Слово — плод
tes3m отсканировала не только фотографии, но и всю статью из American Film 9'83. Я ее распознала; и будет очень классно, если найдутся люди, которые переведут.
вступлениеMerry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Nagisa Oshima's new film, joins Boy, The Ceremony, and In the Realm of the Senses—the most accomplished films of this director's brilliant career—and may even surpass them. Oshima adapted the film from a Laurens Van Der Post novel, The Seed and the Sower, about a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp on Java during World War II. It features four prominent characters: the army superintendent of the prison camp, Captain Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto); one of his men, Sergeant Hara (Beat Takeshi); and two captive British army officers, Jack Celliers (David Bowie) and John Lawrence (Tom Conti).
Oshima's life and career have always been marked by an ambivalent attitude toward the military. He was born in 1932 and received a military education in his youth. His great-grandfather was a leader in the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Japanese militarism was taught as the spiritual inheritance of the Restoration and something of which all young men should be proud. In the early fifties, when he was a university student, Oshima became involved in leftist activities. His first film, A Town of Love and Hope, made in 1959 for the Shochiku studio, was criticized by the studio president for being too overtly leftist. Yet, in subsequent works such as The Ceremony, Oshima has shown an interest in soldiers, right-wing partisans, and other vestiges of Japan's past.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence features superb performances by its four leading actors. Tom Conti and David Bowie are familiar to Western audiences, but the film's real surprises are its Japanese stars. Ryuichi Sakamoto, portraying Captain Yonoi, is a very prominent and popular musician who also composed the music for the film. He is a novice actor who was chosen to fit a pure type. Oshima has repeatedly used this kind of character, who because of his spiritual purity is a failure in life.
Beat Takeshi, who plays Sergeant Hara, is a stand-up comic who performs a variety of comedy known as manzai. He became famous in the late seventies for this brand of comedy, which is unusual for its antisocial maliciousness. One of his most popular lines is: "Crossing the street against the light isn't so scary if everyone else crosses with you"—which could only be funny to the Japanese, who are scrupulously law-abiding and who cross streets only with the green light. He has appeared mostly on television programs that feature childish slapstick and had never before done any serious dramatic performing.
In the film, Yonoi and Hara both behave brutally because of their sincerely fervent belief in Japanese militarism and in the end are put to death for it. Oshima does not consider them simply to be scoundrels. Rather he depicts them as simple and pure of heart, positing that it was just that sort of person who was most susceptible to militarism, a fact that grieves him.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence depicts the tragic destruction that resulted from Japanese feelings of ambivalence toward Westerners that lay at the base of the Japanese fervor for modernization. Westerners may similarly have felt a complex blend of scorn and reverence for Asia. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, when Japan ended its long period of isolation and began relations with the Western world, it feared that if it did not display military strength, it would become, like other Asian nations, a colony of the great Western powers. So Japan set out to methodically imitate the West. To the Japanese "the West" was a dazzlingly beautiful world to be eagerly sought after. Yet no matter how earnestly the West was imitated, it was clear that Japan could never become more than a second-class power, a fact that Japanese pride could not tolerate. As much as the Japanese admiration for the West grew, conversely a sense of its own particular identity also grew, in such things as the samurai spirit of Bushido and reverence for the emperor. These two incompatible elements fought with each other, and the great upheaval that resulted has been an important and fundamental feature in the spiritual history of the contemporary Japanese. Once rebuffed, admiration for the West was readily converted into malice toward the West.
Nagisa Oshima, however, before considering the relations between Japan and the West in this new film, gave his attention to the relations between Japan and Asia in a great many films. One example is a series of television films Oshima made in 1964, Ajia no akebono (Dawn Over Asia), about Japanese army officers who participated in the 1911 Chinese revolution that brought Sun Yat-sen to power and about their friendship with several Chinese revolutionaries who were their classmates at military school. And in his 1971 The Ceremony, he depicted twenty-five years in the postwar history of a distinguished political family headed by a right-wing patriarch, and how the conservative right still manages to hold sway over Japanese society despite the failure of its patriotic spirit. He has described the tragedy inflicted on Korea by Japan's imperialistic aggression in Death by Hanging (1968) and in a television documentary, Wasurerareta kogun (The Forgotten Army, 1963). He has also depicted China's repulsion of Japanese aggression in two television documentaries, Mo Taku To to bunka daikakumei (Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution, 1969), and Denki: Mo Taku To (Biography: Mao Zedong, 1976).
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence portrays the ruinous collision of complex feelings between East and West. From the depths of this catastrophe it offers up a prayer for the birth of a renewed friendship. It is a splendid, soul-stirring requiem.
Tadao Sato is Japan's leading film critic. An English translation of his Currents in Japanese Cinema was published earlier this year. This essay was translated by David Owens.
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интервью с ОсимойOshima: "I don't like tests or rehearsals. I stake things on an instant.”
Tadao Sato conducted this interview in Tokyo last spring, shortly before the director departed for the Cannes Film Festival. It was translated by David Owens.
Question: How did your plans for Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence begin? Nagisa Oshima: Laurens Van Der Post's novel The Seed and the Sower was published in Japanese in 1978, and I happened to see a copy. It was thoroughly fascinating. It was written in 1951 and was attacked in England for its excessive idealization of the Japanese. Van Der Post had come to Japan in 1927, at the age of nineteen, to work as a journalist for a South African newspaper. Japan was at the time becoming more isolated from the rest of the world, but Van Der Post argued forcefully on Japan's behalf. Then during World War II, he was an officer in the British army and was taken prisoner by the Japanese; consequently, he had an ambivalent attitude toward the Japanese. This Englishman's depictions of his Japanese characters were particularly well written, but all the other characters, too, were very interesting. I was fascinated with how this foreigner's view of the Japanese would change when seen through my own perspective. Question: Your own attitude is ambivalent, isn't it?
Oshima: When I was planning this film, everyone I talked to here in Japan seemed worried that I would go overboard to depict the Japanese in a bad light. Potential investors were worried about the film's entertainment value. But today's Japanese would in any event probably view the film from the outset without excessive empathy for the two principal Japanese characters. Captain Yonoi and Sergeant Hara. I think they would look at them very objectively. I scarcely knew anyone like Sergeant Hara myself, but today's young people surely aren't familiar with that type. But I think if we Japanese were to go to war again, we would behave the same way. But when Japanese see my film they will probably see it from John Lawrence's objective point of view.
