An Anorexic’s Case Against Uchida Tomo

By Quintín

The dedicated followers of the Uchida retrospective in the last Rotterdam Film Festival were divided into two groups. One of them, easily recognizable in the first row of the Pathé 1, was spiritually and materially grouped around the figure of Olaf Möller, cinephile excelsus and an expert on Japanese cinema since the age of ten. The other group was more scattered in the seats of the mammoth theatre and didn’t have a visible leader. During the week of Uchida’s exhibitions (one per afternoon), both groups occasionally exchanged remarks and ironies about the value of Uchida’s oeuvre. “Master, “genius,” “classic,” screamed the members of the first group. “Not quite,” “overrated,” “academic,” answered the second group.

Having been a member of the second group, I would first like to clarify the true nature of the dispute, and then try to argue in favour of my position. I think that three things were at stake in these Rotterdam quarrels: (1) How good a filmmaker was Uchida Tomu?; (2) Which retrospectives should be programmed in film festivals?; and (3) What is cinephilia?

I’ll start by discussing (3). My thesis is that there are two types of cinephilia. Type (a) could be named “my videotheque is too small” cinephilia. Type (b), “life is too short” cinephilia. Type (a) is all encompassing and bulimic, while type (b) is selective, or anorexic. In the centre of this argument lies the auteur problem: depending on what you think of auteur politics, you’re either bulimic or anorexic. In my opinion, auteur politics was a coup d’état manned by the anorexic cinephiles against the bulimics. Concepts like le cinéma de qualité or the Sarris pantheon helped to displace lots of films from the pedestal on which critical laziness had put them. It was like Ockham’s razor, if not the butcher’s knife: let’s keep only the good part of the beef. (Incidentally, it is interesting to return to this debate after so many years and realize the accuracy of these choices, which proves that there wasn’t a real debate back then, but a recognition of the obvious).

In a way, the anorexics won. It became vulgar to say that you were studying the work of, say, George Stevens, Henry Hathaway, or Julien Duvivier—you’d better move on to more classy stuff. But the bulimics slowly got their revenge. If there was little chance to practice bulimia in French or American quarters, there were plenty of other countries to uncover. You could become the master of the most obscure national cinema in the world and get away with it (and then champion horrible films, as national cinema experts always do). The trick still works very well. Some weeks ago, I was having dinner with a secretly bulimic festival director. Somebody mentioned that in some Latin American country a bunch of old films from the 50s had suddenly reappeared from oblivion. I thought, what a bore, given the poor production of the country in those years. But my friend was haunted, and he said, “Maybe there are a couple of masterpieces among them.” But what he really thought was, “Gee, how many films to watch,” like a kid in a candy store. As I said, life is short, and watching the bulk of the 50s production from a given Latin American country is, in my opinion, as exciting as counting grains of sand. But many people make a living from these things: archivists, programmers, scholars, journalists, critics, you name it. They are, by trade, bulimics. So, in the end, bulimia is bound to prevail: nobody rejects his mother’s milk.

Then, what is the strategy of the bulimics? Simply put, to diminish the distance between the ranks. They aren’t going to say that Michael Curtiz was a genius, but that he was a very interesting director with a couple of great films in his oeuvre. I’m sure that right now there is a bloody bulimic cinephile reading this page and willing to take Curtiz’s side, so we can have the Curtiz retrospective and we can start all over again. The new tide in cinephilia goes that way: the second-rate directors weren’t that bad, and when we are out of second raters, we go for the third class, and so on down the ladder. Once we’ve reached the bottom, there is only one step left—to say that maybe the great directors weren’t so great after all. And then Uchida equals Ozu. And, in a few years, we will have the whole History of Cinema on an overcrowded flat surface, just like before the politique des auteurs started.

Now, onto (2), the subject of retrospectives: I’ll be dogmatic on this one. Only retrospectives of masters should be allowed in film festivals. And even so, with care: the retrospectives should be those of filmmakers who are dead. Still, the so-so kind of masters might have some kind of interest if they are alive. At least, they still can improve and they can introduce their films, which is always nice for the audience. And also, living filmmakers tend to be more encouraged by being hommaged than the dead ones. Cinematheques may show all the rest to scholars, students, etc.

