THE HOUSE IS BLACK (Forough Farrokhzad, 1962)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Khâneh siyâh ast has become legendary for four reasons: its qualities as a film; its role in defining the spirit of modern Iranian cinema; its being the first film by an Iranian woman; its being the one film by Forough Farrokhzad, perhaps Iran’s greatest woman poet, who died in a road accident, in 1967, at age 32.
     Farrokhzad’s film documents lepers in their quarantined existence on an island. Its images of these individuals, including closeups, make us look squarely at an aspect of reality we might otherwise be inclined to shun. The opening image is of a woman, one of whose eyes is horribly deformed, looking into a mirror as the camera approaches until the reflected image is immense. This gradual movement helps adjust our sight to the “vision of pain.”
     In a sense, Farrokhzad has incorporated our impulse to look away into the film by enjoining her images to a recitation of one of her poems (in addition to more conventional voiceover narration). The poem’s beauty acts as a buffer for the harsh images. But the poem accomplishes more besides. Expressing a yearning for freedom, it gives the lepers a collective voice while also reintegrating their perceived ugliness in the world of beauty that we all share and from which they have been materially removed. Farrokhzad’s use of her poem helps restore these souls to what we can recognize as the human condition.
     An elastic documentary, The House Is Black pretends no objectivity, nor is everything we see unmediated reality. Like Robert J. Flaherty (Nanook of the North, 1922), Farrokhzad contrives and scripts scenes; her camera extends her sensibility, thoughts and feelings rather than becoming a mechanical recording device. Her film pulsates with humanity. The House Is Black, but Farrokhzad lets a little light in.

FIRES ON THE PLAIN (Kon Ichikawa, 1959)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

No film has distilled more hauntingly the sadness of war than Kon Ichikawa’s Burmese Harp (1956). With Nobi, Ichikawa turned instead to war’s savagery and cruelty.
     It begins with a slap in the face—in closeup. The face belongs to Private Tamura, in the Philippines in 1945—the Imperial Army’s raggedy last gasp. His squad leader is the one disciplining Tamura. The young consumptive was prematurely released from hospital; he should have stayed there five days instead of three, because who can be cured of tuberculosis in just three days? Moreover, food rations for five days had been sent along to the hospital for him. He is told to try to be readmitted; if that attempt fails, the squad leader continues, Tamura must fulfill his patriotic duty by blowing himself up with a hand grenade. He is no use to the platoon since he is constantly falling down on the job—at the moment, digging ditches.
     Nobi becomes Tamura’s odyssey—one punctuated by mysterious sightings of distant fires on the plain. The hospital is blown up, but Tamura survives to endure a series of incidents that encapsulate war’s barbarism and the base impulses, such as selfishness, that it releases from humanity’s Pandora’s box. Patriotism, nationalism: these prove to be the bunk.
     Eventually Tamura joins up with two soldiers who, without his realizing it, are cannibalizing human flesh. He dines with them. The two kill each other. When Tamura tries surrendering, an American kills him. Wilfred Owen wrote of “the Pity of war”; Nobi addresses the horror of it.
     The fires on the plain are the illusion that war is productive or ennobling. Even Tamura, who had hoped to retain dignity and decency, is mauled by it. He dies for nought, with human meat in his belly.

ENJO (Kon Ichikawa, 1958)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Based on Yukio Mishima’s 1956 novel Kinkakuji (The Temple of the Golden Pavilion), Enjo (a.k.a. Conflagration and Flame of Torment) unfolds as the unimpeded flashback of a stuttering boy, Goichi Mizoguchi, who has been apprehended by police for burning down Kyoto’s 14th-century Soenji Temple, where he had apprenticed to the head priest, Tayama, after the death of his father, a provincial monk who revered the building. Tayama had seemed to the boy as pure as the temple itself; after a series of disillusionments regarding the temple either directly or symbolically (although the structure had eluded Allied bombing, U.S. occupiers defiled it by using it as an ad hoc brothel; the Japanese themselves commercialized it later on), Goichi learns that his mentor has a mistress and commits his irrevocable criminal act. If the temple proved too pure an ideal to exist in so tarnished a world, neither can the latter sustain his own youthful idealism. Goichi commits suicide.
     Something is rotten in the state of Japan; Goichi’s arson assaults the betrayal of Japanese fathers and traditions. The boy bears his father’s mark: the stutter, according to Goichi’s narration in the book, that “placed an obstacle between [him] and the outside world.” His father’s death, then, has strengthened, not diluted, the filial bond. But his feelings are even more complex than this suggests, for the beauty of the temple makes Goichi feel that his own existence “was a thing estranged from beauty” (Mishima). Japan’s betrayed past—its betrayed fathers—now taunts the youth, also contributing to his destruction of the Buddhist temple.
     In the film, the temple isn’t much to look at; this underscores its subjective beauty for Goichi. The whole drama is a thing of his mind. Ichikawa’s austere, precise, analytical images are among the most beautiful in cinema.

