MOVIE DIARY RESURGENCE: Shin-Godzilla (2016)

In anticipation of the last (ha, I hope so) Evangelion movie coming out in January, my friend and I are rewatching the Evangelion Rebuild movies. I suggested we do this (1) in reverse order, from 3 -> 2 -> 1 and (2) starting with director Anno Hideaki’s 2016 live action film Shin-Godzilla as though it is an Evangelion film. Why did I suggest this? Because I have a deep instinct for weird film curation connections, okay, I don’t know. My friend was like, well, huh, okay, Caitlin, whatever, but of course I was proven to be a genius. Because Shin-Godzilla is an Evangelion movie—it’s a live action version, more or less, of Evangelion episode 06’s “Operation Yashima.” It even uses (arguably overuses) the distinct Evangelion background music “Decisive Battle.”

Evangelion performed by the Japanese Self Defense Force marching band. I don’t discuss this in the post, but the politics of Shin-Godzilla are 👀dubious.

That + versions of the original Godzilla theme and other music by Ifukube Akira are the main music cues and they are distractingly recognizable and temporally confusing. There’s a great book chapter by Shuhei Hosokawa on sound design and the Godzilla theme in Off the Planet: Music, Sound, and Science Fiction Cinema, edited by Philip Hayward.

You know this one. You don’t have to click play on this, but you want to.

I’m fascinated by Anno, given a major live action franchise, deciding to make something that feels almost shot-for-shot, at times, of his older work. It reminds me of Hosoda Mamoru weirdly remaking his Digimon movie as Summer Wars.

But I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about my new love.

Godzilla early evolution: Kamata-kun! He looks weirdly like my cat.

Of course, I love all monsters. I have a Gritty t-shirt and I don’t watch hockey. I have always felt moe for Godzilla and his children and friends. Controversial stance: monsters are good. And the Godzilla franchise has long encouraged feelings of love and friendship to our God-Gorilla-Whale-King-Destroyer. Disclaimer here, I am not a Godzilla expert and will surely make up some things about Godzilla canon here, but I do love Godzilla. Not as much as the girl who recently went on a date with him, but a healthy familial respect and affection.

People say Godzilla only got friendly in the later movies, but he was a bro from the early tie-in manga.

But the Shin-Godzilla version is special because he’s so freakin’ weird. He’s gross and terrifying. His early evolution, pictured above, when he makes landfall in Kamata (hence his nickname, Kamata-kun), has giant eyes and textured bloody gills. He evolves into something moderately more Godzilla-shaped but then his splits the the bottom of his mouth open to evolve atomic breath. He shoots beams of energy haphazardly from his spines, his fins, his mouth, his gills. I do not know what the heck is going on with his neck. His tail is freakishly long. Does it need to be that long? Is it for swimming? I felt a genuine what-the-fuck body horror revulsion when I looked at him. And he keeps changing! He’s eight Godzillas in one, a Pokemon of Godzillas. The final shot (apologies for spoilers) is some gruesome humanoids evolving from his tail. Eh??? What the fuck?? I shouted at my TV.

Hmm, um, hmm.

One of the wacky scientists repeatedly says they can’t get a good analysis of his behavior because all this Godzilla does is move. He moves through the city in a straight line, destroying, leaving a trail of radiation behind him. But more than move, this Godzilla stays still. He stops. He sits there. This is when he is tired or preparing to evolve. He is this weird mystery body in the middle of the city. He is still while the people scream and the politicians meet. He comes, he goes, he waits. His stillness, rather than his movement, is how he is finally defeated-but-immortalized: frozen with magical science coagulant in the middle of Tokyo.

Much ado was made about having Nomura Mansai, a Kyōgen actor and icon of Heian period homoeroticism with his starring role in the Onmyōji films, play Godzilla through motion capture. Some balance of this Kyōgen-style performance and the decision to make Godzilla fully CGI despite an initial push to make him partly puppet/suit/animatronic results in a very different Godzilla. The original Godzilla was a man in a suit, Nakajima Haruo, a genius stunt performer; once at a talk at Anime Boston, he described his acting style like this: “I stomped where they told me to stomp.” There is something human about the suit-man Godzillas—some flexibility, some texture, some real maneuverability that the CGI Hollywood Godzillas lack. Instead the CGI Godzillas allow a hugeness and an alienness that, perhaps for some, is a superior Godzilla form—they have a supernatural smoothness in movement and in the way they smother the space they occupy.

Shin-Godzilla somehow has the texture and jerkiness of a human Godzilla combined with the size and invasive strangeness of a CGI Godzilla. He moves less and more awkwardly than a man in a suit—this Godzilla really doesn’t know how to walk on land, he just evolved legs yesterday. He plows direct through buildings to save himself the inconvenience of walking around them. In my own youth, I was in a Nō theatre club and, same as Kyōgen, every step you take is plodding, deliberate, weighed down by a heavy costume, before the dance becomes quick and furious in a burst of energy. That is how this strange Godzilla moves, adjusting to open air after evolving under the pressure of water, and then bursting out with literal energy beams. Godzilla’s cycles of rest, movement, destruction are very JO 序 - HA 破 - KYUUUUUUUUU 急, the pattern of movement from slow start to breaking out to frenzied speed attributed to traditional Japanese arts—also the subtitle of the Rebuild of Evangelion films 1 to 3.

