Showing posts with label Akira. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Akira. Show all posts

Saturday, 24 May 2014

The touchstone of Paul Valéry's 'Le Cimetière Marin’ ?

This is a review of The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu) (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

24 May (updated 30 May)

This is a review of The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu) (2013)

Knowing nothing about the film, except glimpses of a trailer, one was intrigued by a Tweet from director and film writer Mark Cousins :



Billed as Hayao Miyazaki’s last film (but ‘Never say Never’), and running to a lengthy seven minutes more than two hours*, it takes as its obvious theme the modernization of Japan between The Great War and what became The Second World War, with the repeated linguistic tic of how many years behind the country is than, say, the technology and aeronautical design of Germany. (There was also an ominous mention, not least because of Pearl Harbor, of whether a bomber would have the range to strike the States.)



For various reasons (on which @CamPicturehouse’s Hitomi has provided guidance), Miyazaki took this as his broad subject : one is that, although his earlier animations have not necessarily embodied the stuff and models of this technology, he has always enjoyed them; another that, presumably drawn by the interest, he is partly adapting a Japanese short story (‘The Wind Has Risen’ by Tatsuo Hori) from 1937, partly his own manga, which had some basis in Hori's work, so some matters can be laid at their door of those sources. Except, of course, that Miyazaki, whether directly or via his graphic interpretation of it, chose to adapt this writing at all…

Less specific in the film is the important matter of flying and of dream, though, of course, animation itself can be well-nigh dream itself : so one can, say, portray the vegetative excesses of Akira (1988) (or, even, of Miyazaki’s own Princess Mononoke (1997)) without a fraction of the costs that, when using a camera to capture live action, would be involved in post-production. (And blood need not look much like blood, so one can be gory, but without the body’s fuel-carrier being a shockingly brilliant scarlet, whereas most non-animation films, whether or not brains are blown out, want to be as convincing as possible.)

Flight, too, can be portrayed without the danger and cost of real period aeroplanes in flight – and so, Jirô Horikoshi’s aeronautical idol Caproni, with his 'beautiful dreams, can witness his multi-winged creation crumple, on its maiden trip, with relatively little effort (and, with it, his first hopes for mass passenger transport). Yet, at the same time, the film is not, of course, even going to mention how such efforts in aircraft design would lead to the bombing of Barcelona, by the Italian Air Force, in the Spanish Civil War (on which Eyes on the Sky (Mirant al Cel) (2008) tellingly meditates).


Here, because Jirô is, from the first and obviously**, a dreamer and consorts with his idols when asleep (although, as in the case of Junkers, with others in waking life (whose fellow engineers proudly say Das ist unser Stolz***), some depth is added, if not to his character, then to his obsession with ever improving on powered flight. (Yet one should not for a moment imagine that he faces dark nights of the soul, such as John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic ascribes to Oppenheimer as author of [the technologies behind] those bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki…).



Cousins’ observation about the adults is too right. Not only is the behaviour often that of children, but, as the film unfolds, they even physically resemble ageing in reverse****. With time / changes in policy, but for reasons never explained (as with that non-apparent round-the-world trip***), Jirô becomes quasi-officially persona non grata, but it takes his boss to realize and rescue him under his own roof : so, in the well-worn groove of the eccentric boffin (stylish in a lilac suit) who does not deal with the small things (e.g. Alan Turing, or John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (2001)), he is too busy mentally in likening fish-bones from his habitual lunch to designing aircraft struts (and he eats the same lunch, because he likes it, and sees no reason to introduce variation).




A moment of tenderness is telling, because, although committed to his work into the night, he is also committed to the promise to keep hold of Nahoko’s hand : he accepts it less as a limitation, than as a challenge to be the best single-handed slide-rule***** user. As he delivers the line to her, one feels that he is undercutting any possible gallantry in the gesture (though it is both still given and received) – how can love exist in such matter-of-factness, even passed off as humour ?

