Honeymoon: Day 3 <> OR <> Finally Sum Fuckin' Fun

Kickin' off the first REAL day of the 'moon with a kick ass Irish breakfast--they loaded us with delicious meat and pastries--and stoppin' off at the first friggin' place that comes to mind besides Leprechauns and green when most of us 'muricans think Ireland--BLARNEY CASTLE.

The first thing I learned about the castle that I didn't know is that it rests on HUGE grounds. They're beautiful and fun for the whole family.

But if you're lookin' to kiss the stone, you've gotta hit up the castle itself. It was my first real castle and pretty fuckin' cool. You can check it out from head to toe.

And, of course, once you climb all the way to the top you can kiss the disgusting stone of a thousand lips. There are two old guys there who feel you up and charge you $1.50 for it too--its optional, but, you better PAY or they look at you sideways.

It was pretty cool. There are a lot of other places on the grounds which I wont go into here as we're in a hurry to hit up our first pub in town.

Honeymoon: Day 2 <> OR <> Packt Like Sardines Ina Tin Can

So, things worked out--I guess. As all things in life, honeymoons never seem to work out quite as planned. We spent a whole friggin' day flying around the world. Our first plane was great--spaciously sitting together and what-not. But when we stepped onto the plane for Ireland it became painfully clear that the voyage was going to be miserable.

We were separated, first of all, with no chance of shuffling seats. I was packed in with a couple GIANT bros--apparently we were traveling with a college group--but at least I had a window seat, or so I THOUGHT.  The seats were right up against each other, narrow isles, ZERO leg room. My knees were touching the seat in front of me and so the two GIANTS to my left had to spread their legs and hang over into my narrowing space in order to fit. Lydia was sitting with a much smaller young gentleman and sleeping middle aged woman.. I'm sure she has complaints, but I didn't want to hear them much after my OMFG I CAN"T SLEEP and THIS GUY STINKS horror.

They served us a frozen TV dinner and mediocre snacks in just the proper increments to prevent sleep if you were somehow able. I mostly played the shit movies they had On Demand and did my best to find a happy place. I didn't get up at all during the flight. It was too difficult. The GIANTS would have to get up and make everyone else around us uncomfortable so I just sat there and watched Quartet. It was pretty obvious but attempting to redirect the film and think up better lines and plot points kept me going. Next I watched Skyfall, again--but it was good. Started A Good Day to Die Hard, but couldn't finish it--it was during this film that I almost fell asleep but was interrupted by peanuts and ginger ale. I spent the remainder of the trip watching The Life of Pi, a great film. I was so delirious at this point that I could really identify with the main character.

We landed, exhausted. Rented a car. Drove down the coast line with low tolerance and luckily no other-side-of-the-road mishaps. Our first night was at a golf resort in Blarney. The beds were AWESOME. Lydia slept in "late". I slept until about 4am, got out of bed at about 5am--when their shitty 4 channels no longer amused me--and I walked around on the golf course until sunrise. It was windy and chilly but well worth it. There were beautiful blue greens fading to innumerable hues all around me as the sun crept in.

I got back to the room before the sun was  up proper and jumped back into bed for a  bit. I held my wife for  a minute before waking her for our first Irish breakfast and trek back into town to kiss the stone.

Honeymoon: Day 1 <> OR <> Never Trust A Travel Agent

We spent the day gathering all the last minute items and wrapping up loose ends. Dropped off the dog, picked up cat food and outlet adapters. We read and reread our itinerary and airline rules. My biggest concern was whether they'd let me through with a thimble of my brother's ashes to scatter at the Cliffs of Moher.

When we arrived two hours before our flight at 5pm we were informed that the itinerary, updated 4 days ago on the 16th, was incorrect and our plane left the gate as we approached the check-in counter. After a long argument over the phone with a lady from Jersey, our travel agency scheduled a flight for tomorrow at 10:58am. They refunded us a whopping $300 because we're "only missing our first night's stay" in Kilkenny. I wanted to choke the bitch for that one.

So, we returned home and tried to pretend we were still on vacation.. we ordered Minsky's Pizza and watched The Guard. It was one of the only Irish films that didn't seem too depressing. I mean, really--take a look--it is hard to find an Irish film that isn't about the IRA, prison, political upheaval, Leprechauns, or Selkies. Also, I had seen most of those films anyway. I really liked The Guard, it had a muted personality filled with wit and a dry plot. It was character driven and the actors did a great job.

The plan now is to arrive in Dublin on Wednesday at 10am and immediately drive through Kilkenny in a rounda-outta-the-fuckin-way route to Blarney. We have tickets we paid for to tour the castle--so hopefully we'll have enough time to make it there and still hit up the sights we intended to see in Blarney.

I have started reading James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I haven't really read past the bio and introduction but I am already excited to get started. I know Joseph Campbell loves Joyce. He quotes from him a lot and refers to him as the most important modern writer. Others have told me that they've liked his later works but still have no idea what A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is about. They talk about it like a reading marathon or endurance test. I am intrigued.

Already, in the introduction by Seamus Deane, I identify with the main character through the writer's descriptions--as I'm sure most people might be. This line in particular related:  Stephen, as a child, as boy and as young man, is seduced time and again by siren voice -- parental, political, religious, sexual, literary -- but concedes ultimately only to his own voice, or to the ventriloquial versions of his own voice that he assigns to his 'soul'.  The writer also quotes from the text. One line I appreciated:  The exercise of authority might be sometimes (rarely) questionable, its intentions, never.

I just got a copy of the 1967 film adaptation of his later book Ulysses. I really want to read the novel, I feel like I already have since Truby's screenwriting book The Anatomy of Story breaks it down for examples of good storytelling--I used Truby's book as the guide to my first full length screenplay. I think I'm going to take a break and watch that now as I doubt it would be something my beautiful new wife would be interested in. Will follow up with thoughts and more adventures of Honeymooning.

Wedding Bells

I married the beautiful woman who changed my life today.  It was a lovely day.  Evening spent dancing in the moonlight.  Photo by Cory Hinesley

Lots of great wedding photos by Brandon Forrest Frederick

Belmondo and Seberg Birth Beatty

          In the nineteen forties, the American dream suffered a traumatic blow due to war and psychological trauma.  The eternal optimism of yesterday became the limping daydream of barbaric human animals.  We were able to fathom beautiful delusions, but our instinctual drives would always prevent their fulfillment.  The Set-Up, in 1949, opens on a series of signs which reflect this fractured psyche.  The bold lettering of Paradise City, a boxing arena, dominates the frame.  Below it, the sign of a nightclub, Dreamland, glows in the darkness of night.  Beneath these two, the much smaller sign of a restaurant flashes Chop Suey.  The combination of these play like an equation: Paradise City + Dreamland = Chop Suey.  Chop Suey, an American rendition of Chinese cuisine, is an outdated term for all things inauthentic (think, what a bunch of hooey, Chop Suey).  This equation seems to put its own words to the state of the American psyche.  Dreams wrapped in delusions equaling an inauthentic way of life.  A flavor made in America; a flavor we all love.  With this bitter taste on our tongues we made authenticity a criminal, romanticism a fugitive, and put lovers on the run.

The Set-Up is a boxing Noir. Scorsese talks at length about boxing movies being the perfect metaphor for life.  The fight is in the ring, the ring of life.  The bell dings and you start to fight, round, after round, after round until someone is knocked out.  This boxing film involves an organized racket fixing the fight.  The fight is the one last chance at victory for the hero.  His wife wants him to quit but he is a fighter and a fighter’s gotta fight—even though this may be his last.  His wife can’t stand to see him take the beatings any longer.  She thinks she knows he is going to lose again, so she takes a bet out against him, hoping to retire with the money.  From the very beginning this film has no sympathy for the weak.  A paper boy tells a fight card peddler complaining about fairness to “take a hike”.  We watch the truth of struggle and survival take place in and out of the ring.  In the alley behind the arena the gangsters bust the hero’s hand because he fights honest and fair.  He won, but he and his wife are left with nothing but his honor.  In the world of Noir, you can fight fair to the end, but it always ends with disaster.

