Secret Origins: Radical Japanese film of the ’60s & ’70s @ Jonas Mekas’s Anthology

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2013, 2019 Paul Ben-Itzak

First published on the DI/AV on February 14, 2013.

If you think Butoh is the excruciatingly slow (or delectably languorous, depending on your point of view) dance interpreted by performers doused in flour that its Western acolytes have laid claim to with Zen-like fervor and wonder why this post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki art form was once called the ‘dance of darkness,’ Donald Richie’s 1959 “Sacrifice / Gisei,” being screened Sunday February 24 at Anthology Film Archives as part of its mini-festival of Film Experiments in 1960-70s Japan (meant to coincide with the Museum of Modern Art’s Tokyo 1955 – 1970: A New Avant-Garde exhibition closing Monday), will set you straight. The dance captured here is neither slow nor nuanced. Indeed, in a response typical of an ignorant Western critic, when the 8mm to video 10-minute piece opened (American so-called Butoh interpreters would take 10 minutes just to move a muscle), the performers running in circles and lifting their arms over alternating shoulders moved so gracelessly that at first I mistook the choreography for a paltry Japanese imitation of Judson, before I read the press release and realized that this Butoh authentically captured reveals the opposite, how diluted the ‘dance of darkness’ has become as it’s been transmitted by generations of non-Japanese interpreters. The film ends (spoiler alert) with young men and women happy-go-luckily pissing on (or raping, female on male), defecating on, and finally castrating an agonizing colleague. (Decidedly not a scene that would ever make it into today’s ‘family-friendly’ New York theaters.) (Sharing the bill with “Sacrifice” is the 1969 “Portrait of Mr. O,” the first in a series of collaborations between Chiaki Nagano and Butoh co-founder Kazuo Ohno.)

If you’re looking for something here to take the kids to, try Program 9 (Monday February 25), which is mostly cartoons, the ones I was able to screen most easily described as being composed in various fashions from and manipulations of cut-outs. Akira Uno’s 1965 “Toi et Moi / Omae to Watashi,” replete with fish and anthropomorphisms and set to baroque music, suggests where the French dance – filmmakers Montalvo-Hervieu might have found their animated ideas. But the gems here come from Tadanori Yokoo (who made them in 1963-64-65). After opening with the bon-bon “Kiss Kiss, Lichtenstein,” which applies flip-book technique to comics tableaux to create cut-away cartoons (animating the bisou), Yokoo delivers a tour-de-force riff on everything wrong and right with the Anglo hegemony of the era, a Peter Maxian extravaganza (although Yokoo here precedes “Yellow Submarine” by five years, so perhaps the former was inspired by the latter) clocking in at less than 10 minutes in which which “Alain Delon” (a dollar dangling from his mouth) and “Brigitte Bardot” are pursued and blasted to smithereens by the Beatles and a John Wayne-like figure on horseback, across the Manhattan sky-line, by jet bombers and submarines, until they find respite on a train bound for the peak of a volcano. There’s even a curtain-raiser performed by “Elizabeth Taylor” and and a scythe-wielding Richard Burton, and a cameo by Marilyn Monroe.

Katsu Kanai’s 1970 “Good-Bye” combines the sensibilities of the above-described two programs; so you could take the kids for the singing candy salesman (accompanied by drummer) hawking Japanese and other Asian bon-bons outside a Korean village, but then you’d have to cover their eyes for the graphic male on male and possible female on male rape scenes. The first was, I think, meant to represent Japan raping Korea, given that the PR describes “Good-Bye” as the first postwar Japanese film to be shot in South Korea, and an “absurdly comic but nevertheless poignant exploration of Japanese-Korean relations and the roots of the Japanese bloodline.” To decipher the geopolitical implications, I think your kid would need to be a scholar of the subject, so if you’re not, I suggest going for the surrealism that’s used to explore the theme. The not entirely linear (Eastern?) turn of events suggests that the viewer might be able to arrange his or her own chronology and even narrative of the micro if not the macro plot-line. It’s a sort of cylinder without an apparent beginning or end, an invitation to the kind of time-travelling hop-scotch Kurt Vonnegut designed in “Slaughterhouse Five.”

While I was unable to screen the film, its topicality in the wake of Fukiyama recommends Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s 1971 “Minimata: the Victims and their World / Minamata: Kanja-San to Sono Sekai,” screening Thursday, February 21. When the fertilizer company Chisso began depositing wastewater with traces of mercury into the nearby sea, residents of the town of Minimata started to show symptoms of what came to be recognized as a dangerous disease. Tsuchimoto follows the townspeoples’ struggle to receive a formal apology from Chisso.

What all these films have in common is they suggest a less-sanitized memory of an era which American popular culture media has been trying since the turn of the last century to turn into Valhalla, stripping the glossy veneer from the “Mad Men.”

