IN 1999, the British daily newspaper The Guardian conducted a poll about the most important moments in cinema. To introduce the result, Neil Jordan was asked to write about the choices. The filmmaker was quoted as saying: “I can far more readily think of my favourite bits of movies than my favourite movies.”
This was the same feeling I had when Meyen (Hiponia Quigley), a Canada-based friend, asked me to post images for 10 days from films that have made an impact on me.
I have seen this game already online.
When finally the call came my way, I did not know how to respond. In my mind, there were just too many images and plots swirling around. My memory bank cannot possibly store them at the front of my brain, so to speak, for easy picking.
The game calls for 10 images.
The invite usually comes with another person’s choice of an image. Meyen posted a scene from a film set during the feudal wars in Japanese history. I quickly guessed the title of the film: Ran (Chaos). I was more surprised than incredulous when the answer came back: Nah. It was not from Kurosawa’s monumental film. How can I be wrong? I have taught Japanese cinema for some 30 years! I cannot be mistaken with that jidaigeki, or period drama. I did a second take: Kagemusha (Shadow Warrior). I was right this time.
I commented how Mifune Toshiro was great in that. I did a second look. Memory was playing tricks with me. It was not the great Mifune but an equally great actor, not as popular as Mifune in the Philippines but more popular in Japan. It was Tatsuya Nakadai. He was the great villain in Yojimbo. Like Mifune, Nakadai figured in many Kurosawa films. Mifune, as we would remember, would conquer Hollywood; Nakadai would stay home.
How can I be wrong again? Wasn’t that particular act of selecting Nakadai over Mifune the reason behind, according to the Japanese tabloid, the rift between the latter and Kurosawa?
I stepped into the game of images in the Kurosawa mode. Akira, we might need to clarify, after all one of the great living directors presently in Japan is also a Kurosawa—Kiyoshi. A darker sensibility with fondness for gore and violence—that is Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
Kurosawa Akira became my cinematic LSS—Last Song Syndrome. By the time I got to the first chance to tell people about an image left in my mind, I was ready to contribute another Kurosawa to the table. It would be from his film titled Ikiru (To Live).
No student of cinema would miss the image of an old man, seated on a swing, with winter of both the climatological and the existential kind around him. Slow in pace, almost stately, the film is about an old man who knows he is dying. He walks around bidding goodbye to his world. He tries to tell his son his anxiety but nothing comes out of it. He decides to build a playground for a poor neighborhood. He is ready to go.
The film is in black and white. It is the sort of film that a teacher anxious to lose his popularity in his film class would not show. But I decided to show it to my Japanese film class. Ikiru would gain more votes than the loud chambara (swords fight movie) or the meanest Yakuza film of Gosha Hideo. It became the favorite of my class that semester.
The image for the second day of the challenge was pure memory. We always have aunts or big sisters who would bring us to a movie house for many reasons. In my case, it was an aunt or a set of titas. On hindsight, they were offering me an early film appreciation course. But really, as one would confess to me when I was grown-up, I was the best excuse for her to leave home and watch movies. But I cannot thank her enough.
My memory was clear that afternoon my aunt took me to the cinema. On the screen was a woman so beautiful but also so dolorous. She had several brothers who all depended on her. Her mother was sick. Everybody represented danger in the film. This actress had the habit of making her chin quiver to express her reaction to the sufferings within her and without. That afternoon, in a small movie house in the town of San Fernando in Ticao Island, Charito Solis was staring at us from the screen and I knew then I would never forget that face.
Directed by Gregorio Fernandez, Malvarosa was the film of Charito Solis. It was also the name of a shrub in my grandmother’s orchard in Ticao. No taller than a meter, it could surprise you with pink blossoms lined with deep purple, as deep as one’s sorrow. Like the sorrows of Malvarosa.
Something was happening to me in this film game. I was posting an image amid a pandemic of images, from a hundred years or more of memories about cinemas that were unforgettable or disturbing or both. The remembering was not anymore about the film but about the time one watched the film. I was recalling friends, places, spaces, time, scent….
There is a name for this manner of assessing films outside the films: extracinematic.
The next image I posted was from a classic—Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront. Credit goes to the strength in the name of the filmmaker that it survived the bigger attraction on the marquee, that of Marlon Brando.
Geraldine Page, haughty in the most theatrical pose with Paul Newman, confused friends. The initial guess was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I am not surprised at all because the film with Page and Newman was by the same playwright. Tennessee Williams is also the same tormented mind behind names, like Blanche DuBois (A Streetcar Named Desire). In Sweet Bird, Page would play a faded movie star, Alexandra del Lago.
I was on my seventh day of the 10-day challenge as I wrote this column. By the time this column comes out, the image of a huge human eye over two low mountains would have greeted my friends. The image is from Kurosawa (again) and his most misunderstood film, Rhapsody in August. Starring Richard Gere as a second-generation Japanese-American (he speaks Nihonggo in many scenes), the film is a dense narrative about the memory of an old woman about the A-bomb over Nagasaki. In one scene, the grandmother of four children tells them about that day, where, looking over the mountains of Nagasaki, she heard the sound of a flash of light covering the entire horizon. Then, as she recalls, an eye appeared over the valley. In a scary decision, Kurosawa superimposes a real eye at the horizon. Speak of the literalness of a metaphor and the power of cinema.