2008: the year in DVD

It’s one of my favourite parts of my job, discovering some treasure long forgotten, previously hard-to-find or crying out for reassessment. Looking over the past year’s standout DVDs I see two interesting trends: a steady stream of compelling westerns and fresh opportunities to appreciate the astonishing presence and emotional dexterity of the great actresses of Hollywood’s studio era—sometimes both in the same title.

The Furies, Day of the Outlaw
Barbara Stanwyck’s magnificent performance in Anthony Mann’s fascinatingly perverse 1950 western, a web of incest, gender reversal and land ownership, is alternately terrifying—keep your eye on those scissors—and moving. Equally scary and nearly as affecting is Robert Ryan, heartsick, vengeful and rivetingly repressed, in Andre De Toth’s wintry 1959 western, in which grotesque outlaws, led by Burl Ives, take over a farming community. 

Kid Galahad, Daisy Kenyon
The long road of high stakes and good times shared by the no-longer-young Bette Davis and Edward G. Robinson reaches its terminus in this superb 1937 boxing flick. She falls for a naïve fighter but only winds up steering him toward another woman with a fraction of her easy-going charm. Joan Crawford however can’t decide between crazy WWII vet Henry Fonda and adulterous lawyer Dana Andrews in Otto Preminger’s 1947 women’s picture—yet watching her try makes for something of profound emotional textures.

Blast of Silence
Writer/director/star Allen Baron’s ultra-low budget 1961 noir is a stark portrait of a neurotic, lonesome hitman, as well as one of the movies’ most striking portraits of New York City. Criterion's supplements heighten the film's unique position as both an inspired one-off from an unusual and little known talent in American movies, as well as supplying a sense of how the city has changed.

Dr. Renault’s Secret, Dragonwyck
Gene Tierney’s the innocent country girl swept off to Vincent Price’s lordly lair of aristocratic rot in Joseph Mankiewicz’s excellent 1946 gothic melodrama. Yet Tierney’s not as fundamentally innocent as the amazing J. Carroll Naish, who plays both the brute, inarticulate hero and monster in Harry Lachman’s 1942 post-Darwinian horror film, which was truly my B-movie discovery of the year, brimming with strangeness and fascinating supporting performances, including one from the inimitable Mike Mazurki.

Moontide, Road House
Ida Lupino is the suicidal waif who pierces the heart of Jean Gabin’s wandering longshoreman amidst murder, booze and plumes of fog in this atmospheric, creepily homoerotic 1942 proto-noir half directed and then abandoned by Fritz Lang. Lupino then manages to turn just about everybody on, including Richard Widmark and Cornell Wilde, as the traveling take-no-shit singer and pianist in this sexy, very adult 1948 noir. Both came from Fox as part of their continuing series of noir releases, a series that hopefully keep up its annual yield in 2009.

Death of a Cyclist
Juan Antonio Bardem exposes the lower depths of classism in Franco’s Spain in this 1955 noir. A secret affair is threatened with exposure after an accidental killing on a bleak country road.

Mon Oncle Antoine
There’s something ridiculous in labeling what’s been deemed the greatest Canadian film of all time a discovery, but, sadly enough, there you have it. I confess, I never saw it until Criterion, and American company, put it out. But I don't think I'm alone in undervaluing the classics of my own country. Claude Jutra’s richly evocative 1971 masterpiece captures a moment of transition in rural Quebec and a child’s developing awareness of sex, death and the trail of hidden compromises that lead to adulthood.

Larisa Shepitko, Aki Kaurismäki’s Proletariat Trilogy, The Films of Budd Boetticher
Three multi-title director showcase boxes of tremendous value. Shepitko’s films were poetic explorations of troubled Soviet memories; Kaurismäki’s are marked by a highly distinctive, minimalist comic deadpan and affection for crime stories about losers; Boetticher helmed some of the best westerns of the 50s, five of which are included here.


The Small Back Room, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1949 wartime drama features an alcoholic demolitions expert who has to both diffuse a bomb and keep alive an old flame. Martin Ritt’s 1964 spy story plunges us headfirst into the Cold War and the chilling lengths governments traverse for the sake of secrecy. It features a terrifically brooding turn from Richard Burton that seems like it must have been study material for Daniel Craig. Two brilliant British films about the toll of war on ordinary lives.

