Hirokazu Kore-eda has quietly amassed one of the most remarkable bodies of work in contemporary Japanese cinema. Quiet not so much in terms of international acclaim, which has been steady and mounting since the release of his first feature Maborosi (1995), but in the increasingly becalmed nature of the works themselves. Even at their tensest (2004’s Nobody Knows) and most despairing (2001’s Distance), Kore-eda’s films seem to operate on the level of a whisper. His latest, Still Walking is a seemingly unassuming miniature capturing one day in the life of a family that builds incrementally and, yes, quietly, into a vast landscape of regret, bitterness, and love. Reverse Shot’s Jeff Reichert sat down with Kore-eda during the Tribeca Film Festival to discuss his work and themes. For more about Still Walking, read Kristi Mitsuda’s Reverse Shot review at indieWIRE.
Reverse Shot: One of the things that strikes me about a lot of your movies is that they’re structured around things that aren’t actually in the film. In Nobody Knows we see the children living without their parents, in Distance, it’s the survivors reflecting on the victims of the gas attacks, and in Still Walking, the family gathers to commemorate a death. How do you go about structuring a film around an absence?
Hirokazu Kore-eda: This isn’t something I’m very conscious of, it’s just the way it comes out. When I was finished working on Nobody Knows, a French reporter at Cannes said to me, “You always portray people who are left behind, and your themes are always about memory and death.” Until she said that I wasn’t really aware of it myself. But there’s something that really resonates with me about that condition of being left behind. In Japanese society dead people have a different sort of presence; if you’ve done something bad, you might say, “Oh, I can’t face my ancestors.” Japanese people are very aware and conscious of the presence and effect of dead people in their everyday lives.
RS: Is this “left behind” feeling somehow then the starting point for your films? There always seems to be something just hanging there unspoken as if the narrative springs from a feeling rather than the other way around.
HK: I think that might be true. I made Hana (2006) after my father passed away. I had a very distant relationship with him—it was very superficial and we never really had deep conversations. But I discovered as I was cleaning out our house a Go board, and I remembered in that moment that my father had taught me how to play Go. In rediscovering that memory, I realized that even after his death I’m able to continue to grow and evolve my relationship with my father. Click here to read the rest of Jeff Reichert’s interview with Hirokazu Kore-eda. And click here to read Kristi Mitsuda’s review of Still Walking.
You’ve seen this empty canal before. Some boys and a dog were running around here, across the street and into it, just a few minutes ago. But you’re not prepared, five minutes into The Headless Woman, with a sunny pop song on the car radio, for the protagonist to hit something. Yet you’ll spend the rest of the film making sense of what happened here, of what you’ve seen and not seen. In the films of Lucrecia Martel you’re challenged to pay attention well before you’re ready, to play catch-up, figuring out who’s related to whom and what is relevant. But as with the protagonist’s subsequent disorientation, your heightened yet bewildered state isn’t a set-up or effect—it’s the point. Martel sharpens your senses—and celebrates and rewards them—while compelling you to distrust them.
In each of Martel’s first three features, a mysterious incident confounds characters and viewer alike, setting a tone that the Argentine director sustains yet also narratively subverts. In La Cienaga a woman falls onto her wine glass as drunk swimsuited houseguests fail to notice or care about the bloody mess; in The Holy Girl a man presses himself sexually against an impressionable young woman in a crowd; and in The Headless Woman, Martel’s latest knockout, Vero (Maria Onetto) hits something on the road, reacts strangely, then forgets herself. Martel reinforces disorientation by pairing shallow-focus close-ups with episodic narrative; hers are meandering stories presented as visual suspense. Although Vero’s gradual recovery of self and memory serves as Martel’s clearest through-line to date, dramatic resolution remains a low priority. At any moment there can be revelation, but confounding moments are destined to follow. Minor clarifications only deepen the major mysteries of consciousness and perception. Click here to read the rest of Eric Hynes’s review of The Headless Woman.
And on the occasion of this brilliant film’s theatrical release, we’ve reposted Chris Wisniewski’s insightful interview with Martel, conducted on the occasion of the film’s premiere at the 2008 New York Film Festival. Here’s a sample:
RS: One of the layers that seems to be present in all of your movies is the issue of class, and I think here, you have moved it to the foreground.
LM: Because it was interesting to show without pointing to it or underlining it. The mise-en-scène, the movement of the characters, and the use of focus—what was in focus and what was not—allowed me to make a very clear reference to it.
RS: Vero goes through the film confused, and we share her confusion. Sometimes we see things that she does not see, and other times, she see things that we don’t. For example, when they go driving at night, her husband talks about seeing the dog, but we never see it. How did you decide when to show us more and when to obscure what we see?
LM: For me it’s very clear. Most of the time, I trust what the characters are saying. So if they say they see a dog, I believe there is a dog. If you show everything, you underestimate the audience. It is important to blur the line between what is real and what is not and to get people to think about reality and perception. If you show everything, you make this path very clear and precise, and it doesn’t help the film.
Another year, another great Dardenne brothers movie. Getting monotonous, isn’t it? Well we won’t complain if we keep getting to see movies like Lorna’s Silence. More to come this week on this fantastic new film, but first, take a look at a sample from Damon Smith’s interview with the brilliant Belgians, and then click below to read his entire profile and interview.
RS: There’s often an atmosphere of distress in your narrative films. There’s an anxiety, almost a thriller aspect, in the way they’re constructed. Do you think that keeping an audience on the edge of their seat is a way of engaging them with a film about people they might not otherwise care about or want to see?