Beyond his physical weirdness, this stillness-frenzy is what makes Shin-Godzilla’s Godzilla so horrifying—and endearing. Because of course, my revulsion turned quickly into delight. I just love to see weird things doing their weird things. I’m not sure if I can reconcile my love of Godzilla the monster with the reading of Godzilla as nuclear meltdown in this film, but, well, our feelings about monsters can never be fully suppressed.

MAY MOVIE DIARY: The Fits (2015)

Something about the pandemic makes every movie seem like a comment on the pandemic—every shot either an example of social distancing or a reminder of the before time of drinks in bars and rubbing elbows with strangers. The Fits, at least, is really about an illness and about control over the body or its loss, particularly for black women who are, as usual, being disproportionately affected by America’s lack of care. 

Toni, a young black girl who trains as a boxer with her older brother, joins a dance team out of a longing for female companionship. The older girls on the team are overcome, one-by-one, with a mysterious illness that causes sudden seizures. The movie rhythmically moves through training sequences, boxing and dance, which highlight the power and limits of the body. The seizures (known as “the fits” on the local news) are frightening and ecstatic twists on the controlled frenzy of the dance sequences. 

Toni starts the film with a longing to be a part of the girls’ group, never stated but shown through her watching eyes and careful rehearsal of the dance moves. Her move from the boys’ realm of boxing to the girls’ world of dancing reminds me of my own desires to belong to femininity, to join a world of women working together, to be close to other women. I don’t know if I would call it queer, exactly, since at least part of what makes the girls cool is their appeal to the boys, but there’s something in Toni’s relationship to the girls that echoes with queer filmmaking and the desire for more female friendship on screen. 

This idyllic world of girls training and laughing together is interrupted but also heightened by the fits, which unifies the team even while taking them down one by one. The fear of physical loss of control hits Toni hard, even though her boxing training has made her accustomed to pain and injury—she doesn’t even scream as she pierced her own ear. As the other girls topple around her, it becomes clear that they have given in to something which she cannot accept. Their submission to the fits means they have passed over a threshold she fears. 

The “current moment” (I know we’re sick of this phrase) makes Toni’s fear all the more familiar. One of the girls, Maya, the first of the younger girls to get the fits, speaks of the illness as inevitable and almost something to be desired. Now as I write this from lockdown, some governments seem to be thinking the same: it’s desirable for as many people as possible to get the illness so that we can reach some imagined herd immunity. The sacrifice is that millions of people worldwide could die to get there. None of the girls seem to be have been seriously injured in their fits, but what must be sacrificed to pass over this threshold? 

As the movie goes on, it is suggested that at least some of the cases are “hysterical”—psychosomatic, maybe caused by the girls’ own desire for the fits. Director Anna Rose Holmer researched cases of conversion disorder and dancing plagues, which are some of the best wikipedia pages to read if you’re born. With my background, the fits recall spirit possession in 11th century, a real cause of illness and distress where the victim falls ill due to the grudge of a wandering ghost. Spirit possession is cured through a medium (miko) who can take the spirit into herself rather than the victim, where a priest can then exorcize the spirit. The miko often goes into violent fits during this process; essayist Sei Shōnagon lampoons this in one section of The Pillow Book where she describes a lecherous priest ogling the miko’s breasts when her robe comes undone during a possession. There is evidence for earlier forms of shamanistic practice which did not rely on the gendered hierarchy of male priest / female miko in dealing with spirit possession. Spirit possession in literature and some of the historical hysterical plagues worldwide can be seen as a manifestation on the body of the psychological trauma of dispossession, of a desire to speak to a society which will not listen—so it’s commonly associated with woman and outsider classes and religious movements which are not recognized by existing hierarchal authority. Fits and certain types of dance are often associated, separated only by thin line of volition.

In The Fits, the illness becomes a form of initiation: it comes to represent an entrance into the club of womanhood and adulthood. You can’t understand unless you’ve had them. It’s different for each girl which gives them something each of them can share with the others. When Toni enters her fit, we see her floating as her feet step off the ground. She has a vision of performance with her dance troupe in their uniforms. She floats, she falls. Each step into a new world requires a loss of control, a small tragedy, with the potential for flight. 

MAY MOVIE DIARY: Ecstasy (1933)

Since the pandemic began, I’ve been meeting weekly with three friends from Yale FMS to watch movies. Two of us are in Asia, two are in the exalted East Coast, king of time zones, so we’re half in the morning time, half in the evening time. We rotate movie selection and end up watching odd things & mysterious things. 

