連合赤軍 OST - Jim O'Rourke

Jitsuroku Rengô Sekigun: Asama sansô e no michi [United Red Army]
Directed by: Koji Wakamatsu
2007

Download

Studies #2 - Shura's Opening Scene

Shura by Toshio Matsumoto is a demoniac experience, a cinematic nightmare which uses tension in order to build the slow destruction of a man haunted by his tragic fate. Let's see how the opening creates a dream-like atmosphere of a terrific huit-clos without exit.


1st cut [00:00-00:06] - Production Names.

2nd cut [00:06-00:44] - The colorful setting sun plunges the movie into darkness until its very end. Cinema reveals itself as the despair of night.

3rd to 9th cut [00:44-02:24] - Opening credits. A monk rings the bell as midnight comes. Something will sure happen.

10th cut [02:24-02:37] - Narrative ellispsis. We see our protagonist, Gengobei running madly, affraid of someone or something (we don't know) chasing him. And when he turns back to see what is chasing him, a great moment of cinema and editing unfolds:

11th cut to 16th cut [02:37-02:54] - Repetition cuts. In order to underline the terrific tension in which Gengobei is found, a series of quick cuts repeat the same exasperating motion of looking back. As we all know, repetition in extremis, leads to the greatest anguish. Additionaly, what he sees is nothing but police lanterns chasing him. To obliterate the subjects of the action is the same thing as recognize its general aspects. For that reason, what counts here is only the idea of being chased, not the reasons nor the protagonists.

11th cut

12th cut

13th cut

14th cut

15th cut

16th cut

17th cut to 2oth cut [02:54-03:40] - The desperate chase continues. Gengobei has to hide somehow. He runs to the house of his lover, escaping the unknown demons who are chasing him.

21st cut [03:40-04:30] - Gengobei crashes the door, entering in a world far more frightening than the one he was avoiding. He starts walking deeper into the house, hearing the uncanny sounds of crows. He then stumbles across a severed hand.

22nd cut to 23rd cut [04:30-04:37] - Gengobei is affraid. Repetition in this short and quick cut allows an illusion of continuity as if the camera actually had moved with Gengobei's stepping back. In reality, it was only a cut trick:

21st cut

22nd cut

23rd cut

24th cut [04:37-04:52] - Gengobei finds himself alone among a pile of bodies laying on the house, including his lover. With the hope of escaping those who were chasing him, Gengobei only finds his efforts absurd. That is the logic of nightmares.

25th cut to 27th [04:52-05:07] - Gengobei's Lover is dead and Gengobei watches his own corpse. The blood running outside her mouth proves that it is futile to struggle. Gengobei is the spectator of his own death. Formally, the 27th take is a genius one. The camera, unlike the 22nd and 23rd take, doesn't cut and keeps filming in one breath the passage of the shot of the body to the moment when Gengobei gasps. This is only possible because of the dark background which can give us the illusion of a cut to the next scene, thus breaking continuity.

25th cut

26th cut

26th cut

27th cut

27th cut

Cuts 25 to 27

28th cut & 29th cut [05:07-05:39] - The nightmare reaches the summit of its own fallacy, and its precisely there that Gengobei wakes up. I want to say something here, though. As the nightmare keeps getting worse, can't life itself be a dream among others? Shura, in fact, ends with a tragic climax, in the same way as Gengobei's dream ends. We can say that dreams are prophetic but it's more than that: life itself dissolves into tragedy, life itself is just a dream which we can't escape. Such is the bitter true of Shura's claustrophobic madness.

Studies #1 - Maboroshi's Funeral Parade Scene

Truly transcendental. This poetic scene taken from Hirokazu Koreeda's 1995 movie Maboroshi no Hikari turns the living world and even nature into sorrowful shadows of despair. With a genius touch for details, Kore-eda uses images in their poetic nature. Let's see how:


1st cut [00:00-00:09] - The first shot of the broken bus stop. Somehow, this very first shot evokes bleakness as the dark shadow of the main character stands still in her sad somnolence.

2nd cut [00:09-00:44] - Surprisingly a Bus comes, introducing in the scene a dream-like tone, because nobody exits and the "haunted" bus keeps going through the dark road, escaping our vision.

3rd cut [00:44-01:06] - Cut back to the first shot. The main character gets out of the bus stop as she hears an hieratic sound (maybe bells?) as if some sort of enchantment is calling her.

4th cut [01:06-01:14] - The Main character stares at something which we don't know what is. This type of dualist shot (the subject looks at the object separately, in the absence of the second and vice-versa) can be found in Ozu Yasujiro's work, specially in his famous talking scenes.

5th cut [01:14-01:40] - A funeral parade appears. But we are not sure what's the meaning behind this sort of dream-like vision.

