Top Ten: Oscar's Favorite Foreign Filmmakers

tuesday top ten returns! It's for the list-maker in me and the list-lover in you

The Cannes film festival wrapped this weekend (previous posts) and the most recent Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, The Secret in Their Eyes is still in the midst of a successful US run. That Oscar winning Argentinian film came to us from director Juan Jose Campanella. It's his second film to be honored by the Academy (Son of the Bride was nominated ten years back). The Academy voters obviously like Campanella and in some ways he's a Hollywood guy. When he's not directing Argentinian Oscar hopefuls he spends time making US television with episodes of Law & Order, House and 30 Rock under his belt.

So let's talk foreign-language auteurs. Who does Oscar love most?

[The film titles discussed in this article will link to Netflix pages -- if available -- should you be curious to see the films]

Best Director winners Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain) and Milos Forman
(Amadeus and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)

Please Note: Filmmakers like Ang Lee (Taiwan), Milos Forman (Czech) and Louis Malle (France) have won multiple notices for their foreign language work with the Academy but I'm restricting this list to those directors who worked primarily in their native tongue throughout their careers. The three aforementioned men all had their biggest Oscar successes from English language films.

OSCAR'S TEN FAVORITE FOREIGN AUTEURS

The ranking that follows are somewhat arbitrary since we're
dealing with different kinds of attention paid.

Honorable Mention: Ettore Scola (Italy), Bo Widerberg (Sweden), Carlos Saura (Spain) and Zhang Yimou (China) each helmed 3 Foreign Film Nominees over the years... the latter two for submissions from two different countries. Denys Arcand (Canada) and Nikita Mikhalkov (Russia) have each directed 3 Nominees one of which won the prize (The Barbarian Invasions and Burnt By The Sun, respectively). Mikhalkov, who also acts in his pictures, recently completed the sequel to his Oscar winner called Burnt by the Sun 2, but reviews have been brutal so we aren't banking on seeing it in the Oscar lineup next year. Finally, Jose Luis Garci (Spain) directed 4 nominated films, winning once for Volver a Empezar.

let's make this a top dozen

12 István Szabó (Hungary) 1938 - still working
4 Foreign Film Nominees (1 win)
all Oscar categories: His filmography has earned 5 nominations, 1 win

Like Spain's Garci, the last of the honorable mentions, Szabó directed 4 Foreign Film Nominees, winning once. But in the case of Szabó, it's a more surprising achievement. Unlike Spain, Hungary has rarely won much favor with Oscar. In fact, after Szabó's last nomination, Hungarian films have been completely ignored by the Academy.


In a remarkable hot streak in the Eighties, Szabo had four (!) Best Foreign Film nominations: Bizalom (1980), Mephisto (1981 winner), Colonel Redl (1985) and Hanussen (1988). The latter three all starred Klaus Maria Brandauer who became a fixture in international cinema after the success of Mephisto. It helps to speak several languages and be brilliant -- just ask Christoph Waltz (Yes, there are earlier incarnations of all success stories). Brandauer might have even won the Supporting Actor Oscar for his sterling work in Out of Africa (1985) had voters not been feeling sentimental for that Cocoon fella. Oscar was SO sentimental in the 80s.

But where were we? Ah yes. Szabo moved over to English language cinema (directing Annette Bening to a nomination for Being Julia) but he hasn't yet equalled those early Hungarian successes.

11 Mario Monicelli (Italy) 1915 - still living
2 nominations (writing) | 4 Foreign Film Nominees
all Oscar categories: His filmography has earned 6 nominations, 0 wins

He's best known for kicking off the commedia all'italiana movement in cinema and for the classic Big Deal on Madonna Street but Oscar's love for him stretches over six movies (His two screenplay nominations weren't even from his foreign film nominees). Monicelli turns 95 (!) this summer. He hasn't directed a feature film since 2006 but you may have seen him as an actor in the Diane Lane vehicle Under the Tuscan Sun (2003).

THE TOP TEN

10 René Clément (France) 1913-1996
1 Foreign Film Nominee | 2 Honorary Foreign Film Wins (before category existed)
all Oscar categories: His filmography has earned 4 nominations and 2 honorary statues

The Academy gave out 8 special foreign language film Oscars before they decided they needed to give foreign films their own category and René Clément won the prize twice during those years. In those days Oscar only had eyes for France, Italy and Japan. The Walls of Malapaga (1949) was his first win and he won again shortly thereafter for his internationally renowned classic Forbidden Games (1952). Games even won a second Oscar nomination for story two years later once it finally hit American screens (this is before they changed the rules to prevent films from competing in more than one year). That film was in some ways the perfect embodiment of Oscar's foreign type before Oscar even knew it had one: young children as protagonists + World War II.