The Ballad of Narayama, Mishima
With the death of Ken Ogata last October, Japan lost one of its great film actors. In Shohei Imamura’s 1983 epic Palme d’Or-winner, set in a backward rural community, Ogata played the son of an old woman who must be taken up a mountain to die. In Paul Schrader’s 1985 biopic, Ogata embodied legendary writer Yukio Mishima, who suicided in 1970 after a failed military coup, and remains a controversial figure to this day... Okay, so Mishima was anything but a discovery for me, but it deserves extra recognition here as some sort of milestone in the biopic, as a beautifully put together DVD package with commentary from the always articulate Schrader and as an extraordinary showcase for Ogata.  

The sound of the mountain: the sublime baseness of Imamura's Ballad of Narayama, now on DVD

It begins and ends with a mountainous landscape buried in snow, and it’s in between these winters that the story unfolds. Orin (Sumiko Sakamoto) is 69-years-old and in superb physical and mental condition. She’s nimble, good humoured, works hard, and has an impressive mouth full of teeth that her eldest son Tatsuhei (Ken Ogata) admiringly refers to as “rock-like.” Yet Orin’s fortitude is a source of embarrassment, something her fellow villagers in fact hold against her, because, to be aligned with local custom, at her age a body should be breaking down. At her age it’s time to say farewell to one’s family and climb on up to Mt. Narayama.

My guess is it’s a mixture of things: honour, superstition, and this agrarian community’s considerable poverty and general bad luck probably all contribute in some way to this ritual that has every member of the village being taken up to neighbouring Narayama by the age of 70 to die. This Darwinian spin on the old folks’ home seems at once brutish and in its way mystically comforting, with the image of Narayama being cultivated as one of heavenly togetherness. Before Orin finally makes her journey to Narayama we’re given a series of highly engaging impressions of just what sort of life she’s leaving behind, one of hardship, struggles against the cruel dictates of nature, and base satisfactions, from hunting and fishing and eating to violence and fornication and the release of bodily waste—the very first piece of action in the film finds two brothers running out of their hovel into the cold morning to piss in the mud and snow. Yet however primitive we deem these characters lives to be, there’s never the slightest implication that they’re any different from the modern audience watching their story unfold. The camera never looks down on them but rather looks them square in the eye.

The Ballad of Narayama (1983), though based on Shichirô Fukazawa’s stories, is classic Imamura, unsentimental but rife with pathos, casually vulgar, emphatically equating man with animals, observant of ritual and absurdities in every sort of scenario. As the master filmmaker, who died in 2006, famously said, “I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure.” Of course you’d be forgiven for not even knowing who Shohei Imamura is, since his prolific body of work—multiple-award-winning, spanning some 45 years, and of enormous significance to both Japanese and world cinema—is so rarely revived and still so woefully under-represented on DVD. Fortunately Animeigo’s recent release of The Ballad of Narayama makes one of his very best works, winner of the 1983 Palme d’Or, available to a larger audience.

Dead baby litter, bestiality, thievery, vandalism, patricide: the “simple folk” in Imamura’s world are not condescended to or treated as any less corrupted than the rest of us. While the primary narrative here concerns Orin’s preparations for Narayama—preparations that include everything from teaching her daughter-in-law how to fish to secretly knocking out her own teeth!—the film is essentially about examining how a community works, a pursuit that underlies a great deal of Imamura’s films, from his documentaries to The Pornographers (1966), his celebrated porn industry chronicle, to Black Rain (89), his devastating exploration of the lives lived by survivors of the atomic bomb, to his sprawling, magnificent box office bomb The Profound Desire of the Gods (68), a film set on a backward island that’s slowly being consumed by tourist industry, which in certain ways was a rehearsal for The Ballard of Narayama. In every case, how people, however sophisticated, are driven by fear, anxiety, desire and mythical thinking was of central concern to Imamura, and a tremendous, enduring source of humour, insight and resonance.

That Orin’s younger son Risuke (Tonpei Hidari, hilarious) stinks and can’t get laid, that hawks scoop up carrion intended for the villagers, that a ghost lingers shivering behind a tree even after rifles are fired at it, that crops don’t grow or families don’t get along: these are the everyday bursts of chaos that have to be reckoned with in The Ballad of Narayama. The danger with such storytelling is that things get so dispersed it becomes hard to connect with individual characters, but each of the leads here is lovingly detailed and textured, and, in particular, the development of Orin and Tetsuhei’s bond as their days together dwindle builds to a moving conclusion in the film’s mostly wordless final passages, an effect intensified by the weary, troubled but ultimately helpless subtext of Ogata’s performance. Best known in the west for his work in films like Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (85) or Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine (79), Ogata really does have one of the most expressive faces in modern Japanese film.

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.