6th cut [01:40-2:53] - The March keeps going forward as it starts to snow. The profound mystery keeps haunting the whole scene as the white snow contrasts the dark clothes of people. It is also important to notice that the camera is filming from above as if we were watching from the sky. The omniscient vision, which is to say, the vision of the dead.

7th cut [02:53-05:14] - The Funeral Procession slowly exits the screen as the main character is slightly left behind. Not only did the camera started radically filming far away in this shot, but also in doing so it turned the living things into grey, homogenous landscape. Everything in this shot is sacred: so sacred it drives to ecstatic access. The main trick here is to play with our non-knowledge. The poetic beauty of this distanced shilouette lies precisely in this: our eyes can't capture the complete beauty of it, though, they see something, we could say, the partial blindness of the absolute. It is important to notice that, while the procession exits the shot, the main character is left behind, as if the ilusion of the world of the dead slowly fades away in the midst of the crying clouds, lefting behind the only living person who can't follow them anymore.

8th cut [05:14-05:39] - A car arrives. Time and Space coherence has been abolished in this shot with the help of an elipsis, introducing in the scene a car searching for something as the mourning music keeps playing.

9th cut [05:39-05-53] & 10th cut [05:53-06:05] - We can see through the car, the main character standing in front of the sea. As if she was praying to the immensity of nature, thus trying to communicate again with the dead world.

11th cut [06:05-06:58] & 12th cut [06:58-07:37] - The car parks by the beach and the man gets closer to the sea. This announces a conversation between the two characters. The bleak distance communicates the anguish of a world made by shadows.

13th cut [07:37-10:46] The Man and the Woman speak and exit the screen this time. Death can only be one great mystery for those who live. An ilusion of life, perhaps. This being said and anguish now postponed, the couple can finally return to life, exiting the screen now, lefting behind the sea and the sound of the waves furiously crying the silence of the dead, those who can't speak.

Kinema Jumpo's Top 100 (1995 Version)

In 1995 the notable Japanese Film magazine Kinema Jumpo released this top 100 Japanese Films. [See the 1999 version on Wildgrounds]

(Tokyo Monogatari, 1953)

