Colin Marshall

Kazuo Hara: The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On

Errol Morris named this one of his top five favorite films of all time, and what’s good enough for Errol Morris is good enough for me. He highlighted the fact that, when this documentary’s main interviewer doesn’t get the answers he wants from a subject, he just tackles the guy and starts whaling on him. Morris, who’s spent thousands of hours talking to often inarticulate personalities for his own documentaries, surely must sympathize.

This sudden attack, which turns into a gridlocked pigpile, fits perfectly with the sensibilities both of the attacker, Japanese World War II veteran Kenzo Okuzaki, and the man filming him, documentarian Kazuo Hara. Bitter about being forced onto the wrong side of history, which is even more horrific than being forced onto the right side, the middle-aged Okuzaki spends post-military career denouncing the Japanese government by tracking down and grilling his former commanders, haranguing from a sound truck, and (as he proudly tells everyone he meets) chucking pachinko balls at Emperor Hirohito. Knowing a promising eccentric when he sees one, Hara follows Okuzaki around for a few years, shooting the many, many conflicts he rushes into.

Missing at least one finger and possessed of an odd, unsettling demeanor — I can only call it “aggro-nervous” — that doesn’t come through fully in translation, Okuzaki is a victim of his country’s bizarre wartime ambitions. He was shipped off to New Guinea, of all places, where things seem to have quickly devolved into a cannibalistic nightmare. 40 years later, his justice-crazed journey takes him into the homes and businesses of the surviving soldiers and officers who were stationed there, all of whom he strongarms into making some kind of admission, no matter how roundabout, about killing the natives, killing one another, eating the natives, or eating one another. The stories, though they conflict, just get Okuzaki angrier.

You’ll notice a piece of praise from Michael Moore on the poster. Normally, I wouldn’t consider that a good thing; as well known as Moore’s documentaries have become, I’ve always found the man’s taste astonishingly bad. But reading up on Hara, who turns out to be somewhat infamous in Japan as a maker of “action documentary films,” I can see that they’ve got something in common. Hara has spoken about how he doesn’t just want to shoot whatever happens to go on around him; he wants to make things happen in front of his camera. This agitatory (if that’s a word) mindset is also Okuzaki’s, and I personally find his browbeatings (and beatings) far more interesting than Moore’s leaden mockery of corporate executives. But each to their own.

Korean cinema diary: My Dear Enemy, My Friend and His Wife, Secret Sunshine

If you’re curious about what a Korean Woody Allen film would be like, Yoon-ki Lee’s My Dear Enemy makes a fine case study. I say this because it’s a human-scale comedy of relationships that’s nevertheless curiously expensive-looking. It also has a jazz score — more of a jazz score than I’ve ever heard in an East Asian movie, anyway — composed by a Korean, but recorded by American players in Massachusetts. These may sound like the ingredients of one big mismatch, and maybe they are, but at least the feel is distinctive.

The jauntily shifty Byung-woon, a hoodie-and-sportcoat-clad layabout who’s also quite hardworking in his layabout’s way, gets an unwelcome visit from Hee-soo, his frowning ex-girlfriend. She’s come to collect an outstanding loan of 3.5 million won — only like $3000, but still — and, by some miracle of intuition, knows she’ll find her debtor at the racetrack. In the morning. Byung-woon assures her he can rustle up the money if, though not in so many words, she just drives him around all day while he hits up a series of random acquaintances and other old girlfriends for a few thousand won here, a few thousand won there.

This is all the plot the movie offers, and almost more than it needs. It’s one of the more effectively minimalist stories I’ve seen in recent cinema, revealing apparent volumes about its co-protagonists while we watch what is ostensibly little more than Byong-woon performing dozens of small variations on his carefree, ingratiating persona. Meanwhile, Hee-soo performs dozens of small variations on her furrowed brow as she meets countless hitherto unknown players in her former lover’s life. Better than the revelations themselves is the fact that they really aren’t revelations; each fact that surfaces floats on a raft of new questions. We never find out exactly what went sour between Byung-woon and Hee-soo, other than the money thing, and the specifics of the latter’s relationships with all his microlenders remain intriguingly occluded. As they should.

I instinctively want to see a tale like thus told on the cheap, maybe with stolen 16mm footage on unsuspecting public streets or in one long take on standard-definition video. Alas, Lee went with what I would consider a high gloss, peppering the film with bothersomely expensive-looking shots. This isn’t much of a complaint in the scheme of things, but a form-substance mismatch is a form-substance mismatch, however slight.


I recently asked a Korean film critic what I consider the prime question of that nation’s cinema: how on Earth do Korean filmmakers pull off so much melodrama so unobjectionably? Answers have always varied, but one common response is that melodrama is so deeply ingrained in Korean culture that, by now, they can actually execute it with some degree of subtlety and respect for the audience. I’ve always found these two elements lacking in the Anglophone variety, and even nearby in East Asia the situation is bad: Japanese melodrama, for instance, is so maudlin and false that it surely must stand at the brink of official recognition as a national embarrassment.