Which is the film’s dilemma, that, with a main character both emotionally and teleologically distant, what real rapport can there be, and does it have to fall back on other big gestures, moments of poppies on the screen that feel as though they have been scanned from a Monet (plus - from a different Nash family from that mentioned above - a moment evocative of Paul Nash's canvas as a war artist, Totes Meer (c. 1941)), and a painterly palette of peachy skies behind aerofoils cutting through, and being supported by, the air ?

The Wind Rises, from its printed source, takes this line Le vent se lève ! … Il faunt tenter de vivre ! from the start of the last stanza of a fairly long poem by Paul Valéry (of twenty-four six-line stanzas) : Jirô and others keep repeating the words, as if they are a touchstone. To us, out of context, what do they mean, and what are they short for ? In the poem, called ‘Le Cimetière Marin’ (and set in a coastal cemetery), it is not certain that they stand being carved out in this way to stand for the whole. Which is maybe what, all along, this film is trying to do …


End-notes

* The film’s duration is mentioned, because, by contemporary standards, that is getting long for an acted feature – and, if one’s, as it were, 'animation stamina' is not all that it might be, it could be tiring to watch at that length when there is relatively little to stimulate the eye – even blackouts do not have the same effect when they are used, at the end of an animated sequence, to introduce a rest for the eye before the next.

** There is little doubting that the opening sequence will end with him waking.

*** Narratively, Miyazaki then makes the film hopelessly unclear where Jirô is next (or when), with what seems an Alpine location against whose rising backdrop he meets Nahoko, because we have been told in Germany that he is to separate from the rest of the party, because the organization wants him to see the rest of the world.

**** With a multi-player production such as this, as in the great Renaissance studios, this touch may be by Raphael himself, whereas these others, although in his style, are by his assistants.

***** A device whose purpose will not be lost on every generation, one trusts.




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, 18 February 2014

It’s not serious… : An initial review of Spike Jonze's Her (2013)

This is an initial review of Spike Jonze's Her (2013)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

18 February

This is an initial review of Spike Jonze's Her (2013)





Loneliness, loss, fear, and guilt are a sample of what is going on in the life of Theodore Twombly (named after the artist Cy Twombly¹ ?), and, to an extent, the film meditates on those emotions, but also, at the same time, engages thoughtfully with AI (artificial intelligence) and what some call The Singularity, which they say will come soon and where there will no longer be a divide between human intelligence and AI : more acutely than with Air Doll (2009), where our focus and our sympathies are solidly with Doona Bae as Nozomi, this treatment of the Pygmalion-type story is more even handed.

Moreover, the scenario interestingly juxtaposes a technical world, where Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) plays a game that projects into the space of his room and, almost as now, everyone walking along is talking to someone else who is not there, with his job. He works for Beautiful Handwritten Letters.com as a ghost writer for those who want another person to receive a real letter in his or her script (rather than an e-mail) – and we learn more as the film progresses (including that some books are still printed, too).

A familiar enough notion from at least as far back as Shakespeare (let alone various versions of Cyrano de Bergerac, Flaubert (?), or Woody Allen), but here the writing appears, Harry Potter like, directly onto the page from dictation, and, moreover, in script as if the intended writer had written it. One should probably not take for granted what it is that satisfies Theodore in it : he clearly does value what he does, and does not appear to yearn to be any other sort of writer. (He is known to Paul (Chris Pratt) on reception as Letter Writer No. 612, from whom he receives immodest praise, which initially appears to hint at homoeroticism, rather than an unbiased appreciation of his art.)

What we have already contrasted is the notion of what is real and what is a lovingly created fake (for that is how Theodore comes to talk about his work), this in a world where he can be lying in bed awake, select – based on choosing from a sample of messages – a similarly sleepless woman to talk to and, within a minute, be chatting up and having phone sex with a stranger (as it turns out, a rather strange stranger)². On another level, his flat seems to bear continuing witness to the separation that his wife and he have gone through, because there are pine dining chairs facing inwards, as if missing an absent table, and there are books in disarray on the shelves, suggesting that his wife’s and his books had once been integrated, and, without them, there is no cohesion.