Have Pen, will Travel: A forward-looking memoir of Paris, the Dordogne, Cahors, Fort Worth, Chicago, Miami Beach, New York, Maryland, Montana, Connecticut, San Francisco, Reno, and the High Sierras

Paul Ben-Itzak’s new 40-page Memoir, including art by Ansel Adams, Robert L. Berry, Lou Chapman, James Daugherty, Gustave Caillebotte, Jacob Lawrence, Sylvie Lesgourgues, David Levinthal, Roy Lichtenstein, Sam Peckinpah, Charles M. Russell, Saul Steinberg, and Frank Lloyd Wright from both current exhibitions and the AV Archives, is now available. To receive your own copy as a PDF or Word document, including 35 illustrations, please send $19.95 to the AV by designating your PayPal payment to paulbenitzak@gmail.com, or write us at that address to learn about payment by check. Your purchase includes a complimentary one-year subscription to the Arts Voyager and Dance Insider ($29.95 value). Above: Saul Steinberg, “Train,” From the exhibition Along the Lines: Selected Drawings by Saul Steinberg, on view through October 29 at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ascenseur au Pantheon du Cinema: Jeanne Moreau est morte — Long live Jeanne Moreau

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2017 Paul Ben-Itzak

Jeanne Moreau, the embodiment of French film and muse to the giants of French and World cinema for seven decades, including Francois Truffaut (“Jules and Jim”), Louis Malle (“Ascenseur pour l’echaffaud”), Orson Welles, Luis Bunuel and countless others, was found dead in her Paris apartment this morning by her maid, French radio reported. Jeanne Moreau was 89 years old.

After making her theatrical debut at Jean Vilar’s Festival d’Avignon in 1947 and subsequently joining the Comedie Francaise before leaving it for Vilar’s new and pioneering Theatre National Populaire in 1951, Moreau never really left the French stage or screen, continuing to be a formidable presence with her distinctive gravelly voice well into the current decade.

“My voice changed with the years and the cigarettes, but my voice is like that,” Moreau said. “One should never take advantage of one’s tools; at that instant one becomes manipulative. Even with men, I never played the coquette.”

“She’s an absolute monument,” declared the actor Pierre Arditti, speaking today on French public radio. “The very model of what an actor must make of her metier. She’s the very example, that is to say that she was always conscious of her art; when it came to playing someone else, she always mined herself.”

“In a certain manor, she incarnated the modern woman even before the explosion of feminism,” explained Eve Beton, a cinema commentator for French public radio, adding, “This was a woman who loved words; her home was packed with books.” Among other signature moments, Beton singled out Moreau’s poignant portrayal of an ex-convict in Bertrand Blier’s 1974 “Les Valseuses,” which made stars of Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere, as two incorrigible youth on a rampage through France. “They encounter this woman as she’s being let out of prison, they sleep with her, and the next morning she commits suicide.” Moreau’s brief appearance was so moving that it eclipsed that of an icon of a younger generation whom the two seduce earlier in the film: Isabelle Huppert.

It was one of many roles in which Moreau revealed what Serge Toubiana, the former director of the Cinematheque Francaise, described as her strong sense of a ‘sovereign self.’ “She had such a taste for liberty,” Toubiana said, “that she revolutionized the very concept of what it meant to be a star. I rarely encountered such an independent personality. Truffaut said of her, in ‘Jules and Jim,’ ‘She is prestigious.'” For Orson Welles, who directed Moreau in his 1962 “The Trial” after Kafka, Toubiana said, she “incarnated the French language, the French panache.”

While it was not her debut film — among other roles, she’d already held her own opposite French film legend Jean Gabin (France’s answer to Humphrey Bogart) in Jacques Decker’s 1954 Paris polaire “Touchez pas au Grisbi” — the film which announced Moreau’s arrival, Toubiana remembered, was Louis Malle’s 1957 “Ascenseur pour l’echafaud” when, to the melancholy trumpet notes of Miles Davis, she walked the Paris streets, sans make-up (Moreau didn’t need any to make an indelible impression), in search of her man.

Also speaking on French public radio this afternoon, Jean-Claude Carrier, who adapted the scenario for Luis Bunuel’s 1964 “Diary of a Chamber Maid,” recalled, “One day Jeanne came to see me and said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on with Luis. He’s not telling me anything. I have the impression that he doesn’t like what I’m doing.” When Carrier reported the remark to the director, Bunuel replied, “What do you want me to tell her? It’s she who’s teaching me things about the character.”

If Toubiana and others pointed to Moreau’s audacity, for the actress it was an audacity she put to the service of the directors with whom she worked in over 130 films. “What’s interesting,” she said in a recent interview, “is to have commenced in 1948 and have told stories in a different way…. with the Nouvelle Vague, and after, it changed again. In fact these are always the same stories, but told in a different manner. And it’s good to allow a young woman or young man to be conscious, and to have the audacity to express his desire and not be timorous. One should never submit.”