Sweeping sanctimony in glorious 4K

The first of Visitors’ 74 images is that of a gorilla, framed in a pleasing, square, head-and-shoulders, detail-saturated close-up, exuding calm intelligence, seemingly aware of the camera. The illusion, of course, is that he’s looking at us from up there on the big screen. We might project upon his gaze quiet accusation or resigned dismay. That’s the nice thing about ambiguity: it allows varied readings to accrue. But this arresting image doesn’t last quite long enough to cause genuine discomfort. And as Visitors goes along, despite its wordlessness, that ambiguity dissolves into an air of general  sanctimony.

Which was pretty much the drill with Godfrey Reggio’s previous films, collectively referred to as The Qatsi Trilogy, the first and best-known being Koyaanisqatsi (1982), whose rapturous Philip Glass score and fecund images of American wilderness and urban alienation left a powerful impression—powerful enough to mitigate the annoyingness of the film’s didactic faux-profundities. While keeping Glass in the mix, Visitors is a departure for the Qatsi films is that it is black and white and prominently features people, not in blurred masses but rather in ultra-crisp close-up. It would be a mistake to take this for actual interest in individuals or any kind of rigorous exercise in empathy. After the film’s truly hypnotic first, and by far best, third or so, in which the use of close-ups of sundry, nearly still faces, framed in the same manner as the gorilla (none of them examined long or thoroughly enough to gain, for example, the vulnerability or behavioural revelations of Warhol’s screen-tests or Bill Viola’s video works), we come to realize that Reggio isn’t actually invested in his subjects as individuals so much as sculptural objects to manipulate in a numbingly systematic schema.

A telling sequence from late in Visitors: we see a dead swamp, then a cemetery, then vast amounts of trash cascading over a landfill. The film stops short of melting icecaps. If they weren’t so expensively assembled, such sequences would seem little different from a symbol-laden first-year art school video project. With its frequent resorting to slow-motion and its tastefully even lighting, the film is ham-fisted in the most sombre way. Another key sequence finds hands, isolated, like much here, in a void, pantomiming the manipulation of a mouse or touch-screen. The absence of an actual mouse or touch-screen is the thudding point, an invisible finger wagging at us consumer-puppets for our soul-killing dependence on time-wasting devices. (It occurs to me that there are several similarities between Visitors and Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): the reminder of our simian heritage, the lack of fleshed-out characters, the deliberate alienation, the meditation on tools and general warnings about ceding control to machines. But that film was vastly more fascinated with what it critiqued, it had story, and was so much less preachy.) You might argue that this sequence could just as easily be interpreted as a celebration of technology—the same technology used to make this very film—but that would require one to detect in most of Visitors a drive to celebrate anything. This is a resolutely pooh-pooh movie, and truth be told, I probably share most all of Reggio's politics and anxieties. But pooh-pooh with panache. Pooh-pooh with complexity. Show us something we don’t know.       

           

Jiro worship

Sukiyabashi Jiro is a subterranean sushi joint near Tokyo’s Ginza Station. The place serves nothing but sushi, has only ten seats, and the toilet’s down the hall. It’s also the only restaurant of its kind on Earth to have earned Michelin’s full three stars, and a 20-piece meal starts somewhere in the neighbourhood of $300. The proprietor is one Jiro Ono, 85. He’s been making sushi almost daily for 75 years—Jiro hates holidays—and has no retirement plan, despite the fact that his eldest son Yoshikazu has been his apprentice since he was 19 and, though now in his 50s, has yet to take over the family business. Still, even if Sukiyabashi Jiro were to become Sukiyabashi Yoshikazu, would the clientele embrace anything less than sushi shaped by the master’s aged but nimble hands?

David Gelb’s Jiro Dreams of Sushi is both an alluring high-protein documentary about rarified dining experiences and the cult of personality that can form around chefs and an unobtrusive study of Japanese mores and fraught family dynamics. Jiro’s parents barely raised him; he left home to start what would become his career at the age of nine. Jiro was clearly preternaturally ambitious, a born-workaholic and natural disciplinarian and, given his roots, a kid with nowhere to go but up. Yoshikazu meanwhile grew up under the shadow of his globally revered father and, as the charismatic food critic who provides much of the film’s best commentary puts it, he’d have to make sushi twice as good as his dad in order to convince anyone that he was his equal. Both men retain a stoic, if occasionally dryly humorous, persona, so whatever unspoken tensions linger between them can only be inferred.

There are diverting excursions to Jiro’s childhood home and, most entertainingly, to a fish auction, but much of this documentary stays pretty close to the highly regulated lives of its central characters. Gelb shapes his film with handsomely diffused images of food, faces and urban spaces, impressively fluid travelling shots, lots of slow-motion and the celestial strains of Phillip Glass—for a film about simplicity and austerity Jiro Dreams of Sushi is awfully decorative in its storytelling techniques. Yet mostly it works quite wonderfully. 