1 Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
2 Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954)
3 Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955)
4 Humanity and Paper Balloons (Sadao Yamanaka, 1937)
5 The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)
6 A Fugitive from the Past (Tomu Uchida, 1965)
7 Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
8 To Live (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
9 Sazen Tange and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo (Sadao Yamanaka, 1935)
10 The Sun Legend of the End of the Tokugawa (Yuzo Kawashima, 1957)
11 Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951)
12 Tales of Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
13 Night and Fog in Japan (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)
14 A Diary of Chuji's Travels (Daisuke Ito, 1927)
15 The Crucified Lovers (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)
16 The Life of Matsu the Untamed (Hiroshi Inagaki, 1943)
17 Twenty-Four Eyes (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954)
18 Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961)
19 Naniwa Elegy (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936)
20 The Ghost of Yotsuya (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1959)
21 The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (Hara Kazuo, 1987)
22 Battles Without Honour & Humanity (Kinji Fukasaku, 1973)
23 Crimson Comet (Toshio Masuda, 1967)
24 Cruel Story of Youth (Nagisa Oshima, 1960)
25 Late Autumn (Yasujiro Ozu, 1960)
26 Intentions of Murder (Shohei Imamura, 1964)
27 Till We Meet Again (Tadashi Imai, 1950)
28 Kagirinaki zenshin (Tomu Uchida, 1937)
29 The Naked Island (Kaneto Shindo, 1960)
30 The Insect Woman (Shohei Imamura, 1963)
31 Kiru (Kenji Misumi, 1962)
32 Muddy River (Kohei Oguri, 1981)
33 Capricious Young Man (Mansaku Itami, 1936)
34 Heaven and Hell (Akira Kurosawa1 1963)
35 Big Time Gambling Boss (Kosaku Yamashita. 1968)
36 Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936)
37 Vacuum Zone (Satsuo Yamamoto, 1952)
38 The Garden of Women (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954)
39 Fighting Elegy (Seijun Suzuki, 1966)
40 Fire Festival (Mitsuo Yanagimachi, 1985)
41 In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, 1976)
42 Zigeunerweisen (Seijun Suzuki, 1980)
43 Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1954)
44 Drunken Angel (Akira Kurosawa, 1948)
45 A Japanese Tragedy (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1953)
46 Meoto Zenzai (Shiro Toyoda, 1955)
47 Samurai Vendetta (Kazuo Mori, 1959)
48 Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi, 1962)
49 The Husband Witnessed (Yasuzo Masumura, 1964)
50 One Man of the Gambler's Code (Tai Kato, 1966)
51 The Yellow Handkerchief (Yoji Yamada, 1977)
52 The Green Mountains (Tadashi Imai, 1949)
53 The Human Condition (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-61)
54 Stray Dog (Akira Kurosawa, 1949)
55 Yearning (Mikio Naruse, 1964)
56 I Was Born, But... (Yasujiro Ozu, 1932)
57 A Woman With Red Hair (Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1979)
58 Sansho the Bailiff (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)
59 Tokyo Olympiad (Kon Ichikawa, 1965)
60 Cupola (Kiriro Urayama, 1962)
61 The Graceful Brute (Yuzo Kawashima, 1962)
62 Narita - Heta Village (Shinsuke Ogawa, 1973)
63 Enjo (Kon Ichikawa, 1958)
64 The 47 Ronin (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1941)
65 The Song Lantern (Mikio Naruse, 1943)
66 The Army (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1994)
67 Younger Brother (Kon Ichikawa, 1960)
68 Repast (Mikio Naruse, 1951)
69 She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1955)
70 Confidential: Sexual Market (Noboru Tanaka, 1974)
71 The Ceremony (Nagisa Ôshima, 1971)
72 Ichijo's Wet Lust (Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1972)
73 18 Who Cause a Storm (Yoshishige Yoshida, 1963)
74 Zirou Takeshi Kingdoms (series) (Masahiro Makino, 1952-54)
75 The Profound Desire of the Gods (Shohei Imamura, 1968)
76 Stakeout (Yoshitaro Nomura, 1958)
77 Singing Lovebirds (Masahiro Makino, 1939)
78 The Ball at the Anjo House (Kozaburo Yoshimura, 1947)
79 Boy (Nagisa Oshima, 1969)
80 Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa, 1957)
81 Magino Village: A Tale (Shinsuke Ogawa, 1987)
82 Graveyard of Honor (Kinji Fukasaku, 1975)
83 Branded to Kill (Seijun Suzuki, 1967)
84 An Autmn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1962)
85 The Thirteen Assassins (Eiichi Kudo, 1963)
86 Iso no Genta: Dakine no nagawakizashi (Sadao Yamanaka, 1932)
87 Sandakan No. 8 (Kei Kumai, 1974)
88 Family Game (Yoshimitsu Morita, 1983)
89 Kaoyaku (Teruo Ishii, 1965)
90 Once upon a song (Tamizo Ishida, 1939)
91 Mr. Thank You (Hiroshi Shimizu, 1936)
92 Outlaw Killers: Three Mad Dog Brothers (Kinji Fukasaku, 1972)
93 Tokyo Drifter (Seijun Suzuki, 1966)
94 Eros Plus Massacre (Yoshishige Yoshida, 1969)
95 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Hayao Miyazaki, 1984)
96 Tokyo Brothers (Jun Ichikawa, 1995)
97 Vengeance is Mine (Shohei Imamura, 1979)
98 The Age of Assassins (Kihachi Okamoto, 1967)
99 The Ballad of Narayama (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1958)
100 Scattered Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1967)

101 Darkness of Noon (Tadashi Imai, 1956)
102 Japan's Longest Day (Kihachi Okamoto, 1967)
103 A Japanese Village - Furuyashikimura (Shinsuke Ogawa, 1982)
104 The Man Who Stole the Sun (Kazuhiko Hasegawa, 1979)
105 My Little Neighbor, Yae (Yasujiro Shimazu, 1933)
106 My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)
107 A Wife Confesses (Yasuzo Masumura, 1961)

Notes #6 - The search for filmic objectivity

(Erosu Purasu Gyakusatsu, 1969)

"You must play too, because you can't dominate it. You must attach, dis-attach, and transform one and another: «Eros» and «Massacre». The spectator is the local of application. The spectator is the plus (+)." - Pascal Bonitzer in Cahiers du Cinema

Spectator is, definitely, the local of application in the thematic concerns of Eros Plus Massacre. When Mariko Okada points to the screen, she is not only remembering us that what we are about to see is a construction, a film after all, but she is also declaring that the spectator is about to participate in an aesthetic process beyond fiction. A process which can't be made whithout him. There is, in fact, an undeniable longing for objectivity in Kiju Yoshida's chaotic construction. The main ideia is that the spectator builds the film, that he must create to the point in which his subjectivity is destroyed, in order to turn himself a vehicle for the film and not its end. Thus, cinema itself operates in a strange way: it needs necessarily ambivalent participation, echoing in this postulate the same essence as philosophy. Cinema is not a house, it is a construction site.

