanese films, plays Ayako, the nubile daughter of a single father who is out of work and taken to drinking all day. She has a job as a telephone operator for a pharmaceutical company, where her boyfriend also works as a salesman. Ayako is attractive, a fact noted by her lecherous boss Mr. Asai, who owns the company. At the beginning of the movie, we see Mr. Asai at home, verbally abusing his female servants and his wife as well. He is a full-on mysoginist, and right away we see the feminist perspective that Mizoguchi became known for. I use the term "feminist" in a non-political way here, because I cannot stand the politicised version of feminism. Mizoguchi presented the plight of Japanese women in a humanitarian light.
But Mr. Asai, the owner of the company, thinks he can have whatever he wants, and what he wants is Ayako. He has leverage on her, because he knows that her broken down father owes money to his former employer and is facing charges of embezzlement if he cannot pay back the debt. Mr. Asai tries charming Ayako, his employee, but he also waves her father's debt in her face, and as disgusted as she is, she chooses to sleep with her boss so that he will pay her dad's debt.
And Ayako is not portrayed as an altogether demure character to begin with. She is aware of her sex appeal, and once she sees the power it generates for her, she ditches her good-guy boyfriend and goes where the money leads her. Soon she is not only able to pay her father's debt, but also to pay for her conservative brother's college tuition, unbeknownst to him.
In doing all of this, in sleeping with her boss and her bosses' best friend (an even worse lowlife), Ayako winds up in over her head as you might expect, and so she calls on her one time boyfriend, the good guy, and asks him to marry her, for she is now in deep trouble with the bad guys.
That is all I will tell you about the plot, which is expertly carried by the acting of young Miss Yamada, who lived to be 95 and made many movies.
Director Kenji Mizoguchi, who is widely regarded as one of Japan's top three directors along with Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, had been making movies since the Silent era. Not many of his more than 100 films are available on dvd, but judging from the start of my own personal Cinematheque at The Tiny, we are in for a treat in the coming weeks if "Osaka Elegy" is anything to go by.
So far, though admittedly after only one week, we are dealing with a non-traditional Japanese filmmaker, one who was willing to throw women's issues in the face of Imperial Japan during the most aggressive period of it's existence just prior to WW2.
Ozu was also a champion for women, every bit as potent though in a more philosophical way.
But it looks like Mizoguchi went for the jugular.
Two humongous Thumbs Up then, for "Osaka Elegy". What a great start to this mini-retrospective of the films of Mizoguchi. See you next Thursday night at The Tiny Theater for the next one. :)
And I will see you in the morning, as usual. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
No comments:
Post a Comment