DÔDESUKADEN (Akira Kurosawa, 1970)

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

Shugoro Yamamoto’s The Town Without Seasons includes the stories upon which Akira Kurosawa drew for Dôdesukaden, one of his most trenchant and haunting achievements. The film, Kurosawa’s first in color, is set in a Tokyo slum. The title is a word that Yamamoto coined; it is the sound of the imaginary streetcar that a feeble-minded boy, Rokkuchan, repeats over and over as he trots and shuffles along, circumventing piles of garbage, going through the motions throughout the area of being the car’s conductor. Thus Rokkuchan copes with both his limitations, mental and socioeconomic, in the same way: by imagining himself beyond them. This makes life bearable; at least he can pretend—and believe—that he is a productive worker, and in a respectable position. Otherwise, all that sustains him and his careworn mother, with whom he lives, are their Buddhist prayers—another version of his trolley-chant!
     An antecedent to this film is Kurosawa’s The Lower Depths (1957), from Gorky’s play. Dôdesukaden also weaves a tapestry of assorted impoverished human lives. Imagination ameliorates the trauma of poverty for Rokkuchan but falls against hard limits for others. The imaginary dream-house that a beggar builds for his son, with the boy’s own input, cannot protect the child from painful illness and death. Ocho’s single lapse of infidelity, more an imaginative leap out of the poverty with which she identifies her marriage than out of the marriage itself, becomes unforgiveable to Hei; he also is striking out at her as a way of striking out at his status and struggles. He is consumed with anger; she, with guilt—and her trek when, tossed out by Hei, she wanders off amidst a bleak landscape signals imagination’s suicidal end.
     The final shot is heart-piercing: pictures of trolleys adorning the walls of Rokkuchan’s hut. Hopes, dreams, delusions.

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THE DEEP DESIRE OF THE GODS (Shohei Imamura, 1968)

Imamura’s Pornographers (1966) is chiseled in black and white; most subsequent Imamura films, however, are messy and in color: a better indicator, perhaps, of his vision of overflowing humanity. Kamigami no Fukaki Yokubo was Imamura’s first film in this mode.
     Kariya, a Tokyo engineer, visits an island south of Japan, planning for the construction of a sugar refinery. But the gorgeous expanse of water he must traverse to reach this practical destination shimmers with the collective Japanese unconscious. Kariya is thus sailing out of himself into himself; for the primitive community inhabiting the island mirror-images him. Tied to the past, these natives are fascinated with the modernity that Kariya brings and represents; for his part, Kariya is fascinated with the island customs that seem to have veered very little from an ancient past. One of the norms on the island appears to be incest. Nekichi spends his days chained in a gigantic pit: paternal punishment, not for the incest he committed with his sister—his father also is incestuous—but, rather, because he mixed modern with tradition by fishing with dynamite. Nekichi’s predicament evolves into a subtle metaphor for Kariya’s ties to the mainland. Nekichi’s incest reflects modernity’s repression of familial sexual instincts and of the human nature red in tooth and claw that the islanders freely, voluminously exhibit.
     Kariya is deigned a deity by the islanders for the technology (and the Coca Cola) he brings. Nevertheless, his denial of basic connectedness to the natives, which he represses beneath a screen of objectively studying them, assists in his becoming an instrument for the destruction of island culture. Kariya reflects on how advanced he and postwar Japan are. Imamura reflects, instead, on how little Japan has progressed, how basic and instinctual human nature remains.

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DEATH BY HANGING (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)

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

Nagisa Oshima’s Koshikei is the blackest black comedy. A Korean boy, hanged for raping and killing Japanese girls, survives his execution, throwing the Japanese legal system into mortification. The restricted oxygen to his brain has rendered R—the name by which the boy is known—amnesiac, and he is “re-educated,” to make him civilized, acceptable, “Japanese,” and ready for another execution. However, the process reveals how well R eludes Japanese stereotypes of Koreans and how easily the Japanese elude their own exalted self-image. Thus the film’s objective first movement, by patiently observing the procedure of capital punishment both in rehearsal and execution, indicts state murder for its inhumanity, while the wilder second movement indicts Japanese society for arrogance, self-delusion, and ethnic and racial bigotry.
     Implicit throughout is the brilliant theme that will later inform Oshima’s Empire of Passion (1978): that “modern justice” is, in fact, an unwitting repackaging of ancient “justice”—a means by which modern society projects its enormous burden of guilt onto select individuals: a process sufficiently unsatisfying that it needs to be performed over and over. R’s survival of the state’s attempt to put an end to him reflects society’s failure to face and subdue traumas gnawing at its collective unconsciousness. R’s poise despite becoming the system’s pawn provides an ironical index of the chaos of the Japanese character, even as it strives to affect a composed self-image. R blindfolded, facing the noose, erases his distinction as non-Japanese; he becomes an instrument by which Oshima studies the people he knows best. Japanese humanity would seem to depend on how R is treated; but, blindfolded themselves, in their case by the self-image rattling inside their collective head, Japanese officials refuse to consider their own behavior and bent. To quote Nietzsche: “We are all murderers.”

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