Pigs and Battleships

"Why didn't you get killed in Korea?"

Postwar Japan was a nation in flux. The country was experiencing about as much structural, political and societal change in five years as it had in the previous five hundred. Entire castes disappeared, the monarchy was disempowered and the nation was opened up to Western capital. It is in this context that Shohei Imamura made 1963's Pigs and Battleships; a brutal and devastating satire that contemplates the destructive relationship between the US occupation forces and the local yakuza in an unnamed port city home to military personnel.

The film opens with a few notes quite similar to "The Star-Spangled Banner" before the soundtrack and scene reconsider and morph into a depiction of US servicemen marauding through the town's red light district. Kinta (Hiroyuki Nagato) is a young hustler and low ranking yakuza working on getting some Americans into a cathouse. A conflict becomes immediately apparent between the story's "pigs," the foreign army and criminal elements who each exploit the populace, and each other. Kinta bridges the gap between the two as a petty outlaw who dresses American in his varsity jacket, aviator sunglasses and baseball cap. With the occupying army keeping loose reigns over most local matters, yakuza like Kinta have a wide range of allowable behavior including exploiting sex workers, selling drugs, and even cornering the pork market. The dual worlds that Kinta and the crime syndicate both operate in are representative of a Japan struggling to find a new profile for itself. Imamura clearly lamented the effect the inroads of American influence had made while not romanticizing or wishing for Japan's fascist past.

PAB calls for Japan to turn away from both the disorganized yakuza lifestyle and the social corruption that comes with the transient and exploitive US forces. Imamura lays out where the current path would lead, to a place where each would take advantage of the next for the pettiest of gains and to the pigs running amok, literally in one scene. Haurko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) is struggling to forge Imamura's desired path but the family pressure to become an American's kept woman and her inability to convince her beloved Kinta to leave the yakuza lifestyle gradually break her down leading to the film's most viscerally affecting scene. PAB, from start to finish, is purposefully callous and raw on aesthetic and emotional levels. The passion and cruelty are equally savage with victims constantly mocked and the lover's embrace resembling a mixed martial arts cage match. The two protagonists start the story pretty low and sink hard and fast into deeper misery with only minor moments of redemption. The powerful depression is contrasted with a soundtrack that would have fit any number of contemporary patriotic US war films, with a brief respite in the last shot with taiko drums coming to prominence for a redemptive tease before being swarmed again by the effects of the occupation.PAB was Imamura's fifth film, but the first after he was freed creatively from the conservative reigns Nikkatsu films had put on him. The man could frame a good shot, but any innovative camera work in the film is secondary to his creative storytelling. Abandoning a character or storyline would be a huge flaw in the hands of a lesser storyteller but Imamura's skills put him at the forefront of Japanese New Wave cinema in the 1960's. He himself said he liked "to make messy" films referring both to storytelling techniques and his unromantic portrayals of society's dregs. Would only that other filmmakers' messes be half as brilliant.

PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS is screening at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Saturday 5 January and Wednesday 9 January.

The Price of Sugar

The oppression of a European aristocrat

For over two decades the human rights and global justice communities have reported on the gross abuses perpetrated against Haitians workers on Dominican cane plantations. Every few years there is a spike in coverage with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the media publishing a new sets of documents on conditions that often approach chattel slavery. Judging by the early coverage given the new documentary The Price of Sugar it seems that time has come again. The film relates the tale of Father Christopher Hartley, a white priest who dreams of leading black people to freedom.

Narrated by Paul Newman, TPOS is neither technically astounding nor repugnant; it is a competent documentary that avoids the simple point & shoot format without being remarkable in any way. Director Bill Haney weaves a few series of still shots into the film, including some very striking images.