Ecstasy (1933) is Hedy Lamarr’s big breakthrough production, a scandalous film for its time. Hedy Lamarr is famous enough that parents and grandparents all recognize her, but I don’t think many are familiar with this film, produced in Czechoslovakia in German, French, and Czech versions. Formally, the film mixes conventional melodrama narrative with montage sequences revealing characters’ psychological distress. 

The film is known for a rather direct sex scene: Hedy’s character Eva has sex with an engineer she met after returning to her family home in the wake of her divorce. We see the scene through the actors’ faces in (title of film!) ecstasy. Orgasm is represented through Eva’s broken necklace, which later reveals her affair to her ex-husband, leading to his suicide and her guilt-ridden separation from her lover. This sex scene was underwhelming to me but must have been shocking for the time; personally, I almost missed it! 

Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy (1933) runs naked after her horse.

More noticeable was the dramatic first meeting between Eva and the engineer Adam. Eva is bathing naked in a pond when her horse runs off with her clothes. The horse goes to canoodle with another horse and is captured by Adam, who sees Eva hiding in the trees naked. He gives her a set of fashionable overalls which fit her perfectly that he just happened to have with him. Then she hurts her leg and really can’t escape from him—true romance. 

When I tried to post on Instagram about the movie, my image of Hedy’s topless horse chasing was flagged as inappropriate for including “female nipples.” First of all, I cannot tolerate the absurdity of female nipples. What about being attached to mammary glands makes nipples obscene? “Male” nipples are arguably more obscene because they are useless for anything besides pleasure. Second, the current era where the majority of personal expression must go through the content filters of mega-corporations is not far off from the time when the film was made, when national film boards insisted on cuts and the Pope himself denounced it. 

Hedy’s deletion from my Instagram echoes the strangeness of the ending: when Eva, perhaps feeling guilt over her ex-husband’s suicide, leaves Adam at the train station, she vanishes from the film. Instead we accompany Adam through a hallucinatory sequence of workers where he sees a vision of Eva holding his child. But Eva herself, as a character who experienced the pleasure of a broken necklace, is gone. 

Building the House of Memory: A Retrospective of Su Friedrich

This was written for the Arts Council of New Haven, originally published here.

“Don’t fall in love with buildings—they only break your heart,” declares a piece of graffiti in Su Friedrich’s Gut Renovation (2012), playing at the New Haven Documentary Film Festival on Sunday, June 10. The all-day mini-retrospective of Friedrich’s work brings the director, born in New Haven, back to town with a selection of her works on buildings, memory, family, and how we struggle against the loss of the spaces which made us who we are. 

Friedrich’s work fits broadly into a style called “avant-garde” or “experimental” documentary, labels with which she doesn’t necessarily identify—except that filmmakers working under those labels don’t have to follow the rules.

“People who go to film school learn the rules,” she has said of her work. “I never learned the rules.” 

Sunday’s retrospective starts with two short films, Sink or Swim and Seeing Red, which are closer to “avant garde”, followed by three more traditional documentaries which still follow this “no-rules” sensibility: Gut Renovation, The Ties That Bind (1985), and I Cannot Tell You How I Feel (2016). These films combine documentary footage with Friedrich’s own personal narration as she explores her reactions, her fears and desires, as deeply as she explores the world around her. 

The images reflect the subjects’ (and Friedrich’s) thoughts in these films. In The Ties That Bind, Friedrich interviews her mother, Lore, about life growing up in Germany during World War II. As Lore narrates, the film returns again and again to an image of hands cutting shapes from a pattern. These shapes soon merge into a small model of a house. When Friedrich visits her mother’s former home in Ulm, Germany, we see it clearly: the model is her childhood home, reassembled from a pattern of memory. As the story continues, the model house returns to be broken apart as a casualty of the war. By telling the story, the building lives and dies again. 

Friedrich’s mother and her taste in homes returns in I Cannot Tell You How I Feel, which tells the story of Friedrich and her siblings trying to move her mother from her apartment in Chicago, where she’s lived for fifty-two years, to an assisted living facility in upstate New York. Throughout, memory and identity are tied to the spaces we live in.

In one sequence, they talk about trying to fit Lore’s furniture in to the new apartment. She seems to have one couch too many, and they worry that losing a couch will cause a crisis in her day-to-day life.

“That’s how it fits, according to my crazy mathematics,” says Friedrich’s brother as he lays out his floor plan. But no matter how they calculate, they can’t quite get Lore to fit in the new space. 

Friedrich has said that whenever she approaches a new subject, she feels afraid. Not just the usual fear of failure, which we all have, but a fear of exposing herself and the people she loves, of not doing justice to the stories of her subjects, of showing things so close to her to the world. In I Cannot Tell You How I Feel, that exposure leads her to reflect on her fear of dying, of living too long, as her mother goes through the same struggle. 

The loss of well-loved buildings is even more dramatically central to Gut Renovation (2012) which depicts the demolition of industrial Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY where Friedrich and her partner lived from 1989 to 2009, in the wake of its rezoning for residential use.

