THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
that Rudd may have been read out of the movement years ago. This strikes me as neglecting Rudd's talent as a crowd-arouser, and as being hard to square with WUO's invective before his surrender,...
...with Rudd playing an as yet unknown role, sprung at least one man from prison (Timothy Leary), set off bombs in public places, and established an underground organization of sufficient sophistication to keep 40 to 60 underground activists out of the FBI's hands for seven years...
...Lewis wanted to know...
...Customs at a press screening for being pornographic...
...Just as Oshima wanted to offset the potential for pornography in his script, so Kumai wanted to shift our attention away from Osaki alone and toward Mitani as well...
...Lefcourt had worked things out with the DA beforehand...
...No one wanted to make a federal case out of it...
...The reason for this kind of treatment in Kumai's film, as in Oshima's, is to shift the natural emphasis of the story...
...And partly it is because, Commonweal: 659 on account of its ahistorical approach, the film has been shot almost entirely on sound-stage interiors...
...The pristine, specially constructed quality this gives to each set and the patent movie lighting become the opposite of something pornographic...
...The final image of the film is a remote high-angle shot in which Mitani hurries along a busy city street in Borneo, presumably on her way back to her own family in Japan, and is lost in the crowd...
...What sort of man would subject his country to such a risk...
...Reporters liked him, were in no mood to rake up ancient history, never considered his revolutionary ambitions more than a nutty dream of youth anyway, and forgave him in their stories without ever taking time to consider what, if anything, there might be to forgive...
...Even in the hut where Osaki lives now, the evening light is often roseate and the effect almost that of an idyll...
...Osaki's memories, which are sound-stage reconstructions like the sets in Oshima's film, also have a clean and fabled atmosphere...
...The Sixties were a rat's nest better left alone...
...Oshima's movie aims at being accordingly sensational itself, with explicit scenes of copulation and various perversions...
...Indeed, the entire movie is nothing but such scenes...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...For the role of Mitani is not just the simple frame for Osaki's story that it at first appears...
...On the one hand, its freedom from sordidness spares Osaki unnecessary shame...
...The curious thing here, characteristic of the press, was the momentary intensity of its interest in Rudd's surrender, just as it had pursued him so relentlessly at Columbia years ago...
...5, 1976], which was seized by U.S...
...Where had Rudd been the last seven years...
...Director Kei Kumai was also dealing in this film with a disgraceful episode in the sexual history of Japan, and he did so in a way comparable to In the Realm of the Senses...
...It is a very moving conclusion...
...More specifically, the film tells the story of one such woman, Osaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), who is shipped off to Borneo during her childhood, is forced into prostitution after working as a servant in a whorehouse there, and only gets to return to Japan many years later...
...As Rudd stood there in his blue shirt and tan slacks, looking like a graduate student in poli sci, I wondered if he was struck by the ease of his return...
...It is as if Mitani were disappearing back into the very anonymity from which she rescued the now dead Osaki, the relationship between them having been a personal fulfillment and a momentary transcendence of history for them both...
...This strikes me as neglecting Rudd's talent as a crowd-arouser, and as being hard to square with WUO's invective before his surrender, but Kirkpatrick Sale has certainly paid attention to these things and may be right...
...That, in a depressing number of cases, has been the death of thousands of people, political crisis, military takeover, and wholesale repression...
...Not only did he announce them clearly, he backed them up with action...
...3 Billboard (elf) for sapphire panes of silence...
...What he intends to do now is anybody's guess--he hasn't said--but what he was trying to do nine years ago was to lead a revolution in the United States, and he said it all the time...
...they might not see him again until 1984...
...No one was interested in pursuing the question asked by the reporter in the crush outside: "Did you accomplish anything, Mark...
...Although she does serve primarily to narrate that sto~T and as a pretext for Osaki to tell it, the fact that she should do so is in Kumai's view almost as significant as the story itself...
...On the other hand, the abstracted quality produced by Kumai's refraining from extreme realism this way makes Osaki appear to us what she is to Mitani: a figure of legend, a woman whose endurance makes her heroic...
...They called it Amerika, with a "k," but in their hearts they knew they lived in the softest of all possible worlds...
...But such questions were very far from reporters' minds in the days following Rudd's return...
...What sort of reasons would justify it...
...She is so dispirited by her realization she is now an outcast that she is too weak even to hold her head under the water...
...The United States is so far from having a revolutionary potential that the WUO's efforts all came to nothing, but in another, more volatile country they might have achieved what similar revolutionary undertakings in Latin America delivered during the same period...
