Julián Hernández | Cobalto (Cobalt) / 2023

the commercial photographer

by Douglas Messerli

 

“For photography, cobalt blue is one of the most challenging colors to reproduce. According to researcher Robin D. Myers' paper on color accuracy, the color cobalt shows up more accurately when the image was shot in low light or when other colors are incorrectly reproduced, and this applies to both film and digital photography. To reproduce a cool cobalt with a simple blue subject, it is recommended to use fluorescent lighting combined with low and minimal red and infrared emissions to reduce the blue from being ultramarine.”

 

Gustavo Hernández de Anda and Julián Hernández (screenplay), Julián Hernández (director) Cobalto (Cobalt) / 2023 [21 minutes]

In the earliest frames of this short film, we see Damián (Joaquín Bondoni), returning, with help, to the photographic studio of Uriel (Luis Vegas), after Damián has been beaten and robbed by a violent john with whom the former model, now hustler has become entangled. Unable to even use his hands, Uriel must help the injured Damián urinate in his bathroom (also his darkroom), which obviously calls up his own past love of his model, particularly as he soon after gives his former boyfriend a sponge bath.

   Yet the studio, cast mostly in the cold cobalt blue light is also a source of memories for Damián, who has simultaneously been loved and abused through the capture and photographic representing of his own image in response to Uriel’s attentions. Sometimes we cannot quite determine whether Damián’s small yelps of pain are from the bodily damage his john has inflicted or from the memories of their photographic encounters wherein Uriel, bit by bit, as he made him over to be the model and lover he wishes him to become.

    At different moments they both turn toward and away from one another, afraid to recounter that very powerful sexual past and the same moment desiring it again. For one long moment in the bathroom encounter they lustfully hug one another, reiterating what they had but at the same moment metaphorically devouring up one another in their past inabilities to appreciate one another as full human beings.

 

    Slowly as we move back towards their past we perceive Uriel as the loving creator of the young, 18-year-old Damian, as he moves him again and again, sometimes not so gently, into a sexual position for his photographs which create an artistic world while not always recognizing the human one of the model himself.

     Almost continually, even now as an injured man asleep, Uriel snaps Damián’s image, as if “stealing the subject” away from his own being as fearful natives often suspected of foreign intruders as attempting to do as they entered their world in the early 20th century with their demands to record and, let’s face it, commercialize the moment of their discoveries.

     These body-stealing moments are alternated, of course, with kindness. “Do you need anything?” And once again, the snap of the photo, the wind of the camera, this time in the past, with a mention that Damían was born in Celaya, in the province Guanajuato, Mexico, making him a provincial, outside of the center of Mexican culture, Ciudad de México. “He says he was born again when at eighteen he arrive in Mexico City.”

   Almost from the beginning Uriel attempts to make him over, to “try smiling with his eyes,” something quite difficult for the surly Celayan.

     Now bathing his former Pygmalion, Uriel, the angel of light, takes the sponge to Damián’s nude body as if almost trying to wash away all the impositions of the past, despite, a few moments later, Uriel recounting that until he received the call for help, he was convinced that Damian had gone out of his life forever. And even now the sorrowful Damian is told by Uriel to try to sleep as if he were merely a misbehaving child.

     Back to their previous days, Uriel declares Damían to be a terrible model, for which the subject of Uriel’s voyeurism seems to feel necessary to apologize. But, of course, Damían is, in fact, a beautiful human being with whom Uriel falls in love, despite the distance he puts himself between all those whom he photographs.

   But Uriel’s lovely photographs of Damían are not his only works, and his model soon discovers openly pornographic pictures of Uriel engaged in sex with the owner of his apartment, Orlando, from which he has procured it, accordingly, for free.

    That scene is followed by a rather brutal photo-shoot, wherein Uriel asks his model to pose in a black face mask as he places him what appear to be several soft-porn S&M pictures, during which he tells his own story of also being an outsider, who met Orlando, who moved him into his studio, and who soon after went away for long periods of time, leaving the studio into his care.   