As factories, warehouses, and local businesses are destroyed and replaced with cookie-cutter overpriced condominiums, Friedrich expresses the anger of her group of artists (who first made Williamsburg “cool” in the late 80s-early 90s) and the anger of the local small business owners, the butchers and mechanics, who were being priced out of their homes. 

Plot-wise, she does this through her own attempts to document and investigate the changes in the neighborhood. On a map, she counts down each new demolition and marks it in red. She poses as someone looking to buy one of the new condos and tours their model apartments: all trendy, all decked out with the latest amenities, all the same—and all priced upwards of $500,000. And that was in 2008—the same apartments in 2018 go for $1 million for 700 square feet of space. 

Visually, Friedrich shows us how the buildings themselves speak, especially through signs, graffiti, and advertising. A music-video-like sequence shows the signs of the many businesses being driven out of the neighborhood. Advertising for the condos offers surreal welcomes as the model apartments shout: “PICTURE YOURSELF HERE! WE’RE READY FOR YOU!” to the new type of desired resident.

But the best moments are when graffiti attacks the state of the neighborhood, renaming Williamsburg “Condosburg” and declaring the condos “for hedge fund managers!” Friedrich contributes one of the best herself, writing “ARTISTS USED TO LIVE HERE” on the wall around her neighboring construction site. 

In one extended sequence in Gut Renovation, the construction crew across from Friedrich’s apartment struggles for two weeks to destroy a massive rock. The rock becomes an unlikely symbol of the resistance Friedrich and the viewer both desire: if we can just be unwieldy enough, maybe those with the power and the money won’t be able to cart us away. We root for the rock against the jackhammer. Eventually, though, the rock splits. She moves. (To, it turns out, Bed-Stuy, another neighborhood in Brooklyn which is now transforming in similar ways—and her anger remains vibrant.) 

What Friedrich shows us in these films is everyday resistance against the erosion of our spaces and identities. Though ultimately the buildings are lost—the war happens and we grow old—the act of filming the struggle to save the spaces in our memories serves as one way of preserving them. As we look around at our own community, at the everyday losses of space and personhood in New Haven, how can we struggle to save them? How can we, at least, expose these losses and injustices to the world? 

In Memory of Barbara Hammer

This was originally written for the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival Daily Bulletin, published October 14, 2019. The Japanese version follows—I translated it myself with a lot of input from my friend Noriko (who made it so I wasn’t embarrassed to submit it) and then the editors at the Daily Bulletin, who worked very hard to make it read well in Japanese. Very grateful to have such editors!

There was one part I changed in the Japanese version out of laziness that I always regretted: the first line in English said “after living with cancer.” In my first pass translation, my literal translation of that didn’t make any sense so someone suggested ガンとの戦い in the Japanese—I went along with it even though I knew Hammer had specifically rejected “battle” metaphors for her illness. Below, I switched the Japanese to a phrase that maybe still doesn’t make sense but which hopefully calls attention to itself as a reframing of the metaphors of battle/war/fighting which usually hide what cancer is.

———

Barbara Hammer, pioneer of lesbian and feminist experimental filmmaking, died last March after living with cancer for thirteen years. As chair of the YIDFF ’95 jury and as a filmmaker whose work was frequently featured at YIDFF, this year’s festival honors her with a Special Invitation screening of two of her films, Sanctus (1990) and Nitrate Kisses (1992). 

Hammer’s approach to her subjects, to sex, and to the body is direct in a way which sets her apart from many experimental filmmakers. While it would be a simplification to say her work is only about lesbianism, lesbian desire informs all of her work. This includes the goal of making clear things which have been hidden, which seems to come from a frustration with how lesbian desire and sex itself disappears from public view. Sex in film, and lesbian sex especially, is obscured with innuendo; even in “explicit” pornography, sex becomes a visual act, about looking rather than feeling. Hammer’s directness moves us via feeling rather than sight, emphasizing the sense of touch. Her breakthrough short Dyketactics (1974) is a two minute “lesbian commercial” which exposes the joy and simplicity of desire between women within the complex layering of images which would come to be one of Hammer’s trademarks.  

Nitrate Kisses searches for the lost history of lesbian desire in Hollywood. The film represents one of the most queer forms of longing: the desire for past which you cannot see, but which you can feel. Queer people, similar to other minority groups, are in constant search of a place in history books which have written them out in favor of uncomplicated stories of straight desire. In LGBT communities, this process of digging up hidden histories is an important part of creating a shared history. The lost archival history of lesbians in Nitrate Kisses is mixed with images of lesbian sex, sexuality which is outside Hollywood film’s acceptable representation. 

Making the invisible visible (or filming the unfilmable) is central to the experiment in Sanctus, the second of Hammer’s films being screened this year. Sanctus uses x-rays from the archives of Dr. James Sibley Watson to create a ballet of bodies from the inside out. 