Question: Whose point of view do you personally see it through? Oshima: Captain Yonoi's, or perhaps Jack Celliers's. Of course, I carj also take Lawrence's point of view, but I do have some sympathy for Captain Yonoi and Sergeant Hara. Question: Toward the end of World War II, I was a Japanese naval cadet. I never accustomed myself to the sort of brutality that Sergeant Hara [displays in the film], but it is possible I could have become like him. As a consequence, I could not view Hara dispassionately. What was your situation during the war?
Oshima: I was in my second year of middle school at the end of the war and so never actually took up arms, but went through the standard school military drills. My school, the Second Kyoto Middle School, was a very spartan one, and as a result very militaristic. But I was something of a weakling as a boy and was never very good at the martial arts training and military drills. On top of that, I wore glasses, which gave me quite a complex about not looking like a proper soldier. So when the war ended, I felt liberated. I would be able to go on about things without those military drills. Yet though I was a poor physical specimen, I was from a samurai family and had grown up hearing many times about my great-grandfather's active role in the Meiji Restoration, and so I thought I had to uphold the samurai spirit even in Japan's defeat.
Question: What is the connection between Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and In the Realm of the Senses'!
Oshima: In the Realm of the Senses explored the eroticism of physical action, whereas the new film has virtually nothing in the way of physical contact. This time I was trying for quite an opposite way of creating eroticism. In the end, that thing we call eroticism results from human beings wanting to somehow connect with each other, and whether they do it physically or spiritually, the erotic relationship is something I like. That is, eroticism is proof that we are alive. If one human being cannot somehow communicate something to another, then I think he does not feel alive. In this case, the key to the drama, or to its eroticism, is in the impulse to get through to one's enemy. Question: You have yourself dealt with this matter of Japanese seen through the eyes of foreigners in your documentary films about the Koreans and the Chinese. Both countries have viewed Japan from rather perilous circumstances. Do you find any connections between those films and this new one?
Oshima: In Wasurerareta kogun [The Forgotten Army] and Death by Hanging, I was thinking of how the Japanese could not recognize the image they had in the eyes of others. By looking into the "mirror" of Korea one could see the shape of the Japanese. And in making Oenki: Mo Taku To [Biography: Mao Zedong], too, I wanted to find out how the Japanese looked to Mao, or how they looked to most Chinese. In that sense, I guess you could say I always want to find a mirror.
Question: How do you interpret Captain Yonoi's homosexual love for his prisoner, Major Celliers, and his consequent collapse?
Oshima: Yonoi feels terribly humiliated for having been made superinlendent of the prison camp. Japan was winning in the early part of the war and found they had to somehow incarcerate all of the many prisoners they took. I don't think the Japanese army did any research at all on how to run the camps they set up. For the Japanese army the reality of having to deal with prisoners of war collided with a soldierly way of thinking that had never considered the possibility. Consequently, heading a prison camp was a humiliating assignment to a Japanese ollicer's way of thinking. Therefore, in his deep disillusionment, he might be feeling some spiritual affinity for his prisoner, Major Celliers, and is then completely taken by the man's charm. Question: On the night before Hara is to be executed for his crimes against his wartime prisoners, his former captive. Colonel Lawrence, comes to visit him. and they spend the evening talking. Then when Lawrence is about to go, Hara says, with an embarrassed look on his face, "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence." This embarrassment comes from saying something very personal, don't you think?
Oshima: That is a very Japanese reaction, isn't it, that feeling of embarrassment. Our producer, Jeremy Thomas, said that in that last scene Beat Takeshi [Hara] is just a great big baby. I understand what he means, for, in fact, Takeshi is very popular on television with children, which he says is because he feels childish. He has the naivete, the shyness of a small child. I think children understand that. Takeshi also said that Tom Conli humored him wonderfully, like his mother would, which gave him a sense of comfort when they embraced.
Question: How did you come to cast David Bowie in the picture?
Oshima: Van Der Post had gotten to know Robert Redford through their activities on behalf of environmental protection, and he suggested I talk to Redford about doing the film, so I went to New York to meet him. Redford said he had a lot of respect for my work, but he didn't want to do this film. He thought the general American audience wouldn't understand it. I told him I thought that though they might not understand at first, by the end they would. He responded by saying that if an American viewer doesn't understand a picture in the first fifteen minutes, he gives up. I could appreciate that as an established figure in the American film business he no doubt has a good grasp of the American audience. But I am not interested in making films that can be understood in the first fifteen minutes.
When I came back to Japan, David Bowie was appearing in a Japanese television commercial. I was very impressed with the commercial and sent him a copy of the screenplay. He replied that he was very excited by it and wanted to meet me. When I went to New York to meet him, he was appearing in The Elephant Man on Broadway. He sent me tickets and asked me to see the play before we met. I saw it and he was very good, perhaps too good. I don't really like actors who are so exceedingly good. Rather, I prefer actors with abundance of heart and deficiencies of strength. I found out that he used to do pantomime and had aspired to a career of acting oojtbe stage.
The next day we met at his office. Now, I had always imagined David Bowie as being heavily made up and surrounded by bodyguards, and so forth. But he came in wearing a white shirt and white slacks and with just one female assistant. He struck me as being very plain. He was unassuming, unpretentious, straightforward, and down to earth. He spoke candidly. At the end of the meeting I thought we should talk about what he should be paid, but he shrugged it off and said we could talk about that later—he had already decided he wanted to work with me.
I asked if he would also like to do the music for the film, but was a little apprehensive because I didn't want people to get the impression that I had cast him in the film in order to get his music. Above all, I wanted people to appraise him as an actor. He advised me that the sсript had to be improved, and I asked if he might recommend a screenwriter to work on it, but he wasn't insistent about exerting any control in that realm. He just wanted to concentrate on his role. I think that that purity of character comes out clearly in the film.
I was quite happy, too, when he told me I make films the way he makes music, that we both value improvisation and the energy of the moment. I don't like to shoot a lot of extra footage, and I don't like a lot of tests and rehearsals. I stake things on an instant. As a musician who likes to capture a moment, he understood that. Question: You didn't have any differences of interpretation?
