For my film project, I watch a lot of movies. Good and bad. Old, new; new as old, old as "timeless."
Nearly all of them take from me. Making art is hard work. Bad artists make you work harder, investing perhaps everything you have to pull something out of the experience. Many good artists challenge — on their terms — but the challenge by definition goes deep and involves risk. Sometimes I am wounded.
All this is possible. I can do this because I have a vanishingly small list of films that I know I can retreat to. It is a list that is getting smaller, because these are films I have never seen. Seeing a film for the first time is what it is all about for me; you have to have the mystery, the tension of expectation, the sheer fear. I reserve these films for special occasions. Once I make love to them, their power for this function I have saved them for vanishes.
I knew this film would clarify my cinematic soul. I knew that all the work would be done for me, and that I could put my trust in the hands of a master and let down all barriers. I would have the need to add nothing. I would be nourished.
I assume you know Mizoguchi. Together with Kurosawa and Ozu, they created an art form that reinvented the eye, that found a new way of working with the camera. The camera's grace and intelligence mattered. While the rest of the world was developing a more overt visual vocabulary, these men reinvented the craft. Kurosawa with layers. He is the most appreciated in the west because that layering is friendly to other developments as folds.
Ozu with the peace of delegated motion. The camera adds the frame only, for the world to compose itself in. Mizoguchi adapts both of these, putting his being into the slow calligraphic sweeps of the camera. He is the writer on bodies. He is the hand on the potter's wheel.
(Puts new meaning into "The Pillow Book," and the pottery scene in "Ghost.")
If you do not know the story, it actually matters here, as the plot is woven into the eye.
A man of two souls shown as brothers live(s) in a rural village, married to a woman of two souls. One brother is a skilled potter, the other a reluctant farmer who wishes fame. The potter is industrious, not artistic and he is interested in making money with many pots before external forces disrupt the peace.
(The money is connected to lovely dresses, in a complex emotional equation of savoring womanness as a matter of worth of soul.)
He works to create these many pots, but the world disrupts ahead of time, so he must leave them in the kiln — sure death. He and wife escape to the woods. Then a dream — ghost story kicks in. He miraculously finds the pots saved, and more lovely than before, upon being exhumed. The strokes of the pots are very literally transformed into the strokes of the film in an amazing sequence in a boat on a ghostly lake, surrounded by flowing inkfog. The wife is sent from the boat for safety.
What transpires is an encounter in two bodies with woman, sense and artistic achievement. It is "8 ½" but without the boobs, honking and whips. It is this filmmaker's baring of the sacrifices fate pressed on him in order for him to make what we experience. There is a sake cup that he made, of extraordinary beauty and overt ordinariness that he sent into the world and which finds him. Everything revolves around whether he must drink from it.
The tragic event here is that he does. We gain. He loses, everything. He loses everything to give us the clarity, the purity, the peace of a cinematic island of perfect form.
Put this on your list of movies, whatever that list is that comprise effective tools for life.
Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.
Nearly all of them take from me. Making art is hard work. Bad artists make you work harder, investing perhaps everything you have to pull something out of the experience. Many good artists challenge — on their terms — but the challenge by definition goes deep and involves risk. Sometimes I am wounded.
All this is possible. I can do this because I have a vanishingly small list of films that I know I can retreat to. It is a list that is getting smaller, because these are films I have never seen. Seeing a film for the first time is what it is all about for me; you have to have the mystery, the tension of expectation, the sheer fear. I reserve these films for special occasions. Once I make love to them, their power for this function I have saved them for vanishes.
I knew this film would clarify my cinematic soul. I knew that all the work would be done for me, and that I could put my trust in the hands of a master and let down all barriers. I would have the need to add nothing. I would be nourished.
I assume you know Mizoguchi. Together with Kurosawa and Ozu, they created an art form that reinvented the eye, that found a new way of working with the camera. The camera's grace and intelligence mattered. While the rest of the world was developing a more overt visual vocabulary, these men reinvented the craft. Kurosawa with layers. He is the most appreciated in the west because that layering is friendly to other developments as folds.
Ozu with the peace of delegated motion. The camera adds the frame only, for the world to compose itself in. Mizoguchi adapts both of these, putting his being into the slow calligraphic sweeps of the camera. He is the writer on bodies. He is the hand on the potter's wheel.
(Puts new meaning into "The Pillow Book," and the pottery scene in "Ghost.")
If you do not know the story, it actually matters here, as the plot is woven into the eye.
A man of two souls shown as brothers live(s) in a rural village, married to a woman of two souls. One brother is a skilled potter, the other a reluctant farmer who wishes fame. The potter is industrious, not artistic and he is interested in making money with many pots before external forces disrupt the peace.
(The money is connected to lovely dresses, in a complex emotional equation of savoring womanness as a matter of worth of soul.)
He works to create these many pots, but the world disrupts ahead of time, so he must leave them in the kiln — sure death. He and wife escape to the woods. Then a dream — ghost story kicks in. He miraculously finds the pots saved, and more lovely than before, upon being exhumed. The strokes of the pots are very literally transformed into the strokes of the film in an amazing sequence in a boat on a ghostly lake, surrounded by flowing inkfog. The wife is sent from the boat for safety.
What transpires is an encounter in two bodies with woman, sense and artistic achievement. It is "8 ½" but without the boobs, honking and whips. It is this filmmaker's baring of the sacrifices fate pressed on him in order for him to make what we experience. There is a sake cup that he made, of extraordinary beauty and overt ordinariness that he sent into the world and which finds him. Everything revolves around whether he must drink from it.
The tragic event here is that he does. We gain. He loses, everything. He loses everything to give us the clarity, the purity, the peace of a cinematic island of perfect form.
Put this on your list of movies, whatever that list is that comprise effective tools for life.
Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.