Zagreb 29/2002 Hrvatski filmski - HFS

Scorpio Rising (1964) and Invocation of My Demon Brother
(1969). His absorption with mighty machines and American
popular culture was especially prominent in his most famous
film Scorpio Rising, and a bit less in the stylistic miniature
Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965). However, his greatest
passion remained the teaching of the famous Satanist and
occultist Alistair Crowley. Under his influence, obsessed
with occult and mystical themes, Anger directed the movies
Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), Invocation of My
Demon Brother and Lucifer Rising (1973-1980). Finally, one
must not forget his fascination with Hollywood, especially
with the silent film, which resulted in a beautiful short film
Puce Moment (1949) and the books Hollywood Babylon and
Hollywood Babylon II, describing the hidden worlds of
Hollywood stars. Anger spent his life outside the establishment
of the classical film production, barely succeeding to
raise money for his projects. For that reason he shot all his
films on 16mm tape and never used dialogues. On the other
hand, the scarcity forced him to express freely, to make most
of his poetical spirit and an unusual talent for filmmaking.
His films abound with fascinating, hypnotic, surreal atmosphere,
which does not fade even after numerous viewings.
Anger belongs to those original directors whose works have
made a significant impact on several generations of young
filmmakers.
A text is supplemented by a Anger’s filmography (as a director
and as an actor).
CONTEMPORARY NATIONAL
CINEMAS
Dragan Rube{a
Contemporary Japan Film
UDC: 791.43(520)”199/200”
The Japanese can be described as the masters of essential;
they stretched the poetics of minimalism to its furthest limits.
Japanese emptiness is simply disturbing. However, the
art of ’minimal’ demands maximal discipline. It is present
even in the genres in which one would not expect discipline,
like the Japanese pulp school whose ideals are the pop
culture and raw poetics of the Hollywood B-movies. Many
authors recycle Yasujiro Ozu’s model of approach to film,
but there are also those who refrain from this obsession. Japanese
auteur film at the beginning of the third millennium
can be categorized in three schools. Representatives of the
first school are Ozu’s imitators (Masahiro Kobayashi). The
second school make film modernists who have realized that
the ’lost decade’ of the 1990s, with its recession and the explosion
of juvenile delinquency, changed the structure of the
traditional family and produced some new, alternative forms
of family (Shinji Aoyama, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Eiji Okuda,
Ryosuke Hashiguchi). The third group form Japanese catastrophicals
(Nobuhiro Suwa, Kiyoshi Kurosawa) who love
to dissect millennium’s fears and frustrations, aware of the
216
Hrvat. film. ljeto, Zagreb / god 7 (2001), br. 29, str. 209 do 219 Abstracts
fact that not a year can go by without some nuclear catastrophe.
If, however, nuclear reactors rest, surely a member
of some post-apocalyptic sect will jump them on the way to
work and throw some sarin in the Tokyo underground. The
text describes main representatives of each of the ’schools’
and their individualities.
Dragan Rube{a
Shinji Aoyama: ’A Jap Who Loves
John Ford’
UDC: 791.44.071.1 Aoyama, S.
791.43(520)”199/200”
One of the most prominent members of the team of auteurs
that have marked the lost decade of the ’90s is most certainly
the amazing Shinji Aoyama. He was born in 1964 on
Kyushu, the most southern Japanese island, whose landscape
and dialect became the essential trademarks of his films.
Aoyama started his artistic career as a film critic in the Japanese
issue of Cahiers, and later on as a collaborator of the
cult Icelandic filmmaker Fridrik Thor Fridriksson on his
project Cold Fever. In his low budget second movie Helpless,
in which the motif of violence as the synonym of power runs
through the series of hero’s existential crises, Aoyama does
not recycle the visual poetics of his Icelandic guru, as one
would presume. On the contrary, Aoyama uses patterns
typical of the genre film. Similar themes haunt him in the
’policier’ Obsession. Aoyama’s statement that his most impressive
film Eureka is actually a Western should be taken
with a grain of salt. His great love for John Ford is reflected
in his attempts to express the emotions of his ’trackers’ through
action, not words, but also in the way he uses internal
landscape. Contrary to Ozu who is focused on neon sights
of the old Tokyo, on transmission lines with telephone wires
and factory chimneys, Aoyama leaves the urban milieu,
chooses the monumental cinemascope in the sepia-tint and
goes off to the untouched nature, fascinated by wide, deserted
spaces (canyons, high planes, volcanoes). This Fordian
landscape assumes the role of the leading actor and is no less
sensitive to the beating and suffering from the characters of
flesh and blood (take a look at a freshly picked plant that
sheds plant juice instead of tears). Aoyama’s post Goddard
contemplation on the New Economy (Desert Moon), although
inferior to Eureka due to the author’s unsupportable arrogance
and pretentiousness, proves that the director prefers
traditional family values. In Eureka, wife and daughter
of the main character disclose their safe haven on the run
from the urban chaos. ’If my character is driving a car, I
want you to feel that you are sitting beside him,’ said Aoyama.
In Eureka we though that the pleasant ride would go on
forever, however, already on the next drive — in Desert
Moon — Aoyama crashed into the bumper of his arrogance.
Nevertheless, this does not diminish the significance of his
directorial individuality.
Text is accompanied by Aoyama’s filmography.
H R V A T S K I F I L M S K I L J E T O P I S 29/2002.