Rashomon and The Rashomon Effect

Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1951) tells the story of a husband and wife’s encounter with a bandit. The result of the encounter ends with the death of the husband. The story is told through from the bandit’s, the wife’s, a woodcutter’s and even the dead husband’s perspective (through a psychic.) Each story conflicts with the other, making it impossible to determine which version of the story is the truth.
From this film, the term “The Rashomon Effect” was coined. The term means:
the effect of subjectivity or perception on recollection, by which observers of an event are able to produce substantially different but equally plausible accounts of it. (wikipedia)
Kurosawa examines how humans remember certain events and how from each memory there are different specifics that stand out. The truth becomes skewed as it is seen differently through different people’s eyes. It also becomes nearly impossible to decipher what is truth and what is a misperception, who is the real bad guy?
One other aspect of the film worth mentioning is in the end when the three men hiding from the rain discover an abandoned baby. The common man realize that the woodcutter stole the dagger that was used in the murder that is found with the baby, leaving him to say, “all men are selfish”. The woodcutter convinces the men that he will be responsible for the baby as he already has several children. This act of remorse convinces the priest to restore his faith in humanity.
I think Kurosawa wanted to make several observations about the human condition. In truth, in greed and in redeeming qualities. This film stands out because of these reasons and many more.

Interview with a Brazilian filmmaker

I'll be making an introduction to this video and a conclusion, but the interview itself has been reenacted by legos and voice overs. This is a cut of the project:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1NaYOoP1Ws

Interview with Finnish Filmmaker Jarkko Virtanen

Over the course of a month, I interviewed Finnish filmmaker Jarkko Virtanen online via Facebook messages. At 26 years old, Virtanen has already traveled the globe as the cinematographer for a 50-minute documentary about illegal immigration in the European Union, as well as attended the screening of this film, Paradise, Three Journeys in This World (2007), at festivals in Asia, Europe, and America. Virtanen earned his Bachelors degree at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, and is currently finishing his Masters in Cinematography while shooting various short films, advertisements, music videos, and full-length documentaries. What follows is an edited version of our Facebook interview.

Anderson: Could you tell me about your background? Where were you raised?

Virtanen: I grew up in a small village called Mäntyluoto. It is on the west coast of Finland. There are about 1000 people living in the village. I did my secondary school and college in a nearby town called Pori. Both schools were specialized in arts.

A: How did you develop an interest in film?

V: When I was a kid I use to draw and paint a lot, but soon noticed that my skills were not enough [to advance] and moved on to still photography. When I was a teenager we used to make our own short films, and I got my first Hi8 camera when I was around 15 years old. I started to write scripts and plan bigger and bigger films . . . We never actually filmed the "big one," but it kept me thinking about filmmaking. I applied for photography school, but didn't make it. The next year, I applied for cinematography school and they took me in.

A: What cultivated your interest in cinematography, specifically?

V: It was logical to continue my interest in drawing and painting, expressing my feelings through pictures. [At first] I wanted to do everything myself, but again [realized] that my skills were not enough for writing or directing, and I had an eye for visual aspects of film.

A: Is there a film or film job that you have accomplished that you are particularly proud of?

V: In 2007, I shot a 50-minute documentary, Paradise, Three Journeys In This World, with very low-fi equipment, but made it look pretty good, after all. It's about important issues (illegal immigration in EU), too, so the story is also strong.

A: You studied at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, correct? What influenced your choice in attending TaiK? Did you earn a Bachelor’s degree from the School of Motion Picture, Television, and Production Design?

V: Yes, I did my BA in the same school and now I'm still doing my Masters. TaiK is the best school in Finland where you can study film. That was the biggest reason [I chose it].

A: Could you tell me about how you launched your career in Finland? Would you take the opportunity to work abroad, if it were presented to you?

V: In Finland (and why not elsewhere, too) it's all about connections. If you manage to get to know people who are working in the industry, it’s easier for you to get a job. Nobody asks your CV. They hear that you have been doing this and that, and maybe someone puts in a good word for you. I'm applying to a film school in London, and would love to work abroad.

A: According to the Finnish Film Foundation’s website (http://www.ses.fi/en/), their goal is to “support and develop Finnish film production, distribution and exhibition.” Have you as a filmmaker, or someone with whom you have worked in the industry, ever taken advantage of their support, either for a short film or a feature? What are the benefits, or the disadvantages, of using their services?

V: Almost all the films made in Finland need the support of SES because it's almost impossible to make a film with private money . . . There are no big studios who produce [these] films, so almost all [feature films] receive their funding straight from SES. It's always [beneficial]. Usually funding comes from SES and some TV channels. In Finland, there are five channels.

A: Could you give me a brief synopsis of the film Paradise: Three Journeys in this World, and tell me about your involvement in the filmmaking process? What did you learn?

V: Paradise: Three Journeys In This World is a poetic documentary. In the first journey, we travel along the route of tomato trucks to Almeria, Spain, where illegal immigrants from Africa work in greenhouses. The second journey takes us to Morocco, where numerous immigrants are willing to do anything to get to Europe.

We meet Adam, who has escaped war in the Ivory Coast. Now he is living in hiding along with numerous other refugees and immigrants, constantly fearing violence from local authorities. The third journey takes us through the desert to Bakary Fofana’s home village on the border of Mali and Mauritania, where the desert [will, it is believed, ruin] human life in the village within the next few decades.

I was [involved in] preparing the film from the beginning, but wasn’t involved much on the story. I decided the [shooting] format, and planned and gathered the equipment kit used. I learned about video shooting, and about different cameras during the pre-production. I tested a few similar-sized and priced cameras, and made conclusions about what makes a good video camera. I figured out the visual style of the film and the ways to get there. There was a lot of talking and making notes about how we should shoot the film, what to avoid and what to reach [for]. Patience is a virtue in doc shooting, at least if you are dealing with some hot issues and people who are afraid.

A: Finnish cinema has been around since the 1890s – as long as motion picture technology has existed, but is there one particular aspect of your country’s film heritage that inspires you, or discourages you, in your work?

V: There are many problems in Finnish feature films, such as very bad and simple scripts. There’s also not enough money to do any other genre than drama (no Finnish action films, etc.).

A lot of good, world-class documentarians work in Finland, and they deal with important issues. The good thing about Finnish doc [filmmaking] is that people are not afraid of taking risks. You can find a lot of artistic stuff made on the Finnish doc scene.

A: How important is it to you to have one of your films screened internationally? If it’s important, is it financially feasible? And what would be the main reason(s) you want your film screened outside of Finland?

V: If you can get your film shown outside of Finland, you can hear comments from people who come from totally different cultural backgrounds. It might be very useful and interesting to know if your film can reach peoples’ hearts and minds in other countries, too. You cannot get rich making films in Finland . . . And traveling to festivals is just about seeing new people, possibly making contacts and hearing different viewpoints on your film.

A: What good advice have you received that you would be willing to share with other young, amateur filmmakers?

V: The best way to learn filmmaking is not by reading books. You have to go out there and do it.

Happy Times for the People of China?

Although a Chinese film, Happy Times (to me) illustrates an odd, very westernized story line with perhaps a twist of Chinese culture by not embracing the unrealistic ideals of the body as America practices. The characters provided bits of comic relief to a traumatic theme, and the ending is not truly prepared for considering the amount of time spent creating a heart-warming relationship between Zhao and Wu Ying. But I cannot help to think of this young blind girl being exploited by giving massages to older retired men… it was incredibly hard for the director to persuade me to believe Wu Ying gave messages merely on the idea of self accomplishment and making new friends.

As far as the film’s relation to the Chinese government/affairs, it could be a blind twist on how the government overseas and treats the people of China, as Wu Ying was abused and ordered around by her evil stepmother. It may be a stretch, but I could somehow see the relation.

Word Study: Palme d’Or (pg 704)

The Palme d'Or (English: Golden Palm) is the highest prize awarded to competing films at the Cannes Film Festival. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee. From 1939 to 1954, the highest prize was the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film. From 1964 to 1974 it was replaced again by the Grand Prix du Festival.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palme_d'Or

It's Complicated: The Story of Chinese Cinema

Chinese cinema has had a long and complicated struggle with finding a distinct national voice that exists in spite of foreign influence and strict censorship, yet somehow it has managed to develop a unique method of story telling that draws upon tradition and embraces it’s creative restraints.

In the beginning of Chinese cinema, audiences were exposed to “melodramatic and sentimental tales [that] dramatized the disjuncture and contradictions of life in the modern, western city. If they were tragedies, decline and misfortune were inexorable, but if they were comedies, the wondrous device of coincidence would intervene” (Barry 409). This makes since for the time, because cinema was still in its silent era, when melodrama flourished, and the west possessed the major influence over cinema. The Chinese, like everyone else, were exploring the abilities of the medium, and they were learning from the work of other countries so that they could begin to build their own conventions without having to start at the very beginning.

In this early cinema, there were often times where male cons gained obvious laughs from the audience (Barry 409), which again is expected in silent cinema. Audiences at the time were willing to laugh at the bad guy because he was not human, and they were rooting for the good guy. These cons had the perfect opportunities for slap stick comedy, and were often the source of laughs in Western silent films, like those of Charlie Chaplin, who in spite of turning the lovable tramp into a comedic entity, also made the villains the brute of many slap-stick jokes.