While it’s unclear if Dong-il Shin’s My Friend and His Wife qualifies as melodramatic by Korean standards, its story looks positively soap-operatic to Western eyes. It’s got a dead baby in the first act, a hellish conflagration in the last, an act of penitential suicide to finish it off, and the running theme of friendship’s honor tested by some of the most harrowing circumstances imaginable. I’m beginning to sense that this might be the predominant theme of modern Korean narrative: once forged, and no matter how abused or neglected, the bond of friendship — as well as all its attendant balance sheet — is escapable only in death, and maybe not even then. (The associated edict of “bros before hos” also seems important.)

As much as I enjoy watching Korean movies, I rarely feel like any individual one gives me a whole lot of insight into Korean society or culture. But this one emphasized one quality in particular to me: when Korean dudes are tight, they’re tight. This might be a mandatory-military-service-country kind of thing, and indeed, Jae-moon and Ye-joon, the buds in question here, met during their two years in the ranks. Jae-moon becomes an entrepreneurial fried-chicken cook (which is a thing you can be in Korea) with a pregnant wife, while Ye-joon becomes a lonely stockbroker. But this class and lifestyle divergence don’t mean nothin’; one comes immediately whenever the other calls, even if it means putting hold important tasks like, uh, sex. Glorious third-trimester sex.

Lee proceeds to put this friendship to the test and then some, but my strongest reaction wasn’t so much to the ensuing near-Greek moral struggle as it was to the relationship itself. None of the young male products of middle-class America I know really even have friends; not friends like this. They might have had their circle of dawgs in childhood and adolescence, but sooner or later they get siphoned off by girlfriends and wives and then descend into private hells of isolation where nothing can possibly satisfy except the next unsatisfying woman to come around the bend. Jae-moon and especially Ye-joon don’t wind up in a much happier place, but at least they didn’t just drift there.


And if we’re speaking of both melodrama and dead children, we must speak of Chang-dong Lee’s Secret Sunshine. Lee has lately been acknowledged as the master of this stripe of emotionally heightened 21st-century Korean film, which even a quick read of the plot synopses of his filmography suggests is true: “Starts with the suicide of the protagonist and uses reverse chronology to depict some of the key events of the past 20 years of his life that led to his death.” “A suburban woman in her 60s begins to grow an interest for poetry while struggling with Alzheimer's disease and her irresponsible grandson.” “The difficult romance between a mildly mentally disabled man who was just released from jail after a two and a half year sentence for involuntary manslaughter and a woman with severe cerebral palsy.”

This, his best-known picture, has more to do with the struggle for acceptance into closed societies, the one-upsmanship of repentance, and the tacky excesses of Korean christian groups. For a while, I was sure this was going to be another (and thus an inferior) version of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Maborosi, presenting us as it does with a widow who moves to a small town, young son in tow. But where Kore-eda’s widow finds an imperfect renewal in her life-reboot, Lee’s finds that she’s only just entered her world of hurt.

From what I’ve read, Lee is something of a Kubrickian taskmaster on the set, barking difficult, unclear order to his actors over and over and over again until they’re actually overcome by the despair he’s bent on capturing. To be sure, the story puts young Shin-ae through a wringer of almost implausible pressure, and if you want to make that credible — so says one directorial school, anyway — you’ve got to apply some of that pressure yourself, in real life. To the extent that the film is about Shin-ae’s suffering, I have to admit that Lee nailed it, but it seems to me that the most interesting parts lie elsewhere, sometimes partially obscured.

Bottoming out about two-thirds of the way through, Shin-ae caves in to her pharmacist’s insistence that she join the local Christian prayer group. There she undergoes a sudden conversion, which appears surprisingly stable until she’s comes up against the tricky issue of forgiveness. All ready for that flood of virtuous feeling that can only come from turning the other cheek to those who have done you wrong, she finds that the one who’s done her wrong has, himself, converted — and claims to have already gotten word of his being forgiven, straight from the Man Upstairs. Hence the short turnaround time between Shin-ae’s first religious epiphany and first religious crisis.

I’ve long been fascinated by the hold Christianity has taken in Korea. From the outside, the country can at times look like one big megachurch, but, as I recall, only about 30 percent of the population actively subscribes to the teachings of Jesus and Company. That figure doesn’t sound like much, but it’s bewilderingly high by East Asian standards. Parts of Secret Sunshine seem to offer a commentary on this along the lines of “easy come, easy go,” but I’d be hard pressed to draw out an overall judgment on the religion. The group that draws Shin-ae in — or welcomes her in, if you see it that way — comes off more than a little loony, expressing their zeal through that distinctively unconvincing aesthetic, hollow plastic-y grandeur. Yet Shin-ae’s newfound beliefs really do appear to part her clouds. Until they don’t, that is. Lee refuses to resolve her issues with faith, fate, and fatality, which is only good filmmaking, since they’re inherently irresolvable. But I suppose that’s what religion dines out on.

