A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, October 1, 2017

The Ceremony (Nagisa Oshima, 1971)


Masuo Sakurada: Kenzo Kawaraski
Ritsuko Sakurada: Atsuko Kaku
Terumichi Tachibana: Atsuo Nakamura
Tadashi Sakurada: Kiyoshi Tsuchiya
Grandfather: Kei Sato
Setsuko Sakurada: Akiko Koyama
Shizu Sakurada: Nobuko Otowa

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Toichiro Narushima
Production design: Shigenori Shimoishizaka
Music: Toru Takemitsu

In his comments on The Ceremony in Have You Seen...? David Thomson makes an admission that perhaps I myself don't keep enough in mind: "I have seen enough Japanese films to know that, much as I admire that national cinema, it is based on precepts that are strange to me." But Thomson also makes an important point when he likens the family in The Ceremony to those in "Faulkner or Greek tragedy." We are distanced from the tortured family narrative in the film not only by cultural differences, but also by the larger-than-life mythic quality of the personalities and events. The transgressive sexuality -- the pervasive incest in the Sakurada family -- and the rigid adherence to tradition, which reaches its most absurd point when an elaborate wedding is conducted with the bride in absentia, are on one level satiric indictments of Japanese culture, but on another level are statements about human obsessions that transcend national boundaries. Sometimes Oshima's attempt at this kind of transcendent mythmaking bogs The Ceremony down a bit, and the performers don't always rise to the demands of the material, losing their grip on the humanity of their characters and bringing in a whiff of pretentiousness to the enterprise. But it's a fascinating film to watch -- and often to listen to, when Toru Takemitsu's spiky score appears.
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