Three years ago (it seems like yesterday), I saw a film at the Film Forum in Manhattan: Under the Sun, a documentary film about North Korea. Such a film would be pretty much unavailable in movie theaters outside of New York. I saw it five times within a period of a few days. Each time I went back I saw something I had missed.
The film, in Korean, was directed by the Russian documentary filmmaker Vitaly Mansky.
The central person in the film, who is unforgettable, is an adorable eight-year-old North Korean girl named Zin-mi. Zin-mi lives with her parents – except we don’t know if they really are her parents; they may be actors playing her parents — in an apartment that may have been a “stage prop” in Pyongyang.
The director, Vitaly Mansky, spent almost a year in Pyongyang, ostensibly collaborating with government authorities to shoot a documentary about an eight-year-old girl’s (Zin-mi’s) entry into that country’s Children’s Union, the political organization that all young people there are required to join.
A New York Times critic, Glenn Kenny, made the following very perceptive, right on the money comment about the film: “It touches a nerve substantially deeper than the ‘I’m sure glad I don’t live there’ one.”
The North Korean government went to great lengths to try to prevent the film from being released.
The film is a “quasi documentary.” The compelling thing about it is that you come away caring about the people and touched by the film’s PATHOS — despite the fact that one is aware that the people live regimented lives in a totalitarian state where they have been effectively brainwashed and reduced almost to automatons (or so it often seems).
The film is beautifully done and tugs and pulls at the viewer emotionally on many levels. It features beautiful, elegiac music — used sparingly with great effect — composed by a Latvian composer, Karlis Auzans. (I am proud to say that we have become Facebook friends.)
The plot is ostensibly about Zin-mi going through steps, including school, as she prepares to join the Korean Children’s Union. At the film’s conclusion, she breaks down and cries upon being admitted to the Children’s Union. She is perhaps crying from relief that the stress of achieving the goal is over and, it seems, from what one would call joy mixed with sadness.
The scene of Zin-mi crying in the film is on YouTube at
The film captures the pathos — musically and otherwise — in a scene where you see North Koreans having family photos taken in a sort of assembly line fashion. A couple stands proudly in front of an automatic camera with their children. The photo is taken and another couple poses. And so on. As they stare into the camera, one sees expressions of pride but also feels a great sadness. The music rises to an emotional pitch and captures this. One feels empathy with the people posing, with the North Koreans. One feels that they are people, just like us.
That, despite very hard lives, they experience feelings like ours. One feels like crying oneself, but one, at the same time, experiences a kind of joy in contemplating the miracle of human existence, and how this elemental reality links us all, regardless of circumstances.
You can hear the elegiac, profoundly moving music composed by Mr. Auzans for this scene at
I’m following the foot philosophy and am going to Manhattan to take the ferry again. I’m not sure why.
I saw “Ex Libris,” the Frederick Wiseman film about the New York Public Library, last night … it’s over three hours long.
I was tired, which may have been a factor, but I wasn’t that thrilled with the film; and, I was very disappointed with Wiseman’s “lecture” Thursday evening.
Nevertheless, I am glad I saw the film.
Today, I am going at 11 a.m. to see another film at the Film Forum: “The Red Pony,” a late 1940’s film, with a score by Aaron Copland, based on the Steinbeck novella. We read it in junior HS.
I had one good teacher in junior high: Miss Hanlon, our eighth grade English teacher. She seemed to think well of me and of my appreciation of reading.
Once we were reading “The Red Pony” and I made what seems in retrospect to have been a perceptive comment about the boy, Jody’s, father. I said that he was a certain kind of stern father who had trouble showing affection for his son. I was thinking of my relationship with my own father. Miss Hanlon appreciated these comments.
on aesthetic and cultural appreciation of literature and film; my favorite directors (小津安二郎は日本の映画監督・脚本家)
by Roger W. Smith
I will begin this essay with some comments on what I feel the development of aesthetic sense and critical standards, as they apply both to literature and to the cinema, entails.
To put it as simply as possible: in order to have a deep appreciation of anything cultural, you have to become acquainted with the BEST works. Nothing less.
Let’s consider literature for a moment. Consider the case of someone whose acquaintance with books is limited to reading works such as The Thorn Birds, Jacqueline Susann, The Bridges of Madison County, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and similar works.
I have nothing against such writers and works or their readers per se. It’s enough that people love to read and take pleasure from it. I am not a snob.
But, if that’s all you have read, you will never have
a frame of reference;
a yardstick; or
models of excellence
for purposes of comparison when it comes to appreciating literature in full.
You won’t be able to distinguish between what is perhaps entertaining and/or diverting and what is truly great. You will never know the difference.
The same comments apply to cinema.
Let’s say that in the past you saw films like The Graduate, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, Coming Home, or Kramer vs. Kramer and regarded them as classics. Perhaps you still do.
I have news for you (I’m sorry if I sound arrogant): THEY AREN’T. For why I feel this way, see my discussion of directors and films below.
Extending this comment broadly (i.e., to both literature and film), I would say that it’s like comparing War and Peace with Ben-Hur or Anna Karenina with Erich Segal’s Love Story. You have to have read or seen classics to know the difference.
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I only began to understand and appreciate film after moving to New York City in the late 1960’s, just after graduating from college.
I owe my appreciation and acumen about films, such as they are, to a friend I made during my early days in New York: William S. (Bill) Dalzell.
Bill Dalzell was a self-employed printer who did printing for left wing groups such as Women’s Strike for Peace. (An aside: he was apolitical, though he was sympathetic to such groups’ goals.) He was a very cultured person and a lover of film, as well as of New York.
He taught me, single handedly, to appreciate film.
Bill Dalzell had a personal list of his five all time great films:
D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916)
German director Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938)
Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1944, with a Part Two released posthumously in 1958; in my opinion, Ivan the Terrible is an even better film than Eisenstein’s better known film The Battleship Potemkin)
Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (The Word; 1955)
Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to Matthew (1964)
(See YouTube links below.)
Thanks to his advice, I saw them all at least once.
Truly classic films such as the above five are in a league of their own. Few people have seen them or even know of them.
What are some of the ingredients of great filmmaking? Not being a film critic, I can’t say really – I am not qualified to. But my friend Bill made an observation to me once that I remember. He said that films work their magic by “sight and sound.”
Consider the great directors. Most use music very effectively, use it sparingly. They don’t overdo it. But music is a key part of the aesthetic experience. And, the great directors don’t use schlocky music. What you get is Prokofiev, Monteverdi, Schubert, and so on, plus awesome original music. How many treacly film scores have we been subjected to by second rate directors?
To Bill Dalzell’s list of the greatest films, I would like to add and comment on a few favorite directors of my own.
Yasujirō Ozu, a Japanese film director and screenwriter
He is not nearly as well known as he should be, though his critical reputation is very high. He is my personal favorite among directors, perhaps outranking the five listed above.
Of course, it was Bill Dalzell who first alerted me to Ozu’s films. He made a comment that turned out to be true. In Ozu’s films, nothing happens.
They are films about ordinary Japanese people — businessmen, housewives, families — living ordinary lives. One watches them going about their daily lives – there is no melodrama — and, instead of being bored, by some magic which the director, Ozu, achieves – which one can only marvel at – the viewer is never bored. Instead, one is totally engrossed.
It seems like a certainty that you are watching real people go about their lives, a documentary of sorts, as if the director had entered a home or workplace in Tokyo and turned on his camera. It’s hard to believe – one totally forgets – that one is watching actors.
There is wonderful music, simple and enchanting, used sparingly.
It is wonderful to hear Japanese spoken.
There is a sense of place. The films are shot in Tokyo. One feels that one is there, in the houses with people sitting on mats, in bars where businessmen are drinking copiously, in the narrow streets with their colorful lights and signs and paper lanterns.
Ozu has a great visual sense, but like everything else in his films. his cinematographic technique is not obtrusive. He is not showing off. You are having a wonderful aesthetic experience without quite realizing it.
There is no distance between you and the film, because everything is done simply and with great clarity. There is no bombast, no showing off, no cinematographic techniques being used simply to impress. And, there is no overacting, as is, sadly, the case with most American films.
I do not have a single favorite Ozu film. My favorites include:
Late Spring (1949)
Early Summer (1951)
The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952)
Tokyo Story (1953)
Late Autumn (1960)
An Autumn Afternoon (1962; Ozu’s final work)
Robert Bresson
My other personal favorite is the French director Robert Bresson. My favorite Bresson film – his films are all of the highest quality — is Au hasard Balthazar (1966).
The Balthazar of the title is a donkey. It is a sort of “Black Beauty” story (the reference here being to the novel by Anna Sewell). The characters are plain people – some of them mean spirited and petty minded, if not downright cruel – in a French village.
