Revolution

Eros + Massacre (1969)

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Eros + Massacre

“The fundamental theme is: how to change the world, and what is it that needs to be changed? Reflecting on the present situation through the medium of an era already past, I came to believe that Osugi’s problems continue to be ours.” – Yoshishige (Kiju) Yoshida, Cahiers du Cinema, Oct 1970.

Writing on Eros + Massacre, Yoshida’s 1969 abstract epic, will be an incomplete task by its’ end. I say this not only due to my own limitations as a writer to grapple fully with the range of historical context and the extremely intricate construction/style. I say this because Yoshida’s film is like a maelstrom in the sea, the currents of past, present and future swirling around each other in an ocean which contains them all. If an artwork or a film begins to sprawl out, it becomes tougher to comprehend; to remember, to be sure or confident in the judgements you make concerning any analytical or emotional responses/interpretations. Conventional cinematic viewing can often lead to two responses to material which you don’t understand; hostility or reluctance to speak at all. For several reasons I’m sure, Yoshida’s films have travelled in high places but their release and exposure to the wider mainstream of cinema and it’s viewers has been largely invisible throughout common film education. In fact, until I saw Eros + Massacre, I was not aware a Japanese New Wave in cinema even existed.

So I am grateful to Arrow Video’s work in restoring the film (alongside others) in a 2017 release. I am also grateful that Yoshida’s work has managed to travel continually in some form, because that maelstrom you experience when watching the film is reflective of the same one we live in continously. By design, Eros +Massacre takes the alternating streams of conflicting histories, narratives we tell ourselves, and half-remembered reveries and unleashes them through the screen, releasing a dam of cinematic forms that has been continually choked by the need to fix a singular narrative in place, a singular plot with a singular story. In a film concerned with what it means in the present when we try to construct ‘a usable past’, it is difficult to cope with a visual presentation closer to the real life experience of our own, consciously navigating ourselves through societies different conflicting accounts of “what really happened”, “who really did what”, “why did that happen the way it did?”. History is built from the ruins of the present, interpretations from different arenas of society (with differing amounts of pressure), and the narrative channelings of any one human writer looking to find out why things are the way they are. To put this onscreen is no easy task.

So my writings on Eros + Massacre will forever remain incomplete, and I think Yoshida would be contented to know that. At the very least, love and its’ limitless potentials combined with its’ consequences, is a good place to start.

It feels strange to pick a starting point when discussing the film, if only because it’s reflecting the film’s own obsession over how malleable the temporal world that we navigate can be. Eros + Massacre starts in the 1960s, but it’s tracing a circle back to the 1910s/20s, where the principal characters are displaced by their visions of the future, and the actors of the present are grasping the sands of the past running through their fingers.

Pinning the story to the wall reveals some facts, Eiko (Toshiko Ii) and Wada (Daijirō Harada) are two students in the late 60s, adrift in the modern cosmopolis of Tokyo. Beginning with an interview, Eiko spends much of the runtime trying to make sense of her past, and her relationship to her mother Itō Noe, who was involved in the feminist and social upheaval happening in Japan in the late Meji and Taishō periods of history. She was also involved with Ōsugi Sakae (Toshiyuki Hosokawa), a radical Japanese anarchist who entertained three simultaneous couplings; one with his wife Yaruko Hori, one with journalist Kamichika Ichiko (played by Yûko Kusunoki, she is referred to in the film as Masaoka Itsuko due to the real Ichiko attempting to sue Yoshida for violation of privacy which led to a theatrical recut for release), and one with Itō Noe (played by Mariko Okada). He did this through a radical profession of free love, in the denial of the self and of the social pressures enforced on society through monogamous coupling and private property ownership. His philosophy was in conflict with the state pressure and forces of Japanese politics, but also at odds with the desires of each of the women he was in relation to. It is from this pool of love, politics, philosophy and time that Eros + Massacre spends it’s time swimming in.

To try and separate the stories in order to make better coherence of them, is precisely what Yoshida’s construction is designed to resist. The histories of this time are thrown together in parallel, at times bleeding into the reality of each other with such actuality that the timelines and their characters quite literally unify together in the same space on screen. Eiko is subject to the role of the interviewee from the beginning, the camera (and by extension its’ operator Wada) becoming a cypher for our own way into this world, but Eiko also becomes the interviewer and tries her best to get answers from her mother, who’s enigmatic appearance reveals only enigmatic answers.