SEVEN SAMURAI (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Akira Kurosawa’s Shichinin no samurai is a powerful fable about the defense of a poor farming village in the sixteenth century. Dozens of bandits are poised to attack. The village leader suggests finding “hungry samurai” for whom payment in food is sufficient. Weary of fighting, Kambei Shimada (Takashi Shimura, magnificent) nonetheless consents to the task, recruiting six others, one of whom, brash, vulgar, boastful Kikuchiyo (Toshirô Mifune, turbulent, hilarious, heart-piercing—his greatest role), isn’t really of the samurai caste, but, a farmer’s son, provides a bridge connecting the simple farmers to the hired killers protecting them.
     This film is elemental, intensely physical, and existential, with soaking rains, whipping winds, farmers in the fields harvesting barley, and a final ferocious confrontation between bandits and samurai. Too, there is one of the most gorgeous passages imaginable: amidst blossoms, the meeting of a boy, the youngest samurai, and the young daughter of a farmer. And one of the saddest: a prostitute’s retreat into a flaming hut, to avoid facing her samurai-husband—the collateral cost of his protecting others rather than protecting his wife.
     Robust, dynamic, Seven Samurai projects a harsh black-and-white world in which feudal wars have undermined order, inspiring criminals to prey on the vulnerable. Indeed, most everything conspires to threaten the survival of farmers. Someone says, “It is luckier to be a dog than a farmer.” But it is far less fortunate to be a samurai. At the end of the film, only three of the seven are left standing. They face the graves of their four comrades, in each mound the warrior’s sword as a marker—Kurosawa’s glorious hommage to John Ford’s The Lost Patrol (1934). One remarks: “Again we are defeated. It is the farmers who have won. Not us.”
     Bravery, honorable commitment, success—these say otherwise.

GOJIRA (Ishirô Honda, 1954)

One of the silliest (though sometimes highly enjoyable) genres in American cinema is the fifties gigantic- or creepy-monster-movie, which often falls into one of two thematic categories: the Red scare (“Keep watching the skies!” is the closing warning of Christian Nyby’s terrifying 1951 The Thing, about an oversized, malicious carrot); the scare that atomic testing was unbalancing nature and creating nasty creatures quite beyond even Goya’s imaginings—often bigger, badder versions of familiar animals (giant ants in the 1954 Them!; a giant spider in the 1955 Tarantula). (The actual-sized tarantula is quite scary enough. My mother once inadvertently brought one home in a bunch of bananas.) One can argue, I suppose, that the seriousness of the underlying themes lends substance to these wayward entertainments for (mostly) kids, but the form is too flimsy to provide more than mere pretext. In Japan, Ishirô Honda’s Gojira is something else entirely—something of a very different order. A fine piece of work, its pretext, too, is the frightfulness of nuclear bombing. But Honda of course has something real upon which to draw as well: the horror unleashed by the explosion of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly a decade earlier.

Honda is famous for his launch of and toil in kaijû—big monster movies. He made many about the enormous reptile at the center of Gojira (called Godzilla in the 1956 English-language version, which is a slashed, dubbed version of the original, with an American reporter inserted to provide easy navigation amidst an unfamiliar culture), and the enormous pterodactyl Rodan also was Honda’s invention (Sora no daikaijû Radon, 1956). The genre, and Honda, often pitted one big beast against another, as in King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962). In Mosura tai Gojira (1964) Gojira battled a giant moth, and Mekagojira no gyakushu (1975) even had dueling Godzillas. (In Japanese, “gojira” means “gorilla whale.”) Honda made numerous science-fiction films as well.

Honda and Takeo Murata co-authored the screenplay for Gojira from an original story by Shigeru Kayama. Four of their principal collaborators are black-and-white cinematographer Masao Tamai, who gives a profound depth to the film’s images of darkness, Kazuji (billed as Yasunobu) Taira, who finely edited, Akira Ifukube, who composed the spare though effective score (a much better one than John Williams’s not dissimilar one for Jaws), and Eiji Tsuburaya, who directed the film’s special effects team.

