For me, even more exciting. Surely the most important release of the year.
That said, the "trilogy" thing is silly. There are
brilliant, thematically linked Jissoji films between 1970 and 1974, and the best (by a smidgen) is the one that's not included here,
[A Faint Dream].
Here's a short, no-doubt-spoiler-ridden introduction to all four works culled from the
Though the media-, genre-, and format-roaming of his sprawling opus may suggest a broad eclecticism, or even a disregard for personal creative engagement, Akio Jissoji’s works evidence underlying aesthetic and philosophical pursuits that persist throughout his career, regardless of dramatic discontinuities in the works’ cultural prestige, popular standing, budget, or political engagement. Known mostly for his involvement in the popular Ultraman franchise and for his adaptations of de Sade’s Justine, or Prosperities of Vice (Akutoku no sakae,1988) and of Edogawa Ranpo’s horror stories Watcher in the Attic (Yaneura no sanposha, 1993), Murder on D Street (D-Zaka no satsujin jiken, 1998), and “Mirror Hell” (“Kagami jigoku”, his contribution to the 2005 Rampo Noir anthology), Jissoji managed to encapsulate a career’s worth of highly personal reflections within the span of four brilliant but little-known feature films directed back to back between 1970 and 1974. This tetralogy – comprised of the so-called “Buddhist trilogy” of This Transient Life (Mujo, 1970), Mandara (1971), and Poem (Uta, 1972), together with the thematically and stylistically kindred A Faint Dream (Asaki yumemishi, 1974), all produced by the Art Theater Guild – reveals an auteur’s preoccupations with matters both quintessentially Japanese and universal in scope and thus may be a useful starting point for an understanding of this regrettably underrated filmmaker.
Critics tend to group the first three ATG films and ignore the fourth, viewing that trilogy as implying a critique of modern capitalist Japan. To be sure, Jissoji’s first three features, produced at a time when social upheaval was not only reflected but amplified in the films of other, openly political, Japanese filmmakers like Oshima, Yoshida, and Wakamatsu, share key traits with those films – notably the unflinching analysis of middle-class alienation and the pervasive use of erotic imagery. But such similarities constitute a kind of environmental “white noise” in Jissoji’s early 70s features, so that to focus on them is to overlook the director’s specific creative vision, a vision that transcends social and political contingencies. When one considers A Faint Dream as part of a greater tetralogy, Jissoji’s explorations take on a broader scope, so that his criticism of contemporary materialism becomes only a facet of a wider dissatisfaction with materialism’s intrinsic inability to address a larger problem, the problem of impermanence. The response to the flaws of capitalism cannot be, according to these films, a rush to embrace another form of materialist world-view, be it Marxism or Sartrean existentialism, since both are rooted in historical and ideological contingencies that are just as transitory. Instead, Jissoji’s work suggests, the only response to impermanence may be a commitment to the pursuit of form even in the absence of content or function.
While some of Jissoji’s stylistics echo Antonioni’s estranged landscapes and Robbe-Grillet’s objectified modernity, none of his characters exhibits the malaise of Euro-existentialism that pervades the work of those filmmakers, and his observations and insights never reach the threshold of political engagement that was common among existentialist thinkers in the West. Instead, Jissoji seems preoccupied with the ephemerality of the material world – indeed, the Japanese title of his first feature, Mujo, means, literally, “impermanence” – and with its significance in shaping the human condition. Trapped in their Buddhist ethos, Jissoji’s characters, regardless of historical setting, social station, or personality traits, share the same keen awareness of history’s transitory nature, the differences in their material conditions defining their coping strategies. In the tetralogy’s narratively diverse films, Jissoji presents a pageant of characters who struggle to lend meaning to existence in ways that range from the timid and introspective to the abusive and blatantly antisocial.
In This Transient Life, impermanence frees Masao, a young man who lives on his wealthy family’s lakeside estate, to pursue the fulfillment of any desire without regard for conventional morality. Not only does Masao forego university life and brazenly reject his father’s cushy job offer, but he seduces his sister, Yuri, and fathers a child with her. When the more tradition-minded Yuri worries that their mother may be onto them, Masao advises her to marry Iwashita, a habitual suitor, to deflect suspicion. Masao blithely argues, when his devoted sister is horrified that he would be willing to let her have sex with another man, that she should be “above all that”. And when Yuri, still trapped in conventional notions of doomed love, suggests that they double-suicide to avoid the shame of discovery, Masao rejects even death as meaningless, thus prolonging his life and its perpetual pursuit of personal freedom – a freedom that includes sex with prostitutes; a threesome with his aging mentor (a celebrated sculptor who’s carving a Kannon for a nearby temple) and his young wife; and, in the name of impermanence, abdication of any sense of responsibility toward his and his sibling’s child. “Children are” after all, he claims, “a dream of adults; and a dream is only a dream.”