To be living in the present means you do not have full access to the past, and cinema for a long time has carefully glided over that fact by creating an external frame to witness the events of the past, which are in fact only interpretations filtered down through the creative process that any film crew embarks on when producing a film. So the film continually investigates and re-investigates itself, freed from trying to pretend that the past is both fixed and fully accessible, the film is continually reflecting on the impressions and echoes of the positions we place ourselves in in our spatio-temporal existences, the echoes of the paths previously tread and the imagined ones we have yet to walk.

All of this sounds very metaphysical, and that is perhaps because it is. One of the struggles of trying to give shape to writing about this film, is the very fact that it wants to be oriented in this tangle of metaphysical tensions. It’s revolutionary bent in style and substance means the film is a chaotic mass of roots growing downwards, it’s divisions only allowing you to see the more complex relations between each strand. Take the monumental work of cinematography in the film (fulfilled by Hasegawa Genkichi), which contains some truly exquisite and deft compositions. It’s long focus and depth of field means the surroundings are filled with an atmosphere of the Japanese architecture, a sense of understanding is built between the environment and the people who inhabit it. The compositions themselves then not only possess a treasured sense of environmental scale lost in modern cinema, but the compositions are radically de-centred; they resist being images easy to process, reflecting the turbulent and complicated relations between the characters they are not easily found on screen, lurking in the corners of frames or partially shielded from view.

This grows as the architecture becomes an active element in the environment; characters are reflected through windows and mirrors as they speak to each other heightening their fractured distance; they burst continuously from shōji (Japanese paper-style walls) appearing from hidden pockets and frames within the cinematic one. But this is the cinematography only of the earlier period, and the shooting style of the 60s era embraces the nouvelle vague‘s more confrontational camera work, of a more direct exposé of the characters onscreen. Here Wada and Eiko are not just subjecting themselves to the looming stare of the long spiral of history, but they are in the throes of confronting themselves and their own gazes. So the cinematography expands here, visual extremism as the analysis digs and digs in the ruins of time. Eiko even has the past projected onto her literally through a screen projector, as she confronts Wada on notions of love, manhood and the gap between desire and fulfillment of them.

As the film progresses, that visual extremism or dynamism starts to affect the more traditionally composed cinematography of the past sections building upon it even further. The film’s most reknowned sequence is a tri-part replication of the Hikage Teahouse Incident, where Kamichika Ichiko stabbed Ōsugi Sakae after discovering him living with Noe. The tri-part, comes from it going over different depictions of how the event could have taken place, each version of events with its focus and dynamics shifted. Here the camera bleeds through an abstraction of archaic stage-play kabuki theatrics, classical cinematography and the more experimental angles of it’s present day focus and artistry. The past becomes the present reflected through the past, and all of these complicated tensions never unify into a single position; the variants and perceptions of history are shrugged off by Eiko (complaining that the incident may never have even happened), and so too the cinematographical strands are left untied into a neat knot. The cinematography fuses together in the moments of brilliant experience when the story is being encountered, but it refuses to contain itself to the limits of past/present/future. It is all those at once, and more.

Do you see why it is difficult to talk about Eros + Massacre? Even now I’m reflecting back the film’s own concerns with its’ presentation. As Eiko and Wada submerge themselves into the stream of the world around them, the film does the same. It concerns itself so much with its’ own construction it even exposes it, a sequence where the director and camera set up is shown initiating Eiko and Wada into their next scene. Their world is inextricably linked to the celluloid reality they’re being burned onto by Yoshishige and his editor Yasuoka Hiroyuki. By the end of the film, not only have all the characters come together across space and time to be preserved in a photograph (“a monument for the future”), but characters in both the past and present have simultaneously commited suicide and reached death and still possess life onscreen, one even hanging themselves with the celluloid and embracing that reality to a deliriously surreal conclusion. The film opens out like a puzzle box, where not even the conventions of mortal life need to necessarily be respected or entertained as they so often are in conventional cinema. You cannot throw off these boundaries, it is not that Yoshida’s work isn’t interested in them. It is more that the work approaches them and explores them intimately through film, a form which isn’t necessarily bound by the limitations of the human form.