A theme that has been common throughout Chinese cinema seems to be that of financial strain providing motivation for the plot. Early on filmmakers put their own financial frustration on the screen through diluted story lines, and over time the financial problems created by the government has begun to provide an easy criticism for politically motivated filmmakers.

After the revolution, China began to re-direct its cinema. “From 1949 to 1966, a national film base financed by the state produced social realist ‘worker-peasant-soldier’ films, in an attempt to build an indigenous ‘revolutionary cinema’” (Yau 693). It was around this time the government realized the motivating and unifying power of film, and they therefore sought to use it to its full potential. They began to manipulate the subject matter to speak to a specific audience, a method often known and referred to as propaganda, which has become the source of government scrutiny and censorship ever since.

In the time from 1949 to 1950, the Northeastern Studio films “told moving stories of women as fighters, victims, and martyrs. In these films, elements as diverse as documentary footage, folklore, traditional music, and hagiography enhanced the popular appeal of female figures of liberation and struggle” (Yau 694). From this time on, women began playing vital, inspirational roles in Chinese cinema that can be followed right up to their present day films.

As China developed its voice, some filmmakers managed to incorporate an interesting dichotomy into their films. The films made between 1958 and 1959, “while focusing China’s modern history, all shared an appealing human focus” (Yau 696). This human focus has also become a stable part of China’s cinematic voice, because cinema has become so centered on the people. Government censorship has been wary of the humanity shown in films and censored them accordingly, while brave filmmakers in all generations have embraced the topic of humanity as a vehicle to express their frustration with the status quo.

The fifth Generation played a very influential part in the development of the modern Chinese cinema. In their films, “tragedy, absurdity, and ambiguity made their return” (Yau 700), and Zhang Yimou began to rise as a maverick of the extremist generation. Their era of filmmaking was influenced by the passing of the second “hundred flowers”, and the publication of director Zhang Nuanxin’s “The Modernization of Film Language,” which encouraged them to embrace technical aspects of storytelling as a method to improve the overall effect (Yau 699). It was this generation that brought China into its spot as an international contender in the film scene, with their limited yet still expanded freedom to express themselves, as well as their attention to technical detail. The fifth generation in China is a lot like the film school generation of the United States, except in China the generation was persecuted and in the United States they were embraced.

Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times, which was made in 2000, bears a striking number of similarities to a lot of previous generations of Chinese cinema from what I can tell. It’s story largely employs the obstacle of financial trouble, with the main character wanting desperately to help the young girl thrown into his care, and his obese lover always seeking more money from a partner instead of true love. It often times employs simple jokes to gain laughs, like when the first “client” for the young girl lays on the crudely constructed massage table and almost falls through the hole at the top, or when the main character ends up sleeping on the balcony after being trapped in the room with the young girl who does not know he is there.

Happy Times simultaneously inverts the traditional view of women and upholds it with the two main female characters. The main character’s lover in the film becomes the con, as opposed to early Chinese cinema when cons were men. On the other hand, her stepdaughter portrays a journey from victim to fighter, roles that were given to women by the Northeastern studio fifty years before. Yimou, whether he meant to or not, seems to make the statement here that women are neither pure nor evil, but like men must be regarded with caution.

With the characters of Happy Times being so interdependent, the film eventually embraces the human focus developed in the late 1950s. The main character, despite being a bum and a con artist maintains a complicated moral code and unexpectedly deep compassion. When he refuses to allow a couple to have sex in the bus that he painted, we see for the first time that this man is not strictly a con, but a man of morals. In his desperate attempts to keep his lovers ‘stepdaughter believing that she is working and making money, he makes self-sacrifices thinking of her, and again shows the audience that he may not be societies most valued member, but he is far from their most despicable. The young blind girl who holds out an unbelievable amount of hope under crushing circumstances is also a key focus of the film. The audience is never quiet sure what she knows and what she does not, and they are therefore trying to read her throughout the entire film, which raises the level of interest dramatically. As she grows throughout the film, she becomes less of a helpless child and more of an woman empowered by her past moving forward.

Yimou’s fifth generation influence is also clear in this film with its absurdity and ambiguity, which were markers of films from the generation. The entire plot is absurd in its circumstances, yet the audience forgives this shortcoming because of the lovable characters. The films end embraces ambiguity to the point of sacrificing a conclusion. In the end, the audience does not know what happens to the main character, and they are left to create a future for the young heroin as she walks a lone down a crowded seat.

