Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/02/19

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

Friday, August 2, 2019

Sing a Song of Sex (Nagisa Oshima, 1967)

Cast: Ichiro Araki, Kazuko Tajima, Juzo Itami, Akiko Koyama, Koji Iwabuchi, Kazuyoshi Kushida, Hiroshi Sato, Nobuko Miyamoto, Hiroko Masuda, Hideko Yoshida. Screenplay: Tsutomu Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, Toshio Tajima, Nagisa Oshima. Cinematography: Akira Takada. Set decoration: Jusho Toda. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka. Music: Hikaru Hayashi.

Politics and pornography intersect in Sing a Song of Sex, a film which, though it has four credited screenwriters, was largely improvised by its young cast. It's set at a time of political demonstrations, during which the teacher (Juzo Itami) of a group of young men preparing for their examinations tells them that bawdy songs -- the film's Japanese title has also been translated as A Treatise on Bawdy Songs -- are themselves a political statement, a way for the poorer classes to find release from oppression. And so the lines between fantasy and reality are blurred in the film as the young men act, if only in their imaginations, upon their desires, many of which focus on the pretty Mayuko (Kazuko Tajima), whom they depersonalize by referring to her by her seat number in class, 469. Often enigmatic, Sing a Song of Sex is the kind of film for which it's best that many of us just go along for the ride rather than to try to unravel its social and political implications, which are very much of a particular time and place.