As his digital masterpiece Deep In The Valley gets a release  in Japan, Indian Auteur manages to stop director Atsushi Funahashi in his tracks and indulge him in a tete-a-tete on all things cinema.

Please could you elaborate, for us, on your history and growth as a cinephile.

I was a pure cinephile when I was in my teens and was watching as many movies I could. Usually in Japan it’s very hard to get into college so you have to study a lot. That’s why the high school forces you to quit sport- I was playing tennis since I was a kid- but the school forced me to quit and two years were spent in preparation of an entry into college. And I absolutely hated it, because it’s forbidden. A friend of mine encouraged me to come and watch films, and so I did. That one movie turned into a life long passion. But the movie that had a great impact on me was Samuel Fuller’s White Dog.  I just had to spend time watching many Fuller films and it was cheap at around 600 Yen (around 6$). It is a reasonable cost for high school students.

Spielberg’s Duel is like Fuller’s White Dog, but it is a monster film, and scarier, perhaps, than Jaws.  It shocked me, you know because it’s merely a dog, or a simple machine(truck), but through the utilization of mise-en-scene and cinematic language, you can make them appear scary and monstrous. And I thought it is really wonderful, and this revelation helped me discover my desire to be a cinema director. Though the worlds of direction or mise en scene were not directly or immediately apparent to me, but that was the moment I wanted to know what was happening behind the scene, or behind the camera.

Therefore I turned to watching many movies during the time: Howard Hawks, the French New Wave, Victor Erice, Fuller, John Ford; all mixed together. At the same time, I was also reading the Hitchcock/Truffaut book. When I was in High School, each time I saw a Hitchcock film, I went back home enthusiastically and read the book. They were some of the most memorable and fun moments of my High School years.  So that’s how I grew without studying the curriculum as such, and it was translated into Japanese by Hasumi san (legendary Japanese film critic Shigehiko Hasumii).  And it was out of curiosity that I fell in love with cinema and that’s how I decided to enroll into the cinema studies programme.

While you studied cinema, thus, you also simultaneously became involved in film criticism and writing on film. How did that come about?

I started writing when I was in college. It was really not a professional career as such, but I started with the college magazine and we did not have the web at that time. Yet, I was writing on cinema all the time.  Mainly, Taiwanese New Wave: Hou Hsiao Hsien, Edward Yang or the French director Chabrol (Claude Chabrol). Everyone was talking about Godard or Truffaut, so during my years as a film critic, I spent time trying to understand Chabrol(especially since I was a big fan of Hitchcock). He is definitely one of the most underrated filmmakers of the New Wave.

Contemplates.

Even Rivette is one…

So do you think criticism in a way helped you define your aesthetics in cinema, because when we saw your film, John Ford was quite invisible, but the influence of Hou seemed quite apparent.

Of course, it’s always interesting to watch films and say that such and such filmmaker knows John Ford, or is influenced by him. Or that he knows Hou Hsiao Hsien, or Howard Hawks. It’ a given in cinema, that when you watch unknown filmmakers, you can notice their influences. It’s a form of criticism towards the cinema when we constantly refer to its past. There are many filmmakers who behave that there is no history in cinema. I recently saw the Indian film Kaminey, where the director (Vishal Bhardwaj) was cutting rapidly and inserting sound effects (reminiscent of music videos) almost senselessly, yet believing that no one has done that before. So criticism helps one understand the different relations in cinema, and provides an important backbone to know where to take your influences from and where to take them to.

