Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

 Ma Rainey by Sterling Brown

I've been thinking of what James Baldwin once said about artists being in-service to the people they represent. It is something that is often taken for granted, but such a responsibility exacts a great toll. This toll is even greater for black artists in the United States where one is so much more exploited and looked down upon than others. This play is about a black artist and her band coming to grip with this apartheid-exploitation, while at a recording session. The play takes place 100 years ago and was written in 1984, but all the complaints and debates of the band have been in the news for the last decade. 

The band is made up of a very diverse group of characters: a devout trombone player leads them, a philosophically-minded intellectual piano player, a nihilistic trumpeter that is convinced that he is the greatest artist of all of them there (including Ma Rainey) and the bass player who is the audience-surrogate and just wants to get this day over with. They are the backing band for Gertrude "Ma" Rainey one of the first professional blues singers and mentor to Bessie Smith. They spend the day of the recording session engaging in dialogues about their fates as black musicians and Rainey and her hot-headed trumpet player duel back-and-forth over everything including a chorus girl that Rainey is involved with (Rainey was bisexual). The setting of the play is Chicago rather than Pittsburgh where August Wilson's Century Cycle usually takes place. The setting does a great job at adding a layer of claustrophobia to the tensions that unfold at the recording session and the tensions between the trumpeter and everybody else ensures what type of play this will be (Chekhov would've been proud of how well Wilson executed everything). Historical fiction is always going to have its own complications, but I think August Wilson does an excellent job at it here.

 Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (The actual song.)

As to the film itself: it was a very vibrant film given the tension in it. Every single actor nailed it and the costume designer is to be commended. I expected the adaptation to be well given that this movie was produced by August Wilson acolyte Denzel Washington.  Viola Davis, Glynn Turman, and of course the late-Chadwick Boseman (in his final film performance) give spell-binding performances here. Though I can only imagined what this would've looked like on the big screen, I am still glad to have seen it.

Princess Mononoke (1997) directed by Hayao Miyazaki

 "I am not attempting to solve the entire world's problems. There can never be a happy ending between humanity and ferocious gods. Yet, even amidst hatred and carnage, life is still worth living. It is possible for wonderful encounters and beautiful things to exist. I will depict animosity, but that is in order to show the fact that there is something more precious. I will depict the bondage of a curse in order to show the joy of liberation. What I will show is the boy reaching an understanding of the girl, and the process of the girl's heart opening up to the boy. In the end the girl may say to the boy, 'I love you, Ashitaka. But I can't forgive human beings.' The boy will smile and say, 'that's alright. Won't you live together with me?' 

This is the kind of film I want to make." – Hayao Miyazaki's April 19, 1995 pitch for Princess Mononoke

 

How The Sun First Rose on "Japan"

This film is neck-and neck with Castle in the Sky (1986) for my favorite Hayao Miyazaki film. This film was the first of many of Miyazaki's "final films." This film has one of the fiercest female protagonist of his his movies up to that point and along with Miyazaki's environmentalist themes, had a strong look at Shinto spirituality and an amazing allegory of the founding of that country that we call Japan.

An Emishi boy, a civilization of Yamato settlers and iron workers led by a female warlord who is an amazing call-back to the female antagonist of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), and the various forest kami–especially wolf kami–that have taken a human girl dressed in Jōmon-era clothes as their own interlock with each other over the land and each other's existence during the early Muromachi period. From these three mutually-hostile groups will be the creation of we now call "Japan." San aka the titular Princess Mononoke represents not simply the natural world but, pre-historic Japan at it's roots—symbolized by her Jōmon clothes; the antagonist Lady Eboli represents represents the contradictions of modern civilization and the brutality of the Yamoto conquest of the islands that they would call Nippon: she's kind to all the outcast of that era of society, but she takes all her rage on the land and the kami that live in it. In the middle is the co-protagonist Ashitaka who represents the Emishi not so ancient as the Jōmon, but one of the ethnic groups that resisted easy assimilation or subjugation to the Yamoto hegemony: they were until the end (or beginning depending on how you look at it) of the Muromachi period offering an alternative to what we now think of as "Japanese culture" on the main island of Japan—much closer to the land than the Yamoto, but still a human civilization. This movie reminds me of Maya Angelou's On The Pulse of the Morning, but in a Japanese context. Nobody has a reason to trust one another—and all the reasons to destroy each other. But it is shown in  the little moments that when they do work and relate to each other with compassion, they can make great things happen. Tragically greed, prejudice, and a simple lack of understanding means that history will eventually play out…as tragedy.

It is amazing how beautiful the artwork is here—95% hand-drawn (this was the first Studio Ghibli film to use CGI). Miyazaki closed out the 20th century (and what he thought was his career) with this film: Princess Mononoke is a true masterpiece of not simply anime, but animation cinema as a whole. There wouldn't be another film of this caliber for me until Your Name (2016) almost 20 years later.

Twenty-Four Eyes (1954) directed by Keisuke Kinoshita

 Hotaru Koi by Sekiya Toshiko

This is the first film I have seen by film-maker Keisuke Kinoshita and as far as first impressions go, this is a good one. I knew that Kinoshita was a contemporary of Akira Kurosawa and like Kurosawa made propaganda films for the Fascist government of WWII-era Japan. Also like Kurosawa, he turned decidedly leftward after the war and made many films criticizing the fascist government including this film. While Kinoshita would never find the same popularity outside of Japan as Kurosawa, he was massively popular inside of Japan during and after the war. If you asked any cinephile outside of Japan what the best Japanese film or film in-general of 1954 was you would certainly get Seven Samurai, yet Twenty-Four Eyes was the consensus pick by Japanese critics for 1954.

Twenty-Four Eyes is an interesting historical epic because it documents The Great Depression and World War II not through the eyes of famous Japanese figures or even politically-active dissidents like Akira Kurosawa's No Regrets for Our Youth (1946), but a school-teacher and her first 12 students on the eve of the Depression. It follows them as both the economic downturn and the rise of fascism hits there rural island. All of them would suffer during this time and the war would be the ultimate disaster for them all. The film is a typically 1950s melodrama, but the way it handles how these larger historical forces affected this little area is what admire about this film. While it is a bittersweet film, it still has some hope for tomorrow and contains a possible jab at Bicycle Thieves (1948) of all things at the end. 

1954 was a big year for Japanese films—seriously. The fact that Kinoshita has two critically-praised releases (along with Kenji Mizoguchi) tells how good he was. This film also is more of what I consider a true feminist film as oppose to the films of Mizoguchi which I consider proto-feminist.