Saturday Matinee: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

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By Toshiro Inaba

Source: RealTokyo

What the path of fantasy is telling us

Director Nobuhiko Obayashi passed away right after finishing his last film. In fact, the day of his death – April 10, 2020 – was also the planned premier date for his swansong, titled Labyrinth of Cinema. Its release was delayed on March 31 due to the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak, and Obayashi left this world only days later. What did the director, who had dedicated his life to the gods of cinema, spend a lifetime trying to tell us through his medium? I had a vague feeling that there’s something we need to take away from Obayashi’s movies in these trying times.

I decided to re-watch The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (1983). Leaving all my prejudices at the door, I faced this film with fresh eyes. It’s a story of a girl in the first year of high school who “leaps” back through time. After smelling the scent of lavender, she is cast into a world where time is distorted. The same day repeats itself over and over, and yesterday becomes today once more. As past and present blend together, so do life and death. In this strange timeline, a certain encounter and experience strongly convince the girl to return to normal life again. All of a sudden, time is distorted no longer. It’s as if the protagonist is back in the world she came from. But having returned by passing through a different domain, the girl can now see into a world entirely her own: the world of the soul. She takes that world to heart and protects it as if it were her child, becoming her own woman in the process.

Adolescence is a time when a child’s entire, painstakingly crafted view of his- or herself is turned completely on its head. It is a necessary step if one is to enter the uncharted world of adulthood, but it is also something that takes place deep down in one’s inner self, and an entirely inexplicable experience. Because these changes are difficult to put into words with a child’s vocabulary, they sometimes surface in the form of problematic behavior. Most adults, having forgotten what it’s like to be a child, are unable to properly pick up on these signals. Children are sensitive to the world of the soul; it can be said that children’s eyes are those that truly see into this world. When we grow up to become adults, our inner eye gradually closes to the world of the soul. Are adults, then, unable to see into this world for good, or can the connection be restored? I think we can impart a bit of the soul by talking about fantasy. This can take the form of movies, art, or music. In other words, the soul uses the path we call “fantasy” to tell us something. (Perhaps this is the period called “the autumn of our lives.”) [Note: as opposed to the “spring” of adolescence.] The Girl Who Leapt Through Time rides this pathway of fantasy, traveling through time to knock on the door of our adolescence, as if waking a small animal from its sleep. It asks us: “What is your soul looking at now?”

Obayashi was known for his unorthodox staging methods. He prohibited his cast from acting as if they were machines following the “orders” of the script. He demanded they “live” their roles instead of merely acting them. The director would only present a philosophy, not give any specific acting answers. The set was a place of constant change, and Obayashi told his cast and crew to adapt – even the script itself was subject to change. Actors and crew members unfamiliar with this method would reportedly get quite upset. Obayashi’s films, however, catapulted many actors – including Tomoyo Harada and Tadanobu Asano – to stardom.
I think Obayashi’s message was that the creative process of making a movie requires everyone’s participation and input. Besides the cast, this includes the cinematographers, the audio crew, the assistants; Obayashi wanted everyone to put their heads together and move each other’s feelings.
I feel like Obayashi’s testament to our time, what he wanted to tell us, is something similar to what I just described. In other words, his message is that in society as well as in the medical profession, we need to emphasize the sharing of philosophies, get everyone in this world to share their concerns as creative participants, and think together. The economy is stalling, people are losing their jobs, the medical infrastructure is being overwhelmed – problems abound around us. For that very reason, you need to think; there’s no one right answer; that’s why you need to keep thinking. And the philosophy to adhere to? It’s life itself, isn’t it?
It is said that Obayashi was, throughout his life, deeply affected by something Akira Kurosawa told him in his youth. This was the idea that people who have experienced war should speak up about its horrors and lack of meaning. Feeling that his earlier films had not faced that issue directly, Obayashi said that his last few works –Hanagatami (2017) and Labyrinth of Cinema (2020) – were intended to address this concern.

Sure, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time can, at a glance, be called a teen movie, a sci-fi flick, or a fantasy story. But watching it again made me think of it also as a requiem for the dead. It’s a story told eloquently with silence. Obayashi’s “soul,” walking the path of fantasy, “leaps through time” to speak directly to our chaotic age. Whether we choose to listen is up to us.

Translated by Ili Saarinen

Watch The Girl Who Leapt Through Time on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/16044739

Saturday Matinee: Men & Chicken

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By Sheila O’Malley

Source: RogerEbert.com

David Dencik and Mads Mikkelsen play estranged brothers Gabriel and Elias, respectively, in writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen’s bizarre “Men & Chicken.” The two men are thrown together when, after their father’s death, some family secrets come to light. The comedy in “Men & Chicken” sometimes tips into Keystone Cops territory, with people running around in the background like chickens (of course) with their heads cut off. “Men & Chicken” is a bizarre family psychodrama as well as a mad-scientist movie, complete with a crazy spooky lab full of terrifying objects. How seriously should any of it be taken? It’s hard to tell, but the film has a dry eccentricity that is entertaining and absurd. You don’t know what will happen next. If the hundreds of chickens clucking around in the movie revealed themselves as sentient beings with the power of speech it wouldn’t be a surprise at all. In the world of “Men & Chicken,” all manner of ridiculous things seem possible. 

Gabriel and Elias set off together on a road trip to the isolated Ork Island (population 42) to seek out the brothers they never knew they had. Both have cleft palates as well as personality quirks (putting it mildly), and they can barely get through a conversation without running into intractable conflict. They have circular arguments about Darwin and Einstein. (“Einstein won the Nobel Prize, Elias.” “Yes. In 1921, the lamest year in physics.”) Elias is first seen on a date with a woman in a wheelchair who makes the fatal error of accidentally interrupting him. He snaps, “Do all people in wheelchairs interrupt this much?” Not surprisingly, Elias has no luck with women, particularly unfortunate for him since his sex drive is so titanic that he needs to masturbate multiple times a day. Elias’ “condition” is treated matter-of-factly by his brother (who pulls over to the side of the road to let Elias get out and do his thing behind a tree). Gabriel is a philosophy professor who dry-retches and gags every other minute for unknown reasons.

Elias and Gabriel track down their three half-brothers holed up in a dilapidated former sanitarium, overrun by chickens, ducks, goats. The brothers call to mind the locals in “Deliverance“: They are barely civilized, beating one another (and Gabriel when he first approaches) with huge dead birds or slabs of wood. They threaten each other with “the cage” for rule infractions. It’s a madhouse. They all have cleft palates and other physical abnormalities and live in a raw state of nature (putting the lie to Rousseau’s theories). They are petty, vicious, savage, rule-bound. Interrupting one another is strictly forbidden. 

The sanitarium is an incredible and inherently cinematic location, utilized beautifully by Jensen. There are echoing long hallways, mysterious upstairs rooms and an off-limits basement. There is no electricity. The brothers play badminton in one room, all wearing tennis whites, and they treat the game as seriously as a World Cup match. At any time, a fist fight could break out. Every night they curl up by the fire and have a bedtime story hour, where they discuss plot points and character analysis, and nobody is allowed to interrupt anyone else, and of course nobody can obey that rule perfectly. The family unit is a tinderbox. The ensemble acting is terrific.

Gabriel, determined to find answers about their shared background, tries to wrestle the wild brothers under control. Elias, however, takes to the chaos like a duck to water. Within 24 hours, he’s dressed up in tennis whites playing badminton as though he had lived there all his life. He never wants to leave. 

Mads Mikkelsen, an exquisite actor, so elegant, controlled and frightening as Hannibal on NBC’s “Hannibal,” is barely recognizable as the constant-masturbator Elias. He’s got a haircut and a mustache reminiscent of Christopher Walken’s sleazy look in “At Close Range.” But it’s not just the externals that make him unrecognizable. Elias is chatty, impulsive, rude, irritated by his frustrated sex drive. Mikkelsen, as Elias, is always thinking, processing, eyes shifting around as he takes in new information. He thinks so much more than he says, and that’s one of the reasons that the performance is so funny. It’s not strange just for the sake of being “wacky” or “quirky.” Mikkelsen has made sense of Elias, and has connected all of those disparate pieces to create a very real character. Humphrey Bogart once said that good acting was six feet back in the eyes. Mikkelsen goes that deep, and that’s why he is so transformed. Elias is so strange that one might struggle to place him, or compare him to someone else. But he is his own thing, and you can’t take your eyes off of him. 

Strange motifs and themes emerge and recur: copious ejaculation, dead birds, evolutionary mutations, hybrid breeds, survival of the fittest, inherited characteristics. Nature creates “monsters,” and man can create monsters of his own. Jensen uses horror movie tropes: strange things glimpsed at night, closed doors, phonographs playing in empty rooms. But there are farcical elements too: the brothers running around the sanitarium wielding badminton rackets, the repeated beatings with a stiff dead bird and the casual discussions afterwards (“I’m not mad at you for beating Gabriel with the mute swan. It happens to the best of us.”) There’s also a grotesque element, in the traditional sense of the word: “freaks,” cages, mutations limping through their lives. What was their father up to? What’s with the cleft palates? What is in that basement? At some point, is someone going to sexually assault a chicken? It is discussed as a valid option. 