Oshima: Oh, no, we did. For example, the scene in which Celliers is carrying Lawrence on his back as they try to escape from the camp and are discovered by Yonoi. Yonoi is carrying a sword and he orders Celliers, armed with just a knife, to tight him. I thought Celliers should make as though to take him on, but Bowie said that no one with just a knife could expect to beat someone with a sword and would soon give up. I think Japanese would fight it out no matter what, but I think his response was a very rational one. Question: So did you go along with him? Oshima: Yes, because physically he couldn't make himself do something that bothered him. On those occasions when I went ahead and had him do something that mentally or physically he wasn't inclined to do, it turned out terribly. So the film turned out a bit differently than what I had in mind when I was writing the screenplay. Question: Did you make any discoveries in working with foreigners? Oshima: I learned a great deal about how' we think differently from a screenwriter named Paul Mayersberg who went over the dialogue line by line, fixing it. For example, a brief silence in conversation is meaningful to Japanese, but to the Western way of thinking it means either that one has no opinion or that one is in agreement with what has already been said. If a person says something, it demands a reply. Yet in conversations between Japanese, silences are common. If you and I meet and I happen to ask what you think about a certain thing, you might not answer and I don't question you any further. Then we change the subject and chat a while longer, and eventually you might come back to that first question and say what you think. We rather like that sort of conversation. So in several scenes I had a question at the beginning, the conversation moved on to other things, and the answer came right at the end. Mayersberg said it was incomprehensible: "What's this last line?" he asked. I explained it was the answer to the question at the beginning of the scene. He said the answer should come right away.
Question: Was it difficult to work with so many foreigners?
Oshima: No. Everything went very well. I was lucky in that though we had people from eight countries and could not always speak each others' languages, we worked hard at understanding each other. When Europeans do coproductions with each other, they expect to be able to communicate their intentions rather easily, but when they in fact cannot, trouble arises, But between Westerners and Japanese, the inability to communicate is more expected and our first reaction is to make the other person understand. Consequently, because we were working harder at getting our thoughts across, things went well. In that regard, the theme of the film and the way wc made it seemed to converge. Question: Wc arc of the generation that experienced losing World War II, and losing made us try harder to understand our former enemy.
Oshima: Yes, I still feci that way. As kids we were taught slogans about the "foreign devils," and then after the war Ihoughl we came to know the Americans better. We were shooting on Rarotonga on the anniversary of the war's end and I wrote a letter to a friend in which I said, "I have finally come further south than the Imperial Army or Navy ever did and I am now engaged in making a film with our former enemies." Writing that made me very happy.
Question: As a young man, I always wanted to be able to have the chance to converse with foreigners.
Oshima: This doesn't exactly amount to worship of the West, but the Japanese have a unique keenness for Western things. When you and I went to the Manila Film Festival recently, I saw that this interest in the foreign was not just restricted to the Japanese, that it was universal. There we were, a group of men who had never met anyplace except on battlefields. When Hara speaks to Lawrence in (he film, he asks such things as why such a splendid officer didn't kill himself rather than be taken prisoner, or if all Englishmen were queers—that sort of stupid chatter. But he was talking to an Englishman and enjoying it. Conversing with foreigners is fun.
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интервью с БоуиBowie:
LETS ACT
David Bowie is one of the most durable and certainly the most versatile figure in modern pop music. His rock concerts are as painstakingly directed and choreographed as operas, and the characters he's created for them are as varied as his influences, which range from Dylan to Coltrane, from Brecht to Burroughs, from Kabuki to Kraftwerk. He has been a pioneer in rock video; his stunning visual presentations of his songs have set the standard for excellence in the medium. As an actor he's probably best known for his work as the alien in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, but he also received critical acclaim for his portrayal of John Merrick in the Broadway production of The Elephant Man, and as Brecht's Baal in a BBC television presentation. Earlier this year, writer-critic Ruth McCormick interviewed Bowie in New York about his work with Oshima, a director he has always admired and whose ability to change styles and directions is very much like his own. Question: How do you choose your acting jobs?
David Bowie: I always choose directors. So far, I've been lucky enough to work with two of my very favorites—Roeg and r Oshima. They are completely different in their ways of approaching film, but there is a parallel. As I see it, I've got a luxurious position of being asked to do movies —to take study courses with directors and be paid for doing it, and to enjoy myself thoroughly in the process.
Question: When Oshima asked you to do Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, were you already familiar with his work?
Bowie: Yes, The Ceremony, Boy, and In the Realm of the Senses were the three major things of his I'd seen at the time; they were so totally different in many ways. I think Oshima has a really international outlook. I was totally intrigued when he came backstage after he saw The Elephant Man and asked me if I'd be interested in working with him. I jumped at the chance. But it took fully another two years before the thing finally got started.
He had asked me if I'd wait for him, and I agreed—and, indeed, two years later he called me and said, "We start in three weeks." I'd just finished The Hunger, so, really, the last thing I wanted to do was make a movie! I just wanted to have a holiday, because it was quite a fatiguing role, with the makeup and all that. So I took advantage of the situation and took my holiday in the South Pacific. I got to know the islands pretty well before Oshima got there with the crew, so by the time everyone arrived I felt pretty much as if I'd been on the island for some time, which, in fact, I was supposed to have been in my role. I felt quite at home, and as if I could have been in a camp all that time, because the island's kind of small and you begin to feel cut off after a bit.
Question: It must have been quite beautiful.
Bowie: Well, after two weeks, the beauty starts to wear off. You just feel confined, which was all right, because that was the whole point of my character anyway: It was the right mood to be in. But I've never worked on anything where the momentum gathered such speed—I mean, he works so quickly! The lighting seemed almost simplistic, to the point where you couldn't believe it could look any good. But then you see the rushes, and it's fantastic.
Question: Wasn't the cameraman Toichiro Narushima?
Bowie: Indeed. My father! I was given the right to call him "father." What a tremendous eye he has; he's so quick with his decisions. And then, from scene to scene, we weren't allowed by Oshima to have an overview of what the film was going to be like. We were subjected to so many fast scene changes, because he would accomplish so many scenes in one day, that we were fully preoccupied with strengthening and stretching our individual characters in relationship to the immediate people around us.
After the first couple of days, we realized it was going to be one-take stuff— one take, two takes. And that really fired us up; I think that got us through the movie more than anything else, this terrific momentum. You'd go through a scene, you'd be done, and then you'd be moving on to the next scene immediately, so you were always your character, with no chance to see the overall thing. You were continually redefining what your character was undergoing, what stresses were involved in his reIationships with his own men and with the enemy.
Question: But isn't that like real life?
Bowie: Yes, exactly, and that's how he shoots. It was like real life—you only get one shot at it. He doesn't believe in a thousand takes. He'll do two takes, sometimes three, and he's got it. It's a miracle; he edits in the camera. And the whole editing thing, I believe, was finished about five or six days after the last day of shooting. He'd already assembled a rough cut of the movie—I mean, it was that quick. I asked him how he could do this all so quickly, and he told me, "I've been five years waiting for this, so I've filmed it a million times in my head."