   Soon after, leaving the studio for Damían to care for, he returns to see his model has moved in, seeking shelter in his own space for which he too must now pay to maintain. A battle, imagistically dating back to the Pergamene Greek school sculpture from BC 370-300), the Gustave Courbet painting of 1875, the Thomas Eakins painting of 1899, and the later 1905 George Luks painting, Hernández involves these two me, together engaged, in the historical art of male nudity, in a scene that certainly evokes all of these and other such works as they explore their love and resentment of one another.    “But this is no fairytale,” Uriel insists, casting a much darker layer upon the film that we already know has very dark textures. Damían suddenly starts turning tricks “for fun,” leaving Uriel for days without seeing him.

     When he returns, Uriel again corrects his model (“Straighten your neck”) as he attempts to transform him into the creature he might be able to fully love.

     Once more we are rushed into the future, as Uriel attempts to care for the still-healing Damían, the hustler feeling angry that he cannot remember the beater’s face, and that even worse they took all the money he had made. And now commerce creeps back into the conversation, as Damían pretends to admit, “I do it for the money, OK?”

     Uriel’s answer is strange, “We both know that’s not true.”

     “And I do like it,” answers Damían.

     “I know.”

     Damían’s answer, however, puts the entire work into another perspective: “I can’t fuckin’ stand you Uriel.”

     That admission of their relationship, in fact, leads them into a mad sexual frenzy, a sex scene far more tough that the tender wrestlers, that we realize they are ready in their lust to nearly to consume oner another, to devour almost as vampires one another’s flesh.

      What we realize is that the anger, frustration, the hate is mutual because, in fact, Uriel has used

Damían for his commercial advantage, and even if the other is now working as a hustler, he is perhaps the purer of the two of them, since Damían truly embraces sex as a sensual pleasure. In only this last scene has the photographer finally put away his camera.

       Lover, voyeur, consumer, and the ready receptor of the orgiastic pleasure of sex are conjoined ultimately in the remarkable Mexican director Julián Hernández’s most recent short film, a work that explores territories where few others these days might take us.

 

Los Angeles, August 27, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Review (August 2024).

Kon Ichikawa | ビルマの竪琴 (The Burmese Harp) / 1956, USA 1967

the parrot’s brother

by Douglas Messerli

 

Natto Wada (screenplay, based on a novel by Michio Takeyama), Kon Ichikawa (director) ビルマの竪琴

(The Burmese Harp) / 1956, USA 1967

 

 As critic Tony Rayns notes in his essay accompanying the Criterion re-issue of The Burmese Harp, this film was Ichikawa’s twenty-seventh feature, “his first real landmark in his career.” And “nobody in the industry or the press singled him out as a major talent on the strength of the first twenty-six features, all of them company assignments….” What made this feature so different from those others?

     Based on a novel by Takeyama Michio, The Burmese Harp had already received popular success in its literary form. Indeed, it had been an important book in helping to heal the Japanese wounds of World War II. As Ichikawa would later tell Donald Richie, “Oh, but I wanted to make that film. That was the first film I really felt I had to make.” But as Rayns observes, although remaining basically true to the story of the book, Ichikawa made several important changes that brings the film into greater focus, and affects the structure and significance of the work.

     The original novel, like the film, is the story of a Japanese company stranded in Burma at the end of World War II, attempting to escape the British attacks by crossing over into Thailand. Without food, forced to march through often mountainous and always unknown terrain, and given little aid by the unsympathetic Burmese (the extent of Japanese war crimes committed in Burma would later be revealed), Captain Inouye’s soldiers are a frightened and vulnerable lot. Yet, as the novel makes clear upon the return of the survivors to Japan, these men seem in better condition than other war prisoners. The secret, and one of the major themes of both the book and film, is that Inouye has studied music, training his men to sing in a choral style that uplifts their spirits—and, one might add sometimes also sentimentalizes Ichikawa’s presentation of the horrors of war. One of their men, Mizushima, has become an expert on the local Burmese harp, accompanying the men’s choruses, and using the instrument to signal news of his forays as a scout. Dressed in the traditional Burmese longyi, carrying the harp, Mizushima, his fellow soldiers tease, looks just like the locals.