We have to realize that we are living in an era of disability. Because when you look at the studio era cinema, it’s not just the director but the light man, the production guy or the costume designer who make artistic choices.  And for example when you look at Shochiku  Studio or all the films by Masaki Kobayashi, for instance Hara Kiri, it will definitely seem so much richer. Because it has many layers of creativity and technical adroitness involved, and that remains the same in Japan or in the American east coast.  But when no studios exist, you need to go independent. You do not have anyone to cushion your fall or share the blame of a bad film with you. You have to take the decisions yourself. So you can’t find a great production designer but you really need to be critical in terms of selection of shot, and what you can do with a camera. You are forced to be economical with technique. When you don’t have a production unit or a great location, then you have to shoot like John Cassavetes. You have to make great cinema out of a scene that involves eating spaghetti on the dinner table. (Laughs)

So you really need to be critical and thoughtful as to what you can do out of the limited resources available to you. I still believe that the language of cinema is advancing, for when you see a Pedro Costa film you see how he is advancing. When you see look at his earlier films, it feels like a cinephile movie ala John Ford, but when you look now, you can see how there is a formal growth in terms of his ideas of cinema. Observation of what exists in historical terms in cinema and pushing forward the language, I think is a task that filmmaker has to do, and should try to do and criticism definitely helping in developing such aesthetics.

Coming to your film, it’s one of most beautiful shot films in the digital format. Was the choice of digital an economic one or purely an aesthetic one?

Honestly, I never found a beauty that is unique to the digital technology or one that is exclusive to the film format.  So my answer would be pretty much, yes and no- Though I still prefer film- I like to shoot on 16MM or 35MM. When you project film, you have darkness 24 times each second between the frames. As Godard says:- “24 times death a second”… so it’s death/light, death/light, death and light in an alternating pattern.  So that’s why I like to shoot on film. And when you shoot on digital, the light exists in a completely flat state.

But that is only my personal preference. But for Deep In the Valley, we had to shoot on digital purely due to budgetary concerns. But, to be honest, I don’t want to classify what’s really unique to film or what’s unique to digital, because I’m very optimistic about digital technology and its importance to film culture, as well as its future.

The use of the close up(CU) and color plays an interesting role in your film. One notices that you use a series of CUs for inanimate objects and arrive at the focal point of the narrative after shooting places that may not be directly related to the ongoing plotline, something that reminded us of Ozu’s Pillow Shot? Was the Pillow Shot in your mind while shooting those sequences? One singular CU in the film was the shot of the husband and wife hands clasping together…

Oh Yes, right…It’s very interesting and I’m very happy to hear about the Pillow Shot in India(Laughs). I cannot believe that people would be discussing the Pillow Shot here(smiles). My idea was that you don’t need to shoot the past in black and white and the present in colour. It could be vice versa. That’s why I decided to shoot the past in color. So when I was shooting I was thinking about what is common across this time-span, the period between the past and the present. For example, if you look at the leaves, they are in color as I thought their nature would not have changed in the time span. But the people are shot in black and white, since their existence is not permanent, and mutable.

About the close-ups of the inanimate objects, I teach at a film school, and I don’t show everything, but in bits and pieces, and you don’t want to show everything. For example, in Tarkvosky films you start with a part of land, parts of people, little by little, and then move to more people, so that you can comprehend the situation between time and atmosphere. Therefore, such gradual exposure is something I learned while watching films, reading about films and writing about them.

There is a dialogue in the film which says: “When you look at the Pagoda you don’t look down at it; you look up at it, you admire it, and become fascinated.” Does this dialogue summarize the entire theme of the film? That in turns works in a binary: Like a conflict of: old/young, past/present, color/black and white.

Yes, it does, and it also provides a cinephile’s gaze to cinema, that we look up to it. I think so, and also in the context of cinema history too. People want to make movies out of the context MTV has created for them. To reminiscence what is in the past and to connect that with what is happening in the present is much more deep and profound. The dialogue between the two in this film came out very interestingly. Because I started this film as a documentary, and I just started interviewing people. So you really don’t know when the line(between past/present) would become crucial. Because this line only became pivotal when I started editing the film. And interestingly, this is one inspiration I learned from this man, and coincidently we found the original film of the Five Story Pagoda (the central theme of the film) during the shoot. And I was thinking about how we can put them together, and so the gaze of the Pagoda symbolizes us looking at the cinema screen together, and thus I included it in the film.

