My Favourite Japanese Directors

Following on Nippon Cinema's and Wildgrounds' contributions to the Japanese Cinema Blogathon (June 15th – 21st), I thought I’d also make a list of some of my favourite directors. I say ‘some’ because I like a wide range of directors and making lists is not so easy for me. This list will comprise non-animators and I will do a list of my favourite animators in a separate entry.

So here it goes, in the order in which they popped into my head:


Yasujiro Ozu (小津安二郎, 1903-1963)

I love Ozu’s films for the delicate way in which he teases out the complexities of relationships within families and communities. I sigh whenever I here someone call him “the most Japanese of all Japanese directors” or old-fashioned because I think that his themes are universal and can be understood across cultures and generations. He is one of a very few directors where one could capture a still of any shot in any of his film and immediately identify it as an Ozu film by the framing and set design.

Nagisa Oshima (大島渚, b. 1932)

Oshima’s films can be very challenging to watch because the situations are often disturbing or upsetting. I admire Oshima for his uncompromising efforts to confront his audiences with difficult truths about the society in which they live. My favourite Oshima film is Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence for the way that it reveals the parallels between two colonialist empires (Britain and Japan) underneath the superficial differences that most people see.

Shohei Imamura (今村昌平1926-2006)

The emotional depth and visual beauty of Imamura’s films never ceases to amaze me. The most powerful film of his that I have seen is Black Rain (黒い雨, 1989) about the bombing of Hiroshima.


Kon Ichikawa (市川崑, 1915-2008)

While many may find his films depressing or bleak, it is truly remarkable what a wide variety of films Ichikawa made during his long career. Tokyo Olympiad ranks in my books as the best sports documentary of all time. I have a double reason for liking this film as my Aunt Marian has a brief cameo in the film. During a sequence about heartbreak at the Olympics, she can be seen being carried off the track in a stretcher after taking her infamous tumble during the hurdles. When I asked her about it, she said that her strongest memory of the Tokyo Olympics was of the kind generosity of the Japanese, who felt so bad for the Canadian girl who knocked herself unconscious when she tripped on the hurdles that they filled her hospital room with gifts.

Akira Kurosawa (黒沢明, 1910-1998)

Who doesn’t like Kurosawa? It goes without saying that the man was a genius. My favourite Kurosawa film is Ikiru (生きる, 1952).

And of the young generation filmmakers, my faves are:


Naomi Kawase (河瀨直美, b. 1969)

Her beautiful, contemplative films are a sheer pleasure to watch. I wish that I lived closer to Cannes so that I could see her films the moment they debut in Europe.

Nobuhiro Yamashita (山下敦弘, b. 1976)
There are very few directors that make excellent films about the lives of children and teenagers without falling into the traps of making the kids stereotypes, superficial or too grown up. Abbas Kiarostami is one such director, and Yamashita is another. Linda Linda Linda (2005) and A Gentle Breeze in the Village (2007) are two of the most delightful films about young people that I have seen in the past five year.

Koki Mitani (三谷幸喜, b. 1961)

I think I like Mitani’s films because I also love old Hollywood films, and like a Hollywood film from the golden age, Mitani’s films are invariably big production numbers, like Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald (1997) and The Uchōten Hotel (2006). His films are often choreographed (both cast and camera) like a Busby Berkley movie and full of laughs.


Kiyoshi Kurosawa (黒沢清, b. 1955)

I am not normally a fan of the J-horror genre (or any horror genre for that matter), but I find Kurosawa’s films riveting. The reasons for this are not just his masterful cinematographic techniques, but also his repeated use of the actor Kōji Yakusho (橋本広司), on whom I have admittedly had a wee crush since I saw first him in Shall we Dance? back in 1996.

Embracing / Kyakarabaa (English Subtitles)

Chris Marker's AK: Akira Kurosawa (A.K. ドキュメント黒澤明, 1985)

Like the film Ran itself, Chris Marker’s documentary, which he shot during the on location production of Kurosawa’s 1985 epic, is a kind of an intellectual exercise. In the process of looking up information about the making of this documentary, I discovered that fans of Kurosawa had blasted Chris Marker’s directorial efforts on the comments pages of imdb. One person suggests that it’s an example of “how to make a very good film out of somebody else’s masterpiece” while another calls it a “making of at its worst.” I paid these comments little heed until discovering that the New York Times review by the late Vincent Canby also blasted AK as being “singularly superficial.”