The Academy created the foreign language film category as we know it in 1956 and Clément's was there again as a shortlister for the Emile Zola adaptation Gervaise (1956).Though that film was his last foreign film nominee, he continued to make movies for another two decades including such well regarded films as Purple Noon (1960) and Paris Brûle-t-il? (1966) which received two Oscar nominations in other categories.

09 Luis Buñuel (Spain) 1900-1983
2 nominations (writing) | 3 Foreign Film Nominees (1 win)
all Oscar categories: His filmography has earned 5 nominations, 1 win

Oscar arrived at the Buñuel party conspicuously late. They even ignored Belle de Jour (1967) one of the best films ever, despite awards attention elsewhere. Sometimes they are well behind the curve. Notice how long it took Jacques Audiard (A Prophet) and Michael Haneke (The White Ribbon) to win attention. In some ways it's surprising that AMPAS got there at all with Buñuel given the director's penchant for sexuality and surrealism. Oscar somewhat prefers the chaste and the literal as you know.


Tristana and the years of critical acclaim preceding it, opened their hearts to his work at the dawn of the '70s. His follow up, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), was a double nominee. Its win in the Foreign Film category has to count as one of the best but most unusual choices in the category's entire history. But then Oscar was at his most adventurous in the early 70s. Oscar and Buñuel had one last fling with That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). It was also Buñuel's last affair with the cinema. The father of cinematic surrealism was in his late 70s at the time and died in 1983.

08 Andrzej Wajda (Poland) 1926 - still working
1 Honorary Oscar | 4 Foreign Film Nominees
all Oscar categories: His filmography has earned 4 nominations, 0 wins and 1 honorary statue

Poland's most influential filmmaker was most revered by awards bodies in the latter half of the 70s and early 80s. He won 3 Foreign Film Oscar nominations in that period: Promised Land (1975), The Maids of Wilko (1979... retitled The Young Girls of Wilko) and Man of Iron (1981). To prove that it wasn't a temporary love, Oscar handed him an honorary statue for "five decades of extraordinary film direction" in March of 2000. He won a fourth foreign film nomination recently for Katyn (2007). His lauded filmography also includes Ashes and Diamond (1958) and the French biopic Danton (1983) starring Gerard Depardieu which received awards attention elsewhere but strangely no Oscar heat.

07 Jan Troell (Sweden) 1931- still working
2 nominations (directing, writing) | 3 Foreign Film Nominees | 1 Best Picture Nominee
all Oscar categories: His filmography has earned 7 nominations, 0 wins

He's often forgotten in discussions of Scandinavian cinema (at least here in the US) since Ingmar Bergman casts such a long shadow. But Oscar was quite fond of him up until recently. His high water mark with the Academy was Utvandrarna (The Emigrants) -- strangely not on DVD -- one of only five pictures to ever achieve both Best Foreign Language Film and Best Picture nominations. Given Oscar history it's a bit odd that the Academy didn't jump on his latest picture Everlasting Moments (2008) and even with Max von Sydow in the lead role, Hamsun (1996) didn't win attention either.

06 Pedro Almodovar (Spain) 1949- still working
2 nominations (directing, writing) | 1 Oscar (writing) | 2 Foreign Film Nominees (1 win)
all Oscar categories: His filmography has earned 5 nominations, 2 wins

Spain's most famous living filmmaker has a fascinating Oscar history. The Academy embraced his international breakthrough Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) but then ignored the next ten years of his career. His Oscar comeback was the mature and wondrous All About My Mother (1999) which took the top prize, despite content that would normally scare them away. Given his global fame and AMPAS's familiarity with his mad melodramedic skill, you'd think he'd have more nominated films to his credit. Part of the problem is that the Spanish Academy, which makes Spain's choice about Foreign Film representation, hasn't always been gaga for Pedro's work. Famously they passed over Talk to Her (2002) in its year so Oscar handed that recent masterpiece a screenplay Oscar and a directing nomination instead. It's no small stretch of the imagination to say that it would've beat the German winner Nowhere in Africa that year to become Pedro's second winner in the category. Volver (2006) was weirdly snubbed in the Foreign category but managed the even more high profile Best Actress nomination and became Pedro's biggest stateside hit if you don't adjust for inflation.


05 Francois Truffaut (France) 1932-1984
3 nominations (writing, directing) | 3 Foreign Film Nominees (1 win)
all Oscar categories: His films have earned 8 nominations, 1 win

This icon started his career as an obsessive cinephile and provoactive critic at the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. His feature debut, The 400 Blows (1959) kicked off the French New Wave and proved to be one of the most influential and acclaimed films ever made. That film won him the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival at only 27 years of age. It also netted him his first Oscar nomination and more would follow. His classics include seminal features like Jules et Jim (1962) as well as Oscar-recognized favorites like Stolen Kisses (1968), Day for Night (1973 -winner), The Story of Adele H (1975) and The Last Metro (1980).