Question: Until now Oshima's usually had to work with such small budgets.
Bowie: Absolutely—he was forced to be disciplined. For this film, Toda-san, the set designer, was given all the money. He built this enormous set in the middle of the jungle, this fantastic camp. It was just quite beautifully put together, with bamboo and twine, Japanese-style, and then he hid the whole thing with tents, so you didn't see any of the camp; you'd see part of the camp, an odd bit of a corner coming out from behind the tent, but it was mostly covered by the tent, so actually, everything to the west of that point needn't have been built at all, but he did build the whole thing. He said it doesn't matter—you never show the whole thing, because there's no such thing as perfection in life—you can never make a thing perfect by showing it all and saying: "This is perfection." You just show a little bit of it, and your mind will give you the perfection that's needed to say that this is a perfect shot. An American would shoot everything,—let's have the money out there on the screen!
Question: What about the character you play—without giving away the movie? Bowie: Well, the great thing about the movie is that there's nothing to give away in those terms. You could give the ostensible story line, but it isn't going to help at all, because the thing is the impact of the confrontation between Japanese civilization and English civilization, and how they so totally misunderstand one another. And one man, played by Tom Conti, who does understand both sides, is completely disowned by each side.
Question: He's able to see both sides because he's something of an intellectual?
Bowie: Absolutely. But in that situation, you can't be in the middle or you're going to be disowned by both sides. Your own side is going to wonder why you're messing around with the Japanese, and the Japanese are going to think, This man is of no real nobility, because he's moving away from his own men—therefore, he's a bad man.
Question: On the other hand, your character is a man of action.
Bowie: Yes. I embrace the idea of war, because of my guilt about my dealings with my family, specifically my younger brother, who was a hunchback from birth —which reflects badly, as far as I'm concerned, upon my own being, and so I disown him. I disown all responsibility for looking after him to an extent that leads him into terrible social situations, but I just stand there in the wings and watch him undergo terrible humiliations, without ever running to his defense. All this starts to work on me over the years, and comes to a point where my life becomes meaningless because of the dishonorable way I've treated my brother, so when the war comes, I throw myself into it, looking for salvation, but really it's that now I can die, can die honorably doing something. This is what produces this so-called iron will that I've got; it's just this enforced feeling that I've got to throw myself into the most dangerous situations so that I can redeem myself. So the Japanese see in me this iron-willed, noble figure, but I, of course, see myself as the antithesis of this—-which is again complete misunderstanding on their part.
Question: You've spent a lot of time in Japan. There's always been an element of Kabuki in your shows.
Bowie: Yes, a very strong one. You know, during the shooting, they had so many lovely Japanese traditions, like on the first day of shooting, everybody wore their best suits, and then again, on the last day: white suits, white gloves. And during the five years Oshima had to wait to make the movie, his three main peers on his crew didn't work either. They refused to work with any other people until Oshima was able to make his film. That's such an incredible thing, the way loyalty permeates their whole society, into their arts as well. If he couldn't work, then they shouldn't either.
Question: Are there any other Japanese directors you'd be interested in working with?
Bowie: I must admit, I think that film was about the only one I would have done. You know, there's a rumor—I don't know whether it will come off, but it would be tremendous—that he may do the Mishi-ma story.
Question: Paul Schrader wants to do the Mishima biography.
Bowie: Yes. Paul told me that. You know, he's a superlative writer, but I feel uneasy about his filmmaking at the moment. I think there are a lot of inherently good things about his filmmaking, but perhaps he needs to make a lot more movies. Cat People doesn't have the impact, say, of a Cocteau movie, but then, Cocteau shot in black and white, and that had a lot to do with it. Color is hard in a twilight movie. With black and white, you can read so many colors into it. You color it your own way. That's where rock V roll is quite interesting, because recently there's been a great resurgence in wanting to make promo movies in black and white again. It's not seen as an outdated way of filming things, which is what seems to have happened in the cinema, where color is seen as new and black and white as old-fashioned, which is ridiculous. We seem to have overcome that kind of elitism in rock. In fact, I myself did a couple of things a few years back because I thought you could say much more in black and white. Everything's dealing in terms of denseness, shadowing, light and dark, and shading. You can create another, alternative universe. If you're after a particular effect which has an unreal kind of quality, you can really portray that in black and white.
Question: Didn't you live for quite a while in Germany?
Bowie: I lived in Berlin for about three years. It's paradise for a writer because there are such frictionalized attitudes to life there—there's such danger there all the time. The whole Zeitgeist of the place is this overbearing feeling that there's only a couple of years to go. The longer you live there the more you feel the Wall; it's one of those nightmare things where all the lime, the Wall's moving in. And it has produced, I think, some incredible writers and filmmakers. I like their attitudes there.
Question: John Ueartfield once wrote a very funny piece taking off on the Nazis for policing culture at the same lime they ripped it off and recycled it for their own purposes.
Bowie: Fascist culture was such a secondhand culture! It had the same pretensions as Roman culture, which stole everything from the Greeks. They had absolutely nothing original. Imagine being around at the lime of the Degenerate Art exhibition, when all that stuff went to Switzerland to be sold off for two, three francs —incredible paintings by people like Emil Nolde, who, it's quite funny, turned out to be a Nazi himself. I wonder how he coped with that. There he was, a self-professed Nazi, and his art was called degenerate by the very regime he supported.
Question: Look at Leni Ricfenstahl, who ran into trouble with Goebbels. It's a strange contradiction.
Bowie: Well, I think that's what made Mephisto such an enlightening movie. It was very interesting to see how one could become morally bankrupt in that particular period—how easy it was to be artistically "booed over"—-to convince yourself that you had to remain an artist. It's very scary.
Question: Are there any German directors you'd be interested in working with? Herzog. for instance?
Bowie: Well, he's the kind of director, like Rocg, Oshima, that I tend to gravitate towards—less-known filmmakers.
Question: Who do the kind of adventurous things you would do yourself.
Bowie: Exactly. I really don't think I need the Hollywood bit. I'm not ready to go back there. It all gets too predictable.
Question: What are your plans after your tour?
Bowie: It's hard for me to think past the tour, because it's going to take up so much of the year. My immediate future will be designing the set, working out the landscaping for the songs, how I wish to present them, how much character will be involved, whether I’ll do the whole thing myself, what the premise, the concept of the tour will be—that's sort of the fun thing to do.
Question: That's when you get to be creative rather than just interpretative.
Bowie: That's when I get my first camera!