Notes #5 - Beyond the Structure

(Kaigenrei, 1973)

"When I made Coup d'état, I felt that there was a limitation to what I could pursue in the medium of cinema. In Coup d'état there are no characters according to the preconceived rules of cinema. It's totally free. So even if I were to treat different themes, it would be only a modification of what I did in Coup d'état. For me, it's the most perfect film, in the sense that there is no waste. Just the structure is there. The rest of my career would have become just a repetition of what I had already completed. A different way of saying that is that even if I took a situation that was happening in the contemporary time and made it into a film, the structure would still be the same as that of Coup d'état." - Kiju Yoshida


I would like to say the following: to obliterate waste to the extreme point that only the structure stands firmly on its own, is to place itself - even on an unconscious level - beyond the essential structure. That is true because structure is a relational concept which can't be thought alone in pragmatic terms, which is to say, when the film is being made. No film is a script and when it tries to be so, it's a dancing skeleton (Coup D'État is indeed a dancing skeleton). It seems to me that Kiju Yoshida's apparently antithetic cinema works mainly in the following way: to negate is to affirm erasing, to destroy is returning to the chaotic unity of things. In spite of this, the inexorable bullet that opens Kita Ikki's head is that violent moment in which cinema reveals itself as a silent corpse. No words are allowed. Freedom, as Yoshida calls it, lies precisely in that moment of pure cinema.

Notes #4 - Kiju Yoshida and Georges Bataille

(Rengoku Eroica, 1970)

«Of poetry, I will now say that it is, I believe, the sacrifice in which words are victims. Words - we use them, we make of them the instruments of useful acts. But we tear words from these links in a delirium. (...) Poetry leads from the known to the unkown.» - Georges Bataille in Inner Experience

Cinema is, first of all, the art of moving image. Only when the image is shown on the screen, can there be the place for spoken word. Kiju Yoshida's Trilogy tries to annihilate the realm of words within the creative process, thus creating a mythical world of phantasmatic appearances. Certainly, there is speech and a message but they're enterily subjugated to the original mystery of images. I would say, then, that Kiju Yoshida's cinema represents the sacrifice in which images are victims. By sacrifice I want to state very clearly the destruction of the known use of images into something totally unknown, inscrutable. There is no trace of reality, utility, or any familiar things in the filmed, cadaveric, world of Kiju Yoshida. Thus, the terrific experience of imagetic sacrifice overturns our being, the spectator, in an ecstatic experience where the impossible (the negation of possible images) and the possible (the image itself) harmonize in a spiral of delirium. To sum it up, Kiju Yoshida's poetic Cinema corresponds - paraphrasing Bataille - what one usually calls mystical experience: the state of ecstasy, the negation of time, of rapture, in which the unkown prevails and the impossible is the mesure of all things.

Eros: The Women of Shinoda Masahiro

(Filming Buraikan, 1970)

(Himiko, 1974)

(Hanare Goze Orin, 1977)

Sogo Ishii's Panic in High School Script!

Script

Noisy Requiem

(Tsuito no Zawameki, 1988)

«The reason why I chose the Kamagasaki district of Osaka for the location was that I felt that the place had a neglected sort of feel to it, since the characters who appear in the movie are also alienated by society. In these circumstances of ongoing "neglect", each of the characters lives their lives taking pleasure in their own individual way; the beloved mannequin, the younger sister, dwarfism and the crotch-shaped piece of wood. Each form their love takes deviates from the generally accepted values of society. In other words, they are "abnormal" and "degenerate". The characters' actions are entirely motivated by their expressions for the people and objects they love. These may be unforgivable criminal acts, but I find their direct expressions of love beautiful. I think they behave like this because of their insatiable blind purity.

As an example, a beautiful young man has sex with his sister and kills her. Then he buries her, but he can't stop himself and still has obsessive feelings in his mind. He wants to bury her inside of him by eating her flesh, so he eats her. This is an abnormal and criminal action in terms of public order and morality. However, I feel there's some kind of beauty in his acts. At the end of the movie, the dead sister becomes a ghost, and she tenderly watches her brother playing. Her feeling towards her brother is "Thank you for loving me." So, as a person engaged in creative expression, I would like to think about these questions: "Is the love people in the world have close to or the same as this type of love?", "Is the love you feel something pure or just superficial, something artificial and tatty?" What I am trying to express is that love is something much more vast and profound.

To avoid being misunderstood, I would like to stress that the expressions of love contained within the movie are depicted absolutely as just that: expressions within an artistic production, and in no way as positive affirmations of violence. With this in mind, I'd like to say to your readers please live your life prudently, and with love. Where Are We Going?, The Noisy Requiem, Pig-Chicken Suicide and Rusty Empty Can - all of my movies are about love.»

- Yoshihiko Matsui in Midnight Eye