Breaching the life/art divide: synthesis, style and seppuku in Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and Mishima's own Patriotism

If Japanese author Yukio Mishima seemed unusually anachronistic it may be above all because he staked so much on the equation of aesthetic power and political power, trusting that attaining the one would naturally lead to possessing the other. Yet that he also staked everything on the romantic belief that beauty and destruction must court one and other on equal terms, the former reciprocating the latter in fortitude, gets perhaps closer to the deeper truth of this man, the only genuine key to the mystery. Great beauty, in Mishima’s highly disciplined ontology, could receive no higher honour than to meet with a magisterial death.

Paul Schrader’s remarkable, at once beguiling and grotesque film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) wisely founds every aspect of its complex portrait of the artist within the consideration of this deeper truth, bookending itself with the event that most boldly exemplified Mishima’s aesthetic convictions. On November 25, 1970, Mishima ate no breakfast. He carefully laid out his pristine uniform, the one he had specially designed for his private army. He gathered his closest aides, laid siege to Japanese military headquarters, and attempted to rouse a disinterested audience of soldiers and journalists with appeals for Japan’s return to imperial rule. He then committed ritual suicide, or seppuku, before having his men chop off his head. In the nearly four decades since, Japan still seems unable to process this event.

United by one of Philip Glass’ finest scores, Mishima’s final hours, shot in quasi-documentary style, are interwoven with biographical episodes, shot in black and white, and dramatizations from three Mishima novels—Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko’s House and Runaway Horses—that help to convey his persona as it paralleled or imitated his fiction. These sections are the most visually extraordinary, vibrantly colourful, highly theatrical sequences that owe as much to the special genius of designer Eiko Ishioka as to the formal brilliance and collaborative skills of Schrader and cinematographer John Bailey. The result, buoyed by the charming, tormented, spookily focused central performance of Ken Ogata, is not a comprehensive bio-pic so much as a study in meticulous self-invention, and an investigation into a very particular psychopathology. As Glass puts it, Mishima is about “how the unimaginable becomes inevitable.”

Watching Mishima on Criterion’s new two-disc set, it occurs to me that the only other movie that shares something of its specific approach to literary portraiture is David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch (91), which is more a portrait of William S. Burroughs than it is an adaptation of his famous experimental novel. Both movies fuse their writer’s lives with their fiction, both blur artifice and naturalism, both wrestle with their writer’s complicated relationship to homosexuality in fittingly complicated ways, both fixate beautifully on fetish objects and use the body as the site of drama, and both use death as a catalyst of creative propulsion. I bring up this comparison not to diminish Mishima but rather to try and supply a better idea of just how special the movie is.

Criterion’s supplementary material, generous by even their standards, can of course offer a far better idea. The audio commentary by the always engaging Schrader and producer Alan Poul—recorded two weeks after the death of Schrader’s brother and Mishima’s co-screenwriter Leonard—is especially enlightening and lively. Apparently Schrader’s first idea for a movie about an artist willing himself toward death was a Hank Williams bio-pic, though clearly in Mishima—his brother’s idea—he found a subject that would truly up the ante regarding the themes of narcissism, obsession and death he’d been exploring in Taxi Driver (76) and American Gigolo (80). The bulk of the commentary focuses on the extreme sensitivity of the Japanese toward everything to do with Mishima and the many, sometimes frightening campaigns to shut down production in the country where the film has never been theatrically released to this day. Another highlight is a short video featuring insights from Japanese film scholar Donald Richie, who was also a friend of Mishima’s, and Mishima biographer John Nathan. Both speak eloquently and respectfully about Mishima’s painstaking efforts to stage-manage his own life and construct his own celebrity.

Arguably the greatest example of Mishima’s will to synthesize art and life—outside of his novels—is found in Patriotism (66), the 29-minute film he wrote, produced, directed and starred in, which is also now available from Criterion in a separate package with its own very good array of supplements. Shot secretly with a borrowed crew in silent black and white, Patriotism concerns the double suicide of a Japanese Lieutenant and his wife, based on a real event that occurred in 1936. The film feels wholly disinterested in developing narrative, leaving context and developments entirely to title cards. What we get instead is a stark, theatrical, inventively photographed, eroticized aestheticization of suicide, replete with the spilling of entrails and great splashes of blood on white surfaces. The film, obviously, was one of many unabashed rehearsals for its author’s death.

Besides an informative essay by Tony Rayns, the best material on Criterion’s Patriotism disc comes from Mishima himself, who, in both archival film and audio-only interviews, discusses his ideas on Japan’s defeat in WWII, nationalism, death, literature, the West, and much more. Curiously, Mishima makes consistently compelling arguments for even his most unnerving points of view, and his particular charisma, even weighed against the violence of his life, enchants and entices from beyond the grave.