The same is true in The Asphalt Jungle, made in 1950 by John Huston.  This heist movie embodies the phrase, whatever can go wrong, will.  Mr. Emmerich, a wealthy lawyer, cheats; on his wife and a gang of jewel thieves.  The main theme in this film seems to tell us beware our passions as they eventually become our downfall.  Dix loves horses; no matter how much money he steals, it all ends up at the track.  He is never able to buy back his family farm, but at least he is able to bleed out there while horses sniff his corpse.  Mr. Emmerich gets found out by the thieves and fingered by the cops; but in the end he blows his brains out—a fitting death for the worst kind of double-crosser.  Mr. Emmerich was blinded by pride and greed, but Doc is smart until the end; that is, until his love of young girls distracts him long enough to be caught.  I find it eerie that Marilyn Monroe got her start in this Film Noir.  The period saw Freudian narratives and analysis popularized.  The narratives made Marilyn a star while the analysis destroyed her life.

Though 1950 is a pivotal year for Noir, as they became harder and more realistic, it was still the height of the production code era.  A script still had to be approved before production, which meant inserting moral scenes.  In one such scene, the Police Commissioner demonstrates dramatically to the press what the world might be like without the Order of the Police.  Though, I think Houston shows the mark of a great filmmaker as this scene is well done and less jarring to the narrative than other examples.  A classic Noir sense of loss and longing to return runs through the film via Dix.  The first thing he wants to do when he gets that money is to bath in a creek and wash off the city dirt.  We can see Doll cry a little inside as she realizes she is part of that city dirt.  For the most part, Film Noir has two motivations, passion and greed.  This one has a touch of both.

            Sunset Boulevard, made in 1950 by Billy Wilder, only really includes the first motivation through the fear of abandonment designation.  There is a sub-genre of Film Noir, however, which discusses love.  It attempts to embody the reality of love within the bounds of the Noir story world.  It is called, lovers on the run.  In a world where people live false lives manageable only through shared deluded constructs, anything outside the construct is an attack.  Being barbaric animals, these people will then counter-attack in defense of their way of life.  In the world of Noir, any authentic or unique experience is such an attack on the society at large.  This climate of the Noir story world creates the perfect storm for lovers on the run.  One of the characters, usually the male lead, is made a criminal due to misunderstanding or being forced to act in defense against society.  He attempts to escape, becomes a fugitive, and is pursued by some representation of authority, i.g. Police or crime boss.  Early in his escape he encounters a woman who understands him; after all, women have been persecuted by male dominated society for generations.  She helps him escape, even if it is only through her understanding, and typically joins him on the road—becoming a lovers on the run flick.

            TheyLive by Night; made in 1949 by Nicholas Ray, is a great example of this type of lovers on the run story.  Bowie is a young man, imprisoned unlawfully as a minor, convinced by two career criminals to escape from prison.  While on the run, he and the gang kill a Police Officer and lose all hope of turning back.  Except for Bowie.  Bowie is somehow freed through his love of Keechie, the neglected daughter of a poor drunken filling station operator.  They attempt to hide out in a cabin and Bowie is then pursued not only by authorities, but the gang as well.  When Bowie tries one final escape to save Keechie and his unborn child, a vengeful and selfish woman sets them up to be nabbed by the authorities.  Bowie dies in a hail of gunfire while Keechie is left to raise his unborn child alone.  Their fatal flaw wasn’t robbing banks or running from the law, but falling in love.  Love, in the world of Noir, dooms one to a life on the run and premature death.

            This romantic plot, where the man finds salvation through the woman, is not typical in Film Noir. Gun Crazy, made in 1950 by Joseph Lewis, is the more classic structure for Noir.  In this case, the man is more psychologically stable in the beginning, though neutered.  Then, one day, he meets a woman lusting for power, though unable to achieve said power without a fallace.  So she is forced into the role of the black widow, to lay in wait for the perfect man, one made erect only through her intervention.  The two become interdependent and whole in the presence of the other.  Gun Crazy makes these themes even more evident through its fetishism of guns.