Nicholson Primer

Act now and you can be the first to comment on my primer on the novels of Nicholson Baker, published today on The Millions:

If you don’t know Nicholson Baker as an intensive describer of everyday minutiae, surely you know him as an intensive describer of goofy sexual fantasy. At the very least, you might hold the broad notion that he’s very, very detail-oriented. None of those images capture the novelist in full, but if you twist them into a feedback loop by their common roots, you’ll get closer to the reality. Whatever the themes at hand, Baker adheres with utter faith to his narrators’ internal monologues, carefully following every turn, loop, and kink (as it were) in their trains of thought. He understands how often people think about sex, but he also understands that, often times, they just think about shoelaces — and he understands those thoughts of sex and shoelaces aren’t as far apart, in form or in content, as they might at first seem.

This is why some find Baker’s novels uniquely dull, irritating, or repulsive, and why others place them in the small league of books that make sense. Not “sense” in that they comprise understandable sentences, paragraphs, and chapters; the existential kind of sense. So many novels exude indifference to their medium, as though they could just as easily have been — or are merely slouching around before being turned into — movies, comics, or interpretive dances. The Baker novel is long-form text on the page as well, but it’s also long-form text at its core, and on every level in between. Adapting it into anything else would be a ludicrous project at best and an inconceivable one at worst; you might as well “adapt” a boat into a goat.

After you’ve read the whole thing, feel free to enter the month-long grip of anticipation for my Jean-Philippe Toussaint primer.

The Ubuweb Experimental Video Project: 45. John Baldessari's I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971)

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I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art. 13:06 min., black and white, 1971. By John Baldessari. Ubuweb's description:

In 1971, Baldessari was commissioned by the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Canada to create an original, on-site work. Unable to make the journey himself, he suggested that the students voluntarily write the phrase "I will not make any more boring art" on the gallery walls. Inspired by the work's completion — the students covered the walls with the phrase — Baldessari committed his own version of the piece to videotape. Like an errant schoolboy, he dutifully writes, "I will not make any more boring art" over and over again in a notebook for the duration of the tape. In an ironic disjunction of form and content, Baldessari's methodical, repetitive exercise deliberately contradicts the point of the lesson — to refrain from creating "boring" art.

The 85-year-old Calvin Tomkins recently wrote a New Yorker profile of the 79-year-old Baldessari. The article is called, as it happens, "No More Boring Art", and I've got to admit, the collision of this very old art journalist and very old artist made for more interesting reading than anything I've seen from the youngsters recently. (It actually prompted me to buy a digital subscription to the magazine, which meant, as a youngster myself, enduring that lingeringly heretical feeling of paying actual money for online content.) Unsurprisingly, Tomkins mentions this very project, both its get-Nova-Scotian-students-to-write-on-the-walls phase and the tape-myself-writing-on a-pad phase. He quotes Baldessari: "It's very boring, isn't it?"

Well, yes and no. It's easy to dismiss the kind of art Baldessari has spent most of his career making — Lance Esplund, reviewing "Pure Beauty" at LACMA in the WSJ, certainly did — but I can't deny the spark I get from this sort of thing. Would I sit down in a gallery and watch the gray hand of John Baldessari write out "I will not make any more boring art" for thirteen straight minutes? Probably, because how often does the opportunity come up? Would I watch the same thing on a computer screen? I guess that's exactly what I'm doing right now, but the resolution is low — I can't even make out the sentence — and I do feel the lack of an institutional environment to strange up the experience. I really should've made the trip to LACMA, but hey, with seven more Baldessari-related pieces available on Ubuweb, I won't have to do entirely without.

Tom Wolfe: From Bauhaus to Our House

This is not a well respected study of modern architecture, but it’s a damned well written one. Of course, Tom Wolfe isn’t a well respected authority on anything other than writing damned well. Knowing only his way with words and his anti-fandom of modernism in all manifestations, I picked up this book hoping only for a good articulation of an opinion I don’t hold. I’ve made a hobby of reading the best possible versions of arguments with which I disagree; maybe this is just superstition, but it strikes me as somehow... healthy?

Wolfe argues that, at some point in the early 20th century, American architecture got turned upside down. Before, wealthy clients called the shots, commissioning buildings brimming with extravagance and ornament to match their own larger-than-lifeness. After, they were made supplicant to the towering egos of the new artist-architects, themselves in thrall to European intellectual fads premised upon the preposterous notion that the architect knew better than the client not just what they wanted, but what they needed.