...Because her treatment at home is her bitterest humiliation, Mitani's esteem for her assumes a crucial significance in her story...
...The fabled treatment which Kumai gave to Osaki's story is, then, an attempt to reflect Mitani's attitude toward it...
...No longer a source of degradation, having been a karayuki-san has now become a source almost of honor...
...Free of the absurd legal entanglements that followed, it finally opened in the U.S...
...Black revolutionaries like the Panthers were on the edge, they used to say...
...At the end of Sandakan #8 Mitani is in Borneo t o find a graveyard Osaki told her about where the karayuki-san colony buried its dead...
...Wasn't it customary for a defendant to give some account of himself in such circumstances...
...This seems quixotic now, to say the least, but his intentions then were perfectly serious...
...One of the reasons the Weathermen went underground was to prove their bona tides...
...Back in the Sixties the SDS radicals used to excoriate themselves for what they called white skin privilege...
...Could Lefcourt offer anything by way of guarantee the defendant wouldn't skip for another seven years7 His assurances weren't worth much the last time...
...But the film is otherwise free, in both Osaki's present and her memories of the past, from any compulsion to show us squalor...
...They give the historical episode the detached, abstracted feel of a fable...
...It's the sort of mythic twilight in which deities repose...
...Last year at this time a film that was creating a certain controversy was Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses [Commonweal, Nov...
...When the woman on whom this character is based was caught, the sensation was considerable in Japan because her case brought out so much about sex that had been suppressed in ~Iapanese society...
...Osaki's most affecting moment in the film comes when, as a result of her brother's rejection, she tries to drown herself in her bath...
...2 Bobbin, shuttling gauze of summer air...
...this summer, and is still playing here in New York...
...An important part of Osaki's story--to her, perhaps, the most important--is her ostracization when she tries to return to Japan...
...Because Kumai's treatment thus enhances and expresses the relationship between the two women, making it, rather than Osaki's story alone, the subject of the film, that treatment is really far more interesting than the similar one in In the Realm o/the Senses...
...The historical issue in Sandakan #8 is the existence in Japan earlier in this century of "karayuki-san," young women who were sold off by their impoverished families into indentured apprenticeships as prostitutes in other parts of Asia...
...For them it was truly liberty or death, but the white middle-class student revolutionaries could always pack it in, go home, pick up their schooling and careers...
...14 October 1977:660...
...But it was only a gesture...
...This is partly because the two lovers' story, which actually occurred in the thirties, has been stripped of all historical context and detail...
...After she has found and restored this burial ground, she notices, as her final line the film informsus, that the graves are all set with their backs turned to Japan...
...They don't idealize or belie Osaki's suffering, but they don't try to objectify it either...
...The romantic dusk lighting where Osaki sits telling her story shows her to us as the object of Mitani's reverence...
...Living out her old age in abject poverty in Japan, Osaki tells her story to a young woman she meets, Mitani (Yoko Takashi), who is a university student doing research in women's history...
...Local and federal prosecutors apparently want to forget the whole affair, but the Weather Underground Organization...
...Now another Japanese film, Sandakan #8, which has only just arrived here though it was made before Oshima's film, seems to have very much the same quality as Oshima's...
...Even her brother, who loves her so much he cripples himself in his anguish when she is taken away, will not take her back into his home again after she has been a karayuki-san...
...When Rudd finally got into a courtroom on the fourth floor of the Criminal Courts building,' Judge Milton Lewis momentarily resisted Lefcourt's application for Rudd's release in his own recognizance...
...For all that, however, what strikes us about the film is the fact that it doesn't seem particularly raunchy...
...Curious not because the press assumed Rudd's surrender meant the game was up, but because it neglected so completely what Rudd had been trying to do...
...It is the true story of a gangster and a moll so passionate and devoted t o him that, after murdering him at his own invitation, she cuts off his penis as a keepsake...
...His reception was goodnatured and friendly in the extreme...
...THOMAS POWERS TWO WOMEN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN The Japanese, it seems, like to make a fable out of history...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 JOHN FANDEL DAMSELFLY Chopper for the Emperor of ants...
...When Mitani first comes to the hut in which Osaki lives, she shrinks back at the sight of nightcrawlers nesting in the filth there...
...That esteem reverses her status in Japanese society...
...How, Rudd must have asked himself, can you make a revolution in a country like that...
...After seven years underground in the belly of the monster, Rudd was welcomed back, given a final final warning about running off again (now Mark, this time we really mean it), and sent home to his parents in Maplewood, New Jersey...
Vol. 104 • October 1977 • No. 21
