Tag Archives: Dostoyevsky

THE IDIOT (Akira Kurosawa, 1951)

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

Kurosawa’s THE IDIOT (1951), an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel set in post-war Japan, was originally conceived as a 265 minute film with an intermission. That cut didn’t work for the studio and Kurosawa cut it down to 180 minutes. The studio asked for further cuts and this is how we’ve ended up with the 166 minute currently available. When I began watching and knew nothing of its history, my first thought was ‘Kurosawa’s not afraid of length.’ Little did I know. The film was  a critical and box-office failure upon first release and would have sunk Kurosawa’s career but for the international success of RASHOMON. The extra 99 minutes of the original cut now seem irretrievably lost (though one can hope).

 

This history helps explain why the film seems so narratively inelegant, title cards offering so much background, voice-over at the beginning also used to fill in information that could have been shown rather than told. I now realise it probably once was. The story is a complex one with many sub-plots but at its basis is a triangle focused on Taeke Nasu (Setsuko Hara), a woman sold at a very young age to be an industrialist’s mistress and traumatised ever since. The two men in love with her are a) Kinji Kameda (Masayuko Mori), the titular Idiot, once mistakenly convinced of war crimes and rescued at the last minute from the firing squad. He himself thinks this experience affected his brain and  traumatised him into idiocy. The other suitor is Denkichi Akama (Toshiro Mifune), a rich, handsome, self-destructive playboy. Whilst watching it I imagined it as a thirties Hollywood film with Garbo, Leslie Howard and Clark Gable in the roles and the film itself as a juicy, pulpy saga, probably as far from Dostoyevky as you can get.

There are incredibly beautiful moments and sequences. The moment where the two men arrive in Sapporo and see Taeko Suso’s image in a storefront is beautifully conceived. The gorgeous photo is framed, behind a window, their adoring faces frame hers, but only as a reflection in the window itself. It’s a beautifully conceived image, all these hopes, illusions, longings, desires, just a play of light, evanescent, a projection onto an image; an illusion.

There are extraordinary set-pieces; the run in the snow after Kameda leaves Akema with the butchers’ knife, first contemplating suicide, then out to kill him. The whole of the Sapporo carnival sequence with people skating in phantasmagoric costumes as lovers wait to reveal their desires; there’s extraordinary images (black shadows blinking on Taeko Nasu’s face as suitors bid to become her next lover; and like other Kurosawa film, this one makes extraordinary use of the weather and the elements, here snow, ice, cold, blizzards, a flickering stove to ward off all of this so loaded it periodically bursts into flames, surely a symbol of the burning and unquenchable desire they each feel. The first part of the film is titled ‘Love and Loathing’, the second ‘Love and Agony’.

At the very beginning of the film a title card informs us that Dostoyevsky tells of the destruction of a pure soul by a faithless world and that ‘In this world goodness and Idiocy are often equated’. This particular film, like Rashomon, also deals with questions of truth but very differently. Here everyone except the idiot lies, tells half-truths, lies by omission, lie to themselves. That the idiot doesn’t is what makes him an idiot but it’s also what makes him good, why even people who want to hate him can’t. Goodness is valued by others even when they themselves can’t achieve it, and most don’t even aspire to it. So like the cliché of Russian Literature, people love, anguish suffer and at they end die too young. It is a mess of a film but one that I loved watching and it has many extraordinary sequences. I would love to see the original cut if it ever resurfaces.

One of the pleasures in the process of intensifying is that I am now recognising actors, those who appear in Kurosawa’s other films (Mifune, Masayuki Mori, Takashi Shimura) and also those who appear in famous Japanese films of the period, here Setuko Hara and Chieko Higashiyama, who so beaitufifully played, respectively, the daughter-in-law and mother-in-law in Ozu’s Tokyo Story)

José Arroyo

 

 

The Double (Richard Ayoade, UK, 2014)

Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

the-double

 

 

A really smart and ambitious take on Dostoyevsky’s The Double that doesn’t quite ‘play.’ In the film, the present is imagined as a dark 19th-century world with 1930s appliances where everyone is lonely, the self is divided, alienation is the norm and suicide is the only way out. Jesse Eisenberg plays two versions of a character and impresses with each. That it doesn’t quite ‘play’ is not as bad as it sounds. Many great movies don’t: La règle du jeu, The Magnificent Ambersons, many others; and if Ayoade’s film is nowhere near that level, it still makes for a fascinating watch. The Double is beautiful to look at, all noir-and-amber lighting, characters in frames within frames, boxed in, and with the camera often zooming out so that their imprisonment becomes complete. Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska are mesmeric and I loved seeing Cathy Moriarty again. After Submarine and The Double, Richard Ayoade is no longer a director of promise but one of achievement.