Film buffs will note that he also acted, even receiving a BAFTA nomination for appearing in his admirer Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Here's Spielberg talking about working with him.



04 Akira Kurosawa (Japan) 1910-1998
1 Honorary Oscar | 1 nomination (directing) | 3 Foreign Film Nominees (1 win) | 1 Honorary Foreign Film Win (before category existed)
all Oscar categories: His films have earned 12 nominations, 2 wins and 2 honorary statues

Japan's most famous filmmaker spent over sixty years working in the cinema and his legacy is enormous. The Oscars don't paint a full enough portrait of his cinematic impact. Only two of his films won the Foreign Oscar: the game changing Rashomon (1951) which people have been riffing on ever since, making it one of the true must-sees for cultural literacy, and Dersu Uzala (1975) which actually won the prize for Russia rather than Japan. His other nominated films were Dodes'ka-Den (1970) and Kagemusha (1980). I can't recall the circumstances which led his King Lear style epic Ran (1985) to ineligibility in the foreign film category but the Academy compensated with a well deserved Best Director nomination for that classic.

Still, despite what would be more than plentiful Oscar attention for most filmmakers, this portrait feels incomplete. Major classics like The Hidden Fortress (1958), Yojimbo (1961) or The Seven Samurai (1954) had to make due with technical nods or none at all. They sure did owe him that honorary Oscar they gave him in 1990 "For cinematic accomplishments that have inspired, delighted, enriched and entertained worldwide audiences and influenced filmmakers throughout the world."

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The Top Three

Oscar's most beloved trinity of foreign language film auteurs (in terms of this list's criteria) had the good golden fortune to be doing incredible work during the decades when US movie culture was most enamored of foreign fare. That is, at least since the silent film era, before sound came crashing into cinema toppling it like the tower of Babel.

03 Vittorio de Sica (Italy) 1901-1974
1 nomination (acting) | 3 Foreign Film Nominees (2 wins) | 2 Honorary Foreign Film Wins (before there was a category)
all Oscar categories: His (directorial) filmography has earned 10 nominations, 3 wins and 2 honorary statues

The Bicycle Thief and The Garden of the Fitzi-Continis... the titles alone sound mythic somehow, having amassed so much cultural heft over the years. Those two Oscar winning classics aren't true bookends of de Sica's acclaimed filmography but since one is from the 40s and one from the 70s they work as such. This Italian neorealist and prolific writer/actor/director was celebrated often and seemingly continuously from Shoe-Shine (1947's honorary winner) through his supporting actor nomination for A Farewell to Arms (1957) and onward until the Fitzi-Continis. His swansong The Voyage (1974) didn't win awards but it was a fitting goodbye, since it allowed him to reteam him with his frequent muse Sophia Loren.

Loren & de Sica. They made beautiful films together.

I was a bit surprised to see his name above Kurosawa's in this listing given their name recognition value these days but he's a truly giant figure from world cinema history, popularizing neorealism in the late 40s and delivering multiple classics. He was also one of the principle authors of Sophia Loren's legend having directed her in both her Oscar winning role in Two Women (1961) and in celebrated films like Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1964's foreign Oscar winner) and Marriage, Italian Style (1964). He also directed American screen giants like Montgomery Clift in Indiscretions of an American Wife and Shirley Maclaine in Woman Times Seven (she was Golden Globe nominated for that multiple role performance).
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02 Ingmar Bergman (Sweden) 1918-2007
9 nominations (directing, writing, producing) | Irving Thalberg Award | 3 Foreign Film Winners | 1 Best Picture Nominee
all Oscar categories: His filmography has earned 21 nominations, 7 wins and a Thalberg

This legendary Swede's body of work is so deep and impressive (not to mention deeply immersed in the human condition) that listing his numerous Oscar successes wouldn't even acknowledge what some would argue is his greatest achievement (Persona, 1966). That black and white masterwork in which a mute actress (Bergman's muse and lover Liv Ullmann) and her nurse (Bibi Andersson) become pyschologically fused has influenced much work since, including two of the greatest films from other world class auteurs (David Lynch's Mulholland Dr and Robert Altman's Three Women). Woody Allen never did his own Persona riff but he is arguably the most famous of Bergman's many auteur fans.

Bergman's filmography is essentially one treasure after another so we'll have to ignore the bulk of it for brevity's sake and point you to his Oscar films in case you haven't seen them. Program a mini festival at home. All three of his foreign film nominees won: The Virgin Spring (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Fanny And Alexander (1982). [Trivia Note: Sweden has never won the foreign prize outside of Bergman's work]

Cries and Whispers (5 nominations, 1 win for cinematography)

In addition to his foreign film winners Bergman's other gold successes include Wild Strawberries (1957) Face to Face (1976) and Autumn Sonata (1978). The Academy fell deepest into a hypnotic Bergman trance in the early 70s when they gave him the Thalberg award and then followed up that honor with multiple nominations, including Best Picture, for his great and disturbing female grief drama Cries and Whispers (1972).