In the film, the 150-foot reptilian beast with scorching radioactive breath rises from its watery depths. Identified with night, in which it majestically cloaks itself, and recorded by the camera initially as eerie and unfathomable amidst the oil-blackness of night, Gojira in effect is emerging from Japan’s collective consciousness. Its first appearance is accompanied by a blinding blast of light in the dark: a visual echo of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Its subsequent appearance in a fishing village, its head visible from behind a mountain, suggests Odilon Redon’s 1898 oil painting The Cyclops.) Soon after, it is also identified with torrential rain from above and upheaving sea below: water gone riotous. It reeks of primordial nature but, too, of a violent interruption of nature. Visually, the film unites the elements of water and devastating light that identify Gojira; it turns Tokyo, which it attacks, into “a sea of flames.” The slight slow motion that is applied to the fire that Gojira leaves in its wake, disclosed mostly in long shots, indeed suggest a waterlike wavering. We learn that Gojira has “absorbed an enormous amount of atomic radiation,” a fact not only sealing its identification with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings but also defining its astounding limits of endurance. Kyohei Yamane (Takashi Shimura, splendid), a radiologist convinced that the Jurassic relic is beyond human capacity to kill it, believes that the dinosaur-dragon needs to be captured and studied for its survival of such high doses of radiation. But the nation is mobilized in its attempts to down the beast, for instance, by a coast-long electrified fence and by missiles shot from airplanes. Nothing seems to work, and Gojira’s long assault on Tokyo that pitch-black night, set to the measured pace of the entire film that allows us to contemplate, not merely react to, the depth of horror that Gojira represents, constitutes one of cinema’s great waking nightmares. Gojira bellows, moans and groans, but mostly it is silent, an implacable thing that somehow seems to have strayed from the silent film era into the relatively fragile domain of sound. The day after the attack, a leftward tracking shot reveals the ravage that Gojira has left behind before returning to the sea to regather strength for its next attack. What we see is a bombed-out landscape, the outcrop of war.

This thing of nightmare, this thing of war guilt and real, pure horror, once roused, invades Tokyo twice, generating panic, destroying nearly everything in its path, filling hospitals (as had the atom bombs) with the burnt, the contaminated, the dying. This is a thing one shouldn’t try to kill? One scientist, the eyepatched Daisuke Serizawa, perhaps possesses the means: a doomsday device—the English translation, not much help, is “oxygen-destroyer”—that can better Gojira at its game of blind, all-powerful mayhem. It is introduced to us in a terrifying fashion: an off-screen demonstration recorded on the face of Serizawa’s cousin, Yamane’s daughter, Emiko, as her witnessing to what happens to a huge tank of fish draws from her a bloodcurdling scream. Deepening the perplexity here, for me at least, is the fact that by showing her this horror and swearing her to secrecy Serizawa perversely seeks to bind Emiko’s heart romantically to his own. Emiko, however, loves Ogata—in this subtext of family secrets, the couple have not yet told her father—and it is the two of them who eventually succeed in overcoming Serizawa’s reluctance to have this weapon of his rise from its depths, even to destroy Gojira, lest it fall into military hands and be used just as the U.S. used doomsday devices—atom bombs—against Japan. In symbolic terms, all this re-creates the situation of the United States as it sought a decisive end to the Pacific war. (The European war had already ended.) What would Japan have done in the position of the U.S.? In psychological terms, Serizawa’s dilemma poses this question. Weighing the moral and historical imperatives, the victim, Japan, thus contemplates its own behavior had the tables been turned. This is a fascinating aspect of Gojira.

Honda’s film, at the time the most expensive Asian one ever made, startles with its brilliance. Like Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) a few years hence, it treats memories of the Second World War, and the atomic dread that followed, at a symbolic, even an allegorical, remove. Between them, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1956) also did this. It is almost as though the atom bomb, the God of a new era, had to be approached indirectly, so great is its fearsomeness. However, Kurosawa also addressed the theme directly and contemporarily in his underrated I Live in Fear (Record of a Living Being, 1955), whose title more or less discloses the unspoken motto of the time. Two Japanese films about the Japanese holocaust and its aftermath of suffering, to which one can relate Honda’s more elliptical treatment, are Kaneto Shindô’s Children of Hiroshima (1952—the first Japanese film to treat the event openly) and Shohei Imamura’s especially stark and sober Black Rain (1989).

Born in 1911 in Yamagata, Honda became an assistant director in his early twenties. War interrupted his career; he was a prisoner of the Chinese in his mid-thirties. In 1951, he began directing his own films, many of which relied heavily on special effects, and he wasn’t above assisting again, in the case of his friend Akira Kurosawa: Kagemusha (1980); Ran (1985). Honda was an actual contributor to Kurosawa’s splendiferous Dreams (1990). One of his segments is “The Tunnel,” a stunning piece about war in which a soldier, uncertain whether he is alive or dead but learning from his commander that the entire Third Platoon was killed, marches upon order, along with his lost comrades, to the land of the dead. One of the elements of this “dream”—this sorrowful nightmare—is one of the most brilliant monsters ever conceived for a film: a dog, normal size, grenades strapped around its radioactively red-glowing torso, eyes like burning coals, aggressive barks magnified on the soundtrack to ferocious, fiendish proportions—in effect, the beast of war; war’s embodiment. Another of Honda’s segments is “Mount Fuji in Red,” about the blowup of a nuclear power plant. Two signature elements of Honda’s appear here: panicked human commotion; holocaustic fires. Honda also contributed scenes to Kurosawa’s wonderful mortal meditation Madadayo (1993). That year, Honda died at age 81; Kurosawa delivered the eulogy at his funeral. Six and a half years later, Kurosawa himself died, so perhaps the two are once again making films together on the other side.

I hope so.