Glass houses - director Kon Ichikawa - Statistical Data Included

Film Comment, July-August, 2001 by Moller Olaf

Scorned in the East, forgotten in the West, the once-legendary Kon Ichikawa ignores his critics and continues to do what he does best: make films, remake films, and hold a mirror up to Japanese tradition. Olaf Moller finds the true auteur in the so-called hack.

During the past two decades of his prestigious and adventurous career as a director -- spanning now more than half a century with over 70 features and still going strong -- Kon Ichikawa, once hailed as one of the world's greatest directors for films like The Harp of Burma (56), Fires on the Plain (59), and An Actor's Revenge (62), has become an embarrassing bate noire for most Japanese critics. Today he's regarded as a master who's lost his touch, a relic from another era stubbornly refusing to retire, and, worst of all, a sellout.

At first glance, this sobering verdict of a brilliant career gone down the tubes is corroborated by his work's trajectory. From the mid-Fifties, beginning with The Heart (Kokoro, 55), to the mid-Seventies, ending with I Am a Cat (75), Ichikawa seemed virtually incapable of directing anything less than a great film -- it's actually easier to count the potboilers. There are also major films to be found both before and after the main phase of his career. In Ichikawa's apprenticeship period, starting with his now-lost debut, the unreleased puppet animation A Girl at Dojo Temple (45), and ending with his last film prior to The Heart, Ghost Story of Youth (55), there are a handful of remarkably good films, and the same holds true for the post--I Am a Cat period. There are surely other discoveries to be made among Ichikawa's rarely shown early works, and doubtless many of his later films will look much better in hindsight.

Considering his age, it comes as a surprise to hear that Ichikawa was a sickly child. Born in 1915 in Uji-Yamada, the son of a kimono merchant, he was housebound for much of his childhood, and learned to draw at an early age. He discovered Chaplin and Disney, and through them, a passion for the cinema. Animation seemed to be his calling, as it combined his two major interests, drawing and filmmaking. In 1933, after finishing technical school, Ichikawa became an apprentice at the animation department of J.O. (Jenkins/Osawa) studios. When J.O. was taken over by Toho, then a distribution company that owned a movie-house chain, the animation department was dissolved, and Ichikawa became an assistant director on live-action films. He was lucky enough to apprentice with four stylistically distinct directors: Yutaka "Jacky" Abe, a Hollywood-trained professional with a knack for fast-paced action and sophisticated comedy; Tamizo Ishida, a flaneur and womanizer; Nobuo Nakagawa, a horror-film eccentric; and Mansaku Itami, a social satirist and film theoretician.

Ichikawa's time came in 1947, after he shifted from the strike-tom Toho to Shintoho, its upstart breakaway. (He actually pieced together Shintoho's first film, a promotional production called 1001 Nights with Toho.) By the time he made his true debut feature, a melodrama called A Flower Blooms (48), Shintoho had become an independent operation in dire need of a hit -- which Ichikawa delivered later that year with 365 Nights (48). He would eventually return to Toho, which produced his first major works, Mr. Lucky and The Woman Who Touched Legs (both 52). Later, after a stint at Nikkatsu, where he directed his 1956 international breakthrough, Harp of Burma, he moved to Daiei, where he made most of his generally acknowledged masterpieces. Then, from 1964 on, Ichikawa worked as a freelance director, with Toho co-producing most of his later films.

Opinions differ about when and why things started to go wrong for Ichikawa. Some say it began when he parted with Daiei; some say just a little bit later, with the retirement of Natto Wada, his wife and most important collaborator, after Tokyo Olympiad (65); but just about everybody agrees that there is a break in his work after his 1976 box-office smash The Inugami Family. Ichikawa was 61, and his home, the Japanese studio system, was breaking down. According to conventional critical wisdom, this would have been the perfect moment to step down and behave like a good elder statesman of Japanese cinema: Ichikawa either should have retired, making a comeback with one or two deeply personal projects, or shifted gears to make bigger-budgeted, commemorative message movies for an elderly middle-class audience in dire need of "culture." Instead, Ichikawa directed five adaptations of Seishi Yokomizo mysteries in a row from 1976 to 1979, and then went on to make "important films" at the rate of one every two years, with other diverse excursions thrown in for good measure. In other words, Ichikawa simply kept on working, and began to seem like the superior hack he has often been described as.

Just as it is for Claude Chabrol, filmmaking is a way of life for Ichikawa, bordering on obsession -- the latter being his great theme. This has confused critics, who associate compulsive productivity with B-films and expect A-list filmmakers like Ichikawa to be steadfast, working toward an ever-finer mastery of their art while remaining deeply engaged, regardless of whether they are making a living.