Imdb users can be excused for not “getting” AK, I think, because the film is currently packaged as an extra on DVDs of Ran (Criterion and Universal). The film was made before the advent of DVDs and as such it is not a “making of” in its current context and could therefore disappoint viewers’ expectations. Although it may not have been devised as a DVD extra, Ran and AK share the same producers: Serge Silberman, who produced films for Jean-Pierrre Melville & Luis Buñuel among others, and Masato Hara, who is perhaps best known as the producer of Hideo Nakata’s Ring movies. Despite this, judging from the film itself I’m pretty sure that Chris Marker was given a free hand with AK, because it bears the imprint of his directorial style: a self-reflexive, poetic exploration of a topic.

Unike the imdb crowd, Vincent Canby should have known better than to dismiss Marker’s film so cynically as “not good enough”, as he at least saw the film in the context of art cinema back in 1986. He had reviewed the films of the French New Wave and American independent cinema in the 60s and 70s and had particularly championed directors like Fassbinder and Woody Allen. For its debut in New York the film showed at Film Forum and was paired with Agnès Varda’s short film Ulysse (1982), which Canby also suggested was pretentious and, “oblique” and “self-absorbed.” In Canby’s defense, he was reviewing films in a time when journalists saw a screening once, then had to rely on their notes. This could result in snap judgments and occasional errors – such as his pointing out that AK introduces seven men as the “seven samurai” who have dedicatedly worked for Kurosawa over the years. The seven actually included one woman, of course, Kurosawa’s script girl and assistant Teruyo Nogami.

For me, AK is the kind of film that improves upon repeat screenings and whose real delights are discovered by the patient and observant spectator. Chris Marker is renowned for his avoidance of conventional narrative forms, so one must approach AK with an open mind. He belongs to a generation of documentary filmmakers who rejected the ‘objective’ documentary voice in favour of a more subjective voice. In fact, I hesitate to call AK a documentary as it is much more of a poetic essay that explores the themes of Ran in relation to Kurosawa’s oeuvre. The film also pays homage to both Kurosawa’s methods as a writer and director.

The film foregrounds at the very beginning the fact that the film is a construct by using a first person narrator and opening with a shot of a television and a hand holding a tape recorder against a red backdrop. As the tape recorder plays, we hear the voice of Kurosawa talking about his methods. It is pretty clear that Marker is using this technique to show that although we will be hearing Kurosawa’s voice throughout the film, his words and images are being edited by someone else. The film returns to this red scene throughout the film to show images from Kurosawa’s past films and personal history.

Marker divides AK into eleven sections separated by title cards in Japanese, English, and French. The introductory section is followed by Battle, Patience, Faithfulness, Speed, Horses, Rain, Lacquer & Gold, Fire, Fog, and Chaos. Canby saw these sections as ploys to “upgrade his footage,” yet if you read the film as a poetic essay, then it only makes sense to divide the film up into thematic sections. All of the title cards represent not only themes within the film Ran, but themes and motifs that Marker has noticed throughout Kurosawa’s oeuvre.

The true delight of Chris Marker’s AK is in the framing of the documentary footage his crew took on location. Wonderful scenes that capture true spirit of a film shoot: the waiting, the attention to finicky details about costumes and sets, and the weather. In fact, as the title cards Patience, Rain, and Fog suggest, Chris Marker’s film could have easily had the same title as Teruyo Nogami’s collection of anecdotes about working with Kurosawa called: Waiting on the Weather. In fact, I would highly recommend reading Nogami first then watching AK second as they truly complement each other.

Some of my favourite moments in AK include the contrast of extras in historical costume framed by modern-day cars, Kurosawa patiently reining in Tatsuya Nakadai’s performance, and the wonderful image of composer Tōru Takemitsu exploring the set in the fog. There is also a loving tribute to Fumio Yanoguchi who, the narrator tells us, passed away during the editing of AK. Over an image of the great sound engineer sitting with his recording devices, Marker plays some of the sounds Yanoguchi had captured to add texture to the soundtrack of the film. Yanoguchi had worked on twelve films with Kurosawa starting with Stray Dog in 1949. He also did the sound for a couple of the Godzilla movies. They must have been a pretty tight group of friends and colleagues because the director of the Godzilla movies, Ishirō Honda, is a constant presence in AK standing behind AK and offering him advice when needed.