01 Federico Fellini (Italy) 1920-1993
12 nominations (directing, writing, producing) | 1 Honorary Oscar | 4 Foreign Film Winners |
all Oscar categories: His filmography has earned 23 nominations, 7 wins and 1 honorary statue

Last year's adaptation of Nine, itself adapted from a stage musical adapted from Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963) wasn't well received enough to spark a mini-Fellini revival in the media but the media was once quite enamored of all moving parts of Fellini's cinematic circus. That press conference scene in Nine was no exaggeration or joke. In fact, the word "paparazzi" sprung to life because of one of his best loved movies La Dolce Vita (1960) in which a male photographer's name is Paparazzo. Fellini's celebrity was vast and his actors were also sensations. His male muse Marcello Mastroianni never won an Oscar but he holds the record of most nominations for non-English language performances, three in total).

Though their sensibilities are vastly different, Fellini shares with Bergman, his only real rival for Oscar's foreigner crown, a prolific career and one with consistent inspiration and awards pull. Even before he won notices for his directing he was winning screenplay nominations for films he didn't helm.

Fellini's Academy Award winners: La Strada (1956), Nights of Cabiria (1957), 8½ (1963), Amarcord (1974) Other Oscar-honored Fellinis: I Vitelloni (1953), La Dolce Vita (1960), Satyricon (1969), Fellini's Casanova (1970).

How familiar are you with the films mentioned?
I have a decent grasp of the Fellinis, Bunuels and Kurosawas. I'm nearly a completist with the Almodóvars (duh). But I need to get down to serious business on the Bergman's (small percentage despite my love. What's that about?) and I'm almost completely ignorant on the de Sicas and the Troells. So many I haven't seen.

How about you?
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Kiki Dunst is Turning Japanese. I Really Think So

I've been waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting and (well you get the picture) for things to turn around for Kirsten Dunst. I've loved Kiki long time. Somewhere in the middle of building a rep as one of our best young actresses the public began to turn wildly against her, spurred on by uncontrollable Gyllenhaalism (how dare she dump him?) and snowballing Mary Jane Watson fatigue.

So I'm totally happy to point you to this video "Akihabara Majokko Princess", a collaboration between artist Takashi Murakami and director McG in which Kiki sings "Turning Japanese". Pointed you towards paparazzi shots of this online awhile ago and have been waiting for the actual video to show up. It's a bit NSFW since Murakami loves cartoon nudity.


Watch Kirsten Dunst "Turning Japanese" in Music | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Her voice is processed here but if you've ever watched the end credits of The Cat's Meow you'd know that she is one of the actual movie stars that they should look at for film musicals. In other words, girl can sing. You can read an interview about this project here. I love it when celebrity actors do weird left field projects inbetween movies. Not that she has all that many movies in the works...


But things will turn around. They will. They must.
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Birthday Suit (With Bright Yellow Trench)

Today is the 109th anniversary of one Chester Gould the creator of Dick Tracy. Every time Dick Tracy (1990) comes up, I think "you should watch that movie again!" but I never do. I think I'm still mad that Warren Beatty kept cutting away from Madonna's "More" performance... which should've easily been one of the best movie musical numbers of the 90s (sigh). Otherwise I quite like the movie

Trivia Alert! Dick Tracy is one of Oscar's two favorite comic book movies along with The Dark Knight (2008). Their Oscar track was very similar. Dick Tracy had 7 nominations and 3 wins. The Dark Knight had 8 nominations and 2 wins and in mostly the same categories, too.

• Supporting Actor (both, and the only two comic book performances ever nominated*: Al Pacino and Heath Ledger, winner)
  
• Cinematography (both)
  
• Art Direction (both)
  
• Costume Design (Dick Tracy only)
  
• Sound (both)
• Sound Editing (The Dark Knight only, winner)
  
• Original Song (Dick Tracy only, winner)
  
• Make-Up (both, Dick Tracy winner)
• Visual Effects (The Dark Knight only)

Why was there no sequel to 1990's primary-colored hit? Aside from Beatty's periodic Brigadoon-like vanishing it's because the rights are all tied up in legalese. Boo hoo.

