Bert Cardullo,
Out of Asia: The Films of Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Abbas Kiraostami, and Zhang Yimou; Essays and Interviews.
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008
ISBN: 1443800252
UK£14.99 (pb)
200pp
(Review copy supplied by Cambridge Scholars Publishing)

The title of this book is long enough for me to pick an argument with before I start. Its length, I suppose, is the minimum necessary to describe the contents: interviews of four disparate directors by a skilled and experienced interviewer, together with filmographies, bibliographies and commentary on some of their films. But to go the length of citing each full name, and then to westernise the order of just one of them (that of KUROSAWA Akira), set up for me a needless wariness of the contents. I don’t think this is just perversity on my side. It’s not as if there’s an unwritten rule that Japanese artists reverse their names and Chinese don’t. There was once a kind of cold-war stability when our Chinese artists westernised their names and their Chinese artists didn’t, but this has broken down under much greater freedom of movement and as some of these artists try to make it ‘easy’ for us challenged westerners. In the week that I write, I saw two Chinese documentaries in one programme at Sheffield. The Doc/Fest programmers played safe and used the full name as supplied at each instance. It was only by several emails, that I worked out that one of the directors (Tian Ai ZHANG) had obliged by reversing his name-order, and one (ZHAO Liang) had preferred self-consistency (capitalisations my own).

Of course, the need for this disambiguation depends upon individual reader’s expertise. For most Japanese names, I could distinguish given and family names, but not for other languages. For others, it will strike them differently. Nor would I accept the defence that everyone knows who Kurosawa was. This is not a book that is aimed at specialists, since they would prefer material on their subject in the director’s mother tongue, or at least in more detail. Inverting Kurosawa’s name and not others sets up doubts as to the correct citation of names that might be less familiar to some readers. ZHANG Yimou is cited as Zhang, Yimou in his own bibliography but as Yimou, Zhang in that of Kurosawa. In the Kurosawa section, names of the same artists are in western order in Cardullo’s essay but in Japanese order in Kurosawa’s interview. But in the section on Zhang, the names stay in Chinese order in both parts. The only necessary rule is that writers say how they are tackling this, but Cardullo does not.

So does that finally clear the reviewer to concentrate on the contents? Regretfully, no. The editor of this site rightly expects to see quotations in reviews. But if I am to concentrate on the interviews, which are the meat of the book, the question of uncredited translation will rear up. I can best illustrate that by getting started.

Bert Cardullo is a perceptive interviewer and sets up some interesting comparisons between the directors. But readers of this review will not need telling that two of these directors have been dead these long years. The interview with Kurosawa took place in New York at the end of 1992, some time ago, even though this was, however, at the end of his career. Although I am not one of those to dismiss Kurosawa’s last few films, I was interested to read that Kurosawa said then “On Rashomon my cameraman was Miyagawa Kazuo, and I think black-and-white photography reached its peak with that film” (p. 19).

One of the persistent themes of Cardullo’s interviewers is the use of music. Kurosawa mentions his oft-repeated concept of counterpoint and that “from Drunken Angel onward, I used light music for some key sad scenes” (p. 24). Since I cannot recall Kurosawa ever using “light music”, it’s not hard to see that what is intended is “lightly use”. So what should we quote Kurosawa as saying? Cardullo does state in his preface that the conversations “were all conducted in the interviewee’s native language, save the interview with Ray, which was conducted in English; in each case the director in question supplied his own on-site translator and interpreter”. (p. x) Here’s the rub: we are not told whether these uncredited translations were ever seen or approved by their nominal authors. I cannot vouch that they are even as seen. So, it makes sense for me to concentrate on the interview with Satyajit Ray – which I think is the strongest – conducted “in the summer of 1989 at his home in Calcutta” (at that time Kalikut was still often called that, but seldom now).

Although Ray’s world might be the least modernist of these film-makers, his rooting in his emphatic own culture means that he is least likely to be waylaid by any problems of orientalising. So, his comment about foreign painters, that “Without them, we wouldn’t know what the India of the eighteenth or nineteenth century looked like” [p. 48] has authority. Ray is also the most eloquent in capturing his own aesthetic: He starts with the characters, the “relationships, the setting and the possibility of telling the story cinematically – in motion. Other aspects that engage me are the structure of the picture, its internal contrasts, and the dramatic rhythm.” Ray goes on to refer to nava rasa – “the interplay of moods as expressed by various characters in a work of art” (p. 52). Tellingly, he later lambasts: “But if you make a film about people who belong to no particular place, no particular country really, but who exist in a world wholly concocted by the cinema – an upper class world with certain rarefied mores and morals – then you can only make entertainment, never art” (p. 54). The barb about the “upper middle class” would identify the aim of this answer, even if you had not read the question, as Bollywood movies of the time he was speaking. Without that qualification, the criticism surely has a much wider application. In contrast, he singles out Ozu as having “a devotion to the geography of actors in their setting” (p. 57). Ray, incidentally, also shares the musical asceticism of the other directors in this book: “I hate films, by the way, that are drenched with over-romantic music” (p. 66), and points to lapses where other directors have ceded choice of music in a film to others.

Roger Macy,
U.K.

Created on: Saturday, 19 December 2009