Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/26/19

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

Monday, August 26, 2019

Dodes'ka-den (Akira Kurosawa, 1970)

Cast: Yoshitaka Zushi, Kin Sugai, Junzaburo Ban, Kiyoko Tange, Hisashi Igawa, Hideko Okiyama, Kunie Tanaka, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Ryo Sawagami, Yoko Kusunoki, Noboru Mitani, Hiroyuki Kawase, Hiroshi Akutagawa. Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Shinobu Hashimoto, based on a novel by Shugoro Yamamoto. Cinematography: Yasumichi Fukuzawa, Takao Saito. Art direction: Shinobu Muraki, Yoshiro Muraki. Film editing: Reiko Kaneko. Music: Toru Takemitsu.

Akira Kurosawa's first film in color, Dodes'ka-den was a critical hit, earning an Oscar nomination for foreign language film, but a commercial failure, sending the director into a deep, near-suicidal depression. It's a curious grab-bag of stories of people living in a trash dump, their lives connecting only tangentially for the most part. It has the appearance of such post-apocalyptic films as Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006), Delicatessen (Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991), Escape From New York (John Carpenter, 1981), Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2014), Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1991), and The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969), though its setting is on the fringes of the actual 20th-century Japan -- apocalypse nigh, if you will. The title comes from what is perhaps its central figure, the mentally challenged Roku-chan (Yoshitaka Zushi), who is obsessed with streetcars and chugs through the dump chanting the nonsense words of the film's title, meant to be an evocation of the sound of the tram on the tracks.