Other birthdays for 11/20
1915 Kon Ichikawa, Japanese film director of Oscar nominee The Burmese Harp (1958) and Golden Globe winner Kagi (1959)
1925 Robert F Kennedy, assassinated hero and frequent movie character. I've still never seen Bobby (2006) though, have you?
1927 Estelle Parsons, Oscar winning actress (Bonnie & Clyde). She's still on the road with August: Osage County -- she's in Connecticut right this very second (5 more shows over the next 3 days. Hurry!), DC next month and hits the southwest in January and the midwest in February. I hope you bought your tickets because the show is so worth it. Our post about the casting of the movie is the 2nd most commented on this year (106 comments!). Everybody's got an opinion.
1928 Aleksey Batalov star of Cannes Winner The Cranes Are Flying (1957) -- rent it immediately if you haven't seen it, it's one of the best romantic war dramas ever -- and Oscar winner Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears (1980).
1936 Don DeLillo, amazing novelist

1956 Bo Derek 80s icon, famous in swimsuit for "10", infamous in birthday suit for Tarzan the Ape Man and Bolero (right)
1959 Sean Young 80s actress, wildcard. Best remembered in pop culture as the desperate creature who wandered around in a catsuit trying to convince Tim Burton to cast her in Batman Returns. What's less remembered, unfortunately for Young, is that Burton had actually cast her... as Vicki Vale for the first film before an injury sidelined her and Kim Basinger got the part. Even less remembered and also to Young's credit: she definitely had screen presence. See: Blade Runner and No Way Out for proof.
1989 Cody Linley of Hannah Montana and Dancing with the Stars fame, busy creating a filmography composed entirely of ridiculous character names: "Spit McGee", "Mullet Fingers", "Brownie" and "Tough Boy"



* I may be wrong there. It depends on how you define 'comic-book performances'. More in the comments

A Note from Chicago: I Came for Communism but Kanikôsen Just Gave Me Crabs Instead

Hello, Film Experiencers! This is the rather-absent-of-late BeRightBack, posting a note from beneath the mountains of work I've been buried under for the past two months or so. As you may know, the Chicago International Film Festival is currently taking place in the Windy City. While I had been resigned to skipping it entirely this year, last night I was compelled to ignore my obligations and take in a Sunday night screening of Kanikôsen, the new movie by the Japanese director SABU.



Known for candy-colored, slapstick films like Hard Luck Hero and Drive that rely on the narrative force of a madcap chase to connect a series of inventive set-pieces and visual gags, SABU seemed a provocatively odd choice to remake the stern 1929 proletarian novella Kanikôsen by Kobayashi Takiji (the title is translated variously as "The Factory Ship" or "The Cannery Boat," although SABU has insisted that his film be distributed internationally under the untranslated title). How would the grimy realism and claustrophobic setting of Kobayashi's novella pair with SABU's irreverent, gag-dependent and speed-obsessed visual style?

Quite oddly indeed, as it turns out, though this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The film begins with one of SABU's trademark visual jokes, showing a bedraggled worker peeking out from below deck on the ship, presumably watchful for the approach of the cruel foreman from whom he's attempting to escape. Instead of a foreman, however, the threat arrives in the form of a huge net filled with crabs hanging suspended above his head, which comes crashing down as a set-up for the smash cut to the title card (蟹工船 - lit. "crab/factory/ship"), itself a visual that sums up in three ideograms the components of what we've just seen and will continue to see. It's a clever way to approach the material, finding an engaging visual shorthand to convey the novel's political metaphors while leavening them with humor to disarm the potential resistance the contemporary audience may have to the novel's dour, didactic tone.

This kind of thing continues throughout the first third of the film, but somewhere along the way, SABU seems to doubt the audience's ability to see the purpose behind his flippancy. He starts to remove the humor from the proceedings, and the film becomes a progressively more literal adaptation of the novel. At the same time, though, he brushes up against moments in the narrative that use the vocabulary of international proletarian collective action to show how the characters can escape their misery, but ends up shrinking back from their most radical implications.

For example, in the movie as in the novel, two characters try to escape only find themselves picked up by a neighboring Russian ship. The laborers' toil on the Japanese ship has been relentlessly aligned with beating that of the "enemy" Russian boat, and this is a moment in the story when our exploited Japanese workers see what's really happening there - which, in the novel, turns out to be a workforce engaging in communal labor that has meaning and benefit for the workers, free of exploitation. As idealized as such a view of Russian communism might seem from our smug, post-Cold War vantage point, in the context of 1920s Japan it held a potency as an alternative to the alignment of militarism and corporate interests that colluded to break up labor movements in the name of supporting the imperial war effort in the lead-up to WWII.

But SABU, making a movie in 2009, shies away from endorsing communism and instead turns the scene on the Russian boat into an intentionally absurd fantasia of dancing girls and feasting Cossacks - in short, turning a scene meant to show how labor can be satisfying when done for the benefit of all into a scene that fantasizes a world without labor at all, only dancing and free food. At the end of the scene, a clownish translator imparts a version of "Russian" ideology that studiously avoids the language of Marxist or even collective action and instead talks vaguely of "finding" oneself, implying that the revolution will come from a personal change in individual mindset without any call to recognize the larger structures of power underpinning the exploitation occurring on the Japanese boat.

