The opening narration of Ozu's single documentary/essay, Kagamijishi, characterizes its subject, the legendary kabuki performer Kikugorô Onoe VI, with the following: "His corpulence was a great aide to playing young, ingenuous girls with generous curves." / The film opens with an abstract of kabuki vs. nô, then proceeds to detail in brief some of the actor's famous parts to date (Ozu cuts between stills of the performer and black-and-white presentations of paintings which detail the various roles), in the process glossing the history of the early 20th-century Japanese stage / From there we move on to contemporaneous footage shot by the filmmaker of the "lion dance" (one of many lion dances in the annals of kabuki), the Kagamijishi as it's called — and which I wouldn't know how to translate that well; maybe something like "the little lion with the concussive head" / I do know I've never seen such vigor on the screen / I dreamt of this film at the top of an intermediate slope while skiing at age 14 / Later I dreamt I was trying to explain Budd Boetticher to Paul Krugman / What is the distance of The Triumph of the Will from kabuki? / Life is the sadness of gesture / With kabuki, etc., you must know the story before you attend the performance / Every auteur-movie about theater is superb / Each one is at once more inviting to a popular audience than most of the other films in the directors' oeuvres while displaying glimmers, as by revealing the flip-side of a fan in quick snaps, the most obscure technique / Constantly Kagamijishi exemplifies mise-en-scène / The tree-decor whacked by the lion's mane shall sway / The dynamism of a late-night talk-show set / The curtain drops, one is speechless and thoughtless / At the close of what is possibly the most serious of all the movies by Yasujirô Ozu
Ukigusa monogatari [A Tale of Floating Weeds] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1934:
For the first time in Ozu's cinema: the burlap swathe backgrounds the title credits / For a repeat: "Kihachi" gets reused (from Passing Fancy) as the name for Takeshi Sakamoto's character / Ukigusa monogatari — in English, A Tale of Floating Weeds, released by Criterion on a fine DVD and perhaps distributed via English-subtitled prints as A Story of Floating Weeds... this might be taken as an academic quibble, monogatari [tale] vs. den [story], but each word carries different 'notes' in English as in Japanese... (for example, it's a bit strange, I think, even though it's perpetuated in innocence, that Tôkyô monogatari has always been known as Tokyo Story rather than A Tale of Tokyo...................) / Now let's talk about moxa treatments / I love when films from the '30s or '40s depict medicinal applications which therapeutically lacerate the subject's back, whether the picture be A Tale of Floating Weeds or Clouzot's Le Corbeau / Everything finely tactile in a film, especially the laying of hands on an actor's shoulder-blades, relays vicarious comfort / (Digression: Maybe the most tactile film ever made, and one of the greatest feature debuts, is Martel's La ciénaga) / I'll lightly dip in and out of A Tale of Floating Weeds here, — it's the Ozu film which, for no good reason, 'practically speaking,' I've 'lived with' the most, possibly because for the longest time it was the earliest of his pictures I had access to, and so I felt if I could really internalize this one... to tell the truth I don't remember what I was thinking, I don't know why it was important... I know it can't hurt to watch an excellent film by any great director multiple multiple times over the years, it almost doesn't matter which movie / Mark of the Vampire, La ricotta, or Séance / These days I sort of see this film from a distance / Maybe it's Sakamoto / I'd like to show it to a new audience, explain that every auteur-movie about theater is superb / If the entire work doesn't spring back into focus for me then, I'll look at it fondly still, and there's always Ozu's 1959 color remake titled simply Ukigusa [Floating Weeds], one of the most beautiful color films ever made, and starring the sublime Machiko Kyô, who turns 87 in March / The source of the "floating weeds" in the early film's title: the fishing scene featuring Kihachi, the leader of the itinerant acting-troupe, and his son Shinkichi (Kôji/Hideo Mitsui) — in which their lines are repeatedly, synchronously cast — graceful and eloquent expression of the flow of all things, time included / Kihachi's troupe has rolled back into the town where his son lives, still raised by his mother; his father's identity has always remained unknown, and Shinkichi has known Kihachi solely as an 'uncle,' a 'family-friend,' a father figure... this so that the boy would formulate goals unsullied by the blood-association, direct himself toward aspirations elevated beyond a life as a begging trouper / But 'honor' takes its leap of faith in either scenario, makes its sacrifice / Who's to say whether this ever would have mattered for the boy / The truth is Kihachi felt the 'call of the road' / And the link between father and son might be as tangible as the fishing line but it too disappears beneath the flow / Otaka (Rieko Yagumo, of Mizoguchi's films), a level below in the company's hierarchy, and an unspoken 'wife' of Kihachi, invades the family's home (which doubles as a restaurant) as jealousy takes hold and suspicion percolates; she drops her cigarette casually to the floor: "Thank you for taking care of the master every day." / Kihachi shoves her out of the establishment — cut: close-up of Otaka with her palm to her face — she's been slapped / Otaka asks fellow-trouper Otoki (Yoshiko Tsubouchi) to seduce the son: cut to a pillow shot of a pail and some dice / Otoki waits by the tree, flags blowing in the breeze, as the boys ride past on bicycles — she waits for him in the same place after the show — a good student-boy finds his libido, seduced away from work for frolic with a transient actress, in unwitting defiance of Kihachi's nebulous vision / Backstage: dangling Edison bulbs, newspaper advertisements clipped to which enhance the ambiance / (......Love blossoms because if it didn't, that would be false; Otoki pleads: "Don't get mixed up with a traveling player like me." — cut to: shot of Shinkichi's parked bicycle [image of the boy's respite taken in the company of the actress] in the foreground, while deeper in the frame, in focus, Otoki walks away from Shinkichi — cut to: shot of Shinkichi's face — cut to: the counter-shot, Otoki balancing-walking on the train rail... — terrific elegance, the work of a master; and a drama based on the gaze upon events, life incessantly positioning its constituents in the role of audience.......) / Slowly, without sentience, petals flutter down from the exposed rafters which have been letting in the rain / Otaka: "He's cheap, like you, playing around with actresses." — a profession slightly above Whore — all these false roles played like prostitution / At this pronouncement Kihachi strikes Otaka again, petals spiraling to the floorboards — and now we see the blow — and she raises her hand to her face in the same position as earlier (as did Otoki after Kihachi slapped her upon her arrival at the theater from saying goodbye to Shinkichi) / Mise-en-scène: making things happen in the frame, and making the frame happen / Later, nearly bankrupt, the troupe sits and watches the appraisal of their inventory / The appraiser in disgust tosses the dog costume of Tomibô (the great Tomio Aoki) aside after smelling the shit-stink near the tail / This scene is followed by a devastating shot of the strewn accumulations — the dog's mask, etc. — upon the appraiser's estimate and offer / It's all worth a pittance / "Like father, like son — so fast with the girls." / There's hitting in silent Ozu which there isn't in talkie Ozu, action, and melodrama / Shinkichi raises his left hand to his left cheek, always the target for Kihachi's right-handed swing / There's a resolution of sorts / And as Kihachi and Otoka depart for a new future on the train in the night, nothing can be certain / 'Makeshift families' — implying 'somehow you make it work' / Only it might not work
Ukigusa monogatari [A Tale of Floating Weeds] by Yasujirô Ozu, 1934:
Jacques Tourneur invented the "bus shot" in his and Val Lewton's Cat People: during a scene already teetering on the edge of infarction a bus careens suddenly into frame to pick up waiting passengers — a quotidian detail reconfigured as a mechanism for delivering a shock — is the Cat People bus shot an exploitative device conceived outside the world of the film, its sole purpose a jolt against the audience slammed deus ex machina-style on the part of the director, or is it something more interesting: its sudden impact, unexpected blast, a too-natural phenomenon in a supernatural world? / A bus shot of sorts occurs in Nightfall within the first five minutes of the picture, as a bus nearly smashes the physical camera apparatus that's in the process of tracking backward at the moment the bus enters frame / But what is 'the world' at this early moment of the film? / The modern world? / No discernible source of tension yet — except Tension itself / A series of dissociations permeate Nightfall / No discernible source of tension yet — except an author / Or: some presence-'off' / Let's come back to this shortly / For now draw attention to Anne Bancroft at her most beautiful ever / To the smile made of the lovely imperfect teeth that could tear off a man's collar / She convinces me less in her sympathetic moments / But, again, we'll come back to this / "Mind if I just look?" "See anything familiar?" "Familiar looks very different." / ....For the time being: When the tension discovers a reasonable origin — the two heavies (Brian Keith and Rudy Bond) who confront Jim Vanning (aka "Art," played by Aldo Ray) — another vehicle almost smashes into the camera head-on / We should now begin to ask ourselves why must this camera die? / And the movie keeps moving / It becomes The 39 Steps / Kill the lights / It becomes The Killers (Siodmak) / Menacing, hunting duo / It becomes The Big Heat before the car-bomb / Domestic tranquility for Ben Fraser (played by James Gregory), the insurance investigator trailing Vanning, and Mrs. Fraser played by Marlon Brando's sister Jocelyn / Their household is a vision of peace, twinned with the opening encounter between Vanning and Marie Gardner (Bancroft), two alone who come together, as 'the promise' (INLAND EMPIRE) / "Do I look like a married man?" / (The tenderness and vulnerability between damaged souls: the five-dollar bill, the vodka, the warm martini, the way Bancroft crumbles and clutches her bills, the "No girl ever has.") / Two worlds / The shadow-self / The shadow-man / A man is trailed by his opposite / A man is trailed by his demons / Nightfall is a film that has little to do with literal night; its landscapes, which are psychoscapes, figure largely as day-for-night exteriors, apartments brightly lit at 3am, snow decked pastures in Wyoming, over-exposing, sunlight-terrible, like the scene in the woodland gorge in Build My Gallows High (Tourneur's preferred title for Out of the Past) / Nightfall