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Yama: Attack to Attack (1985)
Forces at work
An outstanding and incredibly important film for which the director paid the highest price. The commitment and courage taken to relate these stories is extraordinary, The film craft needed to relate the events, from the microscopy and intensity of each interaction to the overwhelming macro-forces of history, politics and economics, is every bit as remarkable and only compounds the loss of Sato Mitsuo and his unmade body of work.
The Scarlet Empress (1934)
Grand Folly
All the mutually-mated and mutated blue blood of the courts of Europe must have curdled into a brain-stunting stew long before 1760, so its fitting that Von Sternberg's vision of the Russian dynasty is so damaged and deranged, importing fresh Prussian genes (Dietrich as Catherine) to arrest the degenerative slide. Sam Jaffe's Grand Duke Peter (later, briefly, the Emperor Peter III) is Harpo Marx cross bred with Tiny Tim on the Island of Dr Moreau. Marlene Dietrich's Catherine, after an initial doe-eyed turn as an innocent, is an automaton of desire, arousing with one hand, castrating with the other, at once a vixen and a shrew shot through gauze and candles by a permanently stimulated lens. At its (wordless) best, a feast of ragingly intemperate psycho-sexual and psycho-historical motifs in a wobbly frame.
Foolish Wives (1922)
Against Nature
'Foolish Wives' is the 'Smile' (Brian Wilson, sandpits, fire engines) of world cinema. What wonders might reside in the lost reels when such sumptuous detail and glorious framing fill all that remains? It is as over ripe and decadent as the novels of Huysmans, with Von Stroheim, an amoral Count that drinks oxblood for breakfast, giving one of the most richly-textured variations on villainy ever seen on film.
For all its director's notorious largesse it is the intimate particulars and distillation of atmosphere that enchant: a sea breeze disturbing the drapes and dresses on a sunlit terrace, the Count's tortuously coy dance of seduction in front of the hotel, the interior of a garlanded boat in a bay illuminated by lanterns.
Seishun no satsujinsha (1976)
Raw Power
Framed by the last unfocused protests of 60s and 70s Japanese radicalism, this is a raw and rather ragged take on the doomed young lovers' motif (Thieves Like Us, Badlands) but where their American forebears take flight on the open road our troubled Japanese anti-heroes are set in a frieze of emotional and physical inertia and spend much of their time helplessly moping about in a roadside café.
This rarely-seen film boasts some great twilight cinematography of inhuman hinterlands (highway verges, the edges of an airport, blank vistas of ribbon development) and an unwavering faith in the central performances that borders on the indulgent but ultimately pays off in depicting the ferment of teenage desire and frustration.
Botan-dôrô (1968)
A curious and thoughtful ghost story
The seduction of death itself (in the form of an alluring ghost) is familiar enough territory in Japanese ghost stories (Ghost Story Of Yotsuya, Kuroneko, etc), the twist here being Communist director Yamamoto's playful depiction of the villagers' efforts to thwart the ghost's advances towards their middle class school teacher, Shinzaburou.
As with most Yamamoto films, the emphasis here is on the ensemble playing of the cast rather than any leads. That said, the roles of Banzou and his wife do seem rather overplayed, probably betraying their origin as kabuki grotesques.
Handsomely shot (Chishi Makiura) and scored (Sei Ikeno) to evoke a vivid sense of the dark, sticky nights of Obon, this is a curious and thoughtful horror film that somehow manages to give Bhuddism, capitalism and family a good kicking within the restrictions of the genre and the source material.
Shiroi Kyotô (1966)
A savage and surgically precise critique of Japanese political practice
It shouldn't take the viewer long to work out that the fictional Osakan University hospital at the centre of Satsuo Yamamoto's outstanding film is Japan in microcosm: with its corrupt and self-serving elite and its distrust of democracy, meritocracy and change. The nation and its people are the cancer ridden bodies, still trusting the God like authority of their doctors.
The film opens with real footage of a 30cm scalpel incision on an old man's stomach. The flesh is peeled back to reveal a soup of guts and innards. It is clear that the director is not going to hide anything from us in the next 150 minutes.
The fine ensemble cast ensures that the drama is real and the script keeps the compelling narrative to the fore. The film never feels didactic or preachy and only in the character of Dr Satomi (Takahiro Tamura) do we have any cypher of idealism.
Crisply shot and edited, the same source material was later used for an anodyne, apolitical and predictable TV drama.