     The power of their music is apparent throughout the film, particularly when it briefly allows them a few friendly moments in a Burmese village where they are well fed before the villagers scurry off to their huts. Recognizing a possible trap, and quickly observing that the village has suddenly been surrounded by soldiers, the captain orders his men to sing as a ruse while they prepare for battle. But the song they sing, “Hanyu no yado” (a Japanese folk song that in English we know as “Home, Sweet Home”) seems to charm the enemy, as their soldiers join in the refrain, coming forward without shooting. The scene might be entirely ludicrous were the Japanese not soon after to discover that they have had no choice but to surrender, since their country had capitulated and the war ended three days earlier. Music, accordingly, is represented not only as a force that crosses national boundaries, but is—for these men at least—a true salvation. They survive because they have not been forced to fight.

      Another Japanese company in the nearby mountains, however, is still battling with the British below. Inouye is determined that his men and all others must survive to return to Japan and help rebuild the country. Mizushima is sent to attempt to explain to the remaining rebels that the war has ended and they should surrender.

       His warring countrymen greet him with disbelief, perceiving him either as an enemy agent or as a traitor. Daring this company’s captain to behave with honor, Mizushima is unable to dissuade the unit, all of which are ultimately killed by the British; Mizushima himself is shot.

       In Takeyama’s original book, Mizushima is “found and nursed back to health by a non-Burmese tribe of cannibals, who plan to eat him (a theme that reappears in Ichikawa’s 1959 film Fires on the Plain), but in the film version, the surviving musician is nursed back to health by a Buddhist monk, which completely alters the perspective of the work, and more thoroughly justifies Mizushima’s later conversion to Buddhism.

       At first, however, Mizushima is not all interested in what he might learn from the monk, going so far as to steal the holy man’s robe as the soldier attempts to rejoin his company at a war camp in the south. Yet his long and painful journey—he must climb the rocky mountains and hills barefoot and is near starvation—radically changes him, particularly as he encounters multiple corpses of his countrymen and other soldiers along the way, all unburied, lying in the open prey to buzzards and other scavengers—one of the worst horrors for a man of a culture that reverences their dead. At one point, he is compelled to drag a few corpses away, burning them, carrying their ashes off.

     By the time Mizushima has reached water’s edge near the prison camp, he has begun to rethink his entire life. Many critics seem determined to understand his acts emanating only from his traditional sense of Japanese values; my former Temple University colleague and friend Joan Mellen, for example, argues in her book The Waves at Genji’s Door that “Mizushima has decided to sacrifice loyalty to a single group for devotion to a larger entity” uniting “himself with the family of ancestors comprised by these dead.” Accordingly, she sees Ichikawa’s film as “whitewashing” the Japanese troops, as a work with a “lack of consistent point of view or personal commitment.”

     I see Mizushima’s transformation, however, not simply as an attempt to reclaim the Japanese dead—although that is certainly one of his stated goals in his letter to his captain, read aloud at the film’s end—but as a recognition, a fact also mentioned in that letter, of the meaninglessness of his previous acts, the horror of war itself. He has no other moral choice, accordingly, but to escape his role as a soldier—Japanese or other—and take on a new role as Buddhist monk. His poignant refusal to recognize his own former comrades as they come upon one another on a bridge—a scene introduced by the director and repeated, in Rashomon fashion, from each point of view—is, in fact, a different kind of traitorous act. As the comrades repeat his name over and over in their questioning looks, he not only denies their existence, but the actions of all his countrymen, of soldiers of every country. In that very denial, however, he has forged a new moral identity, a transcendent existence.

      Yet Ichikawa’s film is not precisely an anti-war film either, and that is perhaps what makes this work so implausibly rewarding. Neither director nor character lash out against the soldiers and their acts; they have only done what all soldiers are taught to do: to kill, to survive, to serve the higher order of their nation. Their continued wonderment about their former colleague and their determination, despite his refusal to recognize them, to have him join them in their return home, perhaps helps to redeem them as well.  It is as if the siren song of music might lure him back, and with him some part of their lost selves. One of the most brilliant images of many stunning visual moments in this film is the company singing at the top of their lungs in an attempt to bring back Mizushima across a wire fence, faced by a group of local Burmese, their faces reflecting both the enjoyment and confusion of their enemy’s vocal performance.

       The captain goes even further; seeing a parrot on the monk’s shoulder, he buys its brother, teaching it to repeat “Mizushima, come back to Japan.” When the men convince a Burmese woman trader (the wonderful Kitabayshi Tanie, speaking an Osaka-accented Japanese) to give the bird to the monk, we recognize it not just as an attempt to regain one of their lost, but, as the trader suggests, the return of one brother to the other, a temporary joining of the two cultures.

    Mizushima’s answer, to return the first bird, whom he has taught to say “I cannot join you,” expresses only the inevitable truth: his spiritual journey can never be reunited to their earthly desires. After the two forces—the men’s voices and Mizushima’s Burmese harp—are once more momentarily and joyfully married, Ichikawa’s camera follows the monk’s silent turn and disappearance into the haze and smoke of the Buddhist landscape where he must remain.

 

Los Angeles, February 29, 2008

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2008).

 

Douglas Sirk | Imitation of Life / 1959

imitations of art

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eleanor Griffin and Allan Scott (screenplay, based on a novel by Fannie Hurst), Douglas Sirk (director) Imitation of Life / 1959

                                                                                                

On August 21 of this year, 2009, I attended the 50th anniversary showing of Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life. At the Samuel Goldwyn Theater of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, the audience was also treated to a special interview of the remaining living major cast members, Juanita Moore (who plays Annie Johnson) and Susan Kohner (who played Annie's daughter, Sarah Jane) by Susan Kohner's son Paul Weitz and film critic Stephen Farber.*

     Although I had previously seen the film several times on television, I'd never before seen it on a large screen, which is truly necessary for this highly color-saturated and artificed film.

    Behind my interest in seeing this movie were several pieces written in 2008 and 2009 by then-sixteen-year-old Felix Bernstein on various aspects of artifice in film and theater and, in particular, a brief discussion of the camp elements in Sirk's works. Just a few weeks earlier, I had also caught a television showing of the 2002 film, Far from Heaven, a film (on which I write in these volumes) that is an homage to many of Sirk's films and cinematography. In the end, I realized that all of these coincidences had led up a to necessity to write on this movie and its effects.

     Certainly, as many have, one could begin by describing Sirk's Imitation of Life as a soap-opera, or—with another kind of backhand dismissal of the work—as a "woman's picture." In introducing the film to the audience of 1000 viewers, Farber himself, while clearly an admirer of the film, admitted to some terribly clichéd moments of the work, particularly in Sirk's montage of the passing years of Lora Meredith's (Lana Turner) career.

     To my way of thinking, however, to use these adjectives is to miss the point. For the film is not simply a tearjerker or even a slightly over-the-top portrait of a woman determined to have a career, but is an intentional—if artful—presentation of the American dream as kitsch.

     I have never been able to comprehend the great attraction of so many directors to the vague acting skills of Lana Turner, but Sirk knows a woman determined to be a star when he sees her, and uses Turner's exaggerated posturings to their best effect. In the interview after this film's showing, Juanita Moore revealed that Lana spent much of every morning with her discussing the events of Turner's 14-year-old daughter's murder of Johnny Stompanato, Turner's lover, the actress often breaking down in tears. It is clear that Sirk could not have found a more vulnerable and over-wrought figure for his purposes.   