            Bart is a sharp shooter obsessed with guns because of the power and purpose he feels while wielding a gun.  However, he cannot fulfill the true nature of his talents—to kill.  He trains others to shoot and kill but isn’t whole shooting targets.  Bart meets Annie.  Annie is a sharp shooter who shoots with flare.  She lusts for more power and material wealth but is only limited by the man she uses.  Upon their meeting, that man is a carnival boss.  But with Bart in the picture it quickly becomes obvious that she can have more.  Together, they are made whole.  Bart is complete through her ability to kill and she through his fallace.  They do stick-up jobs until there is nowhere else to turn but Bart’s past.  There he is confronted by his impotence through his family and friends.  In the final moments, Bart chooses to kill Annie rather than let her kill.  They die in each other’s arms when the posse opens fire.  Here a man corrupted by a woman, though, fulfilled through her, loves her, is again punished by society for his reluctance to fall in line.

            These films are more sentimental than other Noirs.  They’re almost responding to the traumatic times as a Neorealist might, had they been American instead of Italian.  They Live by Night opens with text on the screen telling us the story is about two kids who haven’t been introduced to the world.  This is supposed to express their innocence and set the audience up to empathize.  This Noir takes the view of the sick barbaric individual and flips it on its head, depicting society as the sick one.  It denounces original sin, highlights the innocence of youth untouched, of love when allowed to flourish and grow.  I think the scene with the Justice of the Peace also says this.  He knows the world is harsh and so he refuses to sell them false hope.  He basically tells them that the only hope at salvation is in love itself.  That love will be given no quarter, always on the run under the scrutiny of society.  Love will either save you outright or you’re doomed to the same imprisonment of the system like everyone else.  Gun Crazy has similar thoughts.  The two eventually realize there is no way to rationalize their love or their behavior.  They know they must run or die, though Annie chooses to fight against the power and Bart’s past, he would rather die in each other’s arms as martyrs.

            These ideas don’t die with Bowie or Bart, but are carried on into New American Cinema by Beatty and Altman.  The Neo-Noir pictures produced during this new era had become more intentional and self-aware thanks to the French NewWave.  Critics like Godard coined the term Film Noir in Cahiers du Cinema, where they raved about the dark American films that had been totally overlooked and undervalued by American audiences.  Godard said that Nicholas Ray is cinema and had it not already been invented he would have done so.  Warren Beatty was influenced by the New Wave and decided to bring it to America.  He made a film with Arthur Penn kick-starting “New American Cinema”.  The term was coined by Pauline Kale when writing about their film, Bonnie &Clyde, made in 1967.  In this film we see the male body as the vehicle of power to be manipulated through feminine intent more obviously than in Gun Crazy. Gun Crazy was one of Bonnie & Clyde’s major influences along with Breathless.  These films depict a silent feminist revolution via the neutered male ego and his sex.

Bonnie & Clyde also shows us a sick society full of docile bankrupt people and business.  Though I don’t think its intent is sympathy for the individual, but merely for us to see them.  We are to be informed through them as Beatty is through Belmondo and the New Wave.  Clyde overcompensates for his impotence with cocky confidence.  We know he is aware of his impotence through his desperate need for approval from Bonnie.  In Gun Crazy, Bart was totally unaware of, or at the very least cognitively dissonant of, his impotence.  I suspect that Clyde was informed through his parents, Michel and Patricia, yet doomed to repeat the sins of his forefathers until freed finally at breath’s end.