While serving as chair of the YIDFF ’95 jury, Hammer discovered the work of Ogawa Shinsuke and Ogawa Productions. She filmed the documentary Devotion (2000) on the work of Ogawa Pro as a filmmaking collective. Devotion feels like an outsider coming to a world not quite within her realm of understanding; instead, Hammer follows her own interests in collective filmmaking to investigate the community in ways which might not have been possible for those who had been embedded within it. The film is famous for its focus on the women of Ogawa Pro, where they slept, what meals they cooked for the men, their sex lives, and their own commitment and pride in the filmmaking process in which they were an essential but often invisible part.

For an artist so committed to exposing the body, cancer and dying were frustratingly obscured by metaphor and platitudes. The last era of Hammer’s work was committed to the direct exposure of the process of dying, in films such as “A Horse is Not A Metaphor” (2008), about her experience of chemotherapy, and “Evidentiary Bodies” (2017) which, in its intended form, is screened in a space with Hammer’s own medical scans on display. She became an outspoken advocate for the right to die through physician-assisted suicide. In her final lecture/performance The Art of Dying or (Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety) at the Whitney Museum of Art in October 2018, she argued for the dignity of death as a part of life, one which should be governed by our own choices. “I prefer a conscious death. A death I can be proud of,” she said. 

 May her memory be a challenge to each of us to speak our desire out loud and to reach out and touch every part of life and death. 

ーー

レズビアンフェミニストの実験映画の先駆者であったバーバラ・ハマー監督は13年間に及ぶガンとの「一緒に生きていること」の末、今年の3月に亡くなった。YIDFF‘95の審査員長、YIDFF‘97コンペ作品の監督として付き合いも長かった山形映画祭は、『サンクタス』（1990年）と『ナイトレイト・キス』（1992年）というハマーの２作品を今回上映する。

多くの実験映画と違って、ハマー作品は、その対象、セックス、そして体の扱い方が直接的である。作品がレズビアンイズムとフェミニズムについてのものだと言えなくもないが、作品はレズビアン的欲望は肝心な部分である。一般的な映画の中にセックス・体・レズビアンがほとんど見えなくなるくらい隠されている。ハマーの直接さは映画を普通に「見る」ことより、映画ではあまりできない「触れる」ことで感動させる。初めて話題になった短編作品の『Dyketactics』（1974年）は「レズビアンのCM」として映像を重ねることによって、女性同士の欲望の単純さと喜びを表現した。

『ナイトレイト・キス』という作品はハリウッドのレズビアンの消えた歴史を探求している。この作品ではクイア（英語の”queer”が「変人」と「LGBT」の両方の意味がある）の懐かしさを表す。この懐かしさは「見えないのに感じられる」過去の懐かしさだ。セクシュアルマイノリティーの人々は、他のマイノリティーのように、マジョリティーだけが見える歴史の中に「自分がいた」ところをいつも探している。LGBTコミュニティーの中に、この消えたLGBTの歴史を探すことはコミュニティを作ることの大事な過程だ。『ナイトレイト・キス』では、ハマー監督はレズビアンの消えた歴史とレズビアンの性的な場面を混ぜ、ハリウッドの表現できることの「外」が見えるようにする。

見えないものを見えるように、あるいは撮影できないものを撮影することは『サンクタス』の実験において中心的なことだ。ジェームズ・シブリー・ワットソンという医者とアマチュア監督のレントゲンを使って、ハマー監督は体の中の映像で素晴らしい踊りを作った。

YIDFF‘９７で『テンダー・フィクションズ』が上映され、審査員の時と違い時間に余裕があるハマーは、小川紳介と小川プロの作品に出会う。そして映画集団としての小川プロについて『DEVOTION小川紳介と生きた人々』（2000年）というドキュメンタリーを作った。『Devotion』で、ハマーは集団において人ができないような映画集団の日常的な政治を探検する。この作品は特に小川プロの女性メンバーを可視化する。どこで眠ったのか、どんな料理を作ったのか、セックスはどうしたのか、と踏み込んだ質問に、小川プロの人々は一員としての誇りと傾倒をハマーのカメラの前で語る。

このような人生の全てを裸にする芸術家にとって、「ガン」と「死」が比喩と嘘に隠されることは悔しかった。ハマーの晩年の作品、ガンと死の過程と向き合い、世界にはっきりとみせた「A Horse is Not a Metaphor」（2008年）は化学療法の経験を描く。「Evidentiary Bodies」（2017年）という作品は会場の空間にハマーのCT画像が展示される。ハマーは、尊厳死と医者による死の幇助の運動者になってきた。2018年10月、ホイットニー美術館で最後の演技・公演を行なった。『The Art of Dying or Palliative Art Making in the Age of Anxiety』のテーマで自分で選んだ死の尊厳を強く主張した。「意識のある死を望む。自慢できる死」と語った。