Once you move through that, you then can see the huge chasm that is being carved into the psyche when the film communicates on love, on politics, on the massacre between them. Yoshida’s position on these matters is a culmination of the thought and ideals of those real historical figures for sure, but they are also very much his own. Grown from the environment of the 1960s, a time when across the globe cinema was experiencing an internal revolution in how to portray itself. So the theories of Ōsugi on free love are placed in chronic opposition to his undermined sense of self, as well as his betrayal of revolutionary ideals to become an informer. Itō Noe’s genuine desires of self-realisation are undercut by her inability to free herself from the tangles of her own pride and her love with Ōsugi, or rather than undercut they are simply challenged by. Itsuko (real life- Ichiko) listens to Ōsugi’s words, we can hear her agreeing with his philosophies even though you can see in her face that she does not believe them and it drives her to madness. Eiko’s ambition to make sense of her past can’t be fully reconciled with the impossibility of ever fully knowing what happened or even why. And all of this takes place against the barely visible backdrop of that metaphysical conversation of being both in society and of it, the white gloved hands of the state slowly grasping tighter around the necks of those who radically rebel against its’ structures.

I’m sure there are plenty of “answers” out there written by critics and academics alike on what the content of Eros + Massacre means, and I’m sure that plenty of those reasoned pieces provide valuable insight into how the film manifests meanings that are difficult to explain in language. But Yoshida’s masterpiece is a contemplation on the limits of love without end, and it is designed to flow through you and fill you with understanding, before closing it’s doors until you decide to enter again (quite literally!). For me to have written a piece which could ever claim to answer these questions in full, would be blind to the negation of self that Yoshida seems transfixed by in this film and the answers that can be felt when moving beyond the ego. There is wisdom in the film, but it is on you to define and shape it into a usable experience for your world, just like Eiko wants to create a usable past out of the infinite fragments and permutation of the human experience.

I would never fully claim to understand it, and I don’t need to claim to mindlessly agree with the full extent of its politics and discourse to show you it is worth watching. It is a film born in a maelstrom, its’ characters whipped and thrown through the seas of time and culture and memory and dreams. They are placed in the infinite set of tensions created by our own complex and ever-evolving desires; our reason, our regrets and our ambitions. All of which continues to evolve moment-by-moment against or with the society around us, and the lies and truths we tell to each other, to ourselves, to the world. Even in love, one of our most freeing feelings we can experience, we still cannot make sense of its’ complicated edges, the way our personalities can hold conflicting dissonances and enable us to repress our desires through multiple layers of filtration (society, lover’s egos, our own sense of self and how honest we can be etc.). If Yoshida’s film was the defining statement on these matters, we could all go home and rest easy, but Eros + Massacre is borne of a restless current, of a train surging forward from one side of the screen to the next.

So I leave the work here, incomplete and in ruins. And there is a humbling sense of peace in that, like Tsuji Jun (Etsushi Takahashi), Itō Noe’s second husband who she leaves for Ōsugi. He weathers this storm of life in the film, retreating into his shakuhachi (Japanese flute) playing as a way to cope with love leaving his world. Maybe there is more wisdom in this path, maybe less. Maybe the value of his choice is not dependent on how good or bad it is, but simply that it is at all. Maybe that is all we should ask from ourselves, from our art. It might not answer every question, and it might demand more from us in the future, but perhaps that at least might be a good place to start.

-Alex

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Eros + Massacre (1969)

Battleship Potemkin: History in Eisenstein’s Making

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potemkin

” ‘The Battleship Potemkin’ has been so famous for so long that it is almost impossible to come to it with a fresh eye…it has become so familiar that we cannot perceive it for what it is…the fact is ‘Potemkin’  doesn’t really stand alone, but depends for its power upon the social situation in which it is shown.” – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times, July 19, 1998

Battleship Potemkin (Dir. Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) in our hyper edited age, runs for too long. Even at a short 115 minute running time, a duration not seen in our feature films of today, it still drags near the end. The ageing of a film’s mechanics throughout time is a curious feature that is very hard to measure, and harder to discuss. I often try to purposely avoid a meta-analytical slant on these essays, instead preferring to discuss each film in itself, set by its own standards rather than the ones I impose on it. Eisenstein didn’t have the cultural history of 100+ years of cinema that I am a part of. There was very little history of cinema for him to place his works in, while now Eisenstein’s works, so radical, daring and provoking at the time, have been carried through the drifting of history to occupy a place for film enthusiasts, film historians, and not much else. It’s what happens to any work of art, but the experimental nature of Eisenstein’s style of cinema means that his vision morphs quicker in time. It’s neither good, nor bad, just an effect. To an audience unused to the hyper edited media we watch daily, the audience of 1925, it must have been very well timed, perhaps even going too fast at points.

