Machiko Kyo stars in Akira Kurosawa masterpiece, screening as part of Japanese diva series at Film Forum
RASHOMON (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Saturday, April 9, 11:15, 2:50, 6:20, 9:50
Series continues through April 21
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
One of the most influential films of all time, Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 masterpiece stars Toshiro Mifune as a bandit accused of the brutal rape of a samurai’s wife (Machiko Kyo) and the murder of her husband (Masayuki Mori). However, four eyewitnesses tell a tribunal four different stories, each told in flashback as if the truth, forcing the characters — and the audience — to question the reality of what they see and experience. Kurosawa veteran Takashi Shimura — the Japanese Ward Bond — plays a local woodcutter, with Minoru Chiaka as the priest. The mesmerizing work, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, is beautifully shot by Kazuo Miyagawa; Rashomon is nothing short of unforgettable. Rashomon is screening April 9 as part of Film Forum’s “5 Japanese Divas” series, featuring four weeks of films starring Kyo, Isuzu Yamada, Kimuyo Tanaka, Setsuko Hara, and Hideko Takamine, who play strong, determined women in such classic works as Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1966), Mikio Naruse’s Okaasan (1952) and Flowing (1956), Kurosawa’s The Idiot (1951) and Throne of Blood (1957), Keisuke Kinoshita’s Carmen Comes Home (1951) and Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953), Sansho the Bailiff (1954), and Street of Shame (1956), among others.
Brian De Palma lets his Hitchcockian roots show in Sisters, even going so far as to hire Bernard Herrmann to compose the music for this low-budget horrorfest starring Margot Kidder as a detached Siamese twin and Jennifer Salt (Eunice from Soap) as a writer for the Staten Island Panorama, the author of such columns as “The Lost Borough,” “Save the Ferry,” and “Why We Call Them Pigs.” You’ll guess the twist about twenty minutes in, but you’ll still have a lot of fun with the usual load of De Palma sex, gore, and violence. Sisters is screening in a rare 35mm print at BAM on Friday at 7:30, kicking off the “De Palma Suspense” series, and will be introduced by writer-director Noah Baumbach (The Squid & the Whale). The series continues Saturday night with Paul Williams starring in De Palma’s cult favorite Phantom of the Paradise, which will be followed by a Q&A with producer Ed Pressman and costar William Finley. Carrie and Body Double screen on Sunday, with The Fury on Monday, Obsession on Tuesday, Blow Out on Wednesday, Raising Cain on April 18, Femme Fatale on April 19, and the great Dressed to Kill closing things out on April 20.
Kôbô Abe and director Hiroshi Teshigahara collaborated on five films together, including the marvelously existential Woman of the Dunes in 1964 and The Face of Another two years later. In The Face of Another, Tatsuya Nakadai (The Human Condition, Kill!) stars as Okuyama, a man whose face has virtually disintegrated in a laboratory accident. He spends the first part of the film with his head wrapped in bandages, a la the Invisible Man, as he talks about identity, self-worth, and monsters with his wife (Machiko Kyo), who seems to be growing more and more disinterested in him. Then Okuyama visits a psychiatrist (Mikijirô Hira) who is able to create a new face for him, one that would allow him to go out in public and just become part of the madding crowd again. But his doctor begins to wonder, as does Okuyama, whether the mask has actually taken control of his life, making him as helpless as he was before. Abe’s remarkable novel is one long letter from Okuyama to his wife, filled with utterly brilliant, spectacularly detailed examinations of what defines a person and his or her value in society. Abe wrote the film’s screenplay, which tinkers with the time line and creates more situations in which Okuyama interacts with people; although that makes sense cinematically, much of Okuyama’s interior narrative, the building turmoil inside him, gets lost. Teshigahara once again uses black and white, incorporating odd cuts, zooms, and freeze frames, amid some truly groovy sets, particularly the doctor’s trippy office, and Tōru Takemitsu’s score is ominously groovy as well. As a counterpart to Okuyama, the film also follows a young woman (Miki Irie) with one side of her face severely scarred; she covers it with her hair and is not afraid to be seen in public, while Okuyama must hide behind a mask. But as Abe points out in both the book and the film, everyone hides behind a mask of one kind or another. The Face of Another is screening April 7 as part of Film Forum’s “5 Japanese Divas” series, featuring four weeks of films starring Kyo, Isuzu Yamada, Kimuyo Tanaka, Setsuko Hara, and Hideko Takamine, who play strong, determined women in such classic works as Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1966), Mikio Naruse’s Okaasan (1952) and Flowing (1956), Akira Kurosawa’s The Idiot (1951) and Throne of Blood (1957), Keisuke Kinoshita’s Carmen Comes Home (1951) and Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953), Sansho the Bailiff (1954), and Street of Shame (1956), among others.
Based on the 1943 novel by Graham Greene, Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear is a classic Hitchcockian noir about an innocent man caught up in a dangerous web of mystery and intrigue. Ray Milland stars as Stephen Neale, a man who, as the film opens, is being released from an asylum after serving time related to the death of his wife. His freedom doesn’t last long, as he stops at a local fair and visits the fortune-teller, who accidentally helps him win a guess-the-weight cake that some very bad people want to get their hands in. Out on the run, his only friends are Willi (Carl Esmond) and Carla (Marjorie Reynolds), foreign siblings who run the charity organization the Mothers of Free Nations, the sponsor of the fair. Throw in a séance, the Blitz, an old blind man, an alcoholic private investigator, a book called The Psychology of Nazism, a disbelieving Scotland Yard detective, and wonderfully shadowy camerawork and the result is a tense, exciting spy tale filled with plenty of twists and surprises. Ministry of Fear is screening as part of 92YTribeca’s Closely Watched Films series, hosted by Elliott Kalan and featuring special guest speaker Jackson Publick.