私たちもハマー監督のように自分たちの欲望を叫んで、人生と死のすべてと直接向き合い映画を観たり作ったりしようではないか。

Lily Festival (2001, Hamano Sachi), program notes, Kinema Club XVIII

Lily Festival

百合祭 Yurisai

2001, 100 min

Director: Hamano Sachi 浜野佐知

Written by: Yamazaki Kuninori 山崎邦紀, based on a novel by Momotani Hōko 桃谷方子

Starring: Yoshiyuki Kazuko 吉行和子, Mickey Curtis ミッキー・カーチス, Shōji Utae 正司歌江, Shirakawa Kazuko 白川和子, Nakahara Sanae 中原早苗, Hara Chisako 原知佐子, Ōgata Hisako 大方斐紗子, Meguro Sachiko 目黒幸子　

Desire doesn’t evaporate like dew when we hit a certain age: in Lily Festival, the freedom of old age leads to a new blossoming of sex and passion when the seductive Mr. Miyoshi (Mickey Curtis) moves into an apartment building with a group of feisty old ladies. Miyano Rie (Yoshiyuki Kazuko) finds herself flirting with the comparatively younger Casanova but also longing for the sort of intimacy she had with her recently-deceased friend, Mrs. Totsuka (Meguro Sachiko). As the women begin to compete for Mr. Miyoshi’s attention, we see their lives, their friendships, and their simple desire for touch and companionship: Mrs. Mariko (Shōji Utae), the landlord’s busybody wife, Mrs. Yokota (Shirakawa Kazuko) with her wisdom from years of owning a bar, Mrs. Kitagawa (Ōgata Hisako) who is always embracing one of her many cats, the youngest (69 years old!) Mrs. Satoyama (Nakahara Sanae), a bit of a goofy gossip, and the serious Mrs. Namiki (Hara Chisako). With this star-studded cast of film and TV actresses, plus the handsome Mickey Curti, Lily Festival brings to life the tension and comedy of strong personalities living together and looking for love.

Though the gentle humor feels familiar, Lily Festival’s serious treatment of late-in-life sexuality is starkly, regrettably unusual. Women of any age in film and television are often denied the possibility of being agents of their own pleasure; even when a woman is shown desiring sex, it is often as a device for arousing the desire of men in the audience. Films focusing on desire by women, between women are rare. Older women, apparently useless once they stop being “sexy” in the typical (young) manner, are relegated to roles as mothers, wives, grandmothers, friendly old ladies, supports or obstacles for the younger, often male, protagonists. When an older woman is the protagonist, the story is often about her children, her husband, her loneliness, her patience—her life is told through her forbearance as a central figure in a family which, as she grows older, seems to need her less and less. Lily Festival is what happens to those women once they have moved out of their relatives’ houses and get back to living their lives, kids and grandkids be damned. It answers two lacks in the world of film: a depiction of older women as sexual people, whose desires and identities are still evolving, and a nuanced portrayal of female intimacy, how the line between friendship and romantic/sexual love can shift between two women.

Hamano Sachi is the most prolific female filmmaker in Japanese history—and most people have never heard of her. The majority of her over-300 films are in the genre of softcore pornographic film called pink film. Pink films are structured around sex but, outside of the sex scenes, allow a great deal of freedom in terms of genre, story, and form (as long as budgets and deadlines are met.) The world of pink film therefore came to be known as an area of filmmaking where young, independent directors could make their debut without enduring the hierarchy and oversight of the traditional studios. Of course, that freedom doesn’t apply to women in the same way: Hamano writes of the harassment she endured just starting out in pink production in her memoirs 『女が映画を作る時』 (When a Woman Makes a Film). Rejected repeatedly and subjected to abuse and exclusion, she persisted out of a simple desire to make movies, no matter what, and a fierce stubbornness.

She debuted with The 17-Year-Old Free Love Tribe in 1972; she continues to make pink films to this day. In 1998, she began making non-pink films, starting with Wandering the World of the Seventh Sense: Searching for Osaki Midori on female author Osaki Midori. She followed that film with tonight’s Lily Festival and, in 2011, Yuriko, Dasvidanya (a.k.a. Yoshiko & Yuriko), a historical film on the lesbian relationship between author Miyamoto Yuriko and Russian translator Yuasa Yoshiko. Throughout her films, both pink and mainstream, she cultivates a focus on women’s desire through a focus on the intimacy of touch—the closeness between lovers, between friends, and between bodies brought to life through a camera which carefully caresses women both as objects and as subjects of desire. In Lily Festival, look for these gentle caresses and consider the simple potential of desire to transform one’s life.

Following People Unintentionally, Summer 2017

The summer has been summed up so far by following people unintentionally. A man walking down the street (too slow!) turns and goes into the same FamilyMart I was going to, heads to the machine I need, takes twenty minutes to buy his tickets or pick up his package slip. It's a package, because later I see him at the register gesturing with the slip to my shop assistant when I send him back to pick up my packages. I look at him sharply in recognition. But he waits in line; should have been faster shopping after getting the slip, you only have thirty minutes to bring it to the counter. 