One last, small thing that I noticed about the film was it's reference to America. In the cafe, when the girl begin to dream about getting her eyes fixed, she talks about how her father will take her to America is they cannot fix them in China, and as her dream gets bigger and glorifies America, her surrogate father's friend cuts her off saying something along the lines of "You don't need America, we can do it in China". This conversation, to me, referrenced a distinct Chinese voice in cinema, claiming their superiority to America, the West, and Capitalism. It also reminded me that in China there is censorship, and filmmakers must be cautious of what they put on screen to make sure China is glorified and not put down.

Word Study:

On page 700, Yau brings up the term “the fifth generation” and points out the word generation “acknowledges previous generations contributions”. I decided to look up the word generation. According to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language Fourth Edition, it means:

1. All of the offspring that are at the same stage of descent from a common ancestor: Mother and daughters represent two generations.

2. Biology A form or stage in the life cycle of an organism: asexual generation of a fern.

3. The average interval of time between the birth of parents and the birth of their offspring.

4.

a. A group of individuals born and living about the same time.

b. A group of generally contemporaneous individuals regarded as having common cultural or social characteristics and attitudes: "They're the television generation" (Roger Enrico).

c. A stage or period of sequential technological development and innovation.

d. A class of objects derived from a preceding class: a new generation of computers.

5. The formation of a line or geometric figure by the movement of a point or line.

6. The act or process of generating; origination, production, or procreation.

Of these, the definitions 4b, 4c and 4d, as well as 5 all seem to fit. The fifth generation was characterized by their style of film, which was standardized in many ways due to higher education and a common disgust for the current government. The “generation” also fit into a sequence of development, with each generation encouraging the next to be more radical in their story telling while embracing the technology used to create film. Under this same idea, the generation fits definition 4d if the word objects is substituted with people. It did draw many things from the previous generation, but also made those concepts more radical in their own work.

Finally, the generation has become a point on the timeline of Chinese Cinema, and therefore fits into the idea of being a “point on a line” in definition 5.

Works Cited:

Barry, Chris. “China Before 1949”. The Oxford History of world Cinema: The Definitive History of Cinema Worldwide. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 267-275. Print.

Yau, Esther. “China After the Revolution”. The Oxford History of World Cinema: The Definitive History of Cinema Worldwide. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 267-275. Print.

Happy Times and the Fifth Generation

Zhang Yimou’s Happy Times is the story of an older man who is looking to get married, but cannot afford to provide his future wife with the finances she requires, and through several lies on his part, he ends up growing closer to her stepdaughter. The girlfriend character is like the evil stepmother from Cinderella, and her stepdaughter is very much like Cinderella except that she does not end up with a prince at the end. The relationship that develops between the girl and the main character is very cute. He becomes a father figure to her, when her own father is missing in another part of the country, and virtually forgotten about her. I love how these two interact with one another, and how he tries to protect her from his own girlfriend. I thought early on that this was going to be a comedy, about him trying to deceive his girlfriend with the hotel, and it would somehow all work out in the end, but then I realized that that is what would happen in an American movie, and a Chinese movie is very different from this. There are certainly comedy bits sprinkled throughout the film, but it is on whole a drama, about their relationship, and their relationships with the rest of the world. The girl has somewhat of a happy ending, going out into the world on her own, but as she is blind, this is also a very scary thing, and she is going into the unknown in more ways than one. The man ends up in the hospital, and doesn’t even get to say goodbye. One of the most moving parts of the film was when the girl left a tape recording of her goodbye message, and the friend reads the letter to her recorded message. I was pretty much crying at this point, it was very sad and beautiful. One of the interesting things about this film is that it is somewhat about the old traditional ways clashing with the new ways that are beginning to emerge in China. The man is very traditional, even when it comes to his fake business, he won’t let the young people go into the bus with the door closed. This is representative of the way he was raised, and how much of China was for many years. It is just in recent times that things have begun to loosen up. Zhang Yimou was part of the ‘Fifth Generation’ of Chinese filmmakers, and as they were the first to begin to part with the old ways, this may have something to do with that. In this film we see the differences between them, and it may be because of this unique vision that the characters are designed thus. One somewhat literal idea might be with the removal of the very red painted bus, it is a symbolic yet literal removal of the ‘red’ communism of Mao Zedong. China is still a communist government, but through time and through more liberal filmmakers like those of the ‘Fifth Generation’ and Zhang Yimou, the government grows more relaxed and lenient than in past times.

Word Study: Kuomintang

Kuomintang |ˈkwōˈminˈta ng; -ˈtä ng; ˈgwô-| (alsoGuomindang |ˈgwōˈminˈdä ng |)a nationalist party founded in China under Sun Yat-sen in 1912, and led by Chiang Kai-shek from 1925. It held power from 1928 until theCommunist Party took power in October 1949, and it subsequently formed the central administration of Taiwan.ORIGIN from Chinese, ‘national people's party.’