A colleague reminded me the other day that an article I wrote on Fukasaku Kinji was no longer on the net. The piece, which I originally wrote forNewCinema From Japan News, Vol. 2 (January 2000), printed in conjunction witha Fukasaku retrospective at the Rotterdam Film Festival, had been slightlyrevised and put online at Asian Film Connections along with some of my other work. (It also appeared in Japanese in Eiga kantoku Fukasaku Kinji no kiseki [Kinema Junpo, 2003]). When that site went private (without telling me, I might add), all my articles there disappeared. My colleague's inquiry has inspired me to return this article to the Internet.
InFukasaku Kinji's world, to begin a yakuza movie with the Bomb, as with Battles Without Honor and Humanity(Jingi naki tatakai,1973), is not only to create a symbol of the nihilistic, nearly apocalypticrealm of corrupt, internecine struggles that will ensue, but to fix ahistorical marker that delineates the core of much of his work and makes himone of cinema's unique historiographers. The Bomb did not simply designate thefirst realization of nuclear horror, it prompted the end of the war and thus,to many of Fukasaku's generation (he was born in 1930), the total collapse ofall the values - authority, nation, honor, etc. - they had been force-fed inschool. For them, the explosive leveling of Japanese buildings and institutionsmeant less the end of the world than the thrilling opportunity to act in total,anarchic freedom while starting from scratch.
Thatdidn't last long, what with the recovery spurred by selling parts for the Korean War and the high economic growth of the1960s. So even with all the Fukasaku films that begin with images of theimmediate postwar, the narrative center is often the frustration over the lossof that moment of liberation. If the violent yakuza, unruly hoodlum, or corruptcop is the symbolic object of Fukasaku's admiration of anarchic freedom, it is thegangster just out of jail, confronted with a world utterly transformed, whobest embodies the realization that all those opportunities have been lost inthe resurrection of Organization, Corporation, State, and Nation. Whereas theyakuza of Kato Tai or Yamashita Kosaku in the mainstream of 1960s Toei ninkyo (chivalric) yakuza films may fightmodernized gangsters seemingly in order to defend traditional social ties (though that is sometimes debatable), Fukasaku'shoodlums reminisce about the past and lash out at the new - even when oppositionis clearly futile - in order to defend a world with no social bonds other thanthose formed by the clash of bodies.
Thistemporal shift - one could even say temporal collision - between what was and whatis, is important to Fukasaku's work not only because it resonates with thenarrative clashes, but also because it echoes the centrality of writing historyto his cinema. While he may be the precursor of a Miike Takashi in hisapocalyptic nihilism and sympathy for Japan's social marginals, Fukasaku,unlike Miike with his presentation of an ahistorical postmodern mayhem,resolutely grounds his narratives in a more traditional historical opposition:between those who write history and those who do not.
Inhis early work like The Wolf, the Pig, and the Man (Okami to buta to ningen, 1964), conflict is still offered in the form of a present bearing different temporalities (here socialclasses). But the films from the late sixties begin to introduce into the imagethe markers of an official history relating the passage of time: newspapers,journalistic photography, police records, and the authoritative narrator. Thefreeze frames that punctuate his works approximate these discourses and oftendenote a moment of history officially told.
Thesediscourses, however, are really not Fukasaku's own. Just as the "officialrecord" in Under the Flag of the Rising Sun (Gunki hatameku shita ni, 1971) really hides more than ittells, the means of much historiography - words - such as with the inscription onIchikawa Rikiya's grave in Graveyard of Honor
(Jingi no hakaba, 1975), are misleading if you don'tknow the story behind them (a story we the audience do know). Battles withoutHonor and Humanity andUnder the Flag of the Rising Sunarethen powerful attempts to combat the dominant history of the modern era throughfocusing on the underworld events and people usually left unspoken.
Given that much about Sgt. Togashi and Rikiya remains ambiguous at the end, Fukasaku's history makesfew pretensions about telling the Truth. One of the reasons for this is becausethis history is cinematic. That is, first, in the sense that these films reflect a partof postwar Japanese film history. Starting out in the gang cycle before thecrystallization of the traditional ninkyo film at Toei, Fukasaku never fit well with thatmainstream and thus became instrumental in its downfall, replacing chivalricduty and honor with, as epitomized by Graveyard, its complete lack. Having underminedthe yakuza genre, however, Fukasaku in a sense had to leave it, and workedmostly in big budget entertainment after the 1970s.
Yeteven in some of those films, the writing of a "cinematic" historyremains central. If Fukasaku's history is not the words frozen onto the recordsor the still shots of the news photographer, it because he emphasizes themovement that escapes those means, a historical action expressed through akinetic style defined by hand-held cameras, canting frames, speedy pans andzooms, and fast editing. One can say such cinematic action itself is Fukasaku'shistoriographic calligraphy.
Ina film like Street Mobster (Gendai yakuza: hitokiri yota, 1972), these stylistic elements stronglyapproximate those of cinema vérité, but Fukasaku is not really a documentaristpursuing reality. The totally unfounded assertion in Shogun's Samurai (Yagyu ichizoku no inbo, 1976) that Tokugawa Iemitsu wasbeheaded soon after his assumption of the shogunate, or the audacious (yet notcompletely without foundation) combination of "Yotsuya Ghost Story"with "Tale of the Loyal 47 Ronin" in Crest of Betrayal (Chushingura gaiden: Yotsuya kaidan, 1994) are less assertions of truthagainst a false history than, like the ninja manga of Shirato Sanpei that wereinfluential in the 1960s minus the Marxism, efforts to provide alternative mythsto the official ones. Fukasaku's history is less concerned with facts than theviolence, action, friendship, corruption, love, humor (often provided by KanekoNobuo), betrayal, and homoerotic beauty (Black Lizard [Kurotokage, 1968])--all the stuff of genrecinema--that are present in history but which have no means other than perhapsfilm to fully tell their tales. If Yagyu wails about the nightmare he has beenconfronted with at the end of Shogun's Samurai, it is because Fukasaku's chronicle has continually been using the most oneiric of media to give Japan the bad dreams it bothdreads and craves about its own history.