LD: No, no. But as soon as there’s a murder involved, you’re going in the direction of suspense. It’s not really to get people on the edge of their seats. What we’re interested in is trying to see how far a character will go when everything around her tells her, “Let him die.” Is she going to resist that pressure or not? Everyone is telling her to let it happen: He’s a drug addict, who cares if he dies of an OD? There’s generally no inquiry, no police investigation when somebody dies of an overdose. The first idea is often that it’s a suicide. Rather than a thriller, it’s really asking whether the character is going to go to the end of this plan. In other words, is she going to kill or not? But it’s more the moral dimension of things.
RS: Preparing for our conversation, I read an essay by Emmanuel Levinas called “Ethics and Spirit,” in which he wrote, “Murder is possible only when one has not looked the Other in the face. The impossibility of murder is not real, but moral.” And that seems to resonate very clearly with Lorna’s path in this film.
LD: Yeah. I think that person looking back at us forbids us from killing. The face of the Other is the part of the Other that is the weakest, and it’s also the part that invites us to murder. That’s how I understand Levinas’s work. The fact that killing is forbidden is something our characters live with in the film, but it’s very different from the reality of life. Levinas says that at some point, it is the Other’s gaze, the other person looking at us, who calls to us in order not to die. And in a way, Lorna knows that Claudy has to die. That’s what she sees in the end.
On the occasion of her 80th birthday, Agnès Varda, the woman sometimes referred to as the “grandmother of the French New Wave,” decided to turn the camera back on herself. The Beaches of Agnès was the result: sprawling, spry, and ever curious, like the filmmaker herself, it revisits a life that, for over 50 years, has been inextricably linked to the cinema that shaped it. In addition to making groundbreaking films like Cléo from 5 to 7 (1961) and Vagabond (1985), Varda has also sustained an impressive career as a photographer and more recently as an installation artist. In 1962 she married the filmmaker Jacques Demy, with whom she stayed until his death in 1990. I met with Varda at the Santa Monica home of Patricia Knop and Zalman King, just steps away from one of her beloved beaches, where she observed matter-of-factly, and with a touch of merry nonchalance, “I was lucky enough in my life to be at the right time in many places.” Here among the sun-dappled collection of 19th-century carousel animals and thick-bodied angels, this grand dame of cinema with the impish grin looked perfectly at ease, equally at home as both jester and queen.
The Beaches of Agnès, appropriately, occasions retrospectives. Los Angeles’s American Cinematheque has been screening a number of Varda’s films in anticipation of the Beaches release, from Jacquot (1990), a moving reconstruction of Demy’s childhood made in the late stages of his illness, to the elegantly observed essay film The Gleaners and I (2000). The program also included several films that Varda made during her various residencies in California, including the “hippie love” film Lions Love (and Lies) (1969), starring Warhol superstar Viva, the documentary Mur Murs (1980), a kind of Gleaners precursor in search of the unnamed creators of Los Angeles’s street murals, and the rare gem Uncle Janco (1965), a short and colorful portrait of Varda’s long-lost relative drifting in the bays of Sausalito. In Beaches, Varda is chastised by Chris Marker (disguised as his trademark cartoon cat, Guillaume-en-Egypte) for having spent the summer of 1968 not on the streets of Paris but in Hollywood. To me she explained: “France was dull, really, and when we came here it was, oh my God, like a shower of freedom, counterculture, the way people would dress, would speak, would have all these love-ins, all these happenings, all these meetings.” Varda’s bright enthusiasm for California was rivaled only by the audience at the Aero Theater, which gave her a standing ovation before the first screening of the series had even begun. Slightly embarrassed, she urged everyone to sit down. “Maybe after,” she quipped.
At midnight Olivier Assayas was still going. Looking no worse for wear after a full day of press interviews and the premiere of his new film, Summer Hours, at the New York Film Festival, Assayas held court at a festival-hosted dinner, receiving well-wishers with shy smiles, deep nods, and indiscriminate eye contact. Long after other distinguished guests retired for the night, Assayas leaned forward and joined another conversation. Dressed in a distressed blazer and burnt-orange Adidas sneakers, the 53-year-old French filmmaker could pass for late thirties, his grey hair seemingly premature atop a boyish face. The director, who’s notoriously expansive in his interests and passions, weighed in on film, music, literature, criticism, and politics. Brain wheels spinning, he often doubled back on himself, restarting a sentence several times before proceeding with an extended string of thought. Talk of the news of the day—it was early fall and the depths of world financial crash was only just presenting itself—touched on questions at the heart of Summer Hours. How does one adapt—psychologically, emotionally, financially—to a swiftly changing world? . . . . .
. . . . . RS: It seems like cinema is almost best suited for approaching this in some ways, because it’s both literally making a record of something, making a memory, while simultaneously making an abstraction, a metaphorical representation. Throughout Summer Hours I was thinking of that scene in Les Destinées when Charles Berling watches Emmanuelle Beart picking fruit, and there’s this sense that this is time out of time, this isn’t necessary the narrative but something wonderful that is happening. There are many similar moments in Summer Hours, an appreciation of every moment whether or not the characters realize what’s happening.
OA: Of course, because cinema is involved with time. You can only represent time by using time. It’s what novels struggle with. Because they have so much space novels can deal in tiny details, but ultimately the emotions we have are visual emotions. We process thoughts and feelings as images. They echo within and stay with us. Cinema has a capacity of capturing those moments. Time is built into film, and you can somehow control the pace of time in a way that you can’t in a novel, because with novels your reader just reads a few pages, puts it back, and picks it up a week later. Cinema’s like a piece of music, it has its own rhythm, its own system of echoes which you control because you know more or less that your viewer is seated in the same theater—though DVDs become a problem because you don’t control what the guy does anymore—but basically the idea is that you can build on the echo of things in time. This film is entirely about that. The film has a billion subjects, but ultimately it has one subject, which is the passage of time. . . . . .
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