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The Expert's Eye
JStyle caught up with Roger Pulvers near his home on Sydney's North Shore to probe his thoughts on the international impact of Japanese cinema. Roger writes a weekly column, Counterpoint, for The Japan Times where he critiques various social, cultural, linguistic and media-related issues faced by modern-day Japan. The eloquent and engaging man who gave the Japanese Film Festival-featured movie The Face of Jizo its English title and translated the original play into English, was happy to share these anecdotes and observations with us.
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Roger Pulvers (author, playwright
and theatre director)
Roger was born in New York in 1944. He studied at
UCLA and Harvard Graduate School before doing post-graduate
studies in Warsaw and Paris. He relocated to Japan
in 1967 and has published more than 25 books in
both English and Japanese. His plays have been performed
in Australia, Japan and the US and he was assistant
director on the film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence.
Roger became an Australian citizen in 1976.
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Roger's role in the making of
Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence
"I befriended Nagisa Oshima in 1981 at a retrospective
of his films put on by the Australian Film Institute.
When he came to Australia I went around the country with
him as his interpreter. He gave me a script that he had
which was based on Laurens van der Post's story The Seed
and the Sower. He said he was making it into a film and
I read it and was very moved by it.
"In April 1982 he wrote to me and asked me to be
his assistant director. We filmed the movie in the Cook
Islands in August and September 1982 and we did some scenes
in Auckland as well. I interpreted for Oshima and the
foreign actors, trying to solve all sorts of major and
minor problems. It was an initiation-by-fire into a very
trying and demanding role.
"I can look at the film and know that just outside
the frame I'm crouching there always worried that my foot
was going to get in the frame. It was just an amazing
experience."
A background of Japanese cinema
"The Japanese have
had a vibrant cinema scene for almost 100 years but pre-war
Japanese cinema, as good as it was, with great directors
such as Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse, Shiro
Toyota and so on, only had only a minimal impact on the
outside world. For a number of reasons; obviously Japan
was considered an exotic culture, the visual cinema language
in particular and the way a narrative was constructed
and presented were very non-Hollywood. If anything, it
was closer to German and French cinema of the pre-war
period. At the time Japan was a country of 100 million
people and cinema was very popular so they did not actually
need success overseas to pay for production costs. However
after the war Japanese cinema was reborn in two ways;
some of the pre-war directors started making films again,
the most notable being Ozu and Mizoguchi, and a new crop
of film directors, the most famous of whom was Akira Kurosawa,
began to work with the established studios like Shochiku,
Toho and so on.
"From the early '50s these films began to garner
particular acclaim in Europe but not in America. In America
they were, and to a certain extent still are with few
exceptions, art films. Americans don't like subtitled
films - something which made foreign cinema a minor market
in the US. But in Europe, Kenji Mizoguchi won the Venice
Film Festival's Silver Lion for Ugetsu (1953), a film
based on the classic, Ugetsu Monogatari. In addition,
Kurosawa's Rashomon made a huge impact on European audiences.
However the films of Ozu didn't become popular outside
of Japan until after his death in 1963. But here we are
talking about non-Hollywood modes of narration and of
creating character and Japanese scenes and historical
themes exotic to Western audiences.
"Even when the setting is in modern Japan, it was
very hard, and still is to an extent, for Western audiences
to see past these manners and trappings of culture. Let's
face it, Western audiences are hung up on these things
and think of Japan as a bizarre location. This can be
seen in what are essentially 'Western hang-up' films like
Memoirs of a Geisha. But the cinematic brilliance of Kurosawa
in particular stunned European audiences and had an effect
on a lot of young European and American directors, Steven
Spielberg being only one of many.
"Kurosawa was a visual artist who had a painterly
approach to film composition. He was a graphic artist
in his own right, and when he did a storyboard of a film
he actually drew or painted almost every scene. If you
look at the framing and the presentation of each scene
you will see a tremendous artistic integrity; that it's
not just people standing around talking and it's not an
artificial compositional thing either. Each scene builds
dramatically and visually to the next to make up a whole.
It's like going through a huge art gallery of paintings
by Rembrandt or by one such artist and each one is stunning
but it just builds up an incredible impression until you
come out with the whole sense of having seen a unified
work of art. There are not many directors who can do this.
He was appreciated mostly in the West for his period dramas
but he was a master of recreating contemporary Japan as
well."