The shop assistant is a South Asian man named びぴん; we speak in careful Japanese and I make one of those semi-apologetics jokes I always make, this one about how I've picked up packages there every day this week. It doesn't land. The shop assistant at the 7-11 in Shinjuku Ni-chome is also not Japanese, but she speaks to me in English immediately, because (I assume) it's Shinjuku. She switches back to Japanese before the end of the interaction. I followed a man there from the station, but I was actually meeting my friend! I swear! After, we wandered around looking for a cafe-bar that doesn't exist. Next time we go, it will certainly be there. 

Those two old men weren't the first though. One day, I was walking back to my house and I thought I'd stop by the Mandarake on Otome Road (classic Otome Road). After crossing under the overpass, I noticed a woman walking front of me. She was pretty, ナイスボディー, but I noticed her hair—it was the same color as mine in one of those clever highlighting jobs that sometimes work on stylish Japanese women. I always wonder a little at people who would willingly change their hair to be the same brown as my natural color—I always wanted my hair darker. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and slightly curled. I followed her down the street. She turned and went down the stairs to Mandarake. That's where I was going! I followed, she vanished into the store. I went in, walked past the ridiculous Johnny's section (I don't approve), through the doujinshi, past commercial manga—and there she was, in the back corner with the art books and old doujin or magazine extras, where I always find some real gems. I turn immediately, panicking that she'll think I'm a stalker. I look at the goods section, then at Yuri on Ice, wasting time until she leaves. When I see her step aside, I swoop in and lose track of her. 

After Mandarake, I stop in the K-Books and look at magazine, BL games, books. They're doing some major reorganization (moving?) so a lot of the shelves are bare and boxes of inventory are stacked in the aisles. The shop assistants rush around like little busy bees packing up their gay porn like it's honey for a long winter. I head back towards the section where the BL anthologies were; they're still there. I peak around the other side of the shelf, and there she is, my shadow. Or am I her shadow? My shadow-leader. I pretend like I haven't seen her and rush back to the novels. 

Maybe being alone makes me sensitive, able to find people heading in the same direction I am, able to align myself with strangers. But certainly, definitely not speak with them! 

A Taxing Woman, program notes, Spring 2017

For the Yale Film Colloquium's Film Against Fascism series, we showed a series of films selected to comment on the Trump administration in ways both roundabout and direct. Below are the program notes for my choice, Itami Jūzō's A Taxing Woman (マルサの女, 1987).

Love. Sex. Death. Taxes. Most films keep the last to the shadows, where it shapes budgets and production—which city will give us tax breaks for filming there? oh, then, let’s film there—and never enters into the mind of the unsuspecting audience. Not so in Itami Jūzō’s A Taxing Woman (マルサの女, 1987) which transforms the stereotype of the boring tax investigator into an action hero detective—sniffing out lies, digging through trash, riding around on a great motorbike—and centers the question of tax payments (and nonpayments) with an examination of the absurd complexities of the tax system and the even more absurd lengths people will go to to cheat it. 

Itami Jūzō was a successful actor, the son of wartime director, screenwriter, and satirist Itami Mansaku; when he debuted as a director with 1984’s The Funeral, he displayed a knack for films which were steeped in the comedic gifts and referentiality of someone who knew the film world inside and out. The Funeral brought him wide acclaim from the Japanese press, winning Best Picture from the Japan Academy Prizes. His second film Tampopo, his best-known feature internationally, is a quite literal “ramen western” in which a woman (Miyamoto Nobuko, who stars as the tax investigator in A Taxing Woman and also happens to be Itami’s wife) struggles to learn the craft of ramen-making while local thugs try to bully her into closing; she is defended by a lone wanderer with a hidden past (Yamazaki Tsutomu, who returns to play the real estate baron in A Taxing Woman). The comedy skillfully combines genre play with an examination of food and sex, family and desire. A Taxing Woman, his follow-up feature, is less overtly genre-bending, but still displays Itami’s characteristic eccentric humor—a humor of discomfort, of characters behaving oddly, of a stilted awareness of the filmic world.

Applied to the world of money-making and money-counting, Itami’s humor functions as a satire of 1980s Japan, obsessed with its own economic prowess and detached from the real responsibilities of economic success. In the midst of the 1980s economic boom, Japan experienced an unprecedented (and, it turns out, soon-to-end) period of high growth, leading to a proliferation of buildings and businesses which would vanish with the burst of the bubble in the early 1990s. (If you recall the abandoned amusement park/hot springs space in Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, which becomes a home for spirits and gods, those are one such version of post-bubble ruins.) Love hotels, the official business of Gondō in A Taxing Woman, similarly boom over the course of the 1980s, developing ostentatious gimmicks and elaborate facades, becoming the site of cultural exploration of sex and desire outside the traditional family home; they also increasingly become the target of police and tax bureau attention as businesses associated with sex and licentiousness. 