      Lora Meredith is a woman with a young daughter, surviving on the pittance she makes from labeling envelopes, who by accident meets Annie Jackson (a woman Moore herself described as little more than a Black mammy) with Jackson's daughter in tow at Coney Island. Even worse off than Meredith and her daughter, Jackson and Sarah Jane have come to the end their resources, without even a place to sleep. Jackson craftily negotiates a bed in the Meredith flat in return for all the services of a maid, and, in the process, quickly insinuates herself and daughter into their household.

     Meanwhile, would-be photographer Steve Archer (John Gavin), who Meredith also met at Coney Island, has fallen in love with the Turner character: "My camera could easily have a love affair with you." Archer is even willing to go to work at an advertising company to support Meredith. But she, we quickly discover, is utterly determined to become an actress, despite the fact she is no ingénue. At the very moment that Archer attempts to propose, Meredith receives a telephone call, promising her a career. In response to his demands that she return to reality, Meredith summarizes her position and the film's often absurd dialogue: "Well, I'm going up and up and up—and nobody's going to pull me down!" In short, as Fanny Brice might express it, “Don’t rain on my parade.”

     Indeed, like some rising balloon, Meredith quickly floats away from her moorings, and, as any reader of popular fiction might predict, ultimately loses touch with her daughter Susie (Sandra Dee) and her servant-confidant-friend Jackson. Time and again Archer is sent away—indeed the platinum-haired Meredith appears to have become a celibate devoted only to stage and film—and Susie is given "things" instead of love.

     If the movie stopped here we might easily describe it simply as a soap-opera. But although Sirk pretends to center the work on the achievements of his star and on the success of those for whom the American dream might be possible, his camera and the script focus instead on the "back" story of the black mother and daughter living in her house. Although Annie Jackson has long acclimated herself to a menial and forbearing life, her light-skinned daughter is as determined as Meredith to achieve the American dream, even if it means giving up her own identity and becoming white. While the white figures in the film seem almost oblivious to problems faced by Jackson and Sarah Jane, Annie herself knows them all too well. In response to Meredith's dismissal of Sarah Jane's attitude, Annie replies: Miss Lora, you don't know what it means to be...different..." At another point she summarizes: "How do you tell a child that she was born to be hurt?" That "hurt" is witnessed time and time again in this film, as Sarah Jane is beaten by her racist boyfriend (played by Troy Donahue) and turned away from all her jobs the moment she is discovered to have black blood.

     While Meredith accumulates, Annie, it is apparent, becomes more and more giving until she has little left to give except her own life. In those humane actions she becomes the only real figure in the film. The title may have you believe that the characters are "imitating life," but their true actions are even more perverted, as one by one they attempt to imitate "art." Just as the film intentionally pushes the limits of its own credibility, so do they seek out worlds that cannot and do not exist. Lora may have become a "star," but we recognize, precisely in Sirk's montage of stage titles that her string of hits has all the craft of the mediocre plays of Margo's in All About Eve or of Auntie Mame's Midsummer Madness. Archer seeks to become a great photographer, but ends up as an advertising executive. Sarah Jane finds a career as a cheap singer and dancer in dives and supper clubs. Susie imagines herself having a relationship with a man twice her age (Archer). Through his use of popular clichés Sirk reveals that the dreams of this all-white world are also outrageously kitsch. When art becomes a kind of commodity, a symbol of a desirable something missing in life, there is little chance of normality.

      The movie ends with another vision of art, with Jackson's theatrical funeral, attended by the numerous friends and admirers who Meredith could not even imagine existed. Decked out with a great singer (Mahalia Jackson), a band, and a hearse pulled by four white horses, Annie's funeral—an event created by Annie herself—is a fuller artistic realization than any of the performances or activities of the other characters. And that creation points not to art, but to another kind of eternal life.   

 

*Moore died at the age of 99 in 2014. Already when I saw here in 2009, her memory of perhaps her knowledge of the director and his milieu was slipping a bit, as she described the German-born Sirk as a Southern gentleman, who, she claimed, had no little recognition about the racist content of his film.  

    

Los Angeles, August 22, 2009

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2009).