What they needed, in this case, being austerity, angularity, flatnesss; a sort of monolithism. Wolfe bemoans all the Seagram Buildings that, at least in the early eighties, he seems to have felt rising all around, enclosing him in a circle of oppressive starkness. Easy to give him that, except he spins his aesthetic preference into a paranoid tale of a blinkered intelligentsia beneath which cower American businesses — where the real work happens — and the American common man — the engine of the real real work — alike.

These are ancient incantations, and I have to imagine they were at least a little weary in 1981. A lot of people hate, or profess to hate, modern architecture, and I’m sure there’s plenty interesting to be written about that. But for some reason, the people who actually take up the cause always seem to be polemicists of one kind or another. Wolfe, who converts his distaste into a grand narrative, is more benign than many; though irritating, that’s still pretty much the jaywalking of intellectual crimes. The increasingly nutty, apocalyptic manifestos issued by, say, Prince Charles, are another matter. I do find some of his urban planning principles desirable — I enjoy an unseparated mixture of housing, commerce, and industry, though I don’t know that I’d move to Poundbury to get it — but he suffers the same malady as most high-profile enemies of modern architecture: atrocious taste. The alternatives the anti-modernists propose aren’t always as bad as Prince Charles’ 1920 England by way of Disneyland, but they’re always worse than modernism.

But then, these big arguments about the fate/destiny/mandate of architecture all boil mostly down to taste, don’t they? I happen to like modern architecture, even straight-up Bauhaus; Wolfe doesn’t. De gustibus non disputandum est. He does reference the common argument that unlike, say, paintings, architecture affects everyone who walks by buildings, and thus should be designed to popular taste, which feels like it should be more convincing than I actually find it. Here the conversation turns to that eternal struggle, the slobs versus the snobs. How large-scale 20th-century efforts to improve the lot of the working class came to be bitterly resented by same, how a seemingly endless array of noble projects all devolved into Caddyshack, remains, for me, one of the fascinating historical questions going, not that this book addresses it in much depth.

I admit that, for all the pleasure I take from the sort of architecture Wolfe bemoans — the International Style, a favorite of mine, gets an especially extended whipping — it does have roots in a truly ugly ideology. Though it’s far more often attempted than accomplished, I find the top-down imposition of collective behavior abhorrent. I can’t deny that these architects whose aesthetics I greatly admire wanted to build “machines for living,” treating lives as ants in a farm to be redirected at the flighty will of theory. I feel a little like Bryan Ferry saying those Nazis might have been wrong about a lot of things, but boy, look at that style.

Anyway, From Bauhaus to Our House is wrong about a lot of things, but boy, look at that cover design.

 

Rehumanized

The Humanists, my monthly film column at 3Quarksdaily, returns this week with a piece on Sangsoo Hong’s Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors:

“Art is the concealment of art,” someone once said. Though sources conflict about exactly who that was, his words must have reached Sangsoo Hong, who toils to produce films that look and feel like nothing at all. This is a canny strategy to raise cinephiles’ eyebrows: plain people doing plain things, plainly portrayed? Then there must be something big and complex grinding away beneath the surface. While this way of thinking often leads straight to a dead end, the wall against which earnest film students beat their heads until their grad school fund runs dry, it pays off when applied to Hong, the most distinctive filmmaker to emerge out of South Korea’s cinematic boom of fifteen years and counting.

The Hong movie, of which ten specimens with a strong family resemblance now exist, is both a hard sell and an easy one. Spartanly unadorned, it’s built out of long, often unmoving shots of decidedly un-epic subjects. Its large stable of floundering creative types — writers, composers, filmmakers — pass the time hanging out in pubs, taking car and train trips, pounding bottle after bottle of liquor, stumbling into wanly unappealing sexual encounters, and blearily, unconvincingly, insisting upon their worthiness as artists, as lovers, as human beings. Their conversations are as outwardly inane as anything overheard on public transit or in hotel lobbies around the world. Despite the small scale of their problems, solutions refuse to budge from the hazy distance.

Yet it can all be so relatable. Though subject to a wide range of cultural and temperamental oddities — about which more later — Hong’s flighty monuments to frustration endure, in some sense, the same problems we all do. They want to stake out recognizable individualities, to do work that will make a mark on the cultural world, and to hook up with the men or women they’re particularly into — to connect, in various senses. But these broad desires are also vague, and they’re easily overwhelmed by the detritus of the moment. In Hong’s world, this detritus manifests as an endless stream of cigarettes, bottles of soju, chintz in all its forms, and sudden opportunities for sexual congress.

But do check it out in full. I don’t know whether it’s the highly concentrated dosages of Anthony Lane with which I’ve lately been injecting myself or the film critics I’ve been interviewing for The Marketplace of Ideas, but my interest in film criticism has been fired up lately. Maybe I just need a form to quixotically attempt revitalizing.