To the Close Observer: In Memory of Donald Richie

Updated February 27

Life in Japanese Film: Donald Richie from Berkeley Arts and Letters on FORA.tv

In this excerpt from The Story of Film, Mark Cousins, Donald Richie and Kyōko Kagawa discuss the life and films of the sublime Yasujiro Ozu.

What interests you about Donald Richie?
He's like my Uncle Boonmee. I think that he embodies a lot of memories about cinema, and if I work with him I almost have an excuse to research and get to know the generation of Kurosawa and Miziguchi, etc. He also lived through that time and saw the change of Japan, and I'd like to know that because it's such a fascinating country with great literature and cinema. I've only worked in Thailand, so if there's a country I want to step out and "know," it's Japan. [Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 'Interview', indieWire, May 17, 2011]

Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear of the death, at the grand old age of 88, of the preeminent English-language scholar of Japanese cinema and culture Donald Richie.

Richie, author of more than thirty books (including Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character, A Lateral View, Travels in the East, A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics, The Donald Richie Reader, and The Japan Journals)  was one of the must-reads of our generation but was also an experimental filmmaker of huge note, too -- see his 1968 film Five Philosophical Fables here for an example. This was one of the reasons why Apichatpong Weerasethakul (a filmmaker Richie considered to be "the new Kurosawa") was hoping to work with him - sadly, due to Donald Richie's ill health in recent years, it seems likely this intriguing collaboration did not take place.

Richie's work has featured many times over the years here at FSFF, so as well as celebrating the brilliant film studies content he produced, this blog also gives sincere thanks for his amazing scholarly generosity, placing much of his work online and in the public domain.

Key posthumous tributes to Donald Richie

• David Bordwell, 'Donald Richie', Observations on Film Art, February 25, 2013
• Peter Cowie, 'Remembering Donald Richie', Criterion Collection, February 22, 2013
• Kim Hendrickson, 'Donal Richie (1924-2013)', Criterion Collection, February 19, 2013
• Karen Severns, Donald Richie Tributes website

Online works by Donald Richie

• Donald Richie, Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character (New York: Anchor Books, 1961; Michigan Electronic Reprint 2004)
• Donald Richie, 'In the Realm of the Senses: Some Notes on Oshima and Pornography', Criterion Film Essays, April 30, 2009 
• Donald Richie, 'Remembering Kurosawa', Criterion Collection, December 9, 2009
• Donald Richie, 'Ikuru', Criterion Collection, January 5, 2004 
• Donald Richie, ' Stories of Floating Weeds', Criterion Collection, April 19, 2004 
• Donald Richie, 'Dersu Uzala', Criterion Collection, July 17, 1995
• Donald Richie, 'Tokyo Journal: Remembering Toshiro Mifune', Criterion Collection, September 30, 2008 
• Donald Richie, 'Ozu and Setsuko Hara', Criterion Collection, May 8, 2006
• Donald Richie, 'Samurai Rebellion: Kobayashi's Rebellion', Criterion Collection, October 24, 2005
• Donald Richie, 'Red Beard', Criterion Collection, November 19, 1989
• Donald Richie, 'Expressionism in Film', Tokyo - Berlin / Berlin - Tokyo Exhibition Catalogue, Mori Art Museum, 2006
• Donald Richie, 'The Daughter of the Samurai: a German-Japanese co-production', Tokyo - Berlin / Berlin - Tokyo Exhibition Catalogue, Mori Art Museum, 2006
• Donald Richie, writer and film critic, Conversations With History: "Writing, Film, and Japan: An Expatriate's View," 9/21/01
• Japan Times archive of work by Richie
• Donald Richie on Midnight Eye - Visions of Japanese cinema 

Online Interviews/Reviews, etc., about Donald Richie

• Alexander Jacoby, 'Donald Richie: A lifetime's observations of Japan', The Asi-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, August 2006
• Moving Image Source Interview, October 2006
• Richard Lloyd Parry, 'Smilingly Excluded [Review of The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 by Donald Richie]', London Review of Books, 28.16, August 2006
• Jasper Sharp, 'Inteview with Donald Richie', Midnight Eye, December 8, 2003
• A letter Hollis Frampton wrote in 1973 to Donald Richie, then the Film Curator at MoMA

For Donald Richie

• David Bordwell, 'Kurosawa's Early Spring', Observations on Film Art, December 8, 2009 
• Catherine Grant, 'On Japanese Cinema', Film Studies For Free, July 27, 2010

On Japanese Cinema at FSFF

• On Japanese Cinema
• Emperor of the Senses: RIP Nagisa Oshima 1932-2013
• Nagisa Oshima (1932-2013), a Tribute by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
• On Kazuo Hara and Japanese Documentary Film
• Reassessing Anime: Japanese cinema and animation
• Animation Studies: Three Fabulous Online Resources
• Horror Ad-Nauseam!
• War, Conflict and Commemoration in the Age of Digital Reproduction
• Dreaming Movies: RIP Satoshi Kon (1963-2010)

Cinemagogic Echoes? Len Lye's FREE RADICALS (1958) and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's HOUR OF THE FURNACES (1968)

CINEMAGOGIC ECHOES? from Catherine Grant on Vimeo.