Haiti's economic struggles have existed since slavery was introduced to the island. The forced overpopulation that came with economies designed solely for export, not for sustainability in their own right, has plagued many Caribbean islands, none moreso than Haiti. The French blockade that followed independence in 1804 was only the next in a long line of international attacks against the Haitian economy The United States alone has invaded the country some ten times and today continues to interfere, causing political instability that kills every attempt Haitians make to improve their living situation. It's that political and economic instability that leads many Haitians to seek employment in the Dominican Republic, a poor country that offers relative luxury of the sort a resident of Baghdad might experience in Detroit {"Hey, this place is an oasis of prosperity and peace."). The dearth of domestic opportunities also leaves Haitians vulnerable to those who would exploit them in the worst way just across the border. That context is crucial to understanding how Haitian cane workers in the DR have been brought to such a state. Pity that none if it is provided in the film.

Instead it focuses predominantly on Father Hartley, the fabulously wealthy son of European aristocrats and his struggle against the incredibly rich Vicini sugar barons. The film lionizes him to the extent that it offers the idea that the cane cutters couldn't really survive without him. The perverse power dynamic between shepherd and flock that led one Haitian to refer to him as "a messiah" is not explored nor even commented upon in passing. Nor does the film challenge Hartley when he absurdly claims that the cane workers are "my people." Nor is is explained why there is nary a word of kreyol to be found in a film about Haitians living on Hispaniola (another power dynamic ignored). Hartley has led an interesting life, and his story probably would make a fine tale in the hands of a great filmmaker. But this film, from it's title on down, purports to be about the human cost of sugar. It's unfortunate in a couple of ways that it largely avoids the subject. 1. The historical, social and legal contexts remain a mystery to audiences. 2. Most audiences likely to see the film will recall the white hero, and not the system that has made it so hard for Haitians to successfully fend for themselves, nor their part in it as they pour sugar over their Wheaties.

THE PRICE OF SUGAR is screening daily at the Gene Siskel Film Center from 4-10 January.

"Ruins are an accident in slow motion."

German director Florian Borchmeyer's documentary Havana: The New Art of Making Ruins opens with shots of Havana's crumbling built-up spaces spliced with what appears to be 1950's vacation footage showing happy folks on yachts from what is intended to signify Cuba's glorious past. Borchmeyer then spends the next twenty minutes introducing his five characters who, through clear, concise sound-bites, lay out the thesis that Cuba (the five subjects) lives vicariously through it's past (their decaying domiciles). It's an interesting if unconvincing idea but it's certainly engaging during the initial presentation. Problem is, the film keeps going for another hour and change, becoming less convincing and more frustrating until hitting the unwatchable mark at around 70 minutes.

This wreck starts with the introduction of Totico, a building super who is so obsessed with pigeons that it cost him his marriage and continues through a homeless tai chi adherent, a traumatized woman (also essentially homeless), an aging dissident and a censored writer. Their first contributions to the film are fascinating but as their lives become a little more clear it's painfully obvious that they are in no way representative of Cuban society. Exploring the targeted, neglected and peripheral populaces in any nation will paint a depressing picture, a necessary tool for Borchmeyer to make his thesis even remotely convincing. The poor method and analysis the film offers are unfortunately enjoyable when contrasted to the film's biggest flaw, the gross repetition. Some of the characters repeat each other and themselves almost verbatim. The rehashing of the same idea over and over again leads to glazed eyes and distraction, making one think that the director intends to persuade audiences through hypnosis.

There are two moments that show a little of the film it could have been. A scene with Nicanor, the elder dissident, is introduced with his grandson playing a first-person-shooter game on a computer. "Aha!" one thinks, "Here comes the contrast between the future and the past," but the path is left unexplored. The second brief glimmer of hope comes when António José Ponte, the censored writer, begins to put forth a reason why the architecture of Havana is crumbling. "Aha!" one thinks, "This pretentious blowhard is going to stop name-dropping and give us some real insight." Instead he lays all the blame at Castro's door, offering the theory that it was a plan of sorts, to make ruins out of the city. A fifty-year plan by Castro to turn the Campoamor Theater into worn bricks? Seems as unlikely as the prospect of anybody watching this twice.

HAVANA: THE NEW ART OF MAKING RUINS will screen at the Gene Siskel Film Center on Sunday 13 January and Thursday 17 January.

Comments and discussion are welcome.