Если заметите какие-то опечатки, тыкайте, пожалуйста, пальцем. Я вообще очень слабо знаю английский, а сверять все со сканами было довольно тяжело.
вступлениеMerry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Nagisa Oshima's new film, joins Boy, The Ceremony, and In the Realm of the Senses—the most accomplished films of this director's brilliant career—and may even surpass them. Oshima adapted the film from a Laurens Van Der Post novel, The Seed and the Sower, about a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp on Java during World War II. It features four prominent characters: the army superintendent of the prison camp, Captain Yonoi (Ryuichi Sakamoto); one of his men, Sergeant Hara (Beat Takeshi); and two captive British army officers, Jack Celliers (David Bowie) and John Lawrence (Tom Conti).
Oshima's life and career have always been marked by an ambivalent attitude toward the military. He was born in 1932 and received a military education in his youth. His great-grandfather was a leader in the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Japanese militarism was taught as the spiritual inheritance of the Restoration and something of which all young men should be proud. In the early fifties, when he was a university student, Oshima became involved in leftist activities. His first film, A Town of Love and Hope, made in 1959 for the Shochiku studio, was criticized by the studio president for being too overtly leftist. Yet, in subsequent works such as The Ceremony, Oshima has shown an interest in soldiers, right-wing partisans, and other vestiges of Japan's past.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence features superb performances by its four leading actors. Tom Conti and David Bowie are familiar to Western audiences, but the film's real surprises are its Japanese stars. Ryuichi Sakamoto, portraying Captain Yonoi, is a very prominent and popular musician who also composed the music for the film. He is a novice actor who was chosen to fit a pure type. Oshima has repeatedly used this kind of character, who because of his spiritual purity is a failure in life.
Beat Takeshi, who plays Sergeant Hara, is a stand-up comic who performs a variety of comedy known as manzai. He became famous in the late seventies for this brand of comedy, which is unusual for its antisocial maliciousness. One of his most popular lines is: "Crossing the street against the light isn't so scary if everyone else crosses with you"—which could only be funny to the Japanese, who are scrupulously law-abiding and who cross streets only with the green light. He has appeared mostly on television programs that feature childish slapstick and had never before done any serious dramatic performing.
In the film, Yonoi and Hara both behave brutally because of their sincerely fervent belief in Japanese militarism and in the end are put to death for it. Oshima does not consider them simply to be scoundrels. Rather he depicts them as simple and pure of heart, positing that it was just that sort of person who was most susceptible to militarism, a fact that grieves him.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence depicts the tragic destruction that resulted from Japanese feelings of ambivalence toward Westerners that lay at the base of the Japanese fervor for modernization. Westerners may similarly have felt a complex blend of scorn and reverence for Asia. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, when Japan ended its long period of isolation and began relations with the Western world, it feared that if it did not display military strength, it would become, like other Asian nations, a colony of the great Western powers. So Japan set out to methodically imitate the West. To the Japanese "the West" was a dazzlingly beautiful world to be eagerly sought after. Yet no matter how earnestly the West was imitated, it was clear that Japan could never become more than a second-class power, a fact that Japanese pride could not tolerate. As much as the Japanese admiration for the West grew, conversely a sense of its own particular identity also grew, in such things as the samurai spirit of Bushido and reverence for the emperor. These two incompatible elements fought with each other, and the great upheaval that resulted has been an important and fundamental feature in the spiritual history of the contemporary Japanese. Once rebuffed, admiration for the West was readily converted into malice toward the West.
Nagisa Oshima, however, before considering the relations between Japan and the West in this new film, gave his attention to the relations between Japan and Asia in a great many films. One example is a series of television films Oshima made in 1964, Ajia no akebono (Dawn Over Asia), about Japanese army officers who participated in the 1911 Chinese revolution that brought Sun Yat-sen to power and about their friendship with several Chinese revolutionaries who were their classmates at military school. And in his 1971 The Ceremony, he depicted twenty-five years in the postwar history of a distinguished political family headed by a right-wing patriarch, and how the conservative right still manages to hold sway over Japanese society despite the failure of its patriotic spirit. He has described the tragedy inflicted on Korea by Japan's imperialistic aggression in Death by Hanging (1968) and in a television documentary, Wasurerareta kogun (The Forgotten Army, 1963). He has also depicted China's repulsion of Japanese aggression in two television documentaries, Mo Taku To to bunka daikakumei (Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution, 1969), and Denki: Mo Taku To (Biography: Mao Zedong, 1976).
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence portrays the ruinous collision of complex feelings between East and West. From the depths of this catastrophe it offers up a prayer for the birth of a renewed friendship. It is a splendid, soul-stirring requiem.
Tadao Sato is Japan's leading film critic. An English translation of his Currents in Japanese Cinema was published earlier this year. This essay was translated by David Owens.
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интервью с ОсимойOshima: "I don't like tests or rehearsals. I stake things on an instant.”
Tadao Sato conducted this interview in Tokyo last spring, shortly before the director departed for the Cannes Film Festival. It was translated by David Owens.
Question: How did your plans for Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence begin? Nagisa Oshima: Laurens Van Der Post's novel The Seed and the Sower was published in Japanese in 1978, and I happened to see a copy. It was thoroughly fascinating. It was written in 1951 and was attacked in England for its excessive idealization of the Japanese. Van Der Post had come to Japan in 1927, at the age of nineteen, to work as a journalist for a South African newspaper. Japan was at the time becoming more isolated from the rest of the world, but Van Der Post argued forcefully on Japan's behalf. Then during World War II, he was an officer in the British army and was taken prisoner by the Japanese; consequently, he had an ambivalent attitude toward the Japanese. This Englishman's depictions of his Japanese characters were particularly well written, but all the other characters, too, were very interesting. I was fascinated with how this foreigner's view of the Japanese would change when seen through my own perspective. Question: Your own attitude is ambivalent, isn't it?
Oshima: When I was planning this film, everyone I talked to here in Japan seemed worried that I would go overboard to depict the Japanese in a bad light. Potential investors were worried about the film's entertainment value. But today's Japanese would in any event probably view the film from the outset without excessive empathy for the two principal Japanese characters. Captain Yonoi and Sergeant Hara. I think they would look at them very objectively. I scarcely knew anyone like Sergeant Hara myself, but today's young people surely aren't familiar with that type. But I think if we Japanese were to go to war again, we would behave the same way. But when Japanese see my film they will probably see it from John Lawrence's objective point of view.