This replacement of a vocabulary for collective action with lines that basically boil down to a carnivalesque version of The Secret robs the latter part of the film of its potential power. The film exchanges its witty, puckish tone at this point for a rather sentimental and humorless melodramatic re-enactment of many of the key scenes from the novel, but it nonetheless continues to skirt around any idea of international proletarian community and resistance. The problem with this is that the film has played many aspects of these characters' situations and misery for laughs already, so demanding that we suddenly take them seriously doesn't work - it makes the workers' personal stakes seem flimsy and the sudden incursion into realism seem like a just further exercise in style.

All the same, Kanikôsen is a fascinating reading of the current political and cultural situation in Japan. The recession that started in the beginning of the 1990s has resulted in the erosion of the ability of the corporatist state to guarantee employment to even its educated class, and Japanese books and films (like Kiyoshi Kurosawa's recent Tokyo Sonata, to take one example) have been increasingly pre-occupied with issues of labor as a result. Proletarian novels from the 1920s and 30s, which had gone largely unread in the 1970s and 80s, have undergone a revival as a younger generation grasps for an alternative theory of labor and nation following the collapse of Japan's economic "miracle" and its inextricable fusion of public and private capital; this film itself, in large part, is the result of Kobayashi's novel becoming a surprise bestseller during the last year. And in this context, even its incoherency seems productive. At the beginning of film, the character who has crabs dumped on his head is shown later walking sideways, crab-like, evoking Chaplin's character in Modern Times imitating the machines he works with all too literally; in both cases, it is a madness that, visually, tells a truth about the dehumanization endemic to industrialized labor. It is in these moments that point toward a possible visual language for dealing with the madness of the present moment, resulting in a movie whose parts end up signifying more than its rather garbled whole.

Mezamashii: Kinuyo Tanaka in Sandakan 8 (with Bonus Oscar Trivia!)

BeRightBack here, visiting from the Wordsmoker Collective to blither about Japanese cinema again! Today, I want to talk a bit about great Japanese actress (and first studio-backed Japanese female director!) Kinuyo Tanaka. Specifically, I want to look at her last major role, in 1974's Sandakan 8, which was in the running the following year (upon its international release) for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.


Sandakan 8 is an issue-driven movie dramatizing the then-little-known phenomenon of the "karayuki-san," a practice by which young girls from the countryside were sold into prostitution in foreign lands by desperately poor Japanese families. The government tacitly condoned the practice, as it was a way for Japanese "business interests" to gain a foothold in places marked for future colonization or annexation. Tanaka plays a former karayuki-san who is being courted by a young female "women's studies scholar" who is interested in her story.


Sandakan 8's strengths do not lie in its filmic qualities. The double-flashback narrative frame distances the audience in an unhelpful way, making the dramatization of the karayuki-san's exploitation seem luridly predictable rather than viscerally shocking or moving, and the script's reliance on melodramatic cliché in its narrative arc does little to detract from the grinding, Stations-of-the-Cross-esque pacing.

What makes Sandakan 8 a joy to watch even today, though, are the performances by its female leads: Komaki Kurihara's grace in the thankless role as the young, idealistic scholar; Yoko Takashi's refusal to indulge in the bathos the script urges on her as she plays the karayuki-san as a young girl; and, above all, Kinuyo Tanaka's disarming, funny, and emotionally fluid turn as the former karayuki-san confronting the loneliness and wisdom her past traumas have bequeathed her.


Tanaka makes the unusual and extremely effective decision to play her character as a woman who has been through so much that she has lost any desire to hide her feelings. As the film relentlessly shows us, she is a woman who has lost everything. Tanaka's choice conveys that this has resulted not in bitterness, but in an almost alarming openness to whatever meager joys come her way. It makes her character both childlike and wise, tragic yet joyful as she clings to the companionship the woman scholar provides. Every emotion the character experiences plays across Tanaka's face like dye dropped into clear water.

While the film is not currently available on DVD (the graininess of these screengrabs is due to the fact that the only copy I could find was transferred from a VHS tape), I did find a Youtube clip of the final scene between Tanaka and Kurihara that demonstrates better than any screengrab the quicksilver emotional beats Tanaka hits every second she's onscreen.



Tanaka won Best Actress at the Berlin International Film Festival that year, and, as I mentioned before, the film was also nominated for the Foreign Language Film Oscar. In a rather odd twist, the film it lost out to that year was Dersu Uzala, the submission from the Soviet Union – a film directed by Akira Kurosawa!

Does anyone recall if this has happened before or since - a film nominated by one country being beaten by a film submitted by another country that was directed by a national of the former, not the latter, country? Can this question get more convoluted?