A real-time comparison, for scholarly purposes, of Len Lye's 1958 experimental animation FREE RADICALS and the opening minutes of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's 1968 Grupo Cine Liberación activist film  LA HORA DE LOS HORNOS/HOUR OF THE FURNACES

[Len] Lye's Free Radicals (1958) […] is a black and white scratch animation short, cut to the insistent rhythmic accompaniment of an African drum solo.* It immediately calls to mind the unforgettable opening scenes of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas' Third Cinema classic La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (1968).** While equally exciting and radical, these strikingly similar films hint at the extent to which the world and the political landscape had changed in the decade between their respective release dates, and between then and now. We have no way of knowing if Getino and Solanas knew of Len Lye's film. We know, however, that films exchange ideas, talking to one another across time, and that the conversation between radical aesthetics and radical politics is ongoing, with both daring to 'make it new' and set the world on its feet, by turning it upside down. [Jerry Whyte, 'Free Radicals', CineOutsider.com, December 11, 2011. Online at: http://www.cineoutsider.com/articles/stories/f/free_radicals_1.html]

A demonstration and a lesson, The Hour of the Furnaces imports into cinema the affirmative aesthetics of the written political treatise. A collective ideal informs the whole film. It anticipates a liberated time. It’s not the product of a single voice but of a chorus of poems (Marti, Césaire), manifestos (Fanon, Guevara, Castro, Juan José Hernández Arregui) and films (by Fernando Birri, Joris Ivens, Nemesio Juárez). It conjoins the powers of didacticism, poetry and agogy (the agogic qualities of a work concern its rhythmic, sensible, physical properties – a notion suggested by the French aesthetician Etienne Souriau). Stylistically, the film uses all possible audiovisual techniques, from flicker to contemplative sequence shots (for instance, the final three-minute shot that reproduces a picture of the dead Che Guevara’s face with his eyes wide open), from collage to direct cinema, from blank screen to animated effects, from the rigours of the blackboard to the hallucinogenic properties of the fish-eye, from classical music to anglophone pop hits. Cinema is an arsenal and here all its weapons are unsheathed. [Nicole Brenez, 'Light my fire: The Hour of the Furnaces', Sight and Sound Magazine, 8 March 2012. Online at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/light-my-fire-hour-furnaceshttp://www.bfi.org.uk/news/light-my-fire-hour-furnaces]

'Agogics' is a musical term that designates the use of agogic accents, that is accents consisting in a lengthening of the time-value of the note. The philosopher Étienne Souriau extended the use of the term to include all the arts existing in time. He defined 'agogics' as \what characterizes an artwork that takes place in time, through movement, and specifically through the creation of a fast or slow pace, or the use of different rhythms.' For musicians, the notion is related to gesture, to physical movements, to a bodily interaction with their instrument, to a sense of speed, an energy, a precise handling of a piece. [Christian Jacquemin et al, 'Emergence of New Institutions for Art-Science Collaboration...' [date unknown], Online at: seadnetwork.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/jacquemin_final1.pdf. Hyperlinks added by FSFF] 

Souriau developed his idea of the agogic as an explicit reaction to the ‘rather banal description [of] arts of space in contrast to the phonetic and cinematic arts’. [Of] interest is Popper’s use of the term to describe the quality of temporal pattern that he identifies in a range of works. At one extreme [..].] is the velocity and dramatic choreography of a Len Lye installation. The term agogic conflates speed, acceleration and duration and would appear to be a significant aspect of kinetic form. [Jules Moloney, Designing Kinetics for Architectural Facades: State Change (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2011), p. 64.]

Film Studies For Free's author has been a tad busy elsewhere lately - and there will be lots to catch up with at this blog in due course.

But today FSFF is thrilled to present its (by distance) contribution to a teach-in which took place earlier today. This video was produced in a few hours this morning, using readily available materials for quotation (see above and below), in solidarity with a campus occupation that you can choose to read more about here.

Staff and students of media and cultural studies, working in a deeply personal, activist capacity, gave short presentations on their research and thinking about ideas of resistance, occupation and neoliberalism in the context of the university and beyond, in order to consider how research in their fields might offer new and diverse perspectives on activism and resistance.

FSFF has always liked its politics, like its film studies, to have rhythm and timing, so its research project today foregrounds those elements. You can find its author's scholarly discussion of this kind of "real-time" videographic comparison here: 'Déjà-Viewing? Videographic Experiments in Intertextual Film Studies', MEDIASCAPE: Journal of Cinema and Media, Winter 2013.

FSFF has devoted a number of previous entries to online and openly accessible resources on Third Cinema and revolutionary aesthetics in the past. See especially this bumper post and this more recent one. 

And you can find the two films quoted from above, in low-res online video versions, as per the details and links below.

• Free Radicals by Len Lye (1958). Online at: http://video.frieze.com/film/len-lye-free-radicals/
• La hora de los hornos/Hour of the Furnaces by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino (1968). Online at: youtu.be/jQOXKoMHOE0