In crude terms, the digital world, which puts him in touch with a fellow insomniac, seems more sorted out than the analogue one of life in the flat after Catherine. His occupation, in a bachelor sort of way, is with video-games (where the player has to explore the virtual territory, but not employing a multi-player mode) and looking at the nightscape. (It is Los Angeles, which was beautifully rendered at night in Drive (2011), but melded in some way with Shanghai (which is credited as a location, along with having its own unit).) With Theodore’s job, digital and analogue are more integrated, because the former allows the production of a physical object, even though, as an artefact, it is an illusion.

Enter Samantha, who is no illusion, and who comes into Theodore’s life when he is sold a new ‘operating system’ as a result of a large video display by OS. (Arguably, she / it is an application (some would say ‘app’), not an operating system ?) Neither knows what to expect of the other, and that exploration is the nub of the film – Theodore only seems to know that he does not want something when he has it, as with the date that Samantha encourages him to go on (and which we see at the time, and, afterwards, from his perspective), whereas she does things and presents him with various faits accomplis of increasing audacity (even the acquisition of a body by adoption).

The film evokes all parts of Theodore’s married life with Catherine (Rooney Mara), from which some of his guilt and all of his sense of loss stem, in montages of carefully thought-out snippets. He has the naivety – though also, unlike him, the insight – of the title-character in Lars and the Real Girl (2007) in thinking that Catherine will be pleased for him to hear about Samantha – this tells us how deeply involved he is, that he is telling all the world. For their analogue / digital dating feels daring, as the first gay or lesbian kiss in some long-running serial might have done, and Theodore embraces Paul’s suggestion, on meeting his girlfriend Tatiana (Laura Kai Chen), of a double-date.

Having Scarlett Johannson as the unseen Samantha avoids her physical angularity, which would not complement Phoenix’s own, and allows her voice to float wonderfully and be highly attractive and reflexive. The joy of the film is that Theodore’s and her conversations feel like a real interchange, so one wonders whether it was done with her on set, to take her cues, rather than put in separately. In a sense, she feels more real than Theodore does, because, no matter that we never she her, she jokes, feels, uses inflexions and speaks wise words, to name but a few, and seems to embody life.

The resonant topic of a creature of any sort growing in capacity and in knowledge³ is even made more potent by not having a simulacrum, such as an avatar – instead, we have just the voice, which, by nuance, intonation and what it says, has to convey the sense of discovery and of a remote, yet somehow intimate, other. What the film aims at representing is a variety of experiences of otherness, and, in its course as in its ending, achieves far greater subtlety than films such as, for example, Piercing Brightness or The World’s End (even if they may also aim at other effects).

The main thing that flaws this film, other than it very slightly outstays its welcome through the number and length of episodes towards its end, is Phoenix’s sometimes imprecise diction (as in The Master (2012)), at which times he appears to be speaking without opening his mouth properly, and subtitles would help, if the words are significant.

A very minor defect in a fine performance, though Johannson’s is impressive and probably betters it. (Oh, and, for the fastidious (as Theodore has to be with his writing), the case of the title – unless in answer to the question ‘What do you want ?’…)


More here : The Agent Apsley meditates further on the nature of Theodore...



Epilogue :





End-notes

¹ IMDb does its usual trick of not knowing what his surname is, throwing one back one one’s own resources…

² Nothing new there, except the interfaces offers direct and immediate connection (when we hear Theodore’s user-name).

³ It is familiar, say, from Agent Smith in the trilogy beginning with The Matrix (1999) (which, in turn, has its roots in Akira (1988) and, amongst other things, what becomes of Tetsuo).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Posted by at 2 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)