Quickly, we get to (1): How good of a filmmaker was Uchida? The seven Uchida films shown in Rotterdam prove easily enough that he was a respectable filmmaker for any period or country. (According to Tony Rayns, Uchida’s silent films that he made in the 30s, which were screened at Tokyo FilmEx, but not in Rotterdam, are far superior.) But his limitations are just as clear. Not because he made compromises more than once, as Donald Richie says in the catalogue, but because these films shot between 1955 and 1965 are clearly inferior to the world cinema, and even to Japanese cinema, made before that time or in the same period: Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, Imamura, even Kurosawa, i.e., the bunch we already knew made better films than the newcomer. Visually skilled but not brilliant, sometimes heavy-handed and naïve, Uchida looks his best when he flies from realism, even to the extreme of kitsch, like in The Mad Fox (1962) or in the crazy (but not that crazy) genre piece The Master Spearman (1960). Also, Uchida seemed concerned about the forces of the invisible, which makes a film like A Fugitive from the Past (1965) enjoyable in spite of its theatricality. But his celebrated A Bloody Spear at Mt. Fuji, a road-movie with a social conscience à la Stagecoach (1939), looks stiff and predictable—academic above all things. It’s the kind of film that makes you ask yourself why you’re watching this old stuff if you aren’t writing a piece about the director, while there are contemporary—if often bad—films showing in theaters next door.

But what makes Uchida really suspicious are two good films, Chikamatsu’s Love in Osaka (1959) and Twilight Saloon. At the core of each film’s dramatic structure we find characters who are artists. In the first, based on a play by Chikamatsu, the writer becomes a character who’s inspired by the events around him to write a play, like in Shakespeare in Love (1998). The idea of the artist that the film displays is one where his work is to be inspired by reality, a reality the artist twists to prevent the output from being as cruel as in real life. This conception of popular theatre, or cinema (of course), means a step back from Mizoguchi, who made some films based on Chikamatsu, and never thought about sweetening the plot to appeal to the audience. What we see here is the concept of cinema as a “popular art,” with the filmmaker being in charge of softening reality.

A similar idea of art and artists is in the centre of Twilight Saloon, a film that takes place entirely in a sort of restaurant-bar-cabaret. Resembling a poetic-realist version of Casablanca (1942), the film is a naturalistic tour de force. The archetypical customers represent the whole spectrum of immediate post-war society; everybody does what class dictates. The military are chauvinistic, the students modernistic, the intellectuals despise the worker’s demonstration, the waitresses go after the gangsters, and the manager is greedy. Towards the end, two characters have a decisive conversation. They declare to be “two artists.” One is the saloon’s piano player, formerly the leader of an operetta company. The other is a former reporter and painter, who “stopped painting when he realized that his works were sending people to the war.” These ideas of art and artists, populist, mimetic, and didactic, mark the limitations of Uchida’s own work.

In one scene in Twilight Saloon, an old soldier meets a former colonel, his commanding officer during the war, who lives in a state of deep poverty. They both get drunk and indulge themselves in militaristic nostalgia, according to their past and social function. They are pathetic, and Uchida assumes distance from them by showing them in that way. The film was made in 1955, and Ozu seems to quote the scene in An Autumn Afternoon (1962). The young character is played by the same actor, Kato Daisuke (now a sailor), while the colonel becomes a ship commander played by Ryu Chishu. Like in Uchida’s film, they both get drunk and sing a song from war times. But they do it with irony, with nostalgia carefully qualified by Ryu saying, “It’s lucky we lost the war.” In Ozu’s film, the characters are not puppets, and even their way of getting drunk isn’t ridiculous. They are not “the military,” but Japanese citizens trapped in an historical transition by forces bigger than their own condition or ideology. The genius of Ozu corrects Uchida after Uchida has tried to correct Mizoguchi. Uchida’s approach is essentially inferior both times. I rest my case against Uchida being an auteur.

In one of the more graceful pieces of anorexic cinephilia of all time, after seeing Rashomon (1950) in Venice, André Bazin realized that the Japanese film industry was very important, that Kurosawa was very good but a bit academic (“his perfection spoils my pleasure,” he wrote), and that there were likely Japanese filmmakers like Ozu and Mizoguchi whom he hadn’t yet discovered. Bazin’s article proved, in a hyperbolic way, that it wasn’t necessary to see it all in order to know it all: the brain can do the work of the muscle. But a few years later, when people criticized the young Turks (the future Nouvelle Vague filmmakers) that were revolting against French criticism, Bazin wrote that since these people saw the films 20 times and spent their lives at the first row of the Cinémathèque française, they were the true experts and their opinions were indisputable. That’s why, even if my heart claims liberation from the tyranny of the first row, deep inside I fear that Olaf may be right after all.

The Master Spearman

Festival Highlights

Rotterdam
An Anorexic’s Case Against Uchida Tomo
By Quintín

Berlin
Berlin Blues
By Tony Rayns

Sundance
Crisis In Park City By Robert Koehler

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