Another leading figure of New American Cinema is the director of Thieves Like Us, made in 1974 by Robert Altman.  He also plays homage to his Noir roots in this film, a remake of They Live by Night.  Altman claims he didn’t know, until signing on to produce and direct Thieves Like Us, that it was a remake as he wasn’t aware They Live by Night was based on the book.  Neo-Noirs are more naturalistic than expressionistic Noirs of Classic Hollywood Cinema.  In Thieves Like Us, for example, we see Bowie and Keechie have sex.  In fact, we see them in bed together for quite some time.  While in They Live by Night, our only hint that they’ve consummated their marriage is through her pregnancy.  The dialogue of Neo-Noir is more naturalistic, at times seemingly improved, but somehow doesn’t feel any more realistic to me.  It lacks the subtlety of Film Noir.  Though this is intentional because these filmmakers were free to produce their films however they wanted.  And, of course, the film is in color—though full of shadows and texture, not a high-key Technicolor picture.

Though I love all of the films discussed so far, the film which I liked the most is In a Lonely Place, made in 1950 by Nicholas Ray.  Dixon Steele is a man without hope.  A writer in a world where those who employ him do not value his creative work, but merely use it as a commodity to be bought, carved up, and sold to the masses.  He is driven to violence around those who disrespect the professionals victimized through the slaughter of creativity.  Dixon attacks a studio executive after he slights the drunken actor.  So, it is established early on though there are appealing attributes to Dixon, he is unpredictable and dangerous.  It is here where the perspective begins to shift from the typical to the feminine.  His love interest slowly becomes more and more paranoid as she believes Dixon has the capacity for murder.  She thinks of leaving him and he tries to stop her only to realize himself that he has again raised his hand to a woman, and this time one he loves.  He cannot control the world that continually misunderstands and rejects him.  This traumatized soldier can no longer soldier on.  He glances back once more from the darkness to the woman he loves, simultaneously convicted and vindicated.

This narrative plays on multiple levels.  To anyone struggling with a demon, to the artist who struggles alone, and to the lonely place of love.  It embodies the essence of a man; vulnerable, ugly, and needy.  It starts off about a murder but the murder almost becomes secondary.  It acts as a catalyst for the female lead to manipulate the audience psychologically as she struggles to decide whether she or society are right about Dixon.  It depicts us as fearful creatures, so concerned with betrayal we cannot truly trust, or love.  It shows us how violence and emotional extremes are inextricably linked to creation.  If one looks at the explosion of a star, sex, or in this case, the writing of a story.  Noir lives in us all.  We are inextricably linked to darkness.  Without it we would never know the light.  Film Noir’s influence continues on in our society, pop culture, and my own appreciations.

Knight Takes Pawn

The films of Ingmar Bergman and Akira Kurosawa were surprisingly comparable despite major differences in culture, language, and theme.  I think over all their differences it is an overarching obsession of both directors which trumps all; their obsession with living in the face of certain death.  Their obsessions come from similar historical events and perhaps more personal experiences.  Kurosawa probably most impacted by WWII and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Bergman and Kurosawa both saw a buildup of arms in a post-war world leading to a Cold War between communist and western super powers.  Living and growing up in Japan during these periods would have been rough for a young Akira, but perhaps easier than the abusive childhood of young Swedish Ingmar.  It is difficult to say since both cultures have a history of strict child-rearing.  The extreme nature of Bergman’s childhood punishments might win him the prize.

Whatever the factors were, these two men were obsessed with life in face of death and the theme reoccurs in film after film.  However, they approach their overarching theme in different ways; Bergman through high art and psychological concept and Kurosawa through beautifully crafted traditional films with subtle dialogue and choreographed action.  Basically, Bergman gave most people a head ache while Kurosawa tricked you into a seeing an art film.  I appreciate both methods and outline their impacts below.

The blackest of all plagues is love? But wait, that can’t be.  We make an idol out of fear and call it God.  We sleep with the devil and pestilence is brought down on the land while young girls must burn.  Distraction and temporary avoidance maybe, but fear of the unknown and the absence of God are what we continually come back to in The Seventh Seal.  Jons concludes his statement on the love plague with “if one could die of it [love], there would be some pleasure in love, but you don’t die of it.”  Antonius Block grips the bars between him and his confessor crying out for his response but only death answers.  Meanwhile, Jons gets drunk with the artist as they swap stories and have a laugh.  The only certainty in this film is death and the only truth is the comfort found in the arms of others.  Even poor Plog finds his comfort and cure in the procession through the dark forest.. which leads to death.