Regardless, Battleship Potemkin is an iconic piece of cinema for a reason. Besides being an incredibly potent piece of revolutionary propaganda for the newly established USSR, it is also a film which uses the most intense and visually arresting tool cinema of the time possessed: sheer visual spectacle. From the hundreds of extras, the incredible sets of the battleships provided by the Soviet government, to the infamous ‘Odessa Steps’ sequences, the sheer impression of the pure reality of what was being shot, the knowledge that every person in each shot was not digitally inserted, not crafted by an animator sitting behind a computer somewhere, gives it such a visceral and tactile feel, of cinema reflecting the mass of people, as a spectacle to be watched in its own right. It is the sheer number of faces that help to reflect the mass empathy it seeks to inspire, the suffering on both the micro level, the woman’s eye bleeding through the shattered glasses, alongside the mass trampling down the steps, that is at the core of when the film impresses most powerfully on the mind of its watcher.

I at least find it hard to hold the film to the same kind of standard that I may hold a film now, its techniques incredibly unconventional to the current world I live in. It’s editing in particular, a staple of Soviet film theory, takes precedent here. Coined as “montage“, Eisenstein really best employed a technique he called the “kino-fist”, the smashing of two conflicting elements in a jarring, conscious way to provoke a very reactive response. It turns the film into a far more active, aware experience than most seamlessly stitched together movies, and its ability to allow thematic elements into play rather than a clear logical chain of progression again feels…unnatural, at least in a mechanical way.

The question I feel that is burning in the back of my mind, is beyond its historical value for cinema, which is immeasurable, is the film still worth watching? Has it become so embedded in cultural history that it might actually be better to just appreciate it indirectly? It may sound ghastly, and I can say (with great pleasure) that this is not the case, that it still deserves to be seen, the Odessa Steps sequence alone is an enrapturing spell-binding piece of the raw power of cinema, and while the rest of the film does not equal those heights, it still shines. It is heavier cinema, more thought-provoking, more hard work. But it was never made to be simple mass entertainment, the opiate for the masses. It can’t fail at a race it was never running.

It is not made for our times, it does not move at our pace, it is not such an instantly gratifying experience as the movies may be now, but it still performs its drama, its power and its relevance. Eisenstein wanted the movie to be re-scored every 20 years to remain relevant, and while it may not hold the same potency it did in 1925, it comes from a time when cinema was more thoughtful, more conscious, more…revolutionary. And that spirit can’t be lost. There’s still that “kino-fist” (though it may not possess the “kino-eye” of Dziga Vertov which the blog’s spirit lies in) behind the work, and there’s still the truth of its propaganda purposes lying in wait, ready to be seen by each individual who finds it.

And here it is.

-Alex

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Battleship Potemkin: History in Eisenstein’s Making

Kino Pravda Docs: #2 – The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

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the-black-panthers-vanguard-of-the-revolution

Our eyes see very little and very badly – so people dreamed up the microscope to let them see invisible phenomena; they invented the telescope…now they have perfected the cinecamera to penetrate more deeply into he visible world, to explore and record visual phenomena so that what is happening now, which will have to be taken account of in the future, is not forgotten.

—Provisional Instructions to Kino-Eye Groups, Dziga Vertov, 1926

Working mainly during the 1920s, Vertov promoted the concept of kino-pravda, or film-truth, through his newsreel series. His driving vision was to capture fragments of actuality which, when organized together, showed a deeper truth which could not be seen with the naked eye.

—Wikipedia Entry on ‘Kino Pravda’

In this series, which will run sporadically and when the material presents itself, I will cover documentaries which eschew the traditional forms of documentary style in favour of a more abstract (but not necessarily poetic) presentation of its subject matter, which seems to speak on a greater level than the sum of its parts.

