(no subject)
Чем прекрасно кино и отношения с кино, так это тем, что после какого-либо маленького охлаждения неизменно появляется новая страсть. А вместе с ней и новые имена и личностные открытия, и новое желание или даже необходимость этих открытий. И в этом смысле, после атеизма с сериалами, до чего же здорово открывать сейчас вселенную Хайме Росалеса (чем-то напоминает Траперо) и Брюса Коннера (возможно это запоздало, конечно. и все уже давное все пересмотрели. но некоторые из его работ буквально возвращают к жизни). Плюс японцы Киеси Куросава и Синдзи Аояма. Правда, у Куросавы раньше видел 2-3 фильма. Также, как и у Аоямы. Но у последнего, его ранние работы кажутся даже инетерснее титульной "Эурики". Хотя, как и у Куросавы, так и у Аоямы хватает фильмов, попадающих под критерий "славное, но не обязательное".
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Midnight Eye: When you were a college student you were an assistant director to Kiyoshi Kurosawa right?
Shinji Aoyama: Yes.
Would you say that he was a big influence on you?
Yes, definitely. When I was a freshman in college arguably his most important film The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girl had just come out. I saw it and, let's see, I'd say that for everyone that was interested in film and was in college at that time-which means that they been born between the years of 1962 and 1965-found it to be one of the most important films for them. But, keep in mind that it was the first time we'd felt we'd ever seen a film like that was done in Japan. So yeah, I'd say he was a big influence.
But continuing on this point, I can see elements of Kurosawa's filmmaking in your filmmaking style: in the framing, staging of the action, and cutting. What I find interesting is that in a 'Hollywood' movie, what you see on screen is all of the world that you're supposed to know about. But in both yours and Kurosawa-san's films, there just doesn't appear to be a frame. One gets the sense that the film world on screen is completely open and that your camera just happens to be pointing in this one direction, catching whatever action is going on at that time. And there are numerous examples of this in Eureka, but what do you think of this and is this also an influence from Kiyoshi Kurosawa?
For the average filmmaker, a lot of these choices could just be called style. For Kurosawa-san, I don't know, but for me, it's not style. I choose the camera and actors placement based on some idea of spatial distance; and that distance is really all I am thinking about. Then my cinematographer, Masaki Tamura, and I sit and talk about this over many nights and many drinks and try to figure out what would work best on screen and what we want to show. And that's really it; together the two of us figure this out.
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Click to viewдебют Аоямы (славный трейлер, странный фильм)
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Jim O’Rourke: For the first half or so of your career, you worked firmly within the Japanese studio system (1). Now that you are making your own films, you still find the idea of genre very useful. How do you deal with the structure and language of genre, and do those challenges lead to a greater understanding of why a certain genre communicates in the way that it does?
Kiyoshi Kurosawa: For me, the biggest thing that genre defines is that movies have been historically determined to be between a hundred and a hundred and twenty minutes in length. Of course you’re free to make them longer, but in fact I think that’s a length that has been determined by history. So I have to figure out a way to tell what I want to tell within that time frame, and that’s not my strength, so I rely on the power of film as such. And an even more fundamental reason that I operate within genres is that I’ve seen many, many wonderful movies that I consider to be masterpieces that are clearly bound by a certain kind of genre, or they’re old studio-system pictures. And if I watch these masterpieces, hobbled as they are by the lack of freedom that genre is defined by, I realize that still it’s possible to make a masterpiece under those conditions today.
Do you use the rules as a challenge to learn about the internal operations of a genre and why its language is what it is, as another way to express your ideas?
Certainly that is always a challenge that I enjoy, and even when I’m not conscious of genre, what I’m realizing is that the generic influences if you will, just naturally flow from me as a storyteller, and I’m sure that’s true in music, too-that we end up telling the stories based on certain rules. Well, in fact, I wouldn’t say that I always obey the rules of the genre, but I think ironically what I find most compelling is that no matter how accurately I try to follow the rules of the genre, even if I try to stay a hundred percent faithful to it, simply by the accident of the time that I live in or my individual personality there are always shifts and transformations. So no matter how faithful I try to be, my discovery is that it’s impossible.
Right. I really like how you incorporate a sense of non-linear time into your films. Eyes of the Spider in particular has an incredible power, in part due to its radical structure. The simultaneity of the story’s progression and the non-linear cause and effect open all sorts of new possibilities to reveal the motivations and psychic consequences of the protagonist’s act of revenge. I was wondering what initially inspired you to use non-linear time? Was it other films? Or was it through different mediums?
Actually, no one’s ever pointed that out to me before. It’s a very interesting insight, because I’m not actually conscious of defining a non-linear time structure in the abstract before I make a film. However, I think there is something that is organic to film and unique to it as an art form, which is the nature of time and how to portray it in film. And I am interested in that question of, What is time in film? So I would say I’ve grown more interested in that question over time. It’s something I contemplate each time I make a film, but I’m hardly an original thinker in terms of this. Take the very famous example of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, where three different approaches to a similar reality are explored.
My understanding of filmic time is that it’s always moving forward in one clear, linear fashion, and at the end of two hours you come to the end. It’s only in parts of the story that you may periodically dip into the past. I think that if you approach telling a story the way Rashomon does, what you do is dissolve any factual basis for determining what is true and what is not true. By having all three versions of events moving forward simultaneously, you dissolve the underlying concept of a single truth that’s presumed to be there. And I think that this is probably something very difficult to achieve in any other art form.
(1) Until the early 1970s, the Japanese studio system worked much like mid-century Hollywood, where one rose from journeyman status through various jobs until finally appointed director, usually all within one studio. Any room for personal expression was limited to how one worked within the genre films they were assigned to make. This is true of Kurosawa’s early career. He moved from “roman porno” (an equivalent to the nudie film, and a usual first stop for any filmmaker in Japan) and V-Cinema (direct-to-video filmmaking, much more prevalent than in the Westópopular directors such as Takashi Miike began their careers the same way) through the prevalent genres of the ‘90s: Yakuza (gangster), horror and suspense.