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Kon
Ichikawa by Alexander Jacoby Alexander Jacoby, born in 1978, is a British-born, Tokyo-based film critic whose particular interests include Japanese cinema and silent film. His writing has appeared in various publications, both on and offline. |
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| Of the few Japanese directors who command an international reputation,
Kon Ichikawa remains perhaps the least known and the least well understood.
The handful of his films which received widespread international distribution
in the 1950s and 1960s – The Burmese Harp (1956), Fires on
the Plain (1959), The Key (1959), Alone on the Pacific
(1962), An Actor's Revenge (1963) – testify to that trait which
has ironically proved his greatest critical stumbling block: an eclecticism
of both theme and style which seems to defy auteurist notions of
consistency. Many have dismissed him as “just an illustrator”,
though there is another irony in the fact that the source of that comment
was Nagisa Oshima, a director whose films are similarly eclectic in style
and content. In any case, the criticism is hardly fair. While Ichikawa's
work lacks the obvious integrity of Ozu's, Mizoguchi's or Kurosawa's, its
outward variety belies an overall unity, revealed as one probes (in Tom
Milne's phrase) “beneath the skin”. In fact, Ichikawa worked under somewhat different conditions from the other acknowledged masters of Japanese cinema. The commercial pressures he faced appear to have been rather stronger: it is on record that several projects (including one of his most famous, An Actor's Revenge) were imposed on him by the studio in revenge for the failure of his more personal works to make a profit. Yet he managed, at the same time, to stamp his personality on diverse material. An obvious comparison is with Howard Hawks, whose comedies, which focus on the battle of the sexes, are often described as the thematic obverse of his action films, about camaraderie in an almost exclusively male world. Ichikawa, similarly, divided his films into “light” and “dark”, a division which has some justice – though my own preferred categories would be “ironic” and “sentimental”. Still, since most critics have stressed his versatility, it is worth concentrating instead on the recurrent features of Ichikawa's cinema. Though he did not always write his own scripts (most of his major films were in fact based on scripts written by his wife, Natto Wada, only sometimes with his official collaboration), his background and experiences still demonstrably shape the abiding concerns of his films. A native of the Kansai region, he set many films (The Key, Conflagration [1958], Bonchi [1960], The Makioka Sisters [1983]) in its major cities of Osaka and Kyoto – the latter of which was also the subject of a short documentary he realised in 1969. Likewise, his early interest in painting and his training as an animator continued to shape his visual style. James Quandt has discussed Ichikawa's “use of manga-like storyboards”, his preference for “the control of a studio shoot” over the uncertainty of location work, and the way in which he himself “designed sets, adjusted the lighting, touched up actresses' make-up [and] went to music school so he could write scores” (1). Such total control approaches the techniques of the cartoon, and it is significant that his career in film began, in 1933, as an assistant animator, while his first project as director was an adaptation of a doll puppet play, The Girl at Dojo Temple (1945). As late as 2000, in his mid eighties, Ichikawa returned to the medium with his animated period film, Shinsengumi. Mr Pu (1953) was adapted from a popular cartoon strip, and certainly the exaggerated facial expressions and twisted bodily postures of his early comedies are more reminiscent of Frank Tashlin than of the nuances of Hollywood screwball. But the influence of the cartoon, and of painting, is visible throughout his career, in the artificial mise en scène of such films as Ten Dark Women (1961) and An Actor's Revenge, the former intensifying the stylistic tropes of film noir into a manga-like pastiche, the latter iconoclastically blending influences from animation, ukiyo-e and the traditional theatre among whose practitioners its story unfolds.
Ichikawa's own critique of his country's sacred cows and dark secrets was, at its best, as witty as it was merciless. It was at its worst when solemn; thus, the leaden sentimentality and clumsy didacticism of The Outcast (1962), which labours for two hours with much verbose rhetoric to convince us that prejudice is a Bad Thing. The potentially interesting subject – the continuing oppression, under the allegedly enlightened Meiji dispensation, of the Japanese burakumin, or underclass – is thrown away, and the film is distinguished largely by the cosmetic beauties of its widescreen snowscapes. Nor, regrettably, was Ichikawa able to find an adequate response to the defining trauma of his generation, the Second World War – in which, due to illness, he did not serve. The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain differ in approach – the one sentimental, the other visceral, rather in the manner of the American Vietnam movie of later years. The comparison is telling: just as Hollywood has largely failed to deal with the politics of US involvement in Vietnam, preferring to focus on the individual sufferings on American soldiers, so Ichikawa's war films make only a token acknowledgement of wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese, and largely buy into assumptions of Japanese victimhood in World War II – assumptions which to this day remain too widespread in the country. By contrast, Ichikawa's examinations of his nation's peacetime foibles achieved a crucial detachment. Often, the war was a discreet but necessary background, or an anticipated threat: as early as his first solo feature, A Flower Blooms (1948), he examined the impotence and hypocrisy of the more or less liberal pre-war middle class, whose passivity aided the triumph of militarism. In Conflagration, the destruction of Kyoto's famed Golden Pavilion is seen in the context of the confusion of a defeated nation, while in Bonchi, a story of the merchant class in pre-war Osaka, only the apocalypse of war can destroy the oppressive family structures of that social group. Likewise, the potential sentimentality of Her Brother (1960) – a Taisho-period story about a family's response to the slow death of the delinquent brother from TB – is deflected by Ichikawa's incisive direction, which draws out the irony that only when the boy is dying can his family bear to live with him. The film is very moving, but its subtext is, again, a sardonic critique of the Japanese family.
Ichikawa's sceptical attitude to his country's traditions and institutions ties in with another recurrent theme of his work: his interest in the young, and in the gulfs between the generations. In the late 1950s and early '60s, his regular male lead was Raizo Ichikawa, whose good looks, rebellious yet sensitive demeanour and early death combined to make him something of a James Dean figure. His adaptation in Punishment Room of Shintaro Ishihara's seminal novel of youthful discontent linked him briefly to the taiyozoku (sun tribe) movement, characterised by accounts of the violent amorality and sexual promiscuity of modern youth – that the film was picketed by housewives anxious to prevent students from seeing it only serves to demonstrate the reality of the generational divide which it examines (4). The hero of Alone on the Pacific has little common ground with his parents, and the film ends on a curiously bleak note as he sleeps through their congratulatory phone call. The most extreme example of Ichikawa's concern for the experience of youth is I am Two (1962), an examination of the little difficulties of family life narrated in the first person by a two-year-old child. Here the differing perspectives of the boy and his parents are contrasted, while the film also examines the gulf in attitude between the parents – members of the generation who reached adulthood after the Second World War – and the more socially conservative grandmother. The most emotionally intense sequences of the film revolve around her death, which implicitly exposes her attitudes as outdated.
Given this pervasive criticism of the traditions of his country, it is ironic that Ichikawa's own career suffered as the nation modernised itself. His realisation in 1964 of a documentary about the Tokyo Olympics had its own uneasy symbolism: Japan's hosting of the event demonstrated to the world its emergence into modernity, and coincided with the collapse of the old studio system in the face of growing commercial pressure. After a few unproductive years in the late '60s and a flirtation thereafter with independent production, Ichikawa was eventually able to return to regular filmmaking, albeit on the studios' terms. The complex thriller, The Inugami Family (1976), was the commercial success which enabled him to go on working through the '80s, when even so eminent a figure as Akira Kurosawa was reliant on foreign backing, and the other major directors of his generation had mostly retired, died or gone into television. His later films often self-consciously recall his status as a veteran: he remade a past success in The Burmese Harp (1985), and, with Actress (1987), recreated the Golden Age of the Japanese cinema in a biopic of its greatest actress, Kinuyo Tanaka. Dora-Heita (1999) was a realisation of a 30-year-old script co-written with Kurosawa, Masaki Kobayaski and Keisuke Kinoshita, originally for the independent production company bankrupted by the failure of Kurosawa's Dodeskaden (1970). Even at that remove, its story, about a lone hero's battle against widespread corruption, was a fairly obvious metaphor for those veterans' distaste for the explicit violence and overt sexuality of modern Japanese cinema. In the hands of Ichikawa, such conservatism seems a little incongruous; his best films, despite the tighter restrictions on filmmakers at the period of their production, were willing to deal with most aspects of life, and are as unembarrassed by sex as they are unexcited by violence. The precision of observation is their great virtue. If Ichikawa, alive and still working at this writing, remains, along with Kaneto Shindo, one of the last tangible links to the rich heritage of Japanese film, his best work is not that of a heritage filmmaker. Rather, his acerbic account of tradition, modernisation and alienation in twentieth century Japan will remain one of the more eloquent examinations of how his country came to be as it now is. © Alexander Jacoby, March 2004 Endnotes:
Filmography A
Girl at Dojo Temple
(Musume Dojoji)
(1945) The
Lovers (Aijin) (1953)
Bonchi
(1960) 
Bibliography There
is still no full-length critical study of Ichikawa in English – the
only such studies have appeared in Japanese or in European languages.
However, the 2001 touring retrospective was the occasion for the publication
of a volume, edited by James Quandt, collecting together most of the important
articles so far written on Ichikawa. Seminal pieces such as Tom Milne's
“The Skull Beneath the Skin” and Donald Richie's “The Several
Sides of Kon Ichikawa” may therefore now be consulted there. I should
acknowledge that this volume is also the main source for my filmography,
crosschecked with that in Audie Bock's Japanese Film Directors
(Kodansha, Tokyo, 1978) and other relevant sources.
Articles in Senses of Cinema An
Actor's Revenge by
Acquarello
Web Resources Kon
Ichikawa at Strictly Film School
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