Journal of Literature · Night reading at the moment
Night before bedtime reading, a beautiful article, takes you into the world of memory of reading.
In 1975, Ian Bruma, in his early 20s, came to Japan. At that time, Japan had just finished its turbulent post-war reconstruction. In the past decade or so, Japan's population has surged, its economy has taken off, its manufacturing industry has flourished, and its artistic and cultural fields such as literature and film have flourished. If you look a little further back, Japan at that time was on the eve of the era of economic bubbles, and was about to be caught up in the vortex of globalization.
With her extraordinary sense of smell, Bruma quickly discovered the variety of Japanese avant-garde culture of the 1970s, which was not known to the world, and penetrated into the cutting-edge scene and the core cultural and artistic circle: the cluttered alleys and ruined theaters in Tokyo's Asakusa, the film shooting scene of Akira Kurosawa, and Shuji Terayama's experimental theater troupe. As an "outsider", he wandered to the fields of theater, film, photography and the fringes of Tokyo's underground cultural life, curious and calmly observing and touching everything around him.
Born in The Hague, the Netherlands, Ian Bruma served as editor-in-chief of the New York Review of Books and taught at Oxford, Harvard, Princeton and other universities. Decades after leaving Japan, Based on the recollection of this personal experience, combined with long-term research and thinking, Bruma keenly and sharply captured Japan's complex cultural temperament of nostalgia for tradition and daring to innovate, obsessed with foreign countries and closed and xenophobic, orderly and violent, and wrote the book "Tokyo Dreams: Japan's Last Avant-garde Era", which was recently introduced and published by the Republic of Beijing Daily Press. Today I would like to share with you a chapter about director Akira Kurosawa.
For a long time, I would go to the film center every afternoon for screenings, sometimes in the evenings. There will be a review of Ozu Yasujiro's excellent films, and there will also be Akira Kurosawa's. I myself went my own way and discovered Yoshio Naruse's masterpiece. He was always an underrated director. Lonely bar waitresses and women eager to escape from repressed marriage, his bleak stories touched me as deeply as Ozu's family movies. Keisuke Kinoshita's subversive comedies have also been shown, as well as some rarer films. The wonderful movies I've read about in the books of Donald Ritchie (writer and director) are no longer just names, but on the top floor of the boring building in Kyobashi, they come alive one by one in the form of flashing images.
Kurosawa
As a regular visitor to the Film Center, I quickly saw my companions who lingered with me in the darkness. They were a bunch of weird guys, and they were a must- on the scene: an elderly skinny man who always wore a white cowboy hat and a button-down tie; a fashionable "baby face" in a pigeon-gray suit with a pearl tie clip, like a 20s movie star; a stocky man in his 40s who looked a bit like a tramp, with long greasy hair and a dirty denim coat with the words "I am a Japanese hippie" printed on the back. They sat in the same seats in the second row each time, unless some unlucky fan inadvertently took their royal seat, which would provoke whispered complaints in the hallway.
I don't think they should be very good friends, and after the screening, they will go their separate ways. But in the theater they are inseparable. In between each film, they would gather in the hallway, reviewing scenes from their favorite films, and re-enacting the dialogue clips to exchange views with the various actors. In the final scene of Ozu's 1949 film Late Spring, the father played by Kasa Chi-chi was left alone after the wedding of his only daughter, and the scene was dissected by the group frame by frame. Sometimes, they argue softly over the merits of the two performances.
I think that for movie fans, KasaChijin or Tanaka Atsuyo, or to be more precise, they create fictional characters that are more real than any real human being. So, in general, movie fans are more weird than music fans or ballet fans, because they are creatures in the dark, integrating themselves into the lives of others.
But I was certainly one of them, immersed in the Japanese life imagined by screenwriters and directors during the Golden Age of Japanese cinema. Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, these three masters are of course the love of my heart. Some say that it is impossible to treat these three equally, because their styles and temperaments are very different: Ozu advocates Zen minimalism, Mizoguchi expresses a gorgeous and painterly Japanese aesthetic, and Kurosawa has a technical genius, he borrows Hollywood-style editing techniques, the narrative is compact, and also borrows the style of classical Japanese drama.
The three great masters of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema: Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu
It is generally believed that among the three masters, Ozu is the most "Japanese". His studio even initially refused to release his films overseas, believing that foreigners would never understand them, and might mock Japanese people sipping tea on tatami in suits. Kurosawa is sometimes criticized for "emitting a buttery smell," a Japanese term used to describe people or things with the temperament of a "fake Western devil." Although I was just a stunned student who had just entered the film field, I also understood that this was nonsense. Kurosawa was the only one of the three giants to live until the 70s, and his success outside of Japan drew resentment to him. He is a recognized "head starter" that critics do to knock it back as much as they can.
I think I can explain my fascination with Japanese Golden Age films. The Golden Age lasted from the 1930s to the 1960s, after which television destroyed the studio system and the great Japanese films became increasingly rare. Films made by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, Naruse, and other lesser-known directors all have one thing in common: they embody emotionally rich realism. That kind of blunt honesty is rare in European and American movies. It's not just the fortuitous result of cinematic geniuses getting together, Japanese audiences also play an important role in it and they eat this set of emotionally rich realism very much. This does not seem to be the case today, for reasons I don't know, perhaps because even the shared memory of suffering and poverty is fading.