All sorted?

The word vanguard itself is a curiosity. It’s etymological root lies in “Old French” (9th – 14th Century), in the words avant = before and garde =guard. The before guard.  A cursory search of synonyms of for the word “guard” conjures up these examples.

protect, watch over, look after, keep an eye on, take care of, cover, patrol, police, defend, shield, safeguard, preserve, save, keep safe, secure, screen, shelter;fortify, garrison, barricade; man, occupy.

Now these words, these synonyms are words which we might think of as conflicting. The words “police” and “keep safe” might take on a cruel irony in light of both this doc, and the way in which the left spectrum views police forces. The words “look after” might seem distant from “occupy” even if they are two sides of the same coin.

If this seems dense, it’s because it is. The word vanguard is an incredibly loaded word. The vanguard comes before, to guard and protect what will come after. But just where are they coming from, and what are they planning to guard?

In October 1966, six black men created the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California. By 1970 it had 65 chapters and thousands of members. By 1982 its membership had dwindled to 27 members, its leader was involved in embezzlement and was shot dead by a drug dealer. The history of the party, is absolutely brimming and overflowing throughout this piece, so I’ll waste no time sitting here recounting it to you. If you want to know the events which transpired in the Panther Party, than look no further for a piece which re-contextualizes our history by talking to the people involved, from those right in the heat of the fire to those circling its edges, snapping pictures and jotting the history down. The music snaps and bends throughout, the exhaustive footage chronicling many different facets of Panther life. It’s a damn good doc.

But underneath it all, runs a curious river of thought. The Black Panthers are something of a historical oddity, a loose collective bordering on a militia, committing both social care and terrorist acts whilst advocating the love of Black People, freedom from oppression, basic human rights seemingly denied to them, hounded and assassinated by the FBI, loved, hated, demonized, fetishised and all of this in a 1st World Country. We can often fall into the trap now of only seeing revolutionaries in a third world context, always overthrowing militaristic despots or corrupt inefficient third world plutocracies. But no, here we are, smack bang in the middle of America, one year after the assassination of Malcolm X, two years before the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Well it’s a melting pot. The river then, is essentially this; Were the Black Panthers a force for good, and did they bring about change? When the revolutionaries lose, was their impact worth it?

I went to school in England, and we studied the Civil Rights Movement from 14-15/16 years of age, as a historical period. The Panthers showed up for all of one or two paragraphs in our history textbooks. Beside some cursory reading I’d done on them,  watching The Boondocks and reading Assata, I knew little of them. To see this egg prised open, in the most visceral way, watching Panthers recount their stories alongside real historical evidence and photographs and footage from all sides, media interviews, filming they did themselves, news clips and so on. In fact, in its most mind punching move, reads out and displays documents relating to the Panthers from the COINTELPRO FBI operation, specifically designed to dismantle and “put down” ideas of a Black revolution.

We have become incredibly saturated with general artistic content which reinforces our cynicism. We don’t trust our governments, or rather we don’t believe they have our best interests at heart any more. We see them exposed, in the media and in real life, in bed with corporations, corrupt and selling bribes to each other, only going up and up and increasing in scale. But we also consider them abstract, because, since they happen so often, we’ve come to expect them as second nature. When you see these figures, real life revolutionaries, admit that they had underestimated how insidious the FBI were, it shows just how far we’ve come, in a post-Snowden era, when we have an almost total lack of faith that our government ever wanted to help us in the first place.

The film also largely stays silent on any impact the Panthers might have on today’s social justice movements, the #BlackLivesMatter, the recent resurgence in socially conscious hip hop, the continued police killings. In fact there’s so much disentanglement needed just to work out exactly what happened to the Panthers, that it probably would have been overwhelming, and even unnecessary to try and establish links. After all, the film invokes a different era, and perhaps it might even be wrong to look back too closely to try and pull links into the present. The Panthers existed in a radically different landscape. They had endured no Ronald Reagan, no true collapse of the Soviet style Communism, no 9-11, no Iraq and Bin Laden. Instead they faced Vietnam, easily the country’s first truly demoralising conflict, and Nixon.

