Month / February 2009

by Jonathan M

Kokoro

Videovista have My Review of Kon Ichikawa’s Kokoro (1955)

This weekend, I went to see an amateur production of the opera La Sonnambula by Vicenzo Bellini.  Unlike Kokoro, the opera was terrible.  The singing was bad, the acting was wooden, the set was ugly, the staging unimaginative and the entire thing was incapable of inspiring any emotion at all other than possibly pity or amusement.

You know you’re in trouble when the romantic leading man steps on stage and you can’t help but think that he would be better off playing a duplicitous junkie pimp.

However, I mention the opera as it really made me think about the process of direction.  In Kokoro, the film lays out this intricate web of negative emotions involving alienation, guilt, grief and resentment.  It goes on for an hour and a half making it abundantly clear that the central character is a miserable sod and, through flashbacks, it allows us glimpses into the man’s youth showing us why he was so miserable.  However, with about half an hour to go, it became obvious that the film was ‘treading water’.  As a melodrama, the film was making the kind of moves that lead to a grand reveal but no reveal was forthcoming.  In a film so obviously well written and directed, this struck me as profoundly bizarre and so I set about reading between the lines and working out that, actually, the film is all about homosexuality.

But why did Ichikawa not make that plain?  was it the actors refusing to be physical?  was it a reflection of the source material (which is apparently just as coy)? or was the director himself uncomfortable bringing those kinds of themes to light in what was a very mainstream production?

Auteur Theory paints the director as a supremely powerful creative first mover.  He makes the decisions, his decisions shape the film.  But how does this idea sit with the fact that some productions might well be hampered by factors external to the director’s decision-making process?  In that case should the director walk out or rightly take the blame for the entire thing?  If the director can’t be blamed for those kinds of problems, then to what extent is he responsible at all?

by Jonathan M

The Cloning of Joanna May

Videovista has my review of this mini-series based upon a novel by Fay Weldon.

I’ve read better examples of Feminist SF.  Hell, I’ve seen better examples of Feminist SF but I think The Cloning of Joanna May demonstrates one of the more interesting historical quirks in the way that Feminist ideas permeated into mainstream culture.

One of my problems with with a lot of Feminist SF – certainly at the level of the classics of the sub-genre such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (1970) – is that many of its central concepts have never seemed that revolutionary or alien to me.  I was born in 1976 and growing up, I was well aware of parents who would keep their little boys away from war toys whilst encouraging their little girls to play football.  So when it came time for me to read about some of these ideas, I always felt that the battle had been won and that the ideas of a lot of Feminist SF were old hat, mainstream or blindingly obvious.

However, while I took one lesson away from these ideas, others took a quite different one.

The Cloning of Joanna May is the product of a profoundly cynical culture trying to have a debate with itself.  Britain has never been overly fond of ‘public intellectuals’ and its public debate is arguably shaped more by comedy than it is by reasoned discourse.  For example, consider the ipact of the idea that John Major tucked his shirt into his underpants or Vince Cable’s parliamentary zinger that Gordon Brown had turned from Stalin to Mr. Bean.  Indeed, the most significant works of political drama in the last 30 years have been comedy in the shape of Yes Minister and The Thick of It.  Both series were far more potent in shaping how we see government than any Guardian editorial or Think Tank press release.

The camp and exploitative production values of The Cloning of Joanna May push it dangerously close to being a black comedy but it is also quite sincere in its desire to deconstruct traditional gender roles.  The same is true of The Two Ronnies’ series The Worm that Turned.

As with The Cloning of Joanna May, The Worm That Turned combines Feminist SF with women in skimpy outfits.  Intellectually, the writers accept the ideas, but their cynicism and resistance to these same ideas comes out through lapses into end-of-the-pier comedic imagery.  As parodies of Feminist thought, both series are utterly toothless so the comedy elements of both series should perhaps not be seen as resistance at all, but rather an adoption of the traditional forms of British public debate.