George Lucas and Spielberg presented Akira Kurosawa with the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement, 1990
Donald once wrote about Kurosawa, saying that the protagonists of his films never just existed, but were always in a state of cultivation. This comment remained in my heart because it was both an interpretation of Kurosawa's work and a description of Donald himself. This comment reminds me of what he said to me: A foreign romantic in Japan, about the gradual cultivation of the self, embracing uncertainty with a free and open mind. Donald has also said that the subject of all great art is the essence of reality. Perhaps because of this, Kurosawa Akira has handled various details just right with a very stubborn attitude. Everything has to look real. A movie set in the 16th century, the props in it must use real things, not fakes. Kurosawa spent a fortune on the 1957 film Spider's Nest City, which was built in the Middle Ages, and later discovered that nails were used during the construction and demolished the castle — because the nails were not from that era, and the cameras may have captured this mistake. All of this was a golden age luxury, with studios making enough money to indulge these star directors. By the 1970s, those days were gone. Kurosawa gradually discovered that it was impossible to get enough money in Japan to make the movies he wanted to make.
Akira Kurosawa and the actors on the filming scene of Shadow Warrior
Eight years later, I witnessed Kurosawa's perfectionism on the spot, when his film Shadow Warrior invited me and Donald to play Portuguese missionaries, even though we didn't actually look like Iberians at all. Part of the funding for the film was provided by a Hollywood company. Neither of our characters had lines. It was a group play, and we might not even be seen. Still, when we were in a cramped powder room at Toho, facing the mirror to make up and dress the characters, Kurosawa spent the whole afternoon, fussing about adjusting our outfits—Donald's hair was covered with the right amount of white powder. Our Jesuit robes had to be cut precisely, and all the work was wasted: these two small roles were given to two other foreigners.
But I still witnessed a battle scene in Kurosawa filming Shadow Warrior. The film is set in the 16th century, when a criminal was ordered to pretend to be a dying daimyō in order to maintain the morale of his followers. Wearing a blue single-brimmed hat and sunglasses, Kurosawa stood high in front of the crew, arms around his chest, his lips tightly closed, and his chin raised, as if the general were reviewing his troops. He waved his arms arbitrarily and shouted, "Ready! Boot! Hundreds of samurai on horseback rushed down the hillside in response, and the golden glow of the afternoon sun shone through the dust of the horses' hooves. At this time, Kurosawa stomped his feet in disgust and ordered the soldiers to go back and repeat it all over again—someone had just waved the green battle flag a little earlier, a short second earlier, ruining the shot.
Poster of the CC version of the movie "Seven Samurai"
I had met Kurosawa before that, in 1976, at a private screening of Barry Linden by Stanley Kubrick. At the end of the film, the lights come on, and Mrs. Kawakito introduces me as the nephew of John Schlesinger—my only identity worth mentioning, though untenable. The tall man wore dark glasses and smiled politely. He then gave a lengthy speech about the new 55mm lens that Kubrick used to shoot candlelit interiors in the 18th century. That's what he likes to talk about: technology, not theory. He hated it when people asked him about the meaning of the film, because the work should speak for itself. He could explain the technical details, explain his multicam setup, or his royal film. But he's been talking about this kind of thing for too long.
Kurosawa once said that outside of his films, he did not exist. He must have a project in progress at all times, otherwise it is better to die. In the late '70s, he took a break to wait for enough money to be raised for Shadow Warrior. This made him particularly irritable. In order to survive the financial difficulties, he starred in many Ads for Suntory Whisky. The producer of the commercial was his most trusted assistant, and the outstanding female Teruyo Nogami was affectionately known as "Ono Sauce" (Ono). Perhaps, apart from himself, Kurosawa only trusted Nogami's artistic judgment. He never yelled at her. She is like his royal "guard" (amulet). Before shooting each shot, Kurosawa would turn to look at Nozo standing next to the main camera and ask her if she thought it would work. One day, Wild Sauce called me and asked if I would like to join the French "film historian" Max Tessier on a whisky commercial. We're going to have a conversation with Kurosawa at his country house on the hillside outside Mt. Fuji.
Kurosawa was not happy. He sat in a chair, smoking a cigarette, and gave orders to the photographer, telling him the right angle and the right light. Whenever Kurosawa gave instructions to the film crew, the person actually in charge of directing the commercial was nervous and sweaty. I turned and looked out the window, and the black volcanic landscape stretched along the slope toward the famous mountain in the distance. Max said two things like "nice weather", Kurosawa snorted and then I asked him about a scene from the 1954 movie Seven Samurai, and Kurosawa said, "Well..."
In Spider's Nest City, he directs Toshiro Mifune
We are living in the same room with greatness itself. Two Europeans who love Japanese cinema want to talk to Akira Kurosawa in a whisky advertisement, but their tongues are knotted and stuttered, and they don't know what to say. The light made me unbearable. Soon, I was sweating like an anxious director. "Please speak." The director of the commercial film whispered, casting a nervous glance at Kurosawa. Kurosawa lit another cigarette, held a cup of amber barley tea in his right hand, and waited. Max asked him questions about Spider's Nest. It seems to have been filmed near here, right? Kurosawa's eyes, hidden behind his colored glasses, finally lit up. Yes, he said, pointing to the black sand outside. The castle was once built there, and Toshiro Mifune (starring in Spider's Nest City) was also shot through the armor by an arrow from close range on the city wall. Kurosawa pointed out the camera position of the famous final act and used his hands to show how mifune's "Japanese Mesei Macbeth" slowly fell and died. At this time, the film landscape in which we were filming the commercial was suddenly given a strange vitality. I can play back some movie clips in my mind: the grainy black-and-white landscape, the fog, the sound of the wind, and the fear in Mifune's eyes. It was almost as if the old castle had once again appeared through the shadows of the windows. As for the commercial, I think it was never aired.
Tokyo Dreams: Japan's Last Avant-Garde Era
[B] Ian Bruma / by
He Yujia / Translation
Republic of Beijing Daily Publishing House, September 2021 edition
New Media Editor: Fu Xiaoping
Pictured: Film materials, published books
1981· 40th Anniversary of the Literary Journal , 2021
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