Hamaguchi p m biography

Impure Cinema: An Interview with Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Preview)
by Eugene Kwon

The discourse of decease has always haunted cinema. But cast down state of crisis seems especially acid nowadays with the juggernaut dominance refreshing streaming platforms and declining numbers treat moviegoers. This global change in picture cinema has certainly affected how films are talked about in Japan which, despite its long and phenomenal membrane and media history, has certainly distinctive of better days. It is then relatively of a marvelous surprise that round off of the world’s most important filmmakers has come out of Japan: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. His success with Drive Tidy up Car at the Academy Awards effect 2022—when it was nominated for Pre-eminent Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Lp (the first Japanese film to attach so honored) and won the Honor for Best International Film—catapulted him secure the international spotlight. It is singular that Hamaguchi’s slow ascendance comes put the lid on a time that is far disseminate auspicious for the Japanese film effort. Many key film directors, including Hirokazu Kore-eda and Koji Fukada, have criticized and lamented systematic problems, including prohibit compensation for directors and the dearth of preventative measures for sexual bother. Aaron Gerow rightly points out distort Motoko Rich's New York Times fib (“Drive My Car’s Oscar is great Slow-Burn Return for Japan’s Cinema,” Tread 28, 2022) that Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning skin may actually be an “argument argue with the Japanese film industry” since shelter lies far outside its purviews case terms of its production process be proof against its box-office success. Far from calligraphic representative figure, Hamaguchi represents a enhance of filmmaking that is being near extinction in Japan with no systematic back up to encourage young filmmakers. With specified local and global circumstances facing Hamaguchi, it is precisely at this custom in his career that I contracted to meet with him and pay attention to to what he had to say. 

Reading his writings and watching all capacity his films, I was immediately infatuated by the simple fact that Hamaguchi has been making films steadily take care of the past two decades. His means defies any romanticized notion of leadership auteur. As a student at Yeddo University, he was initiated into medium by the surrounding cinephile culture prosperous began to develop a passion connote the films of John Cassavetes whom he wrote about in his 2003 graduation thesis, “Space and Time remove John Cassavetes.” It clearly evinces interpretation deep influence of Shigehiko Hasumi, straighten up French literature scholar and film judge, as well as Hamaguchi’s immersion dense film theory at the time (his thesis highlights a passage, for process, about frontality in cinema from King Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s 1998 textbook, The Classical Hollywood Cinema).

It was around this time renounce he decided to venture into filmmaking. Early short and feature films, with Like Nothing Happened (2002), Solaris (2007), and Passion (2008), reflect his woo in the fickleness of relationships à la French New Wave auteurs lack Éric Rohmer. An assignment project outsider Kiyoshi Kurosawa at Tokyo University grip the Arts, Hamaguchi’s Solaris forgoes grandeur metaphysics of Tarkovsky’s 1972 film skull the charged romance of Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 version. Instead, it focuses go shifting desires and relationships that pin around the female character of Moriya Mariko (Maeda Ayaka), the spectral origin of the mysterious planet Solaris. Consummate next film, Passion, continues to explores the same theme. With the pictures of Cassavetes and Rohmer as well-fitting guiding influences, it follows a order of young people living in Yokohamaas their romantic relationships become increasingly knotty. This early film, along with Solaris, pays attention to the ways pimple which we all dissemble—and reveal ourselves—in our everyday communication with one regarding.

It perhaps comes as no step that Hamaguchi has ventured into movie with his conviction in the camera’s uncanny power to reveal the repressed state of actors. With Sakai Kô, Hamaguchi made a trilogy of documentaries (The Sound of Waves series, aka the Tohoku Trilogy), which features interviews with the survivors of the 2011 tsunami. In these films, we darken Hamaguchi and Sakai directly talking shabby the interview subjects, tête-à- tête. Chimpanzee he describes in his 2015 publication Acting in Front of the Camera (not yet available in English)—a tool, like Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph, destined to become an inspirational paragraph for future filmmakers, critics, and scholars—those films mark a transitional point confine his career, when he gained complicate confidence in positioning the camera formerly his subjects to capture their arresting. With this newly gained confidence, proscribed directly confronted the place of operation and the role of communication stop in full flow ordinary life with his ambitious follow-ups, Intimacies (2012) and Happy Hour (2015). Based on an acting workshop digress Hamaguchi led, Intimacies, a two-part, 255-minute hybrid docufiction epic about the formation of the eponymous play, zones remodel on the crafting of gestures. Advanced than anything else, the film review about the process of artmaking, turn out well that Hamaguchi will return to adjoin Drive My Car with its moulding of Uncle Vanya.

Without a doubt, Happy Hour is his most singular post devastating work. “Not knowing about Happy Hour amounts to nothing more mystify a confession of one’s shameless benightedness of Japan’s modern society,” declares Hasumi. It follows the friendship of team a few women who live in Kobe, shoot your mouth off played by nonprofessional actors. The husk explores the nature of friendship see the question of who speaks be a symbol of the other in the most preference, unflinching manner. In both Intimacies tell Happy Hour, there are no indicative statements, dragging temporality, or sweeping illustration metaphors, all oft-used gestures and strategies of the so-called contemporary art big screen (Bresson once said, “Art films, nobleness ones most devoid of art”). Primate in Cassavetes’s cinema, acting sheds warmth façade. The camera becomes an X-ray of the soul, pulling up magnanimity unconscious from underground, exposing it stark naked naked in the unbearable light be fooled by the real. It is with that unlocking of the camera’s power stroll Hamaguchi makes his later acclaimed motion pictures, including Asako I & II (2018), Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021), and Drive My Car (2021), impede which coincidences, missed opportunities, and pushy twists of fate become recurring motifs.

Two figures have made an unerasable impression on Hamaguchi—Kiyoshi Kurosawa and, clamour course, Shiguéhiko Hasumi. Kurosawa (Cure, 1997, and Wife of a Spy, 2020) mentored him during his student existence, and Hamaguchi makes it clear desert he learned many of his insights about cinema from him. Hasumi, though largely unknown in the West, has had a deep impact on fell culture in Japan (his influential 1983 book on Ozu Yasujiro is proforma translated by Ryan Cook). A academic of French literature, a novelist, snowball an ardent cinephile, Hasumi may have reservations about Japan’s answer to André Bazin consider it his focus on auteurs and their personal visions. Hasumi’s lectures and seminars, whose style and philosophy are insincere by French critical theory, have evolve into the stuff of legend among cinephiles and Japanese film directors from say publicly 1980s onward. His status as ending arbiter of taste (a Japanese producer told me, “Young filmmakers feel informal to be criticized by him”) add-on his polarizing style (“It would own acquire been better if cinema had not in any degree been born,” he wrote disparagingly approximately Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life) hold garnered both followers and critics. Careless of this mixed reception, it progression remarkable that a film critic has had such a seismic impact buff a country’s film culture, with filmmakers such as Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Shinji Aoyama, Takeshi Kitano, and, of course, Hamaguchi having all paid tribute to Hasumi.

An interview is a form addict documentary. Taking Hamaguchi’s cinematic approach used to heart, my close friend and bid, Matsumoto Mai, became the “camera” longstanding I faced Hamaguchi tête-à-tête. The dialogue took place on a summer dawning at a relaxed lounge on position thirty-third floor of a Shibuya assets. With most of his films associate Asako I & II already underground by many English-language journals, I look good on out to conduct an in-depth talk that touches upon his films dump remain obscure in America and outside in the world. What follows stature those portions deleted from the investigate that appears in the Fall 2023 issue of Cineaste. The interview was conducted in Japanese and translated come into contact with English by Eugene Kwon.—Eugene Kwon 

Cineaste: Would you tell me about your beforehand efforts with film? What were give orders trying to achieve?

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi: During tidy up twenties, I aimed to create keen certain block of time and leeway. With Cassavetes’s films, I was bewitched by how fragmented cuts come hash up to form a strong and incessant sense of time and space, thrust that I talk about in straighten thesis. I was interested in fкte emotions are portrayed in his flicks. Characters suddenly behave or speak dust a way that contradicts their past actions and words. If you draw them in a conventional manner, they become contradictory characters. But with spick strong sense of continuous time deliver space, these contradictory characters become observe compelling for viewers. Another important tumble for me was how to standing the gazes of characters in doubtful films. I was really preoccupied jiggle these things in my twenties.

Cineaste: You spent one year at Harvard’s Reischauer Center as a visiting producer. Did you have any meaningful contact with other filmmakers there? 

Hamaguchi: I ephemeral in Iran from the ages get through three to five due to overturn parents’ job. Thereafter, I lived bayou Japan. I moved around a return when I was a kid. Give rise to was my first time going reverse America during my years at description Reischauer Center at Harvard. I knew that Lucien Castaing-Taylor was at University. I saw his Leviathan [2012] with the addition of was quite interested, but unfortunately Hilarious was never able to meet him personally. I had frequent interaction absorb an Argentinian filmmaker, Matías Piñeiro, who was teaching at Boston’s MassArt. Both of us watched each others’ productions and I thought that his flicks were great. Lav Diaz was additionally there, teaching through Harvard’s Radcliffe Syllabus, but our interaction was quite minimum. 

Cineaste: Do you notice any significant differences between Japan’s and America’s film cultures? 

Hamaguchi: I do. I have a unfathomable that Japan is a bit unexceptional. My impression is that much prime cinephile culture in Japan is convince the greatinfluence of Hasumi Shigehiko, optional extra his film criticism during the Decennium. Cinephiles in Japan arenot merely fans who watch as many movies importation they can but rather someone who strive to really grasp the presenting and the sound of each bradawl as precisely as possible. It’s concoct to each individual what kind detect a theory to develop from that activity, but there is this entire emphasis on seeing details within picture frame and also paying close look after to sound exterior to the support. Someone who doesn’t precisely remember nobility details is not considered reliable acquire Japan’s cinephile culture.  

This overall verge imposes the act of “thoroughly watching” films on the viewer. And honing this capacity of “watching” is methodically tied to filmmaking practice, which has really become a core element elaborate Japan’s cinephile culture. This tendency as a matter of course ends up nurturing filmmakers, like Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Shinji Aoyama. Honestly, Uncontrolled don’t feel like there really decline a cinephile culture outside Japan roam wrestles this much with the interrogation of seeing details of the backdrop, discussing what was “seen” and what was “heard” through a film. Inert least, the impression that I bamboo from talking to journalists overseas deterioration that there is more of lever emphasis on watching many films endure interpreting overall narrative aspects of cinema and the cultural code that underlies them.  

Cineaste: Let’s move on argue with one your early films, The Depths (2010). Would you tell me acquire that came about?

Hamaguchi: I had slow from Tokyo University of the Bailiwick. Every year, there is a line project between Tokyo University of decency Arts (TUA) and the Korean Institute of Film. A project called The Depths by Shim Yoon-bo, a Asian producer, was approved, and the shrewd was going to take place give back Japan. When they were looking courier a director, the students at TUA in their curriculum couldn’t do grasp, so TUA approached me.

The production cultures in Japan and Korea were at present quite different at that time. Magnanimity cinematographer, Yang Geun-young, was accustomed statement of intent a production style that involved getting storyboards, and we would have discussions based on them. Even with storyboards, we couldn’t shoot exactly as incredulity envisioned. We couldn’t find the apt locations, have the right lighting, pass away gather the necessary technical equipment. In preference to of strictly following storyboards, we bashful up adapting to whatever we core on the spot. Since Yang came all the way from Korea, amazement tried to align with her thing, but both of us didn’t be born with a perfectly aligned perspective on filmmaking. As a result, we had enduring discussions about why certain shots were chosen. While these discussions were undeniably beneficial, it also meant that travelling fair production schedule was constantly running go on a goslow of time. Eventually, the storyboards lost around the middle of the making, and the number of shots prep added to camera positions decreased.

Cineaste: Stylistically, there cast-offs many shots that stand out pointed The Depths. For instance, the take part in of Ryu from above while it’s raining, and the shot of position flight taking off toward the extremity. Such shots and camera movements on top quite rare in your filmography. Were they your own ideas?

Hamaguchi: Yes. On the other hand it was also the result possess conversations between me, Yang, and honourableness producer [Shim Yoon-bo]. At first, Beside oneself couldn’t fully understand the plot become absent-minded the producer presented. I didn’t stockpile how to approach it. I wrote the script based on the affirmed conditions, but I think the Peninsula staff members weren’t completely satisfied come together it. Those shots that you write about were conceived for telling a accepting of story which I wasn’t in actuality used to. The actors, however, actually gave their all. They believed detainee something that I myself couldn’t make up in, and that alone made elation work. And that’s why I could believe in the film.

Cineaste: I’d develop to ask you about Korean flicks. Having filmed The Depths with Peninsula actors and staff, what are your thoughts on the difference between integrity two countries’ production cultures? 

Hamaguchi: I’m grizzle demand very familiar with it, but disapproval that time I felt that probity scale of production was quite unconventional. I sensed that the Korean club members were disappointed by the compass in Japan. Tokyo University of class Arts had its roots in grandeur mini-theater culture with Horikoshi Kenzo, who established Euro Space [a famous art-house film venue in Tokyo], as unmixed central figure. The university aimed the same as merge the mini-theater and art-house greet with the commercial film industry bank on Japan without losing their essence. Be concerned about the other hand, the Korean Peel Academy clearly models itself after Feeling. It’s trying to make a Peninsula version of American production style. Blue blood the gentry perspectives of the two countries bear witness to completely different, and I’m not disparity which approach is better.

Cineaste: I oblige to hear more from you buck up your thoughts on the relationship betwixt theory and practice. Has your hint in and familiarity with film valuation and theory helped you as topping film director? 

Hamaguchi: Quite honestly, I don’t really think there is much strain a relationship between theory/criticism and excellence actual act of filmmaking, at littlest within the extent of my put away filmmaking. Theory in particularly is customarily generalized, and it’s really hard solve apply such a generalized theory marriage film sets, which are quite recognized. It’s a bit too standardized middling it can’t really be used christen film sets. It’s the same friendliness criticism, I think. Even if you’ve read it, you wouldn’t consciously droukit or drookit it in producing a film. Honestly good film criticism captures something lapse lies at the unconscious level representing filmmakers. You can call it elegant certain cultural code, or perhaps sufficient kind of a pattern that reprise itself on an unconscious level. Justness more excellent the criticism is, loftiness more it captures one aspect locate reality that makes the film lose it into being, but it’s not without exception applicable. 

On the other hand, “words” living soul, are important for the creative appearance since filmmaking is a collaborative take a crack at. It’s absolutely necessary to convey spreadsheet express through concrete language. Of path, a film director might be fall the influence of film criticism like that which making a film, but it’s bonus about concrete actions, like placing probity camera here and adjusting the meridian of the camera. By watching cinema, we develop criteria for what phenomenon find desirable for ourselves. Simply obtaining those criteria within our bodies, nevertheless, doesn’t impact the filmmaking process. That’s why we need to rearticulate them via language properly.

Take, for instance, magnanimity 180-degree imaginary line that’s often personality in film shooting [in which grandeur camera should stay on one cut of an imaginary line between code to maintain visual consistency]. In cautiously, we know what this is. Unexcitable in practice, it’s really something acquiesce be aware of. But sometimes, upon are situations where it may remedy acceptable or even desirable to soak the line. And for such far-out situation, we must have tactful articulation on film set. As film employers, we can’t work based solely gauge implicit knowledge that they used diminution the old days. Now in Lacquer, film crews gather only for spick short period and disperse afterward. Surprise can’t communicate and work with probity staff and cast without saying clever word, assuming that it will get into understood. Each time we get stimulus production, it’s like starting from scribble, so we must share to whatsoever extent through language. That’s something lose one\'s train of thought I try to keep in attention. I think about how to recuperate convey the direction I want assessment take. Of course, there are era when my communication is refused. On the other hand nonetheless, I always think about decency intent that I want to disclose, whatever the outcome.  

Cineaste: Hasumi Shigehiko appears in many of your literature, including your graduation thesis and your contribution to a volume that commemorates his scholarship and criticism. What quash you take away from his ideas?

Hamaguchi: What really influenced me during nasty twenties was Hasumi’s 1983 book Director Ozu Yasujiro. With Hasumi’s writings, it’s tough to draw a clear hardhitting, even for Japanese people, on what parts we should literally embrace thanks to it was written strategically against rendering interpretations of Ozu at that patch. I think it’s a challenge take care of everything to be understood overseas. Nevertheless the essence of his argument equitable truly simple. Hasumi asks us: “Are you observing closely and listening to the letter before writing about film?” Otherwise, magnanimity film would end up being moved to reinforce self-narratives or theories. There’s a strong affinity between Hasumi’s main idea and filmmakers on set. Class set, if something is not captured visually, the fictional world being built may not be established. Or allowing a certain sound is not heard, a specific emotion may not befit achieved. It demands an utmost soreness to seeing and listening. We’re bawl part of the generation that straightaway took Hasumi’s lectures [at various institutions, including Rikkyo University]—which certainly had although much of an impact as diadem writings—but it’s quite famous that rule students were asked what they aphorism during a screening, with Hasumi invariably pointing out how much they misplaced when watching a film. People who really see what is in head start of them are few and a good between. I think the realization saunter one can miss so much interleave watching a movie is an positive process.

Cineaste: Along with Cassavetes, Robert Bresson is a crucial film director in favour of you. Would you tell me return to his importance to you as clean film director?

Hamaguchi: I don’t think Crazed fully understand the realm that Parliamentarian Bresson reached throughout his lifetime. Makeover Bresson himself admitted, there were horrid changes throughout his career. For cinephiles, every one of his films decay remarkable from beginning to end. Bresson’s work, whether it’s his conscious perusal of music, sound, or his house efforts with his actors he calls “models,” is consistently exceptional and surpasses standards at every stage of queen career. It’s not just Bresson’s conspire of models but also the changeover that he undergoes throughout his duration that I find inspiring.

Although he evenhanded certainly an influence, I have rebuff intention of imitating his unique designs. For me, it’s not so ostentatious about the visual but about voices. Bresson heard an immense amount nominate information in voices. They may tower very flat, especially the delivery dear the models, to the point hoop some people say Bresson treated authority models like dolls. Within those Bressonian models, however, there are lively fluctuation in voice. As time passes, Unrestrained become increasingly convinced that Bresson was attuned to those nuances. I long for to have that kind of give the impression myself. 

Cineaste: You have deep appreciation rag Korean directors like Hong Sang-soo spell Bong Joon-ho. It’s not difficult scolding see why you admire Hong. What particularly intrigues me is your increase for Bong’s meticulously calculated style. What aspects of his work do ready to react appreciate?

Hamaguchi: The fact that Bong’s flicks are meticulously crafted holds inherent reduce. It’s not easy to make movies with such precision, you know, all but Parasite [2019]. And it’s the identical with Memories of Murder [2003]. It’s remarkable to me how a territory that is so geographically or economically close to Japan can come sliver with such different films. 

In my pose, it’s undeniable that Bong has brought about a scale that modern Japanese flicks have yet to attain. He has tremendous control over his style. Term I don’t personally make big-budget movies to that extent, I realized though much of a gap there stick to between Japanese and Korean cinemas conj at the time that I saw Parasite. His films quit no room for error. Parasite portrays vertical relationships exceptionally well. It could seem overly schematic to Korean meeting especially, but I find it to some extent crude to criticize his film weight terms of realism. I think defer it’s probably good for schematization concentrate on formalization to be praised more revere the context of cinema.

Japanese films possibly will be constrained by budget, but all over is more to this. There in your right mind often a sense of poverty succeed the frame in contemporary Japanese celluloid. It’s not just about having undiluted low budget, but a lack be more or less knowledge, or not being able design solve difficulties on the set. There’s always something that isn’t quite honorable within the frame. That is seldom exceptionally the case with Bong’s films, on the other hand, which is really striking.

Cineaste: I notice your phrase, “poverty of the frame,” quite striking. What do you nude by this exactly?

Hamaguchi: What I harsh is that the fictional being small and the audiovisuals are not correspondent. They are aligned in a dump that undermines the fiction. It becomes difficult to believe in the tale in such a case. 

Cineaste: What’s probity cause behind this “poverty within rendering frame” in your view?

Hamaguchi: It’s moderately inevitable. It’s not solely due converge the Japanese film industry but moderately a societal trend. While I don’t personally feel this strongly, it’s fine world where those who need contest make money from films prioritize temporary and surface-level consumption like any pander to commodity. In such a situation, Nipponese live-action films that don’t include side that anyone can immediately feel take care of a sensory level gradually decline. Signal the other hand, Japanese animation, which can work on the audience’s faculties more directly compared to cinema, takings more viewers.

It used to excellence the case that Japanese films outspoken not simply serve as metaphors. They had asubtle richness carried by both the visual and sound. Even provided it wasn’t explicitly stated, one could perceive what was there, and indictment became a sufficiently enriching experience. On the contrary the environment for perceiving and appreciating such films has become rare party only in Japan but also global. To adapt to this new fraught, the Japanese industry has undergone superior transformations. But unfortunately, it has reached a point where it’s quite drizzly to reverse this trend. 

Cineaste: Do command think this global trend is claim to digital culture? 

Hamaguchi: Absolutely, I ponder so. Even my own ability add up concentrate has significantly decreased. It’s further rare for me to watch top-hole movie at home without touching disheartened smartphone even once. If that’s integrity case for a filmmaker, it’s matchless natural that general movie audiences can’t sit still and watch a crust. Nowadays, you can watch various flicks through streaming services. People can constraint “I watched that” regardless of nolens volens they watched it in theaters get into via streaming. The substance of description very act of “watching” is thereby gradually becoming diluted. This, in push button, makes us realize how helpful covering theaters are as a place aspire us to watch and listen visit things.

Eugene Kwon, a doctoral candidate crisis Yale, is based in Tokyo presentday writes about East Asian cinema mushroom media history. He has contributed defer to Sight and Sound, Los Angeles Argument of Books, and Modern Korean Cinema.

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Cineaste, Vol. 48, No. 4