In Mandara, one principal, Shinichi, a recent dropout of the student revolutionary movement, joins an agrarian cult for whose adherents religious ecstasy links eroticism and the transcendence of history. For him, that transcendence is defined not in traditional terms (as reincarnation or nirvana) but as a regression – not just a metaphorical one, and not simply a regression to an earlier time in his life, but a regression to a time before his own birth. Mandara, whose title evokes the definitive aesthetic illustration of impermanence – an art form Buddhist monks meticulously fashion only to destroy once it’s completed – and whose storyline blends references to the recent and more remote pasts (1960s student radicalism and the 1871 Paris Commune) with settings and situations that imply some kind of dystopian near future or alternate present, articulates a notion of history as contingent and ultimately irrelevant. Jissoji’s portraits of the bizarre cult (members engage in video voyeurism, rape games, and near-nude wrestling matches with invisible gods) and absurd student revolutionary cells (the bungling “Unity and Solidarity” group seems more concerned with chastising the “Dadaists” than with any direct political action) highlight the failure of social responses in the face of impermanence. The only potentially viable solutions to that dilemma, he seems to indicate, are personal.
In Poem, Jun, the unwitting bastard son of the mega-rich Moriyama, a small part of whose vast estate Jun is charged with keeping up, responds to the rootlessness of his existence by embracing form over content in every aspect of life. The young man obsessively follows daily rituals, practices calligraphy, and meticulously traces the patterns on the gravestones at a local cemetery. He fashions himself not just as a guardian of tradition – he insists, for example, that the two legitimate Moriyama brothers, a floundering lawyer and a cynical playboy, should not sell their increasingly senile father’s land, lest its ancient forest be destroyed – but as a keeper of form when no one else seems concerned with it. Though he acknowledges the identity crisis in Japanese society circa 1970 – as one brother quips, there is nothing in Japan worth defending anymore – Jun insists that that crisis is all the more reason to diligently preserve life’s highly ritualized forms until some satisfactory new content may fill them. Though Jun’s response to the problem of impermanence is diametrically opposed to Masao’s, Jissoji treats it with equivalent gravity. As for the brothers, they too seem acutely aware of the futility of their actions, but their reactions to that futility are more practical, more instinct-driven, than Masao’s or Jun’s. They conduct rather ordinary if spendthrift lives, their only aim, to exhaust their father’s assets before they die, their only notable indulgence to the temptations of formality, an interest in erotica.
That Jissoji’s ideas about impermanence and its implications are not intrinsically bound to the historical or political contingencies of his own time is made clear by the 13th-century setting of A Faint Dream. Despite the centuries-wide chasm separating them from Masao, Jun, and Shinichi, Jissoji’s fourth feature’s characters are confronted with the same cognitive dissonance, caught between the rarefied rituals of the court and the experiential quality of their otherwise futile lives. The dreamlike film – it may take several viewings to concretize plot points and even to identify characters positively – fixes on the beautiful Shijo, Gosho’s favorite mistress. Shijo gradually becomes disillusioned with life at court after officials wrest her newborn daughter from her and shuttle her between the various “protectors” the former king arranges for her. Shijo’s adventures bring her into contact with a group of charismatic Prayer Dancers whose frenzied chanting is the antithesis of the Tendei and Shingo schools of Buddhism practiced among the aristocracy. At a turning point late in the film, the former royal courtesan now nun happens upon a common prostitute who, though attracted to the Dancers’ promise of heaven to anyone (“even women, even whores”) who ceaselessly prays to Amitabha Buddha, nevertheless admits she enjoys her job too much to give it up. This encounter leads Shijo to the realization that she’s been living “in a fog” and prompts her to wonder whether her own past may be but a faint dream.
Though peppered with irony, exaggeration, and even moments of slapstick, Jissoji’s films take all his characters’ responses to the problem of impermanence, no matter how obsessive those characters may be, no matter how extreme, how at odds with one another their reponses, seriously. Consequently, the tetralogy feels like research rather than assertion, investigation rather than revelation of a discovery. The filmmaker, unlike his characters, is not articulating a case or advocating a position in the face of the problem of impermanence so much as following all lines of thought through to their conclusions, even if each is found inadequate. At the same time, Jissoji’s first four films represent a kind of visual research. While Masao apprentices with a master sculptor, Jun practices his calligraphy, and Shijo perfects her watercolors, Jissoji explores film form, creating a strikingly derealized aesthetic that parallels the impermanence his characters experience. The director’s technical mastery of visual design and penchant for elaborate camerawork underscore the emotional distance between the audience and the characters and storyline. Compositions emphasize graphic rather than human elements; moving cameras often deliberately ignore characters’ actions; extreme wide and extreme long lenses distort spatial relations; and editing (of both picture and sound) frequently privileges disorientation over continuity. Since the films are unified visually more than they are philosophically, one is tempted to compare their director to Jun, someone who trades in regimen, style, form, even if it’s unclear whether meaning will eventually follow. Jissoji, like Jun, creates form without positing a univocal meaning. He, too, is a keeper of form.