I mean, can we even compare ourselves in our paradoxical times to the counter-culture movements of back then? Now our marches are tweeted, our personal politics an everyday factor of life, not a bitter battleground, we see our activism in a negotiating sense, of trying to get more BME or LGBT accepted into the world, we’ve mostly completely dropped the fight for left wing Marxism that the Panthers originally held up. We have vague notions of disdain and distrust for “the government” or “big business” but a social revolution seems a bit dreamy in the state we’re in.  Sure we can draw lines, and see how they impact us now, but you can draw lines from anywhere. Their revolution can speak for itself, and that’s what the speakers do, they recount their experiences fighting for political and humanitarian justice, at the expense of everything else.

I mean it’s so tough to make any kind of headway into the group, for every right there seems to be a counter balancing wrong. They provided free breakfasts for the poor community, but they also held shootouts and were guilty of orchestrating assassination attempts. They were untied for their love of Black People, but were unsure how to proceed beyond their manifesto, and later the egos of its leaders bitterly divided the party. They were responsible for their own actions, but were also mercilessly sabotaged, harassed and dismantled by the covert forces of the United States Government. Every move they made was always under scrutiny, and like any radical, they were never particularly liked, only curiously watched or viciously hated, from the media by the former, and by the institutional racism on the latter.

If anything, the Panthers help to represent how curious a phenomenon it is to be morally steadfast in a world seemingly governed by moral relativism. The Panthers did not want to compromise, and many would ask how could they in the face of such insanity. Of the vicious, terrifying beatings, the physical beatings by the police, or when they were constrained in the courts by racist judges, of the beatings to the black psyche, the feelings of inferiority and worthlessness seemingly inflicted from the (white) on high. The Panthers is anything, were an expression of pure rage, an outlet of historical vengeance provoked by at least three centuries of Black humiliation and subjugation.

The Panthers have come before, to guard what will come after? Have they succeeded? Is the Black populations arguably less oppressed than they were 50-40 years ago? It seems so,and you can look around the world you live in for numerous examples of this.But the fight against capitalism has only become more diffuse and fragmented as time has gone on, and so has the fight the Panther’s picked up way back when. Now the infighting is everywhere, and identity politics runs so rampant because no one can trust their fellow-man or woman to ever properly support them, since it all seems to be predicated on unstable or potentially unconsciously discriminatory logic.Which is why the film takes on an oddly poignant tone. We watch in slow motion, only a small compression of the time the actual Panthers must have felt, how a revolution dies and fades. How when your very right to fight is compromised and undermined, how a revolutionary force can very quickly spiral downwards into an abyss. In that sense, it’s a cautionary tale. It says that real change can’t be achieved without harmony and unity in the cause, whether its violent or non-violent.

If anything, watching this helps to put the nail in the coffin of the existential manifesto of being responsible for your actions. It shows that even being responsible in the choices you make, the meaning you create for yourself, as the Panthers did by trying to be the vanguard of radical Black change, that there are forces at work which can be constructed to dismantle you, and actively crush and suppress you, channel you into streams you made no intention of going down.The joke being that we already believe in government conspiracy’s, find it far more trite than the Panthers would have done, as the extensive manipulation of a government intent on racial and social suppression was exposed to their horror.

My attempts to wrestle with this subject matter have not been particularly lucid, and for that I apologise. This film can be interpreted in many ways, a cautionary tale, a poignant memory, a historical time capsule, a curious peek into a radical movement, a deep psychological exploration of the black psyche in that time. The point is the film is there, and their story is here. The losers on history’s side do not disappear, they are just scrubbed out, pigeonholed and forgotten by the general flow of history. So to see this, to see people inspired into radical belief and action, not just a  curious way to think about the world. The Black Panthers believed in what they did, it was the right thing, not the relative thing at the time. There’s something incredibly admirable in that, even if their actions are ones you may find it difficult accepting. The lines are almost impossible to draw.

Seeing it gives me hope, for the future it may inspire, and fear, that history may repeat itself. But that is for the future, and this film is that of a past, so we’d do well to celebrate its memory. Celebrate the vanguard, for what they represent. Hope for a better future.

-Alex

For the rest of  the “Kino-Pravda Docs” series, click here.

P.S If you liked this please follow us on twitter here for updates. Also we have a DONATE button on the side menu and if you have any change to spare would be greatly appreciated, help us keep writing!

Kino Pravda Docs: #2 – The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution