by Mark Cousins
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The sensuality of the military and the adrenaline rush of flying fighter planes were the themes of Tony Scott’s video-influenced Top Gun. USA, 1986.
That MTV aesthetics and the nobility of the American military could become one-and-the-same thing struck some as disturbing, but not as disturbing as a film released a few months earlier. Rambo: First Blood Part II (USA, 1985) did nothing less than revisit the Vietnam War to show that the US could win it. Written by and starring one of the period’s pumped-up muscle men, Sylvester Stallone, it tells of a Special Operations officer who goes to South East Asia to release American prisoners held by the Vietcong. As directed by the undistinguished George Pan Cosmatos, it becomes an exercise in inchoate rage, a rampage of killing enemies and communists and, as some critics argued at the time, a disturbing expression of its audiences’ blood-lust (297).
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Rambo: First Blood Part II’s re-imagining of the Vietnam War chimed with the new patriotism of the Reagan era. Director: George P. Cosmatos. USA, 1965.
NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN THE ESTABLISHED ASIAN FILM CULTURES IN THE 1980S
Not for the first time in film history, Indian cinema was in synch with that of America. New macho actors like Chiranjeevi became mega-stars in the manner of Sylvester Stallone, making up to fourteen films each year. The centre of gravity of the industry moved away from Bombay and “All India” Hindi films, to the southern city of Madras, which produced five hundred films a year, more than its northern Indian neighbour or, for that matter, Los Angeles. Rather than Hindi, Chiranjeevi spoke Telugu in his films, a language in which at least 140 movies were produced each year. A further 140 were filmed in Tamil and the same number in Malayalam. The latter is spoken in the south-west of the country, where production rocketed because of invest-ment from Muslims working in the Persian Gulf. Again like Hollywood, advertising imagery influenced the pace and dynamism of Indian filming. The country’s equivalent to Tony Scott was Mukul Sudheshwar Anand who started in promotional films for television, and became one of the most powerful directors of escapist cinema.
There was much to escape from. In 1983 the country’s army stormed a sacred Sikh temple at Amritsar. Over 800 people died. The following October, The country’s Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated in a revenge killing by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Two months later, a toxic gas leak from a pesticide factory owned by the American company Union Carbide killed over 2,000 people in a single day in the city of Bhopal in the centre of the country. Hundreds of thousands have since gone blind or suffered liver or kidney failure.
India’s more intellectual filmmakers continued to produce non-mainstream work, but the success of masculine action films further marginalized them. The most experimental of them, Mani Kaul, who made Uski Roti (see pages 316–17), managed to direct Siddheshwari (India, 1989), a poetic documentary evocation of the life and music of the legendary thumri musician of the film’s title. The film is glacially slow and influenced by Robert Bresson, but among the most haunting and beautiful ever made (298).
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Mani Kaul continued to be one of India’s most contemplative directors. Siddheshwari, his semi-documentary about the life of a great female musician, was his most beautifully photographed work. Its cinematographer was Piyush Shah, 1989.
The case of Akira Kurosawa reveals how cruel are the reversals of fortune in the film industry. In 1950, he was the toast of the film world, the keeper of the flame of art cinema. Two decades later, he could not get funding and, in 1971, attempted suicide. Meanwhile, across the globe, George Lucas borrowed from his The Hidden Fortress, set it in outer space, called it Star Wars, and rang the world box-office bell.
In some kind of acknowledgement of that debt, Lucas and his friend Francis Coppola helped produce Kurosawa’s Kagemusha (1980) (299), his first in five years. So much time had the out-of-work director on his hands (like Welles, he made a crust being doing drinks commercials) that he did hundreds of drawings and paintings for the film. It became the most pre-designed of his movies and the most expensive in Japanese film history. This painting of the seated lead character (299, bottom right), a thief who so resembles a dead warlord that he becomes his “stand-in” (“Kagemusha” in Japanese), is much more finished than any story board needs to be. As well as stipulating the exact square-on, low-camera level, full seated-height framing, Kurosawa anticipates precisely the composition of the action: Tatsaya Kakadai centred, symmetrically flanked by the two women. The painting also details questions of make-up, hair, costume and set design. Kurosawa was acting as director, cinematographer and production designer. It is as if, fearful of the possibility that the film might not be made and nostalgic for a classical time in filmmaking when such details were meticulously addressed, he poured all his creative energy into its visual pre-conception. Taken together, these two images represent nostalgia for epic art cinema.
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The story of Kagemusha told of a thief who resembles a warlord, but what is striking about these two images is how much director Akira Kurosawa’s shot scene resembles his design (far right). Camera angle and height, figure and prop placement are almost identical; only the wallpaper design has substantially changed. Japan, 1980.
The other great Japanese directors were more fortunate. Nagisa Oshima had his biggest international success with a film set in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (UK–Japan, 1983) and in the same year Shohei Imamura made the award-winning Narayama bushiko/ The Ballad of Narayama (Japan, 1983). Neither was as influential as Imamura’s documentary films of the 1970s, however (see page 297), the result of which was a golden age of non-fiction filmmaking in Japan.
Noriaki Tsuchimoto devoted no less than thirty-five years – half his life – to making sixteen films on a single subject. More than four decades before the Union Carbide disaster in India, the Japanese fertilizer production plant Chisso began releasing the deadly poison methyl mercury into the waters around the village of Minimata in such quantities that all 100 million Japanese people could have been killed twice over. More than 10,000 people did in fact die or were maimed. Beginning with a TV film in 1965, Tsuchimoto’s films charted the story throughout the 1970s. His defiance was in the spirit of Imamura, and the resulting suite of films – such as Minimata: Kanja-san to sono sekai/Minamata: The Victims and their World (Japan, 1972) (300) – are among the best of the non-fiction genre.
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Camera angle and height, figure and prop placement are almost identical; only the wallpaper design has substantially changed. Japan, 1980.
More astonishing even than the achievement of these was 1987’s Yuki: Yukite Shingun/Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (Kazuo Hara, Japan). In this director Hara follows Second World War veteran Kenzo Okuzaki in his driven quest to discover what happened to his fellow-foot soldiers in New Guinea after the war had ended. Okuzaki became famous in Japan for audaciously sling-shooting balls at Emperor Showa in protest at the wartime atrocities committed in the Emperor’s name. In this film he went further, tracking down former military com-manders, taking tea with them, persistently quizzing them on the events in New Guinea. Getting nowhere, he and director Hara hire an actor and actress to pretend that they are relatives of the missing soldiers, hoping that their moral authority will help prise answers from the retired commanders. The resulting scenes (301) are among the most morally ambiguous ever filmed, because we the audience, the actors playing the siblings and Okuzaki himself all are aware that these old men are being lied to and guilt-tripped in order to lever the truth out of them. Yet Hara and Okuzaki push further. Eventually the veteran attacks one of the old commanders who painfully reveals that the missing soldiers were in fact eaten in New Guinea. Hara is a great filmmaker but a clue to the source of the film’s determination to force the truth out of reluc-tant people comes in the credits: it was “planned” by Shohei Imamura.
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Although rarely seen in the West, Japanese documentary of t
he 1970s and 1980s was among the best in the world. Minimata: The Victims and their World was one of sixteen films Noriaki Tsuchimoto made over thirty-five years about the industrial poisoning of a village called Minimata. Such devotion to a single subject is almost unheard of in Western documentary. Japan, 1972.
Away from such moral complexities, Japan’s film industry was breaking new technological ground. Sony and Matsushita had been promoting rival home video formats since the late 1970s; by the early 1980s, Matsushita’s VHS was ahead and in 1988 Sony admitted defeat by manufacturing a player in its competitor’s format. Renting a film on tape to view at home became so popular that it all but killed off movie-going in some south Asian countries.
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Also about dedication to the truth was Kazuo Hara’s astonishing The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On. In this scene, protagonist Kenzo Okuzaki (left) has hired two actors (centre) to pretend to be grieving relatives of a soldier who died under mysterious circumstances. Japan, 1987.
In Japan, one of the most popular genres of television pro-gramme had long been animation. Book illustrator Osamu Tezuka saw early American cartoons, decided that their style, combined with that of manga comic-books which he knew so well, would work well in Japan, set up a studio, produced fast-paced and escapist programmes, and created in the 1960s a market for television animation greater than that in the US. Twenty years later, magical girls who could morph out of themselves and robotic fighter toys in outer space became such a staple – there were forty different versions of the latter alone – that what had come to be called “Anime” started to gain a cult following on American TV. The difference between Anime and Disney was that Anime was aimed at adults more than children, some of it was frankly erotic, it was more dynamically plotted and it blurred the boundaries between human and machine.
In 1979, spurred on by the worldwide success of Star Wars, a Tokyo-born former television animator, Hayao Miyazaki, took Anime to the cinema screen. Rupan sansei: Kariosutoro no shiro/Arsène Lupin and the Castle of Cagliostro (Japan, 1979), the story of a thief, a princess and hidden treasure, was a big success. It led to the same director’s Laputa: The Castle in the Sky (Japan, 1986), which was more typical of his mysticism. In it, a dreamy pig-tailed girl floats down from the sky into the arms of a young engineer. She carries with her a mysterious stone which leads to the celestial castle of the title and an ancient civilisation therein. Miyazaki’s complex plotting, lush and radiant visuals and metaphysics made him a distinctive voice in international film. His masterpiece Mononoke Hime/Princess Mononoke (Japan, 1997) – the most successful film ever released in Japan to that date – will be considered in Chapter Ten. As well as television and then cinema, a third strain of Anime emerged in 1984. Produced for home video and not subject to content restrictions, these have taken Anime’s traditions of complex plotting and dynamic visuals into areas of violence and frank sexuality.
In Hong Kong, the other major commercial film industry of Asia, new filmmakers contributed to existing trends, and it continued to be a conduit between Western and Eastern cinema, importing and exporting kinetic film schemas. Its latest talent was Tsui Hark, who played a similar role in the Island’s film development as Steven Spielberg did in America. Like Spielberg, who is four years older than him, the Vietnam-born Hark made 8mm films in his teens and produced as well as directed his phenomenally successful later films. He studied at the University of Texas and worked on a Chinese newspaper in New York before returning to Hong Kong. He released his first feature in 1979 but in films like Shanghai zhi Ye/Shanghai Blues (Hong Kong, 1984) (302) he first demonstrated his recipe for success. Again like Spielberg, Hark showed no interest in the more philosophical filmmaking of his country in the 1970s – he consciously rejected those elements in the work of King Hu (see pages 365–66) for example. Instead, as with the blockbuster American directors, the secret of his success was that he was traditional and precocious at the same time. He aimed his work at the family market and captivated it with dazzling craftsmanship. The supernatural became his main subject and he combined Chinese-speaking audiences’ love of horror with martial arts staging.
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Glamour and drama in Tsui Hark’s Shanghai Blues. Hong Kong, 1984.
MASCULINITY AND NEW FILM STYLE ACROSS EUROPE
Horror themes were also as popular in Europe in the 1980s, where sexuality and new film technology were the twin driving forces in filmmaking.5 In France, advertising lent a sheen to film in the 1980s which came to be known as the “cinéma du look”. Nothing could have been a clearer rejection of the pared-down ideas of European directors of the 1960s such as Bresson or Pasolini. Instead, influenced by the new American imagery and supported by philosophers who distinguished between traditional culture of logic and meaning on the one hand and new “postmodern” culture of stylistic surface rootlessness on the other,6 thirty-five-year-old former screenwriter Jean-Jacques Beineix made films like Diva (France, 1981) and 37.2 le Matin/Betty Blue (France, 1986). It is not difficult to see why the first of these was so influential. It broke down social barriers – a young Parisian postman falls in love with a great American opera singer (303) – and cultural ones – a great chase in the Paris metro and a shoot-out, then refined opera music. Like Godard before him he borrowed elements of the thriller genre from America. Said Beineix, later, “Cinema for a long time has been marked by naturalism, even verism. It has had a look like real life. Yet for the last four or five years, this reality has been increasingly transcended by colour, by extraordinarily designed sets and by a certain sense of play (which has nothing to do with reality). The auteur doesn’t speak truth, he speaks otherwise.”7 Just as the French and Japanese directors of the 1960s rejected what they saw as the stuffy class-bound traditions of filmmaking that they inherited, so in the 1980s filmmakers like Beineix were explicitly refusing to “speak the truth” and engage with the sober realities of their forebears. Diva was the A bout de souffle (France, 1959) of the 1980s. In the light of it, the aesthetic austerity of veteran director Robert Bresson’s L’argent/Money (France, 1983) seemed a blast from some forgotten middle age.
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One of the most influential of the new, visually glossy French films which together became known as the “cinema du look”, Diva. Director: Jean-Jacques Beineix. 1981.
Back in the video-age, his near namesake Luc Besson’s Subway (France, 1985) took Beineix’s ideas further. Born in 1959, the year of A bout de souffle, his childhood was spent travelling with his parents who were scuba diving instructors. After excelling in pop promos, he moved into features. Where his La grande blue/The Big Blue (France, 1988) would derive explicitly from these formative aquatic experiences, Subway extends a location from Diva – the Paris Metro – into a metaphor for living below the surface of life. Its action and filming style (304) were even more kinetic than Beineix’s, and more radical too was Besson’s rejection of social content or logical meaning. The opening car chase exceeded Beineix in exhilaration, but Besson’s films at times looked like empty mood pieces, searches for imagery, travelogue transcendence and designer violence. He had lived in America and had no time for the intellectual traditions of French cinema or the idea that his native culture had to be protected from foreign commerce and popular ideas. “Cinema”, he said, “is not a medicine to save anyone’s life. It is only an aspirin.” Besson became one of the most commercially successful of French directors. Though many of the “cinéma du look” films of the 1980s were merely dumb, Diva, Subway, the work of Leos Carax and Besson’s later, English-language The Fifth Element (France–USA, 1997) were vivid expressions of the formalism of their times.
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Luc Besson’s Subway took Diva’s fashionable imagery even further. France, 1985.
As, even more so, were a series of Spanish films by a flamboyant underground figure who was just twenty-nine years old in 1980. Where American and French directors in the age of advertising and music video used the new dynamic visual grammar in a lar
gely conservative way, Pedro Almodóvar subverted pop culture according to his own, original sense of gender, feeling, coincidence and the absurd. This former telephone company worker rocketed out of the uncertain period in Spanish history between the death of dictator Franco in 1975 and the election of socialist Prime Minister Felipe Gonzales in 1982. Madrid felt like the centre of the world to its newly liberated youth and, in Laberinto de Pasiones/Labyrinth of Passion (Spain, 1980), Almodóvar splashed the capital city’s freneticism onto the screen. He loved the swinging 1960s London films of Richard Lester (see page 300) blending their anarchism with the esperpento tradition of absurdist humour (see page 292). Bucking the trend in America to celebrate traditional gender roles, he peopled his film with fifty characters of every sexual persuasion including Sexi, a nymphomaniac who is afraid of sunlight; Riza, the gay heir to a fictitious Arab throne, whom student terrorists are trying to kidnap; Toraya, an aristocrat who tries to seduce him; and Sexi’s father, a famous fertility doctor. Against all odds, Sexi and Riza meet in a disco and fall in love. Esperpento was always about the gap between Spain’s fascist image of itself and the grim realities of the country. In this film and his subsequent 1980s films such as Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!/What Have I Done to Deserve This? (Spain, 1984), La Ley del deseo/Law of Desire (Spain, 1987) and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Spain, 1988) he turned that fascist image on its head. The father figures are lusted after; the mothers are sources of power and symbols of the law. Years of sexual rigidity are blown away by these films, which were often photographed by Angel Fernandez in the bright primary hues of American cartoons. Almodóvar, who had once written a memoir of invented porn star Patti Diphusa in the form of a comic strip-like photo-novel, wallowed in the absurdist emotions of such forms. The humour and irreverence of his films, their pop-art brightness, their sexual explicitness and discovery that, for their women characters at least, subjugation is the first step on the road to recovery and dignity, made his work strikingly popular. Even conservative Spanish newspapers supported his explicitly homosexual Law of Desire when it was a hit at the 1987 Berlin film festival and no less than six of the top thirteen Spanish films released in the US were directed by him.