is the overlap-oeuvre for the worldviews of Tourneur and Lewton, with the title that might have been used by the latter for a magnum opus / Chance presides in Nightfall — the manner in which destiny is built on a foundation formed of the slimmest probabilities which nevertheless come to pass: (1) Stumbling into these robber-killers in the wilderness, who will hunt Vanning for weeks after... (2) Sitting down next to Marie / Anne Bancroft in that bar... (3) Doc's bag looking just like the one that holds the loot... (4) Doc's young wife happened to write Vanning indiscrete letters, which in hindsight might implicate him in her husband's murder... / And then beyond 'chance,' there's the fabricated coincidence: that Ben Fraser, the man Vanning met at the beginning of the film, should also be aboard the same bus, on his way to Butte, Montana as Vanning and Marie are en route to the scene of the crime in Moose, Wyoming / And the elements that don't 'fit together': the Al Hibbler theme song placed across the opening credits; the 'mystical' arrivals across space and time of the killers; Bancroft's sympathy, empathy, her niceness, her innocence, that contrasts with her position and disposition in her first minute onscreen, contraindicate the rapacious qualities of her gaze and jaw... most people in life are not even 'nice,' let alone open to a proposal of marriage after two days; the uncharacteristically humid (for LA), strangely nocturnal heat remarked upon in the opening sequence but which seemingly plays no dramaturgic purpose — rather, serves to 'negative' the Wyoming cold and white of the wilderness — in other words, a purity that embodies its opposite / Its shadow / For the world of Nightfall is a dream-world / Where immaterial desires take shape / Where movie-residue resonates / Where fears walk (pursuers, near-accidents, and accidents that come to pass though one somehow survives to cut/warp to a subsequent moment) / Where interior Fantasy and unfulfilled Wish, the presence-'off' of the subconscious, govern / The inland empire that no camera can film / And Nightfall is one story of that kingdom, of and by the interior author / The Man of Dreams cannot trust the material world / Oil-derricks are killing him / Buses are killing him / Auto-grilles are killing him / Snow-tractors are killing him / Smashing up bodies / Machines want the camera to die / Prosperity, love, tenderness / The world around us wants these in ruin / We are never truly alone / We walk with fear or desire / The other side of the mirror / Our fantasy-world / Our impulse-world / At the end of the movie the killing pair show-down as in a mirror — even the doppelgänger has a shadow-self / Which itself has an impulse / The positive and the negative — as in the last image of the film, the black bag of money laid on the snow, an abstract lump and a blot on the Field of Vision / "Every night I got that much closer to tomorrow my chances got that much better." / "Things that rarely happen are always difficult to explain." / Nightfall, in the sense of 'snowfall' / Like a prayer
Let's come right out and state the obvious: Delubac was a Rohmer actress avant la lettre / And what more is there to say about this film in which every line of dialogue rings so absolute that all commentary would seem verbiage, superfluous / Guitry's Quadrille is just another masterpiece / The author plays Philippe de Morannes, editor-in-chief of the daily Paris-Soir; his long-time girlfriend Paulette Nanteuil (the exquisite Gaby Morlay, a Perfect Woman 'of middle-age,' a gestural dynamo, sexual catastrophe, brows plucked into resembling hedgehog spines or a broken promise to Emil Jannings' face in Faust, — she doesn't know the difference between a truth and a lie and I think she'd bring a soupçon of drama to any loved one's deathbed, in the process charm the pants off every witness to the scene; — to speak axiomatically is to affirm Quadrille as her most potent, most erotic performance)... Philippe's Paulette gives up her flesh and a pound of her heart to Hollywood star Carl Herickson (George Grey speaking witness-protection English) during the lothario's whirlwind Paris publicity tour; Philippe and Paulette showdown / These elements more or less comprise the main course in what Andy Rector calls Guitry's banquet / Events followed by the requisite suicide attempt on the part of la signora di tutti which in turn sets the stage for a happy ending (ah, Guitry!) that prefigures ABC's Batman series by twenty-eight years / And then there's the mix-up of letters... — cf. Une femme est une femme and Montparnasse-Levallois by Jean-Luc Godard, who starred in Jacques Rivette's lost 40-minute 1950 film Le Quadrille / "Men don't cheat on their mistresses." / "In your happiness you don't consider yourself unfaithful, whereas I've been cuckolded." / The scene where Guitry walks in on Paulette, confronting her the morning after the tryst and forcing her to explain herself... breathtaking, toxic, astonishing... the scene a great career builds toward, with no equivalent in movies... flaying the truth of the matter / The closest thing (closest and other) is Bergman or Cassavetes / There is no 180-degree rule / The psychography of career-actresses / From the point at the 37-minute mark where this confrontation, Philippe's disquisitions, commence... Guitry settling in with body and breath... till an hour and a minute... there's nothing that can be adequately written about this... / Why write it / Watch it / — "My Philippe, I love you!" "Easy for you to say." "Yes, because it's true!" "Yes, it seems you see no contradiction."
What's the opposite of "Tramp"? (WWI-era) — Chaplin of Making a Living? Tango Tangles? / ......Time passes, more and more characters resemble Burt Lancaster in The Leopard / Cruel, Cruel Love starts out like the closet scene in Blue Velvet but with all the genders swapped / A mirror structured by two voyeurs / A single roll of Chaplin's shoulders could be considered the '14 equivalent of an Alec Sulkin tweet / Sets that precursor The Jerry Lewis Show / Once, all professional men looked like Strindberg / The fantasy devil-sequence, the dynamics of the close-ups (with Chaplin's facial acrobatics), and the backward tracking (driving) shot of a charging wagon make this George Nichols's most audacious Chaplin one-reeler to date / The one with death-throes that make the sitting public throw its arms wide, keep coming back every time / Talent — — is — — Talent
Abel Ferrara Should Have Had the Chance to Direct Jason Miller
His Favorite Pastime by George Nichols, 1914:
Gently! gently! remove Fatty's hand from your pint / One man buys another a shot and then he lamps him / Every American film made before 1918 could be titled Histoire de Scranton / Same old same old twenty minutes' a whole Poconos when you're drunk
Chaplin forgoes the Tramp in Tango Tangles (directed by Keystone boss Mack Sennett), portraying instead a valorous fine-faced drunk, the extinct sort of chap who, over-age, leapt at the chance of enlistment / Arbuckle plays a rotund fellow who "likes the hat-check girl" / He picks a man up bodily like Moses ready to smash the Commandments and shakes out the guy's party-guts / At the ball arc-lamps blast full wattage, the kind of you-are-there feeling such lighting arouses — "all this happened" / Magic '14-window / Space-time's a hell of a thing / Especially at Keystone Studios / Where every angle of a ballroom's a different set / And the eyelines are glorious
Charlie goes to the movies / Charlie wrings the tears out of his hankie onto his trousers / George "Pop" Nichols cuts between what's happening on-screen and off- (the "off-" is the theater-space of the rapt audience [comprised of Keystone contractees of every stripe], eyes fixed just above the lens onto the invisible reverse-shot which is the whatsit happening inside every viewer off-screen in real-world watching this picture or DeMille's Cleopatra or Sembène's Xala or You Wont Miss Me by Ry Russo-Young) — from large-scale Civil War battle blowout to dally-romance / Fatty Arbuckle gives the Tramp a coin / Ford Sterling does not / (Or is that Henry Lehrman?) / A "stage-door Johnnie," you see, was someone lingering after the performance for an autograph / The Tramp migrates to a door on the premises of the Keystone Studio... / Charlie plays the early version of the celebrity stalker, which is a meme, like "shitshow" / As such he destroys it / (The meme) / The Tramp will always require props / The Tramp lariats a prop gun around to stoke genuine fear / The Tramp destroys a film-in-progress / Makes a shitshow / Then calls 'cut' on this one
Little Lexicon of Anglophone Cliché: A Work in Progress c. 2007
"2 or 3 things"
"A Novel"
"At once _________ and _________, ..."
"For [so-and-so, in dedication]" (exception: the Histoire(s) du cinéma, which invented the practice in cinemaville)
"I found myself unprepared for the emotional wallop"
"Love it or hate it, ... "
"Unfortunately, compared with Rohmer's earlier work, in particular the series known as 'Six Moral Tales,' The Romance of Astrea and Celadon has little to say about eros that's still relevant. It's a film so embarrassingly quaint it's crying out for a parody called Not Another Medieval Movie."