Audience members looking for a character to “relate to” or “like” may have a rough time. But nobody is likable in farce or absurdist black comedy: it’s not that kind of genre, nor should it be. What does all of this add up to? Damned if I know. But it’s fun to see a film that plays by its own rules to such a degree that any comparison to anything else falls apart.

Watch Men & Chicken on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/kcls/video/13448329

Saturday Matinee: The New Cinema

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Watch: Rare 1960s Documentary ‘The New Cinema’ Featuring Roman Polanski, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas & More

By Gary Garrison

Source: IndieWire

Hollywood leaves a lot to be desired in terms of innovation. Studios tend to find something that works, and then squeeze out every penny possible. The viability of these brainless practices aside, it takes quite a bit for the town to even consider greenlighting an original property, let alone a complete restructuring.

But a restructuring is exactly what happened in Hollywood in the ‘60s and ‘70s, despite the laborious pace of the shift (compared to what was happening in Europe), and all the resulting resistance. “The New Cinema,” a short documentary produced sometime in the late 1960s (the exact date is unknown) has found new life on the Internet recently and takes an in depth look at the old Hollywood system and the new crowd of directors who were on the verge of starting one of the great cinematic rebirths.

Directed by Gary Young, “The New Cinema” features some great impromptu interviews from the likes of Roman Polanski, Andy Warhol, Dustin Hoffman, Francis Ford Coppola, and the up-and-coming at the time George Lucas. And while the doc is interesting in its own right, it’s amazing to see this particular collection of filmmakers, most of whom would make some of the greatest movies in history.

Saturday Matinee: What the Future Sounded Like

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What the Future Sounded Like: Documentary Tells the Forgotten 1960s History of Britain’s Avant-Garde Electronic Musicians

By Josh Jones

Source: Open Culture

It really is impossible to overstate the fact that most of the music around us sounds the way it does today because of an electronic revolution that happened primarily in the 1960s and 70s (with roots stretching back to the turn of the century). While folk and rock and roll solidified the sound of the present on home hi-fis and coffee shop and festival stages, the sound of the future was crafted behind studio doors and in scientific laboratories. What the Future Sounded Like, the short documentary above, transports us back to that time, specifically in Britain, where some of the finest recording technology developed to meet the increasing demands of bands like the Beatles and Pink Floyd.

Much less well-known are entities like the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, whose crew of engineers and audio scientists made what sounded like magic to the ears of radio and television audiences. “Think of a sound, now make it,” says Peter Zinovieff “any sound is now possible, any combination of sounds is now possible.” Zinovieff, London-born son of an émigré Russian princess and inventor of the hugely influential VCS3 synthesizer in 1969, opens the documentary—fittingly, since his technology helped power the futuristic sound of progressive rock, and since, together with the Radiophonic Workshop’s Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, he ran Unit Delta Plus, a studio group that created and promoted electronic music.

Also appearing in the documentary is Tristram Cary, who, with Zinovieff, founded Electronic Music Studios, one of four makers of commercial synthesizers in the late sixties, along with ARP, Buchla, and Moog. Zinovieff and Carey are not household names in part because they didn’t particularly strive to be, preferring to work behind the scenes on experimental forms and eschewing popular music even as their technology gave birth to so much of it. The aristocratic Zinovieff and pipe-smoking, professorial Carey hardly fit in with the crowd of rock and pop stars they inspired.

In hindsight, however, Zinovieff desires more recognition for their work. “One thing which is odd, is that there’s a missing chapter, which is EMS, in all the books about electronic music. People do not know what incredible mechanical adventures we were up to.” Those adventures included not only creating new technology, but composing never-before-heard music. Both Zinovieff and Carey continue to create electronic scores, and Carey happens to be one of the first adopters in Britain of musique concrète, the proto-electronic music pioneered in the 1940s using tape machines, microphones, filters, and other recording devices, along with found sounds, field recordings, and ad hoc instruments made from non-instrument objects. (See examples of these techniques in the clip above from the 1979 BBC documentary The New Sound of Music.)

Many of the sounds that emerged from Britain’s electronic music founders came out of the detritus of World War II. Carey’s first serious studio design, he says, “coincided with the post-war appearance of an enormous amount of junk from the army, navy, and air force. For someone who knew what to do, and could handle a soldering iron, and could design audio equipment, even if you only had 30 shillings in your pocket, you could get something.” With their knowledge of electronics and hodge-podge of technology, Carey and his compatriots were designing an avant-garde electronic “high modernity,” author Trevor Pinch declares. “I think you can think of people like Tristan Carey as dreaming of a future soundscape of London.” Nowadays, those sounds are as familiar to us as the music piped over the speakers in restaurants and shops. One wonders what the future after the future these pioneers designed will sound like?