Question: Whose point of view do you personally see it through? Oshima: Captain Yonoi's, or perhaps Jack Celliers's. Of course, I carj also take Lawrence's point of view, but I do have some sympathy for Captain Yonoi and Sergeant Hara. Question: Toward the end of World War II, I was a Japanese naval cadet. I never accustomed myself to the sort of brutality that Sergeant Hara [displays in the film], but it is possible I could have become like him. As a consequence, I could not view Hara dispassionately. What was your situation during the war?
Oshima: I was in my second year of middle school at the end of the war and so never actually took up arms, but went through the standard school military drills. My school, the Second Kyoto Middle School, was a very spartan one, and as a result very militaristic. But I was something of a weakling as a boy and was never very good at the martial arts training and military drills. On top of that, I wore glasses, which gave me quite a complex about not looking like a proper soldier. So when the war ended, I felt liberated. I would be able to go on about things without those military drills. Yet though I was a poor physical specimen, I was from a samurai family and had grown up hearing many times about my great-grandfather's active role in the Meiji Restoration, and so I thought I had to uphold the samurai spirit even in Japan's defeat.
Question: What is the connection between Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and In the Realm of the Senses'!
Oshima: In the Realm of the Senses explored the eroticism of physical action, whereas the new film has virtually nothing in the way of physical contact. This time I was trying for quite an opposite way of creating eroticism. In the end, that thing we call eroticism results from human beings wanting to somehow connect with each other, and whether they do it physically or spiritually, the erotic relationship is something I like. That is, eroticism is proof that we are alive. If one human being cannot somehow communicate something to another, then I think he does not feel alive. In this case, the key to the drama, or to its eroticism, is in the impulse to get through to one's enemy. Question: You have yourself dealt with this matter of Japanese seen through the eyes of foreigners in your documentary films about the Koreans and the Chinese. Both countries have viewed Japan from rather perilous circumstances. Do you find any connections between those films and this new one?
Oshima: In Wasurerareta kogun [The Forgotten Army] and Death by Hanging, I was thinking of how the Japanese could not recognize the image they had in the eyes of others. By looking into the "mirror" of Korea one could see the shape of the Japanese. And in making Oenki: Mo Taku To [Biography: Mao Zedong], too, I wanted to find out how the Japanese looked to Mao, or how they looked to most Chinese. In that sense, I guess you could say I always want to find a mirror.
Question: How do you interpret Captain Yonoi's homosexual love for his prisoner, Major Celliers, and his consequent collapse?
Oshima: Yonoi feels terribly humiliated for having been made superinlendent of the prison camp. Japan was winning in the early part of the war and found they had to somehow incarcerate all of the many prisoners they took. I don't think the Japanese army did any research at all on how to run the camps they set up. For the Japanese army the reality of having to deal with prisoners of war collided with a soldierly way of thinking that had never considered the possibility. Consequently, heading a prison camp was a humiliating assignment to a Japanese ollicer's way of thinking. Therefore, in his deep disillusionment, he might be feeling some spiritual affinity for his prisoner, Major Celliers, and is then completely taken by the man's charm. Question: On the night before Hara is to be executed for his crimes against his wartime prisoners, his former captive. Colonel Lawrence, comes to visit him. and they spend the evening talking. Then when Lawrence is about to go, Hara says, with an embarrassed look on his face, "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence." This embarrassment comes from saying something very personal, don't you think?
Oshima: That is a very Japanese reaction, isn't it, that feeling of embarrassment. Our producer, Jeremy Thomas, said that in that last scene Beat Takeshi [Hara] is just a great big baby. I understand what he means, for, in fact, Takeshi is very popular on television with children, which he says is because he feels childish. He has the naivete, the shyness of a small child. I think children understand that. Takeshi also said that Tom Conli humored him wonderfully, like his mother would, which gave him a sense of comfort when they embraced.
Question: How did you come to cast David Bowie in the picture?
Oshima: Van Der Post had gotten to know Robert Redford through their activities on behalf of environmental protection, and he suggested I talk to Redford about doing the film, so I went to New York to meet him. Redford said he had a lot of respect for my work, but he didn't want to do this film. He thought the general American audience wouldn't understand it. I told him I thought that though they might not understand at first, by the end they would. He responded by saying that if an American viewer doesn't understand a picture in the first fifteen minutes, he gives up. I could appreciate that as an established figure in the American film business he no doubt has a good grasp of the American audience. But I am not interested in making films that can be understood in the first fifteen minutes.
When I came back to Japan, David Bowie was appearing in a Japanese television commercial. I was very impressed with the commercial and sent him a copy of the screenplay. He replied that he was very excited by it and wanted to meet me. When I went to New York to meet him, he was appearing in The Elephant Man on Broadway. He sent me tickets and asked me to see the play before we met. I saw it and he was very good, perhaps too good. I don't really like actors who are so exceedingly good. Rather, I prefer actors with abundance of heart and deficiencies of strength. I found out that he used to do pantomime and had aspired to a career of acting oojtbe stage.
The next day we met at his office. Now, I had always imagined David Bowie as being heavily made up and surrounded by bodyguards, and so forth. But he came in wearing a white shirt and white slacks and with just one female assistant. He struck me as being very plain. He was unassuming, unpretentious, straightforward, and down to earth. He spoke candidly. At the end of the meeting I thought we should talk about what he should be paid, but he shrugged it off and said we could talk about that later—he had already decided he wanted to work with me.
I asked if he would also like to do the music for the film, but was a little apprehensive because I didn't want people to get the impression that I had cast him in the film in order to get his music. Above all, I wanted people to appraise him as an actor. He advised me that the sсript had to be improved, and I asked if he might recommend a screenwriter to work on it, but he wasn't insistent about exerting any control in that realm. He just wanted to concentrate on his role. I think that that purity of character comes out clearly in the film.
I was quite happy, too, when he told me I make films the way he makes music, that we both value improvisation and the energy of the moment. I don't like to shoot a lot of extra footage, and I don't like a lot of tests and rehearsals. I stake things on an instant. As a musician who likes to capture a moment, he understood that. Question: You didn't have any differences of interpretation?