With AK, Chris Marker has created a poignant homage to not just Kurosawa, but to the entire team working with him on Ran. My only reservation in my praise for the film is the use of an English narrator. I know that most of Chris Markers films, such as La Jetée and Sans Soleil, were released with English narrators. I can only guess, because Chris Marker provides little information and gives few interviews, that he makes this choice for aesthetic reasons such as the subtitles detracting from the image. With AK, the narration has been written by Marker, and is delivered in the first person, suggesting that it is the filmmaker’s voice that we are hearing. I have never heard Marker interviewed, but I would imagine that his English has a French not an American accent. The narrator is also not given credit, but Vincent Camby’s review says that Robert Kramer is the voice that we hear. Kramer (1939-1999) was an American actor-director who made most of his films in France because, like Woody Allen, he had trouble finding funding in the States. While the narrator does a very capable job, I think it would have had a stronger impact if it had been the voice of the elusive Chris Marker himself.

Let me know what you think. I'd also be interested in hearing from any French readers if the French version of this film is narrated by Chris Marker himself.

Ran [Blu-ray]

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2009

Ran （乱, 1985)

Western and Japanese theatrical traditions interact in an extraordinarily seamless way in Akira Kurosawa’s 1985 epic film Ran. The film takes the basic plot and themes of Shakespeare’s King Lear and transposes it to an ancient Japanese setting. The King Lear character becomes Lord Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai). Lear’s three daughters are transformed into three sons: Taro (Akira Terao), Jiro (Jinpachi Nezu), and Saburo (Daisuke Ryu). The film also retains the character of the fool (played by Peter aka Shinnosuke Ikehata) and Kent, the loyal kinsman who his banished, becomes Tango (Masayuki Yui).

The adaptation to a Japanese setting was apparently influenced to a great extent by the life story of the 16th century daimyō Mōri Motonari. Some (Roger Ebert) also suggest that the film incorporates autobiographical elements from Kurosawa’s own life. The result is a very theatrical film that for me was more of an intellectual exercise than an emotional journey. As a spectator, one does not become as heavily invested in the plight of Hidetora as one does with Lear.

There are many reasons for this. First, it is hard to see past the horrific past war crimes of Hidetora such as the massacres of the families of his daughters-in-law, Lady Kaede and Lady Sué. Secondly, there is the inevitability of the plot ending in tragedy once you cotton onto the fact that the film is following the King Lear plot. Finally, as visually stunning and carefully composed as the film is, the staginess of the mise-en-scene keeps the spectator at an emotional distance from the subject matter. Especially if one compares the coldness of Ran to the emotional intensity of Kurosawa’s earlier films like Rashōmon (1950), Ikiru (1952), and High and Low (1963).

A good example of how the mise-en-scene creates a distant observer (and not in the Noël Burch sense) is how Kurosawa’s use of colour works both for and against the film. The colour clearly functions in a symbolic manner. Each son has a different colour in order to distinguish their fighting men in battle scenes (yellow, red, blue). Hidetora literally becomes a ghost of his former self with his white costume, hair, and skin colour when he is cast out by his two eldest sons. The focus on colour became so extreme that in Chris Marker’s documentary AK, one sees Kurosawa directing the crew to paint the grass golden for a night see that was later cut. The bright colours -- such as so-red-it’s-obviously-paint blood that splatters during the battle scenes -- become very theatrical to the point that it’s like watching a 1950s Technicolor musical.

The theatricality of the costumes and sets is emphasized by the performances, which seem heavily influenced by Noh. Lady Kaede, in particular, reminded me of the crazy, vengeful female character often found in Noh. She also reminded me of the disturbing character of Lady Wakasa in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu.

I have often wondered why the distributors chose to keep the Japanese title “Ran” for this 1985 Kurosawa film. While watching Chris Marker’s documentary AK, which accompanies my German DVD as an extra (it’s also on the Criterion DVD) I realized that the answer probably lay in the multiple interpretations of the kanji 乱, all of which suit the film: chaos, excessive, reckless, rebellion, revolt, and so on. Ran is a bold, fascinating film whose imagery is not easily forgotten.

The German DVD was released by Universal and includes subtitles in German, English and Dutch. There is also a German dub and an English dub available. The latter of which really seems like a waste of money. I wonder when and why it was done. Unlike Germans, most English speakers only enjoy dubbing in spaghetti westerns. On the whole though it’s a decent transfer and worth the purchase for the Chris Marker documentary.

Ran [Blu-ray]

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2009