It’s always a challenge for me to present the character within the environment. I studied filmmaking in the US, in New York. One thing I thought was quite different from what I had learned about cinema, a technique that people in the US take for granted – shoot their master shot and then jump to a close-up. But Hou Hsiao Hsien never does that, he puts the camera in the right place to capture the energy of the environment. This is one of the biggest differences I felt between the aesthetical tendencies of USA and Japan. Therefore, when I was shooting Deep in the Valley, my intention was to represent a mise en scene that captured the entire environment in one shot.  I did the location scouting and then put pieces together to form the story. Besides, within this film I wanted to have the environment carry this feeling of time passing by, so I had the long take present that axis. That is something Hou-Hsiaon-Hsien does all the time.

Repetition also plays an important element within your film, like the old lady cleaning in the graveyard becomes an important event in the film, and it becomes like a memory of a space, even the narrative is elliptical in nature…

Thank You(smiles). I really like the montage in Ozu films when you look at the beginning you have a very different feeling and by the end of the film it becomes something else, it’s because you have experienced the enjoining content. So one of the things I aspire to do was that when you look at the spaces inside the graveyard, you think it’s just a stone. But as the film progresses the graveyard becomes an element representing the lonely stones, which the caretaker lady also explains. So when you reach the end of the film you do have a different feeling about the stones beyond their tangible existence and I hope that the audience could feel that.

Does the film represent the current tendency of Independent cinema in Japan? And how difficult is it to make films of your personal choice?

There is a growth in guerilla flmmaking in Japan; which I define not just in terms of using a low budget but also using the materials that you have in hand. So it’s not just about writing a story and then approaching a subject, but one can pick a small handy camera and go shoot in the subway or even in the middle of the city. Thus, because of the budget restriction there is no dream situation, that you write a script, do location scouting and then shoot.  For example, in Deep in the Valley we just had three or four people.  So sometimes I was acting as the boom mike holder or the lighting guy.  My last film, The Big River had a fourty people crew in US but in Japan I was shooting with four people. Because of the budget restriction and the reluctance of the cinema industry to give money, there is a growth in the guerrilla filmmaking culture in Japan. It is a purely reactionary stance.

So is this growth anyways related to the situation of cinephilia and film criticism in Japan?

Not really… there was a huge growth in cinephilic culture during the 80s and the 90s. But nowadays, people don’t come to the movie theaters even if it’s for Hou Hsiao Hsien. People don’t even know him. In the 80s or beginning of 90s, when the economy was good in Japan, there was a culture which Hasumi san created or atleast most of. It was auteurism that existed in Japan. So if you said a new film by Godard, Edward Yang etc was to release, people rushed to the theater to catch it, but this culture does not exist in Japan anymore.

The young crowd doesn’t go to the movies (except Hollywood), and it’s the television Industry that has become the major source of funding for the films. So there are many films that carry the names of the actors and the storyline on the poster but they don’t put the name of the director.

Isn’t it disappointing to realize that the director no longer exists?

It’s almost like going back to the studio era in Hollywood of 1930s, when no one cared who the director of the film was. So it’s very disappointing for a filmmaker like me.

What the status of film studies in Japan?

The realities of film studies and filmmaking are apart. But when you compare the situation to US, it’s still a little better. In the US, film studies exist completely in the form of academicism, for they don’t really care what’s  going on in the cinematic field. All they care about is scores and how many times their dissertations are referred to. In other words the academics don’t want to mingle with the society. But in Japan and France, well-written film criticism does influence or evoke people to go to the right movies. In US, it does not exist. In Japan such power did exist in the 80s but it is waning.

Who are your favourite film personalities?

I love Hawks, Fuller, Guru Dutt, Ray, Kiarostami, Ophuls, Budd Boteitcher, I love his works a lot. Jarmusch, Wenders, Ozu, Mizoguchi..too many.. I also love the writings of Tom Gunning, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Hasumi san, Serge Daney, Raymond Bellour.

FILM REVIEW: DEEP IN THE VALLEY

Tags: Atsushi Funahashi, Cinephilia, Deep in the Valley, Independent Cinema, Interviews, Japan

Posted By IndianAuteurTm | Thursday, November 5th, 2009 | Filed under Film Festivals, News, World Cinema