Oshima: Oh, no, we did. For example, the scene in which Celliers is carrying Lawrence on his back as they try to escape from the camp and are discovered by Yonoi. Yonoi is carrying a sword and he orders Celliers, armed with just a knife, to tight him. I thought Celliers should make as though to take him on, but Bowie said that no one with just a knife could expect to beat someone with a sword and would soon give up. I think Japanese would fight it out no matter what, but I think his response was a very rational one. Question: So did you go along with him? Oshima: Yes, because physically he couldn't make himself do something that bothered him. On those occasions when I went ahead and had him do something that mentally or physically he wasn't inclined to do, it turned out terribly. So the film turned out a bit differently than what I had in mind when I was writing the screenplay. Question: Did you make any discoveries in working with foreigners? Oshima: I learned a great deal about how' we think differently from a screenwriter named Paul Mayersberg who went over the dialogue line by line, fixing it. For example, a brief silence in conversation is meaningful to Japanese, but to the Western way of thinking it means either that one has no opinion or that one is in agreement with what has already been said. If a person says something, it demands a reply. Yet in conversations between Japanese, silences are common. If you and I meet and I happen to ask what you think about a certain thing, you might not answer and I don't question you any further. Then we change the subject and chat a while longer, and eventually you might come back to that first question and say what you think. We rather like that sort of conversation. So in several scenes I had a question at the beginning, the conversation moved on to other things, and the answer came right at the end. Mayersberg said it was incomprehensible: "What's this last line?" he asked. I explained it was the answer to the question at the beginning of the scene. He said the answer should come right away.
Question: Was it difficult to work with so many foreigners?
Oshima: No. Everything went very well. I was lucky in that though we had people from eight countries and could not always speak each others' languages, we worked hard at understanding each other. When Europeans do coproductions with each other, they expect to be able to communicate their intentions rather easily, but when they in fact cannot, trouble arises, But between Westerners and Japanese, the inability to communicate is more expected and our first reaction is to make the other person understand. Consequently, because we were working harder at getting our thoughts across, things went well. In that regard, the theme of the film and the way wc made it seemed to converge. Question: Wc arc of the generation that experienced losing World War II, and losing made us try harder to understand our former enemy.
Oshima: Yes, I still feci that way. As kids we were taught slogans about the "foreign devils," and then after the war Ihoughl we came to know the Americans better. We were shooting on Rarotonga on the anniversary of the war's end and I wrote a letter to a friend in which I said, "I have finally come further south than the Imperial Army or Navy ever did and I am now engaged in making a film with our former enemies." Writing that made me very happy.
Question: As a young man, I always wanted to be able to have the chance to converse with foreigners.
Oshima: This doesn't exactly amount to worship of the West, but the Japanese have a unique keenness for Western things. When you and I went to the Manila Film Festival recently, I saw that this interest in the foreign was not just restricted to the Japanese, that it was universal. There we were, a group of men who had never met anyplace except on battlefields. When Hara speaks to Lawrence in (he film, he asks such things as why such a splendid officer didn't kill himself rather than be taken prisoner, or if all Englishmen were queers—that sort of stupid chatter. But he was talking to an Englishman and enjoying it. Conversing with foreigners is fun.
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интервью с БоуиBowie:
LETS ACT
David Bowie is one of the most durable and certainly the most versatile figure in modern pop music. His rock concerts are as painstakingly directed and choreographed as operas, and the characters he's created for them are as varied as his influences, which range from Dylan to Coltrane, from Brecht to Burroughs, from Kabuki to Kraftwerk. He has been a pioneer in rock video; his stunning visual presentations of his songs have set the standard for excellence in the medium. As an actor he's probably best known for his work as the alien in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth, but he also received critical acclaim for his portrayal of John Merrick in the Broadway production of The Elephant Man, and as Brecht's Baal in a BBC television presentation. Earlier this year, writer-critic Ruth McCormick interviewed Bowie in New York about his work with Oshima, a director he has always admired and whose ability to change styles and directions is very much like his own. Question: How do you choose your acting jobs?
David Bowie: I always choose directors. So far, I've been lucky enough to work with two of my very favorites—Roeg and r Oshima. They are completely different in their ways of approaching film, but there is a parallel. As I see it, I've got a luxurious position of being asked to do movies —to take study courses with directors and be paid for doing it, and to enjoy myself thoroughly in the process.
Question: When Oshima asked you to do Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, were you already familiar with his work?
Bowie: Yes, The Ceremony, Boy, and In the Realm of the Senses were the three major things of his I'd seen at the time; they were so totally different in many ways. I think Oshima has a really international outlook. I was totally intrigued when he came backstage after he saw The Elephant Man and asked me if I'd be interested in working with him. I jumped at the chance. But it took fully another two years before the thing finally got started.
He had asked me if I'd wait for him, and I agreed—and, indeed, two years later he called me and said, "We start in three weeks." I'd just finished The Hunger, so, really, the last thing I wanted to do was make a movie! I just wanted to have a holiday, because it was quite a fatiguing role, with the makeup and all that. So I took advantage of the situation and took my holiday in the South Pacific. I got to know the islands pretty well before Oshima got there with the crew, so by the time everyone arrived I felt pretty much as if I'd been on the island for some time, which, in fact, I was supposed to have been in my role. I felt quite at home, and as if I could have been in a camp all that time, because the island's kind of small and you begin to feel cut off after a bit.
Question: It must have been quite beautiful.
Bowie: Well, after two weeks, the beauty starts to wear off. You just feel confined, which was all right, because that was the whole point of my character anyway: It was the right mood to be in. But I've never worked on anything where the momentum gathered such speed—I mean, he works so quickly! The lighting seemed almost simplistic, to the point where you couldn't believe it could look any good. But then you see the rushes, and it's fantastic.
Question: Wasn't the cameraman Toichiro Narushima?
Bowie: Indeed. My father! I was given the right to call him "father." What a tremendous eye he has; he's so quick with his decisions. And then, from scene to scene, we weren't allowed by Oshima to have an overview of what the film was going to be like. We were subjected to so many fast scene changes, because he would accomplish so many scenes in one day, that we were fully preoccupied with strengthening and stretching our individual characters in relationship to the immediate people around us.
After the first couple of days, we realized it was going to be one-take stuff— one take, two takes. And that really fired us up; I think that got us through the movie more than anything else, this terrific momentum. You'd go through a scene, you'd be done, and then you'd be moving on to the next scene immediately, so you were always your character, with no chance to see the overall thing. You were continually redefining what your character was undergoing, what stresses were involved in his reIationships with his own men and with the enemy.
Question: But isn't that like real life?
Bowie: Yes, exactly, and that's how he shoots. It was like real life—you only get one shot at it. He doesn't believe in a thousand takes. He'll do two takes, sometimes three, and he's got it. It's a miracle; he edits in the camera. And the whole editing thing, I believe, was finished about five or six days after the last day of shooting. He'd already assembled a rough cut of the movie—I mean, it was that quick. I asked him how he could do this all so quickly, and he told me, "I've been five years waiting for this, so I've filmed it a million times in my head."
