Blog - Friday, January 30, 2009 0:18 - 5 Comments

Who is Hiroshi Shimizu?

by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky

“I can’t shoot films like Hiroshi Shimizu,” said Yasujiro Ozu. He was sober, for once. “People like me and Ozu get films made by hard work, but Shimizu is a genius,” added Kenji Mizoguchi, five women around him. To Westerners, Hiroshi Shimizu is the variable x in the equation of Japanese cinema. Like Percival Lowell, who deduced the position of Pluto 14 years before anyone spotted it by calculating its gravitational pull on Uranus and Neptune, we make our calculations: “Shimizu > Ozu,” “Shimizu > Mizoguchi” and so on and so forth on our little mental blackboards. A great mystery noun. Like mise-en-scène, Shimizu is something more likely to be invoked than explained, something that seems to encompass everything and that, when given any sort of shape, is defined by what it isn’t (Jacques Rivette joked “You want a good definition of mise-en-scène? It’s what’s missing from the films of Joseph L. Mankiewicz.”– and a pretty good definition of Hiroshi Shimizu is that he’s what’s missing in every other filmmaker). In early Spring, Criterion will release a boxed set of four Hiroshi Shimizu films through its Eclipse label, the first serious attempt anyone’s made to introduce his work to the West. It’s an important gesture, because if there’s any filmmaker overdue for “discovery” in the Anglosphere, it’s Shimizu. But who is he?

Of course when we ask “who” a director is, we’re not asking biographical details. It would be like telling you about Manet’s life, or showing you his signature, without discussing his paintings. That he was Japanese and a contemporary of Ozu (born the same year), Mizoguchi and Naruse is enough. What we mean to ask is what Shimizu’s identity is as a filmmaker. What is the “Shimizu shot?” The “Shimizu theme?” And part of the reason very little has been written in English about Shimizu is that it’s a hard question to answer honestly. A concise answer is never found–it has to be constructed, and constructing one for Shimizu would require a long of truth-bending and a little blindness. Like Claire Denis or Nicholas Ray or Jean Renoir or Richard Linklater, Shimizu is a filmmaker whose greatness doesn’t reside in a single idea or contribution, but within the films themselves. If you’re writing about him, there are certain adjectives you have to let go of: “simple” and “complicated” are both moot, because Shimizu doesn’t distinguish between the two; “digressive” suggests that the core of Shimizu’s films lies in something other than the films themselves–that there is a point he is avoiding that is beside the point he is actually making; “slow” and “fast” have no place here as distinctions and can only be used to say that his movies move quickly through the slowness of everyday life.

It is possible to say that Shimizu made movies exclusively in the present tense and that his movies are passively unsentimental. Sentimentality and active unsentimentality both require distance. In Shimizu, there is no distance. His movies are not simply close to moments; they are the moments themselves. As Rosselini interfaces directly with history, Bresson interfaces directly with experience and Antonioni interfaces directly with the 20th century, Shimizu interfaces directly with breathing, walking, talking–living. His films move like life–not how we remember life, but how we experience it, moods dissolving into each other, events transpiring at their own pace. Of all the filmmakers, he is the one least concerned with memory. The camera travels with people–the great Shimizu idiom is a camera dollying straight back or forward to match the characters’ movement, taking on the emotion of each moment: forlorn during a pensive walk, joyful during a group hike. Or it remains stationary as they recede into the background. A sequence in Children of the Wind consists of a series of half-dozen immobile framings showing a group of children running from the foreground down the road, each shot dissolving into the next as they reach a point where we can no longer make out their details. From the courtyard of their house to the street to a country road until they’re running, undressed, into a river to swim, these cuts are unlike those of any other filmmaker, as though if the film was a piano and every shot was a note, Shimizu’s foot gently pressing down on the sustain pedal at every edit. Scenes are sometimes concluded by dissolving to the same set, the same framing, but with the room now empty; it’s important that we know the characters have left before we know where they’ve gone. There is a worldly gentleness, too, even in the way people move, as if our bodies are all made out of soft dough. Even the bad–especially the bad–are innocent, because it takes a certain naïveté to be cruel. This understanding links Shimizu to the only director his work can be compared to: Carl Theodor Dreyer, the great empathetic filmmaker, who understood that we mistreat out of blindness. Though people often do good in his movies, there are no heroes: heroism only exists in hindsight. “Heroic” is an adjective for something that’s already been done, already been judged. And though people are also often mistreated in the films, there are no victims—victimization is only visible from a distance. It is an unpolemical and unanalytical cinema—to live polemically you’ve got to distance yourself from your actions, disassociate from yourself. The analyst is the one who walks down the street looking at his or her own reflection in the storefronts. Shimizu just looks straight ahead, careful not to trip over a crack.

Shimizu is sometimes referred to as a director of “children’s films” and of movies about marginalized people, the same way Douglas Sirk was once known as a director of “melodramas.” Even in his movies about children, Shimizu does not believe in a “children’s world” existing separately from an adult world, and his movies about the poor don’t show them as occupying a society that’s any different from the one the wealthy live in. They share the same problems, the same rooms, the same meals, the same shots and camera movements. Adult misfortunes trickle down to the children and children’s quarrels affect their parents. His approach to portraying society is, like his contemporary Jean Renoir’s, a holistic one, standing apart from the marginalization and segmentation of later Japanese filmmakers like Imamura, Oshima or Kawashima. There is not a clear separation of tone, either. Shimizu’s cinema is not drama, with its careful measuring of emotions, happiness and sadness counted out like pills or eye drops. The films can be funny and heartbreaking within the same shot, as when a boy has to jump up to get his recently-fired father’s hat off of the office hat rack one last time, or, as in Ornamental Hairpin , which’ll be included in the Eclipse set, where an austere take concludes with a woman bumping into a blind masseur.

This mutability may be what has kept Shimizu away from American screens. Imagine if John Ford was unknown, if his movies and their subjects didn’t have their place in American and international film culture. How would you get people to watch them? What would you write? That they are “sometimes about cowboys?” There is no selling point to Ford, and none for Hiroshi Shimizu. They are both unmarketable. Shimizu isn’t always charming, he isn’t always funny or sad or moving. Like Ford, his brilliance lies in the fact that he could be any of those things at any given moment. That his cinema is capable of any feeling, that it’s after everything and not just one single notion. The emotion or the idea can change in a single shot. That because he is never just one thing, he can be anything.

Travels With Hiroshi Shimizu will be released on March 17th.