Mezamashii: Travelling Through Space and Time with Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims

Hey cinemaniacs, it's BeRightBack again, visiting from the Wordsmoker collective to bring you another "eye-opening" ["mezamashii"] moment from Japanese cinema. This week, I'm talking about the ridiculous, hilarious, picaresque and deceptively sophisticated Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims, by Kankuro Kudo (Netflix it!).


Yaji and Kita are a twosome. They are also lovers, but their inseparability seems more essential to what they are than their sex lives. They are not two individuals who found one another. They exist together or not at all.


Yaji and Kita are a twosome who travel. They were first invented as the bumbling heroes of a late 1700s travelogue meant to advertise inns and other businesses lining a road called the Tôkaidô, which connected the new capital Tokyo (then known as Edo) in the east and the old capital Kyoto in the west. Their adventures in these product-placed locales became so popular that they outlived the businesses they were meant to publicize, stars of one of the earliest and most popular buddy comedies in the world.

Yaji and Kita travel through space but also through time. They popped up again in the 1990s as the heroes of a comic strip (or manga) by Kotobuki Shiriagari that turned them into lovers, existential heroes and drug addicts; unhitched from the real Tôkaidô, they visit inns named after "Laughter" and "Singing" and even into the underworld. They travelled now through the realms of hallucination and dream; they'd become "midnight pilgrims."

Yaji and Kita travelled next out of the world of print and into cinema. While there were silent films made in the 1930s dramatizing episodes from the Edo Period text, it is the 2005 film adapation of Shiriagari's manga lets them do what they do best: remain in motion, hallucinating and cracking jokes and getting into trouble as they wander hand-in-hand from frame to frame, scene to scene, jokey non-sequitur to jokey non-sequitur.


Film allows Yaji and Kita move across genre, space and time all at once: one minute they're in Edo, the next they're in a rap video, then a stand-up routine, a Cheech and Chong-like stoner comedy, a slapstick sitcom. At one point, they tumble like clumsy puppies through Mount Fuji itself, leaving it to some secondary characters to repair this potent national symbol with masking tape.


And yet, even as everything around them seems so fluid and negotiable, their love persists. Near the movie's start, Yaji goes out of his way to assert that they are not merely "chums," but in fact "gay," getting carried away in his exuberance to the point that he picks up a passerby and twirls her around as he exults in publicizing his love.


Of course, this declaration is itself a type of traversal: after all, the very concept of "gay" did not exist in the Edo Period, when members of the samurai class regularly took part in same-sex affairs while heading perfectly conventional households. Part of the joy of Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims is its use of the freewheeling nature of Edo sexuality to break apart the stolid pieties of present day identity politics, allowing desire to move and breath again, to make and remake the world like a kaleidoscope built for two.


And so they remain to the end an eternal, even mythic duo whose essence is constant, ecstatic motion. Straddling a motorcycle borrowed from an American (a.k.a. "Western") movie about the end of a certain dream of freedom, they ride off at the end of their own movie as the embodiment of a new one, one that queers the world in all senses of the term, made of laughter and hallucination and a hand to hold as you move always toward a new horizon, together.

Mezamashii: Getting Wet with Asuka Kurosawa in A Snake of June

BeRightBack here, visiting from the Wordsmoker collective at Nathaniel's kind invitation to gab about one of my most fervently-held obsessions: Japanese cinema. "Mezamashii" (目覚ましい) is a Japanese word for "eye-opening," and I'm going to be using this feature to look at some revelatory and memorable moments that have opened my eyes to the distinct pleasures to be found in Japanese films.


I was reminded of today’s pleasure when Robert mentioned that the third film in director Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo series will be showing at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo movies are gritty and abrasive stories of men who begin sprouting metal from their bodies as if undergoing a form of post-apocalyptic puberty. But there's another side to the director, one that gets a bit obscured by Tetsuo's bristling, metal-engorged shadow. In his more beguiling, less confrontationally "avant-garde" films like Gemini and A Snake of June, Tsukamoto explores not the literal infiltration of the mechanical into the human, but rather the melding of gaze and camera. Filling the screen with ravishing images, he tells stories of hidden observers who try to possess this beauty through voyeurism and photography; in A Snake of June, not only is this character a cameramen, he’s played by Tsukamoto himself.


What makes A Snake of June memorable, though, is less Tsukamoto's shadowy turn as a voyeuristic photographer than the stunning central performance by Asuka Kurosawa (no relation to Akira or Kiyoshi) as the object of his obsession, a call-in crisis center therapist named Rinko.

Kurosawa grounds Snake’s intellectualized schematics by building a layered, believable portrait of Rinko as she transforms from a meek and self-sacrificing wife into a strong, beautiful, even fearsome woman who reclaims her sexuality as she stands up not only to the men in her life, but to the apparatuses they wield in their efforts to possess her, including cameras, vibrators, and phones.