Question: Until now Oshima's usually had to work with such small budgets.
Bowie: Absolutely—he was forced to be disciplined. For this film, Toda-san, the set designer, was given all the money. He built this enormous set in the middle of the jungle, this fantastic camp. It was just quite beautifully put together, with bamboo and twine, Japanese-style, and then he hid the whole thing with tents, so you didn't see any of the camp; you'd see part of the camp, an odd bit of a corner coming out from behind the tent, but it was mostly covered by the tent, so actually, everything to the west of that point needn't have been built at all, but he did build the whole thing. He said it doesn't matter—you never show the whole thing, because there's no such thing as perfection in life—you can never make a thing perfect by showing it all and saying: "This is perfection." You just show a little bit of it, and your mind will give you the perfection that's needed to say that this is a perfect shot. An American would shoot everything,—let's have the money out there on the screen!
Question: What about the character you play—without giving away the movie? Bowie: Well, the great thing about the movie is that there's nothing to give away in those terms. You could give the ostensible story line, but it isn't going to help at all, because the thing is the impact of the confrontation between Japanese civilization and English civilization, and how they so totally misunderstand one another. And one man, played by Tom Conti, who does understand both sides, is completely disowned by each side.
Question: He's able to see both sides because he's something of an intellectual?
Bowie: Absolutely. But in that situation, you can't be in the middle or you're going to be disowned by both sides. Your own side is going to wonder why you're messing around with the Japanese, and the Japanese are going to think, This man is of no real nobility, because he's moving away from his own men—therefore, he's a bad man.
Question: On the other hand, your character is a man of action.
Bowie: Yes. I embrace the idea of war, because of my guilt about my dealings with my family, specifically my younger brother, who was a hunchback from birth —which reflects badly, as far as I'm concerned, upon my own being, and so I disown him. I disown all responsibility for looking after him to an extent that leads him into terrible social situations, but I just stand there in the wings and watch him undergo terrible humiliations, without ever running to his defense. All this starts to work on me over the years, and comes to a point where my life becomes meaningless because of the dishonorable way I've treated my brother, so when the war comes, I throw myself into it, looking for salvation, but really it's that now I can die, can die honorably doing something. This is what produces this so-called iron will that I've got; it's just this enforced feeling that I've got to throw myself into the most dangerous situations so that I can redeem myself. So the Japanese see in me this iron-willed, noble figure, but I, of course, see myself as the antithesis of this—-which is again complete misunderstanding on their part.
Question: You've spent a lot of time in Japan. There's always been an element of Kabuki in your shows.
Bowie: Yes, a very strong one. You know, during the shooting, they had so many lovely Japanese traditions, like on the first day of shooting, everybody wore their best suits, and then again, on the last day: white suits, white gloves. And during the five years Oshima had to wait to make the movie, his three main peers on his crew didn't work either. They refused to work with any other people until Oshima was able to make his film. That's such an incredible thing, the way loyalty permeates their whole society, into their arts as well. If he couldn't work, then they shouldn't either.
Question: Are there any other Japanese directors you'd be interested in working with?
Bowie: I must admit, I think that film was about the only one I would have done. You know, there's a rumor—I don't know whether it will come off, but it would be tremendous—that he may do the Mishi-ma story.
Question: Paul Schrader wants to do the Mishima biography.
Bowie: Yes. Paul told me that. You know, he's a superlative writer, but I feel uneasy about his filmmaking at the moment. I think there are a lot of inherently good things about his filmmaking, but perhaps he needs to make a lot more movies. Cat People doesn't have the impact, say, of a Cocteau movie, but then, Cocteau shot in black and white, and that had a lot to do with it. Color is hard in a twilight movie. With black and white, you can read so many colors into it. You color it your own way. That's where rock V roll is quite interesting, because recently there's been a great resurgence in wanting to make promo movies in black and white again. It's not seen as an outdated way of filming things, which is what seems to have happened in the cinema, where color is seen as new and black and white as old-fashioned, which is ridiculous. We seem to have overcome that kind of elitism in rock. In fact, I myself did a couple of things a few years back because I thought you could say much more in black and white. Everything's dealing in terms of denseness, shadowing, light and dark, and shading. You can create another, alternative universe. If you're after a particular effect which has an unreal kind of quality, you can really portray that in black and white.
Question: Didn't you live for quite a while in Germany?
Bowie: I lived in Berlin for about three years. It's paradise for a writer because there are such frictionalized attitudes to life there—there's such danger there all the time. The whole Zeitgeist of the place is this overbearing feeling that there's only a couple of years to go. The longer you live there the more you feel the Wall; it's one of those nightmare things where all the lime, the Wall's moving in. And it has produced, I think, some incredible writers and filmmakers. I like their attitudes there.
Question: John Ueartfield once wrote a very funny piece taking off on the Nazis for policing culture at the same lime they ripped it off and recycled it for their own purposes.
Bowie: Fascist culture was such a secondhand culture! It had the same pretensions as Roman culture, which stole everything from the Greeks. They had absolutely nothing original. Imagine being around at the lime of the Degenerate Art exhibition, when all that stuff went to Switzerland to be sold off for two, three francs —incredible paintings by people like Emil Nolde, who, it's quite funny, turned out to be a Nazi himself. I wonder how he coped with that. There he was, a self-professed Nazi, and his art was called degenerate by the very regime he supported.
Question: Look at Leni Ricfenstahl, who ran into trouble with Goebbels. It's a strange contradiction.
Bowie: Well, I think that's what made Mephisto such an enlightening movie. It was very interesting to see how one could become morally bankrupt in that particular period—how easy it was to be artistically "booed over"—-to convince yourself that you had to remain an artist. It's very scary.
Question: Are there any German directors you'd be interested in working with? Herzog. for instance?
Bowie: Well, he's the kind of director, like Rocg, Oshima, that I tend to gravitate towards—less-known filmmakers.
Question: Who do the kind of adventurous things you would do yourself.
Bowie: Exactly. I really don't think I need the Hollywood bit. I'm not ready to go back there. It all gets too predictable.
Question: What are your plans after your tour?
Bowie: It's hard for me to think past the tour, because it's going to take up so much of the year. My immediate future will be designing the set, working out the landscaping for the songs, how I wish to present them, how much character will be involved, whether I’ll do the whole thing myself, what the premise, the concept of the tour will be—that's sort of the fun thing to do.
Question: That's when you get to be creative rather than just interpretative.
Bowie: That's when I get my first camera!
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@темы: Подробности, Дэвид Боуи, История создания, Нагиса Осима, Публикации