The haunting soundtrack features the second movement (Andante) from Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 20 in A major, D. 959. Bresson uses music sparingly, but extremely effectively.
Ozu is probably as well known for the technical style and innovation of his films as for the narrative content. The style of his films is most striking in his later films, a style he had not fully developed until his post-war talkies. He did not conform to Hollywood conventions. Rather than using the typical over-the-shoulder shots in his dialogue scenes, the camera gazes on the actors directly, which has the effect of placing the viewer in the middle of the scene.
Ozu did not use typical transitions between scenes, either. In between scenes he would show shots of certain static objects as transitions, or use direct cuts, rather than fades or dissolves. Most often the static objects would be buildings, where the next indoor scene would take place. It was during these transitions that he would use music, which might begin at the end of one scene, progress through the static transition, and fade into the new scene. He rarely used non-diegetic music in any scenes other than in the transitions. Ozu moved the camera less and less as his career progressed, and ceased using tracking shots altogether in his color films. …
He invented the “tatami shot,” in which the camera is placed at a low height, supposedly at the eye level of a person kneeling on a tatami mat … even lower than that, only one or two feet off the ground, which necessitated the use of special tripods and raised sets. He used this low height even when there were no sitting scenes, such as when his characters walked down hallways.
Ozu eschewed the traditional rules of filmic storytelling, most notably eyelines.
[Bresson is] known for a spiritual and ascetic style. Bresson contributed notably to the art of cinema; his non-professional actors, ellipses, and sparse use of scoring have led his works to be regarded as preeminent examples of minimalist film. …
Three formative influences in his early life seem to have a mark on his films: Catholicism, art and his experiences as a prisoner of war. …
Bresson made only 13 feature-length films. This reflects his meticulous approach to the filmmaking process and his non-commercial preoccupations. ….
Bresson’s actors were required to repeat multiple takes of each scene until all semblances of “performance” were stripped away, leaving a stark effect that registers as both subtle and raw. This, as well as Bresson’s restraint in musical scoring, would have a significant influence on minimalist cinema. …
Bresson is often referred to as a patron saint of cinema, not only for the strong Catholic themes found throughout his oeuvre, but also for his notable contributions to the art of film. His style can be detected through his use of sound, associating selected sounds with images or characters; paring dramatic form to its essentials by the spare use of music; and through his infamous “actor-model” methods of directing his almost exclusively non-professional actors.
What I most like about Ozu’s films is his appreciation of moments of silence or non-action. So much is allowed to happen in those moments! They are almost always missing from American films, which seem to require constant noise and movement. You didn’t list it, so I’ll add another favorite: “Good Morning,” which is a comedy.
Thanks for bringing Ozu’s film to the attention of your readers!
I think that to love reading, you have to begin by doing it because of intrinsic interest in the topic and because you are anticipating pleasure, not because you regard it as a duty. You should read whatever you like to; it could be books about sports, entertainment figures, lowbrow fiction, whatever you really and truly want to read.
Whenever (and this comment pertains mainly to classics) you are restricted to encountering good books only as school assignments, when that’s the only place where you encounter them, the game is lost. If you think that classic books are those that you are required to analyze and write essay exam questions on, and nothing more, you will probably not enjoy them in later life. My counsel to all readers, especially young ones, is read whatever you want to read, as much as you can. Seek a level where you have a genuine interest and read at that level. An interest in the best books will often follow.
Similar thoughts of mine upon reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s Why Read Moby-Dick? (2011).
On pg. 61, Philbrick mentions “the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference.”
YES – waiting, I would be inclined to say, until you are ready, motivated, and receptive.
Waiting until the most opportune time.
This is precisely that happened to me with Moby-Dick. And, practically every other classic and/or “great book” I have ever read.
Hardly any of them – almost none – were read by me as school assignments.
The following five greatest films of all time, according to my friend Bill Dalzell, can be viewed on YouTube at the following links. (Note: Some of the YouTube links may not work. Since I posted this essay, some films or parts of them have been deleted.)
D. W. Griffith
Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through the Ages (1916)
Leni Reifenstahl
Olympia
2 parts
Eisenstein
Ivan the Terrible
2 parts
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St Matthew, 1964)
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet, Yasujirō Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon, and Robert Bressson’s Au hasard Balthazar are available from the Criterion Collection.