 

José Arroyo

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, UK/ Ireland, 2012)

Female Directors, , , , , , , , , , ,

IMG_6759

A  clever and funny film, The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology  basically amounts to an illustrated lecture on ideology taking excerpts from a wide variety of films (The Sound of Music, The Searchers, They Live, If, A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket by Kubrick, also two from Forman, Loves of a Blonde and Fireman’s Ball) as case studies with which to illustrate aspects of Slavoj Žižek’s thinking on the subject.

The readings of the films are always entertaining but unsubstantiated and he could easily have said the exact opposite had he chosen to —  he offers no proof either way. One can imagine him adding to the ‘perversity’ of it all by saying something completely different about the films and being just as funny, just as provoking and just as clear on his own thinking; the choice of films is amusing but so personal and idiosyncratic as to seem ad-hoc.

The exposition of the thinking, however, is always stimulating and almost too Cartesian, beginning with a central idea, breaking it down, juxtaposing it with its opposite and then guiding one through a dialectic that sees no contradiction in bringing together desire and historical materialism, the self and the social, the unconscious, the repressed and the other invisible forces that act on us, materially, such as forces and relations of production, and us once more, this time via the social, through the circulation of value in commodity culture.

And why would Žižek of all people seek, much less find, such contradiction? As far back as 1989, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek was already writing that, ‘there is a fundamental homology between the interpretative procedure of Marx and Freud – more precisely between their analysis of commodity and of dreams.(p. 11).’ They’re both attempting to make manifest what is otherwise invisible and which not only act on us but in effect create the us we think we are. Movies are almost an embodiment of such issues and concerns: the dream commodity, the viewing machine that commodifies our dreams, the dreams that commodify our desires.

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology has a really interesting exposition of how the first part of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ has been used as a unifying anthem throughout the political spectrum, internationally, and across the twentieth century. At the end of the film, there’s an equal interesting speculation on the notion that ‘without God, everything is permitted’. Žižek claims that the debate prompted by the notion was begun by Sartre in the 40s (in Existentialism is a Humanism) as a central question on Existentialism from a misquoting of Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. One can understand why Existentialism with its focus on individual responsibility in relation to ethical action would have to address the issues that religion had previously provided a framework for. However, Andrei I. Volkov disputes that Sartre misquoted Dostoyevsky and makes a very persuasive argument that Dostoevsky did in fact say what Sartre attributed to him  though it shouldn’t be taken as an axiom or even as a hypothesis.

The point here is not to discuss Sartre or Dostoyevsky but merely to note that Žižek is not to be relied upon for facts and rigour. However, as a polemicist, he reigns supreme and the film is funny and thought-provoking.  The way he looks, all crumpled up, as if he fell asleep in his clothes last night and has just awoken, and with huge black circles under his eyes, like he’s read so much his mind is a whirl of almost coherent ideas, is funny; as is the emphatic harshness with which that low and somewhat raspy voice of his enunciates.

I’m also glad that ideology as a concept is once again being discussed after all these years of postmodernist emphasis on the partial, the instertitial, the liminal etc.all of which have a narrower focus and whose purpose is of course decimating grand narratives. He shows how those grand narratives nonetheless persist and affect. He doesn’t do a good job of explaining it all and it’s more the work of a provocateur than a thinker. But I liked the provocation very much.

As an added treat, the film places him within the setting of those movies he discusses, Travis Bickle’s bedroom from Taxi Driver say or the military barrack from Full Metal Jacket, which is a way of setting him in the midst of the desires those films enflamed and the ideas they propagated and is a stroke of genius. Another excellent byproduct of the film is that it makes you want to see the films he’s discussing, some of them again, some for the first time (in my case I’m now desperate to see Seconds, the early Forman films and They Live). So all in all, it’s funny, it makes you think, and it makes you want to see more movies — a successful use of 2 and  a 1/2 hours for me.

José Arroyo

IMG_6757