The most eye-popping instance of this reclamation occurs about three-quarters into the film, when Kurosawa blazes with strength and sensuality in a scene that winkingly alludes to the robotic-yet-sensual False Maria's dance in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

Stripping off her dress in the rain, Rinko takes back the machines that have victimized her, including a remote-control vibrator (initially controlled by Tsukamoto’s character, but now controlled by her), but also the gaze of the camera itself, not only the one held (and then, in the face of her ecstatic performance, dropped) by Tsukamoto's character within the movie, but the one he wields as the invisible but omnipotent director within whose movie Kurosawa is appearing.


A student of mine once wrote in a paper that in A Snake of June, "to be seen is to get wet." June is the rainy season in Japan, and Tsukamoto sets his film within its waterlogged heart; even when dry, everything his camera touches glistens a viscous midnight blue.


But Kurosawa's burning gaze cuts through this slippery sheen and pins the audience to their seats with its unflinching power. Rinko's rain dance refutes the filmic tradition that codes female desire as an averted gaze, an unwilling whimper of pleasure escaping the lips. Instead, she incorporates the machines of alienation, objectification, and male-centered desire and reverses their trajectory, using them to set the rain on fire.

(A Snake of June is currently available on Netflix)

Tribeca, Quentin Crisp, Departures

I've been doing some Q&A and panel coverage for Tribeca so if you're interested, read and click on.

Last night I caught Okuribito (Departures) [Q & A] which you'll undoubtedly remember won the Foreign Film Oscar in February. Though it's hard to believe, this marked Japan's first competitive win in the category (though they had a few honoraries early on). Had I seen this film prior to Oscar night, I would have known that Japan's wait would be over. It's more traditional and accessible than The Class (my silver medalist for 2008) and the Academy loves traditional and accessible especially when they're paired with tears. Departures plucks the heartstrings practically as well as its leading man Masahiro Motoki pretends he's plucking his beloved cello strings. [previous post feat. Motoki]

I also caught Englishman in New York [Q & A] which is a non-sequel/sequel to The Naked Civil Servant in that it also stars John Hurt as Quentin Crisp. This time we're getting highlights from the last year's of Crisp's life in the 1980s and 1990s. The film takes place entirely in New York City but for a brief amusing trip overseas for a recreation of the filming of Quentin's "never grow old" scene in Orlando opposite Tilda Swinton. Unfortunately Tilda Swinton does not play herself in this scene.

left: John Hurt as Quentin Crisp in Englishman in New York
right: Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I in Orlando

This viewing was an exceptionally odd experience for me since a dear friend of mine in Manhattan ("Mr. Steele") was once Quentin's editor and friend and he's played by Denis O'Hare in the movie! I probably don't have to tell you that it's very curious if not outright bizarre to see one of your own friends portrayed in a movie.

And finally, I ran into Katey (podcast listeners will perk up now) at an industry party at the most crazy-expensive multiple storied apartment I've ever seen in Manhattan. It was so dripping with money, even well to do movie characters who live in Manhattan could never afford it ... and you know how movie types always live in apartments that cost several times what their real life salaries would be. As a "have not", it's fun to accidentally find oneself in situations wherein one can pretend to be a "have", sipping cocktails on a rooftop patio looking out at skyscrapers. It's the life a life. P.S. Katey and I are brainstorming on a collaboration so stay tuned for that sometimes this summer.

previously @ Tribeca

Hump Day Hotties: Don't Hate Them Because They're Beautiful Oscar Winners

Does winning an Oscar make you more beautiful? Or do you already have to be sexy to win? A chicken and egg mystery for you to solve in the comments. Maybe all one needs to be beauteous is the right photographer and airbrushing? (Now it's a chicken / egg / omelette mystery)

Clockwise from left: Kate Winslet in Elle, Dustin Lance Black in Vogue,
Masahiro Motoki in White Room, Sean Penn in tie and Penélope Cruz
in only a bedsheet. Mmmm.

I'm asking because I'm still detoxing from all the collective beauty on Sunday.

And yes, I'm cheating a bit to include Masahiro Motoki who is not an Oscar winner. But he is the star of Oscar winning foreign film Departures and he was on stage next to the Oscar. And he did win the Japanese Best Actor Oscar for the performance. That said he doesn't really need the help of the beauty-by-statue-association, does he? Anyone who poses nude for photography books probably feels beautiful without shiny trophies. [Cinebeats has more Motoki enthusiasm]

Departures [official site] which swept the Japanese Oscars even harder than Slumdog Millionaire swept ours, is about a cellist (Motoki) who becomes an undertaker when he finds himself jobless, opens in the U.S. in May, distributed by Regent Releasing.

Here's the trailer, or "a" trailer at any rate.



recent hump day hotties
Penélope, Kate and Sean have all been featured in previous seasons (2008, 2007 and 2005 respectively)