Remembering Ichikawa Jun

焚我殘軀， 熊熊聖火，

生亦何歡， 死亦何苦。

為善除惡， 惟光明故，

喜樂悲愁， 皆歸塵土。

憐我世人， 憂患實多，

憐我世人， 憂患實多。

The verses were taken from the Chinese novel, 倚天屠龍記. When I reflect upon Ichikawa-san and the themes of his films not long ago after the screening of his last film, Buy A Suit, the passage came naturally to mind.

On this day last year, I received the news of his passing away. Here is dedicating the verses to his memories. I wonder what he would say if I had the chance to show them to him.

Temple, Video Game, Wheel and Fighter Jets

The experience of watching The Sky Crawlers (Oshii Mamoru) is like visiting a Buddhist temple with an attached video game room. While one gets to be enthralled by some of the most stunningly animated dogfight sequences, other parts of the film slow to a crawl by depicting the routine daily life at the airbase. And Oshii was obviously stingy with the time allocation to video game as oppose to meditating. I can almost hearing the snoring in the cinema when audience has to endure disproportionately long depiction of mundane and repetitive stuff for short moments of explosive aerial action.

That is of course the message itself. Instead of just embedding it within the film through images and sound, Oshii conveyed it by inflicting it upon the audience.

As laid out as part of The Four Noble Truths (四諦) in Budhism, human beings' crave for sensual pleasure, extermination and existence is the origin of sufferings.

Thus, in the alternate reality of the film where world peace is attained, human created the war game industry when two companies were contracted to fight each other, for consumption;

Thus, the pilots were recruited from a species who remain forever young and can be reincarnated after death and be sent back into 'combat';

Thus, the excruciating pain when the species fell in love, carried on with the meaningless 'killings', be killed, reborn with no memory retained, sent back to the same base and carry on with the routine life.

Thus, I was watching the rotating wheel go round, intentionally embedded by Oshii or not.

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"4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days"

"4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days" is as much a personal story of two Romanian girls as it is a political fable of Romania. Set in 1987, Communist Romania, a college student, Otilia, was assisting her pregnant roommate, Gabita, to have an illegal abortion. As they overcame obstacles and moved closer to performance of the procedure, Otilia internalised the struggle and became increasingly emotionally involved. The experience had driven her to review her own relationship with boyfriend who came from a privileged family.

The characters and the story were well developed. But I feel the real achievement of the film lies in its political commentary focusing on the Romanian society at the eve of the revolution- in two year's time, the Berlin Wall fell and with it the end of communist rules East of the Iron Curtain. In the case, of Romania, the communist regime's collapse was marked by the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu in December 1989. After all, as the end credit suggests, the director had alternately named the project 'Tales from the Golden Age'. Here what I gather, at the risk of reading too much:

Just like other ordinary Romanians, Otilia and Gabita had long been resigned to ordinary life within the communist-ruled society. They were happy to study and work as the Party directed and enjoy the occasional capitalist consumables (cigarettes, Tic-Tac etc) obtained via the black market.

Just like other ordinary Romanians, when Gabita encountered troubles that could not be resolved legally, they resort to underground channel. Whether the matter is satisfactorily tackled, help seekers are inevitably taken advantaged of by the 'service provider' who often practice the same trade in state-controlled organizations. As if it was her second nature, she concealed some facts and intentions even from Otilia.

Otilia too was constantly looking over her shoulders for any government agents or informers. She became even more distrusting of the system when she was invited to her boyfriend's place to attend his mother's birthday party.

At the 'upper-class' family's home, the parents and their elitist friends were dining and chatting away not unlike their Western-Europe counterparts- completely oblivious to the hardships in 'common' Romanian families and pending revolution. Nor do they give much regard to the Otilia whom they deemed as having a different (read: lower) social background.

Otilia finally decided that she should disassociate herself from the elite-class, a social status that, before this dreadful day, she long to be associated with but was now just a disillusion. She ended her relationship and left the boyfriend's house.

Just like other ordinary Romanians, both Otilia and Gabita found it hard to adjust to aborting an ideology that has before been ingrained in their minds. The jarring sense of lack of security was epitomized in the scenes in which Gabita pleaded with Otilia to bury the fetus in way she deemed appropriate and Otilia was roaming around town in search for the appropriate burial place in the cold, harsh winter night.

When she finally returned to met Gabita in the hotel, they found that the restaurant was out food. A wedding party, presumably hosted for the elite class, had just ended and the waiter was kind enough to fetch some of the party's left-over food for the two ordinary Romanian girls who emerged from the topsy-turvy night knowing that they are facing a very different world as before.

Just like other ordinary Romanians, post-Ceausescu.

偶開天眼覷紅塵，可憐身是眼中人

The couplet came from the last two lines of a poem by Wan Guo-Wei (王國維), a Qing Dynasty scholar. My translation:

"Through the lens of enlightenment I chance upon glimpses of humanity,

and realize with resignation that embedded within is my destiny."

Written a hundred years ago, it reflects the writer's fatalistic outlook. In present day, the couplet curiously describe the medium that we know as films. Indeed, when we watch a film, we are seeing the visions as framed and captured by the director through the camera lens. The director is employing the images to tell us a story and as we laugh and cry and sigh and rage as the narration progress, we become emotionally invested with the character(s) on screen. We feel for them as we internalize the destiny of the characters as our own.

Beside being a good metaphor, the couplet's spirit is being practiced by some directors as well. They point the cameras to peek a glimpse at humanity and, as audience, we are spellbound by the deeper messages beyond the sights and sounds. As intended by the director or otherwise, we engage in a virtual Q&A session with ourselves about the meaning of life, both within and without the context of the films. The only answer to that can only be that we are to find out by practice as we live our own lives.

Some of the directors that I adore, whose works evoke the philosophy of the couplet are:

Abbas Kiarostami (in particular, Close-Up), Imamura Shohei (in particular, The Pornographer), Theo Angelopoulos, Edward Yang, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Ichikawa Jun.

p.s. Wang Guo-Wei died of suicide when he was 51. Here is the full text of the poem, 浣溪沙:

山寺微茫背夕曛，鳥飛不到半山昏。上方孤磬定行雲。

試上高峰窺皓月，偶開天眼覷紅塵，可憐身是眼中人。