Their distraction, along with the clever maneuvering of Knight Antonius Block, proves to satiate Death long enough to allow the truly pure to slip by and live another day.  But their salvation comes with the profound clarity of mortality as they’re allowed to see Death forcing the others to dance with him beyond the horizon.  No doubt they carry on in a much better state than Block, lacking his eager capacity for doubt and suspicion, as Jof has true faith.  As a reward divine hallucination is a common occurrence for him.  Though for Mia it seems the introspective world of woman has provided her with a much more simple kind of peace.  She is comforted by simple things, her baby, her husband, and wild strawberries.  Antonius Block shares her 20/20 spiritual vision for a moment when he partakes of her sacrament and proclaims, “I shall remember this moment; the silence, the twilight, the bowl of strawberries, the bowl of milk.  Your faces in the evening light.  Mikael asleep, Jof with his lyre.  I shall try to remember our talk.  I shall carry this memory carefully in my hands as if it were a bowl brimful of fresh milk.  It will be a sign to me, and a great sufficiency.”

            The introspective world meshes well with his other thematic obsessions.  In Persona this interior world and it’s relation to the out is explored as a tool of survival.  I think this film is a peek into Bergman’s personal life and at times into his very soul.  In an interview we watched in class he details the development of a Persona, a splitting of the true self from the public self.  He describes it as a defense mechanism that shields his delicate soul from the harshest realities.  We discussed his repeated institutionalization and his emotional fragility is well documented and confessed on paper and film.  He begins Persona by announcing that it is a film.  Then we enter into the Hour of the Wolf—that time where life and death, creation and destruction live.  Here we come across a young boy who attempts to ignore the “call”.  Finally he sits up and begins to massage the screen until it starts to focus.  The boy molds the screen into the face of a woman and our story begins.

            I believe this is Bergman saying, “Hello, welcome to my film, I wrote it, it is about me annnd check out these women I love—I will confess through them.”  So what is the film about?  An actress falls silent and refuses to speak.  A nurse takes care of the actress in an institution and then they live together in a remote location.  Slowly we find out that they are personalities of the same woman.  When unable to deal with reality the actress acts for the nurse; after all, an actor doesn’t truly speak but is merely a tool of the script, a collection of actions and phrases in reaction to other actions and phrases.  In the final reveal they have it out.  A part of each of them and a new persona emerges, stronger than before.  It makes its way back into reality and then Bergman pans back out into the room representation of the Hour of the Wolf.  Here he reminds you that this film has been the making of a little boy who likes stories.  A beautifully shot film and a great example of mastering the craft.  This film could mean so many things but the images, actions, and words are so plain.  And they only mean one thing because I perceived them and the meaning is mine.

            The master craftsman idea reveals a point I’d like to make about both Bergman and Kurosawa and will serve as a segue into Kurosawa.  Neither of these masters would have been half the man without the craftsmen/women they mastered, as film making is a team effort and they picked winners.  His players, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Max vonSydow, Bibi Andersson, and Liv Ullmann became extensions of his pen while Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist interpreters of his sight.  They make a Bergman film a Bergman film as much as Bergman makes it his.  The same could be said for Akira Kurosawa.  Without cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, composer Masaru Sato, or production designer Yoshiro Muraki his films wouldn’t have been the same.  Muraki made sets and costumes that brought an authenticity into frame.  Miyagawa pulled the focus blind and perfect.  Sato’s music has established an audial signature not just for Kurosawa, but Japanese cinema.  His influence is heard in action films and animations to this day.  Perhaps more influential to those mediums, but only because I have a visual bias, is probably Toshiro Mifune.  His movements and behavior redefined the samurai and influenced action heroes from the moment he arrived.  But it was Bergman and Kurosawa who pulled all these people together and made them click.

There is also a flare of humor in their films.  In Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries, or The Seventh Seal we find humor in the relations, in the selfishness of their nature, and especially in their summations and insights on life.  Like Dr. Borg and his maid or Jons and his singing.  The same is true in Yojimbo and Roshomon.  The characters are cartoonish at times and we see the darkness cast right along with the light in scenes where Sanjuro proclaims there is “no cure for fools” and then instantly cuts down three hired thugs.  Sanjuro plays around with people’s lives like Death at the chess board.  At times he even takes a seat at the watch tower and laughs at the effectiveness of his work.  Sanjuro’s actions are an example of Kurosawa’s subtle attack on the idealized image of the past.  He has the look down perfectly; in fact, he obsessively executed every detail of the image to make it accurate.  But then he takes a samurai and has him pit two rival profiteers and their gang against each other.

There is corruption everywhere even in Sanjuro, that is until actual innocent lives come into play.  Here our hero becomes vulnerable and almost dies.  His flaw, completely lacking in elevated society, is doing the right thing, even as a flea bitten rogue.  Later he stands up bravely to a revolver but it has no bullets for him as good triumphs over evil.  One could probably compare these scenes to those like Jons and Raval, the man who convinced Antonius Block to go on the crusade.  Raval has revealed his true nature in desperate times and Jons cuts up his face to mark him for the world to see he is corrupt.  Or the scene where Jons and Antonius stare into the burning girls eyes and see nothing but terror.

Kurosawa brought a level of authenticity to his characters by making them individuals, each with their own quirk, a compulsive process, a demented mind seen through the eyes and smile.  He brought a level of authenticity to the entire film through his obsessive behavior.  In the interviews with his team they talk about his attention to detail, like having fire fighters spray down the town in Yojimbo until the streets were sufficiently eroded.  He devotes time and effort into executing authentic representations of what he imagined, not just what is.  For example, Dreams becomes very authentic because of his work ethic in designing sets and costumes.  People on a hill look exactly like life size dolls dancing for the camera.  In Ran you believe that the king is actually insane because Kurosawa spent hours discussing insanity with the actor until they achieved the distant look of being lost inside yourself.

In Roshomon, Kurosawa lends this ethic to the genre of unreliable narratives.  Perhaps more honestly but still just as confusing as any other unreliable narrative he teaches us that perception is key, subjective, even in cases where the camera objective.  Three people can all be present at the same moment, go through the same actions, and still experience it all differently—in this case each finding a murder their own responsibility.  In Persona we have a case where one person is present with multiple narratives within, both unreliable.  I once heard that Kurosawa described Roshomon as a story about rape in the woods, but recently I found a quote saying, "Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing."  Both very simple explanations for a film that I believe demonstrates his ability to subtly tell much more.  I’d like to call Kurosawa a minimalist but it would be difficult to prove when you look at the construction of his sets and characters.

EphraimKatz said Bergman “is among a select few directors who have consistently used the medium of cinema as a creative art of personal expression, and among an even smaller group that has been able to exercise near-complete freedom and total artistic control over its film product.”  I don’t know if Kurosawa had as much artistic freedom as Bergman, but he certainly said a lot in his films as well.  I believe he is among the same class of film maker and used similar themes.  Their impacts are long lasting and have reached the ultimate level of pop culture indoctrination, the parody.  Woody Allen, who loves Bergman, uses his faces shot (from Persona), has his own white Death, and dances into the horizon at the end with him in Love and Death.  John Belushi does a samurai parody that is made up entirely of Mifune’s samurai performances.  But the most powerful and longest lasting for me—especially since it is the reason I discovered Bergman at a young age—is Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.  Bill and Ted die and play a series of ‘90s board games against the unsportsmanlike Death and win back their lives.  Keanu’s best role by far, he was born to play Ted Logan.  I will never forget the scenes of Kurosawa, however, it is Bergman’s images that haunt me—and they’re mostly just faces.

I'm Not Here

...this isn't happening.