Kon Ichikawa has made some great movies, including this one, but provides a considerable challenge to any auteur theory that expects/seeks thematic continuity in the oeuvre of a director.

Born in 1915, Ichikawa began in manga (now called anime). This presumably goes some ways to explaining his strong sense of visual framing. (As for Kurosawa movies, widescreen is not an option: to see their movies any other way is not to see them!).

Ichikawa has directed 85 films, the most recent in 2002. The two that used to be screened most often in America was the harrowing 1956 "Burmese Harp" about a Japanese soldier who, after Japan’s surrender in 1945, wanders through seemingly endless fields of unburied corpses trying to walk home (or at least out of Burma), and "Fires on the Plain" (Nobi, 1959) in which the Japanese soldier on the Philipines at the end of World War II go beyond desperation into cannibalism. Along with Kobayashi's Human Condition trilogy, Ichikawa's two WWII movies are the most powerful portrayals of the losing side of the "Great Pacific War."

The only other Ichikawa films I’ve seen are the charming "Being Two Isn't Easy"(1962), the highly stylized tale of a kabuki "Actor's Revenge" (1963), the great masterpiece of Olympics documentation Tokyo Olympiad (1965), the 2000 "Dora Heita," a bloody samurai/gangster-clase comedy in Kurosawa's Yojimbo/Sanjuro tradition (from a screen treatment by Kurosawa), and "Enjo" (1958), which has been variously titled in English "Conflagration," "Flame of Torment," and "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion." The last is the title of the Mishima novel that it illustrates. It is very hard to formulate any common themes or to find any visual pattern in the Ichikawa films I’ve been able to see, though the despair of "Enjo" is at least somewhat connectable to the defeat and destruction of the war of "The Burmese Harp" and "Fires on the Plain."

When I saw "Enjo" for the first time long ago (on a date, though, offhand, I'd classify it as one of the worst possible movies for a first male-male date!), I thought that the film aimed to make the audience forgive the very antisocial act of burning down a "national treasure," the exquisite ancient temple that had survived American fire bombing of Japanese cities. Watching it again on video, I think that Yukio Mishima thought that the stuttering boy who destroys what he loves more than anything (or anyone) else—the temple—was justified, because it was being profaned by ignorant and unreverent (and mostly American) tourists and by an abbot whose mistress bears a son the night that Mizoguchi Goichi (Ichikawa Raizô) sets the fire. Mishima himself was given to excessive reactions to what he considered the trampling of what he considered the glories of Japaneseness, culminating in his theatrical suicide.

There is also the Buddhist perspective which may be that attachments, especially attachment to things, make attaining enlightenment impossible.* Against such musings is the lack of enlightenment—and even of the prime Buddhist virtue of compassion—of any of the characters. (It also seems to me to have been in short supply in Mishima's himself.)

That Goichi burns down the temple is established at the very beginning (so noting it is not a "plot spoiler"!), because he is in police custody, not responding to interrogation. The flashbacks begin with him bearing a letter from his father to the abbot Tayama Dosen (Ganjiro Nakamura) who had been a friend since student days of the elder Mizoguchi. The abbot takes the now-fatherless boy in, provides for him, sends him to school, and considers him a possible successor despite Goichi’s painful stutter. The abbot is very disappointed in Goichi, and Goichi is very pained by what the abbot believes are his failings.(The abbot reflects on some of his own failings and sees the conflagration as due to his sins and unfitness as its custodian.)

Goichi is shy and venerates the temple more than anything else, including any possible vocation as a priest. He forms a fairly insidious relationship with a nihilistic, crippled student Tokari (Tatsuya Nakadai considerably more vicious than as the body attached to The Sword of Doom, with a limping form of the swagger he brought to the part of the gunslinger in "Yokimbo").

Goichi suffers inarticulately, but visibly. If he were an American teenager now, he might go on a killing rampage. He is, instead, the 1950s, Japanese version of the puzzle of violent lashing out. Except, as I said, I am less convinced now than I was the first time I saw "Enjo" that Mishima and Ichikawa consider it senseless violence. I still feel sorry for Goichi, and perhaps it is a latent pyromania in me that find the conflagration of that old, polished wood quite beautiful.

More likely, it is the cinematography of Miyagawa Kazuo. Most of the film is very dark (and I remember this being true when I saw it projected, so it is not the VHS)—dimly lit, but in sharp focus. The scenes are beautifully framed. I don’t remember any camera movement, and frequently there is very little movement of the actors either. Miyagawa filmed some of the greatest of Japanese films, including "Ugetsu" and "Sansho the Bailiff" for Mizoguchi. "Rashomon," "Yojimbo," and some of "Kagemusha" for Kurosawa. Thus, he did much to define the look of classic Japanese films, at least the American canon of classic Japanese films. (The Japanese I meet know nothing of these films. It’s not that they have an alternate canon of postwar Japanese films, but that they cannot conceive of anyone being interested in old black and white films. Perhaps, I meet the wrong Japanese, and there are admirers of the heritage of the great masters, though Donald Richie, the person most responsible for introducting Japanese art films to American audiences, agreed with me when I asked him. Mishima also seems better known in America than in Japan now.)

BTW, the novel is also illustrated in color (mostly gold, in my memory) in Paul Shrader's highly stylized (and, in my opinion, fascinating) film "Mishima."


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* I have not attained enlightenment, and like beautiful things, including beautiful old buildings. I'm only reporting the doctrine of non-attachment, not living or prescribing it.




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS