WIPE-OUT: Kurosawa's tricky cuts

Watching the Akira Kurosawa films at Film Forum's Centennial -- a whopping six-week-long tribute to the the first East Asian director to achieve international recognition -- is typically overwhelming, especially if you have (like me) been trying to see as many as possible and also binging on the offerings on Netflix watch instantly. There are various elements that tie these films together and more again that set them apart, but for me one of the most strikingly weird Kurosawa signatures is the wipe cut.






(from Ikiru.)

In his autobiography, Kurosawa seems to explain his use of the wipe as a deliberate turn away from classical editing techniques, those invisible cuts that would render scene transition invisible: "Since the advent of the talkies in the 1930s, I felt, we had misplaced and forgotten what was so wonderful about the old silent movies. I was aware of the aesthetic loss as a constant irritation. I sensed a need to go back to the origins of the motion picture to find this peculiar beauty again; I had to go back to the past." Transitioning with wipes in early cinema would have shown finesse with new technology ("Why eat hamburger when you can have steak?" asks Homer Simpson, rationalizing to Lisa his exclusive use of "star wipe" in post-production). At the height of his career, Kurosawa looked back to the silent era for inspiration, and saw beauty and novelty in telling a story this way.

James Goodwin wrote a book about Kurosawa that, at one point, tallied the critical opinions on the wipe. Semiotician Christian Metz, for example, places the wipe cut within the code of "trucage, which includes optical effects that constitute visual but not photographic material," and is an instance of "intervention by the filmmaker into a story, whereas a film's photographic material alone simply implies the filmmaker's point of view through the development of a story."

Noel Burch, who wrote the book on Japanese Cinema, assesses Kurosawa's employment of the wipe cut as a "deliberate anachronism." According to Burch, "by manifestly causing the frame-line to cross the spectator's field of vision, Kurosawa's wipe cuts expose elements that otherwise sustain the illusion of reality. Kurosawa thus acknowledges discontinuity and the screen's two-dimensionality as conditions of filmic representation, while conventional Western codes conceal these formal limitations." The wipe cut does expose the scaffolding of cinema -- not only "the screen's two-dimensionality" but the typically-subsumed hand of the editor, and the artificial nature of the splice that glues two scenes together.

With a more whimsical take, philosopher Gilles Deleuze imagines that the wipe cut "constitutes an imaginary Japanese character that serves as Kurosawa's cinematic signature... composed of a thick vertical stroke that extends from top to bottom of the screen and is joined by thinner, variable horizontal strokes that move screen right to left and left to right, which are the photographic components of whatever images are involved in the wipe cut." Donald Richie, who wrote great pieces on Kurosawa and compatriot Yasujiro Ozu, compares the wipe cut to pre-cinema: "a 'puncutation mark' in Kurosawa's cinema through which a new image pushes off the old, as one lantern slide pushes off the other." Travelling across the screen, the wipe spotlighs cinema as a highly temporal art, "a finality that appeals, this single stroke canceling all that went before, questioning it, at the same time bringing in the new."

Though Kurosawa influenced scores of filmmakers, perhaps the most well-known acolyte is a certain George Lucas.







Lucas was deeply influenced by Kurosawa (we have 1958's Hidden Fortress to thank not only for the basic plot of Star Wars but for its compellingly headstrong princess character) and his enthusiastic use of wipe cuts was a shout-out to both the Japanese director and Flash Gordon-style television serials.








Transitions like these -- both from the first fifteen minutes of Star Wars: A New Hope -- bring a fast-paced continuity to the film's beginning (the adventure serial: "Meanwhile, back on Tatooine..") and also a sense of levity. In 1952's Ikiru, the maze of bureaucracy a post-war Tokyo citizen must navigate is conveyed through shots of various department heads, wiped together from alternating sides, each directing the supplicant to another bureau. The wipe technique makes it funnier -- images of bureaucrats are stacked like cards, each more punctilious than the last.

Kurosawa at Film Forum runs until February 18, culminating in a two-week run of the director's Lear, Ran. For more on A.K., see Bilge Ibiri in Moving Image Source.

"The general heading of progress": Elia Kazan's WILD RIVER and the Tennessee Valley Authority

In 1937, the Farm Security Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority and a handful of other government agencies, commissioned Pare Lorentz to make a film about erosion in the Mississippi River, in order to raise awareness of the New Deal's resettlement program. The result is an epic Progressive doc, employing a gorgeous musical score and rhythmic "Whitmanesque" narration -- Lorentz referred to the film as an "opera," according to documentary historian Erik Barnouw. Narrator Thomas Charles intones, in the first person plural, a celebration of the damming of the river: "a series of great barriers that will eventually transform the old Tennessee in to a lake of freshwater pools, locked and dammed, regulated and controlled down 650 miles to Paduka."



(30 mins, available through the Moving Image Archive).


Wild River, the 1960 film which capped off the three-week long Elia Kazan festival at Film Forum, begins as a documentary in the vein of Lorentz -- a bewildered Tennesseean is interviewed on the tragic events of yet another flood and, through patriotism, Progressivism, and black & white footage of a deluged Tennessee town, the argument for the establishment of the TVA is set upright. However, as Kazan's film bursts into glorious color and narrative fiction, this sensible government program is slowly eroded.

Montgomery Clift, anxious and marvellously tanned in a tight grey flannel suit, is Chuck Glover, a TVA proxy in a small Tennessee town, sent to coax a firey octogenarian off her island farm. As he grows to admire Ella Garth's all-American tenacity, and begins an affair with her granddaughter Carol, Glover's authority is increasingly comprimised -- not least by the angry band of white Southern laborers (de rigueur for a postwar Serious Liberal Movie) who despise his desegregationist ways. Glover struggles to keep the Authority's work (a methodical deforestation of the river basin) on schedule before the water rises, and to find a replacement house that Ella Garth will approve of; Carol, widow and mother of two, works with new vigor to rebuild her abandoned honeymoon house (above the imminent tide line).



While the most apparent physical threat to Glover comes from the town's belligerent white men, Clift's character shrinks most, as supplicant and (once) as drunk, from the Garth women. When he first steps on the island, via rop-tow ferry, and climbs the hill to the steep-sloped house at it's peak, he's greeted -- or rather, ignored -- by four generations on the porch. Once he meets Ella Garth, Glover expends all his administrative energy in trying to please her, to find a proper house for her in the new development; to coax her off the island without the National Guard ("We can't use force!" is the imperative from the higher-ups.) Late one whisky-soaked night, Glover visits the island to pledge his devotion to Ella, who supresses a smile as he tumbles into the pumpkin patch and archly observes, "It's the first time I've ever liked you, Mr. Glover." Carol (played by Lee Remick, with high color on her cheeks and a determined crease between her eyebrows) is especially dominant. Kazan consistently shoots her larger than her male co-star, active and upright in the foreground while he slouches in the rear. Clift plays Chuck reticent and discomfited, the perfect well-behaved Northerner completely out of his element; he can't help but be dwarfed by Carol. When her house is rammed by a mob of angry locals, her first instict is to jump on their leader and bite his ear off; when she caresses her dead husband's shotgun in front of Chuck, her thoughts are obviously far from hunting geese.

Though not without its own naïveté, Kazan's film is responding with nuance and ambiguity to those dominating institutions of Lorentz's age, to Hollywood and the Tennessee Valley Authority. On the first level, there's the undermining of Clift as hero -- either as sexually desirable ("I'll leave, with or without you," Carol tells him) or as being able to fulfill the goals of the New Deal, to make Roosevelt's intentions felt anywhere but on paper. Is any man needed here? When Chuck first meets Carol and asks, consolingly, if Carol has a guy who can take her in when the river rises, she sarcastically retorts -- "Oh yeah, that's the answer to everything, if I got a fellow!"

On another level, of course, Wild River is seriously questioning the notion of the dam as good for America, as beneficial as the film of 1937 claimed. "File under the general heading of progress," Glover declares when his subordinates question directions from Washington. Lines like these are tinged with irony, but Kazan tops it all with the film's end shot. It's a moment that keeps this film from being heavy-handed, like a Stanley Kramer film, or even as tragic and critically acclaimed as earlier Kazan (maybe that's why contemporary critics didn't like it.) As Chuck, Carol and her children are flown out of Tennessee, they slowly approach the majestic dam, a giant chunk of concrete, monumental, a plug. A zoom mask comes in containing the dam in a laughing circle, ending the film not on true love, as this device is traditionally reserved for, but on a hilarious, profane wink: a giant, ugly thumb stuck up America's river.