This conflict in A Taxing Woman plays out as a clash of eccentric characters: an enthusiastically aggressive lady tax investigator, who always gets her man (or her receipts, as is more often the case), versus a sleazy womanizing yet nonetheless compelling hotel mogul, as they become increasingly wrapped up in each other’s lives through the mechanism of the tax investigation. Don’t expect a romance, though—there’s no room for love in the life of A Taxing Woman.

Meek's Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010): Program Notes for Yale Film Colloquium

For the Fall 2016 Yale Film Colloquium film series, we planned a series of films on the theme of transportation in cinema, including the films Speed, Closely Watched Trains, Luna Papa, Meek's Cutoff, Christopher Strong, and Thelma and Louise. I wrote the program notes for Meek's Cutoff, the fourth film in the series on November 7th, which I thought I would share here as well. 

Meek’s Cutoff, the 2010 western directed by Kelly Reichardt, counters the relentless speed which began our Start Your Engines: Transportation in Cinema series with a style of filmmaking prioritizing the slowness, the silence, and the uncertainty in a form of transportation that cinema has memorialized as a dynamic and triumphant movement westward. While John Ford’s Stagecoach gave us the thrill and terror of the encounter with the “Wild West” through a chase and a gunfight canonized in film history forever, Reichardt’s approach to a group of unlucky travelers on the Oregon Trail divests the West of bursts of adrenaline in favor of a long, increasing tension, a tension which maintains the irreconcilable ambiguity of western settlement and the modernizing impulse which underlies cinema’s own fixation on the machines of transportation and the mechanics of speed.

The genre of the western, eternally returning in new forms throughout film history and in national cinemas around the world, centers on the struggle of modernity to spread to the places and the people whose exclusion from the realm of civilized society is what gave civilization its definition and its power. This negotiation has never been straightforward; even the most stereotypical cowboys versus Indians style of western has embedded in it a love of wildness, a celebration of freedom despite the inevitable filmic conclusion of civilization’s victory over its alternatives. The balance between “primitive” freedom and “civilized” control is the contradiction at the center of the hero of the classical western, a masculine figure whose position on the fringes of the society he upholds makes safe the contradiction we suspect lurks at the heart of every attempt at defining the self, the present, and the nation which relies on the clear exteriorization of all that is other. 

In Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt counters the traditional dichotomies propelling the western genre with a vision of western movement which prioritizes everyday labor, decisions, and anxiety. In the space of the trail, neither civilization nor natural landscape can be fully beautified: the attempts at settled culture the travelers repeat are inevitably dwarfed by a vast unsettled space, promising no water or life for miles, completely unknown. During the day, their faces are always hidden under brimmed hats or bonnets or otherwise shadowed, divided sharply from the brightness and expanse of the landscape which menaces them with heat and thirst; during night scenes, they are obscured in a darkness so complete you will be happy see this film on a big screen in a darkened theater (believe me.) They can trust neither their hired guide, Meek, whose arrogance suggests the rugged masculine individuality deified in western conquest, nor the Native American they find and capture, who has every reason to prefer to lead them into a trap. Centering the narrative on the women travelers, who must sit and listen while their husbands discuss life-and-death decisions, Meek’s Cutoff offers no heroic figure in the classical sense; instead, Emily Tetherow, played by Michelle Williams, emerges as the central figure of a collective, a woman who learns to make choices with no narrative guarantee of a settled conclusion. 

Most noticeably, the film’s pace is slow to the point of being anticinematic, working against the teleological logic of the western, the film, and modernity itself, which pushes narratives and progress forward on the rapidly spinning wheels of cause and effect as they clatter through firefights and love affairs to arrive safely in a settled town. Film developed for global consumption a form of time which was chopped into pieces, occurring simultaneously, based on visual logics which, at some point, we spectators must have learned to understand, because they are utterly different from how we experience everyday time. Filmic time was, perhaps, a later, mechanized offshoot of the time of modernity, which transformed and often dominated understandings of time by conquered and colonized people as Western European powers expanded in power and influence. By slowing and stretching the filmic time, Meek’s Cutoff works against America’s own favorite narrative of modern progress, that of the western, with a story that returns to the west its unsettled time, a time with no promise of ending. 

Beyond these concerns of genre and time, Meek’s Cutoff expressed for me something which I often have trouble describing to people I’ve met in adulthood. I didn’t grow up in the American West, but in the landscape of Meek’s Cutoff I can feel something that reminds me of the countryside where I did grow up, a space where silence is so complete every conversation feels like an intrusion, where the sky dominates the visual field down to an endless stretch of unreadable alien land, and where we’d walk for miles in boredom and communion, remarking only on the land and the work. While contemporary Pennsylvania farmland lacks the sense of jeopardy of the Oregon Trail in 1845, that landscape remained within me as a source of silence and of dread even as I escaped to the overbuilt coasts. Sometimes, in the middle of an action movie fight scene, when the average shot lengths are dangerously approaching the milliseconds, I think about that space. Watching Meek’s Cutoff, I wonder if, underneath the current speed of cinema and its rebellious media children, is a fear of that space which cannot be framed and that time which cannot be cut.