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| From left: Seven Samurai 1954 - inspired
the famous Western The Magnificent Seven, The Hidden
Fortress 1958 - formed the basis for the Star Wars
saga, and Godzilla 1952 - penetrated the US cinema
market of the time and became an icon of Japanese
popular culture. All three film images Toho Co Ltd,
all rights reserved. |
Japanese cinema
in the U.S. market
"The first Japanese film that was a commercial success
in the US to my knowledge was Godzilla in 1954. I saw
it as a child and because it was dubbed into English,
it wasn't until I subsequently arrived in Japan that I
realised it was a Japanese film; I thought it was an American
film! There were art-house successes like Kurosawa's films
but otherwise I don't think there were any Japanese films
that were a commercial success in the US."
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The new generation
of Japanese filmmakers
"In the early '60s
there was a new generation of post-war filmmakers; the
most well-known being Nagisa Oshima, Masahiro Shinoda,
Yoji Yamada and Shohei Imamura. These filmmakers started
to make films about much more contemporary issues and
Japanese life in the post-war period. Oshima's films were
about alienated youth and the war experience, Shinoda
made all sorts of films including some about gangsters,
Yoji Yamada took up with the Otoko wa tsurai yo (It's
Tough Being a Man) film series among others, and Imamura
made black comedies and films about war as well.
"Since then, Oshima has been incapacitated by a stroke,
and Imamura has passed away. Yamada is very active. His
latest film, a samurai period piece titled Love and Honor
(Bushi no Ichibun), showed at the Tokyo International
Film Festival held at the end of October. He recently
told me that he is in preproduction for another film,
set in Japan during the war, which he plans to shoot early
next year. Shinoda's latest film is Spy Sorge (2003),
about the famous wartime spy, Richard Sorge.
"Takeshi Kitano stands out among the next generation
of filmmakers. As Beat Takeshi, he was a wildly popular
comedian on television, making his entry into serious
film as an actor in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. Subsequently,
Kitano went on to make a number of films, some of them
rather violent, which have received acclaim at Japanese
and foreign film festivals. Masayuki Suo also took the
Japanese film world by storm, particularly with his comedy-of-manners
nerd movie, Sumo Do, Sumo Don't (1992) and Shall We Dance?
(1996), both of which were released in Australia. Shall
We Dance? was, for its time, the highest grossing foreign
movie in US history and in 2004 was remade as an American
movie."
Remakes of Japanese
films by Hollywood
"Hollywood has been
stealing, in the best sense, ideas and stories from all
over the world for decades, for a century. So it's not
only Japanese films that they are remaking. Americans
are very good at taking somebody else's ideas, repackaging
them and selling them to the world. They did it with pizza
and now they're doing it with coffee!
"I think they have picked up mainly on the horror
genre and there is a confluence of B-minus cinema that
goes on in both America and Japan. There's a kind of preference
in a certain layer of the cinema-going public that goes
for this sort of film. Even though The Seven Samurai was
taken up as The Magnificent Seven, I don't see this as
a particularly American passion for things Japanese. One
huge example which is often overlooked is The Lion King.
The story of The Lion King is based on the manga and anime
called Kimba the White Lion originally created by Osamu
Tezuka of Astro Boy fame. Tezuka and his estate were apparently
so respectful of Disney that when Disney approached them
for the story, it is said they gave it to them, which
to my mind is a crime against humanism."
Hollywood's take
on Japan
"I've already mentioned Memoirs of a Geisha, which
feeds on the Western urge to see Japan as an exotic setting.
Ever since the Meiji Period (1868-1912), Westerners have
longed for the quaint and 'vanishing' Japan. If Japan
has been vanishing little by little for the past 150 years,
I'm surprised that there's anything left of the place
at all! As for Lost in Translation, Japan was in this
film a mere backdrop of bizarre images and two-dimensional
cameos for the 'real' drama that exists in the lives of
sensitive Americans.
"I'd like to say that Hollywood has come a long way
in some senses, but it has come nowhere as far as Japan
is concerned. Hollywood is still discovering the Japan
of 150 years ago. That's why the Japan Film Festival is
so important; because it's Japan on its own terms."
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| From left: Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)
- Hollywood's interpretation of an exotic Japan,
Ring (1998) Potential Films Ltd - the horror movie
Ring launched a series of overseas remakes, and
Kimba the White Lion 1966 Tezuka Production Co Ltd
& Mushi Production Co Ltd - Kimba the White
Lion was the basis for Disney's The Lion King. |
Roger's Favourite Japanese
Films
1. Ikiru (To Live, 1952), directed by Akira Kurosawa.
A modern story about a man suffering from stomach
cancer.
2. Sanma no Aji (An Autumn Afternoon, 1962), directed
by Yasujiro Ozu. A story set after the war about
a widower and his young daughter.
3. Sen to Chihiro no Kami-kakushi (Spirited Away,
2001), directed by Hayao Miyazaki. An animated film
about greed and passion, set in the most unusual
public bathhouse in the world. |
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