The Cats of Mirikitani

The Cats of Mirikitani is a documentary about a homeless artist of Japanese origin, Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, living and working on the streets of New York near the twin towers. After 9/11, Linda Hattendorf, who was making a documentary on him at the same time and has become his friend, took him to her flat in the hope that she can help him get some benefits like Social Security, SSI, and housing. Slowly Hattendorf learns about the his past and his art, and why he draws same things over and over again - Childhood in Hiroshima, concentration camps, a mountain and a lake with prison cells in front of them, red flames, peeking whimsical cats. The Cats of Mirikitani is a documentary about past, the expressive power of art as a voice and the healing power of human connection and mutual sharing of experiences.

Jimmy Mirikitani was born in Sacramento, California but was raised in Hiroshima, Japan. As a young man, he refused to serve the army (he says "he was not afraid but he was born to be a great artist") and came to US to study art and to become a visual artist, who will as he puts, "combine the oriental and western art forms". But during WWII, after Pearl Harbor, people (including US Citizens) of Japanese Ancestry are taken to camps (there is a controversy in the terminology here too, some call then "relocation camps", some call them "internment camps" and others "concentration camps". Whatever be the case wiki says "A number of persons died or were permanently injured for lack of medical care, and several were killed by sentries". There is a documentary on the other such camp called Topaz). Mirikitani was interned to Tule lake camp in California (which was a segregation center where those deemed "disloyal") and was cut from his family (his sister was moved to a different camp, Minidoka camp in Idaho). After the camp, the interns were moved to a frozen food manufacturing plant near Bridgeton New Jersey for the forced labor. Later, they were released and returned their citizenships, but Mirikitani never received his letter for citizenship because he has moved so often. In his last job as a live-in cook, when his last employer died, he was suddenly left without job and home.

All this trauma and pain from camp to homelessness has, by now settled in the old man to bitterness for this world. His contempt for US can be trivial when heard (after hearing the Bush's speech after 9/11 and what is being done Arab Americans he says "that’s what they do"), but given his past, looks justifiable. But all these years, Mirikitani continued to make art, and we can say that it became a therapy for him to deal with his past. His childhood in Hiroshima, memories of the camp (especially of the kid who died in the camp. He used to like cats and used to follow Mirikitani), Hiroshima bombing that wiped his mother's family, separation from his sister, became subjects of his art. With Hattendorf's help, Mirikitani was able to find some of his lost things - his US citizenship, his sister but most importantly a visit to the Tule Lake Camp where he met other people who came there to commemorate the past, and where Mirikitani shared some of his memories of the camp with others. The last shot of the documentary shows stoically satisfied Mirikitani sitting on the return bus from the Tule Lake Camp pilgrimage. It’s a truly satisfying moment for us, as was for Mirikitani.

Today's Top 20

In no particular order...

1. Tokyo Story
2. Nights of Cabiria
3. Ran
4. Dairy of a Country Priest
5. 3 Women
6. In a Lonely Place
7. The Cloud-Capped Star
8. In the Mood for Love
9. Ten
10. Winter Light
11. Bad Education
12. Mamma Roma
13. Days and Nights in the Forest
14. Beau Travail
15. Hi Mom!
16. Ali: Fear Eats the Soul
17. Distant Voices, Still Lives
18. Beloved
19. A Short Film about Killing
20. Ordet

25 Favourite Non-English Language Films

The title of the post is stolen from here.

The list is intentionally uneven, and some films may not look like the best for that director, more like a second best or an effort to have a different list for the sake of it. There is definitely some truth in all these allegations.

1. Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman)
2. Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu)
3. Jules and Jim (Francois Truffaut)
4. Beau Travail (Claire Denis)
5. Little Otik (Jan Svankmajer)
6. The Tenant (Roman Polanski)
7. That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Bunuel)
8. Ran (Akira Kurosawa)
9. Ordet (Carl Th. Dreyer)
10. Fellini's Casanova (Fedrico Fellini)
11. Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven (R W Fassbinder)
12. Woyzeck (Werner Herzog)
13. Fat Girl (Catherine Breillat)
14. Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (Jacques Tati)
15. Amores Perros (Alejandro González Inarritu)
16. Meghe Dhaka Tara (Ritwik Ghatak)
17. Bad Education (Pedro Almodovar)
18. Yi yi (Edward Yang)
19. Weekend (Jean Luc Godard)
20. Fallen Angels (Wong Kar Wai)
21. Where's the Friends Home (Abbas Kiarostami)
21. Ten (Abbas Kiarostami)
22. Dairy of the Country Priest (Robert Bresson)
23. Medea (Lars von Trier)
24. The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci)
25. A Short Film About Killing (Krzysztof Kieslowski)

Treeless Mountain

A lesser film would have used its time and space to build a feel-sorry deposit box for our precocious young heroines (Jin and Bin) who are abandoned (left with their drunkard aunt) by their mother, but Treeless Mountain (like brilliant Nobody Knows)is more concerned to evoke a world that Jin and Bin inhibits from their POV, often giving this realistic film a dreamlike quality with simple observant close-ups in natural light, laced with brief shots of panoramic scenery showing passage of time, as they come in terms with loss and abandonment. The best thing about Treeless Mountain is two young precocious performers (a case can be made if they are actually performing), and something special always comes out when the camera stays on them observing their face as they observe the surroundings around them, these are the scenes where cinema comes close to a clear-slighted reading of a young, enduring mind and soul.

Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Where the Wild Things are.

These three films collectively caught up with the child within us. Their handmade craft and quirky imagination shows us a world which is not Pixer perfect. Films like Walle and Up are great, but un-child-like, they are films by adults (and I dont mean it as a compliment). One of the biggest eureka moment of my movie watching career was a realization after watching Kiarostami's Where is my Friend's Home. I realized that none of the adult in that film understood our little hero's state of mind, and that was the whole point. He was like a zombie cruising through an adult non-caring (When I say care, I certainly dont mean food, clothes and general nagging by moms and dads) world. Kiarostami treats him as a full grown human being with his own world around. His world is not incomplete, its just unlike ours. Max of Where the Wild Things are is one such creature too, with a different world and imagination, and his journey into the wild is his own exploration into his own imagination. Director Spike Jones gets that. Second thing about this trio is the hand crafted quality which is infinitely innovative (Mr Fox is so story-book-flat and its so amazing that way) and endlessly spooky (could Caroline be so spooky if it were pixered? Could Mr. Fox be so playful and rollicking otherwise, Could Wild Things be so child-like wild in an adult animated world), and to a kid, this craft looks somehow achievable - sew a button for an eye, make a puppet to dig a burrow, make a monster deadly but not without the possibility of friendship. How can an able child match the perfection of an able adult, that is cruel. Up has perfect balloons and chubby baby, quantum of nostalgia (or are they just fucking cute) for me and you, but plain quotidian for a different world. This trio is all about prolific puerility, a blue pill for the kids.

Bright Star

Bright Star is about Keats (Ben Whishaw) love affair with Fanny Browne (an excellent Abbie Cornish) during his last 3 years (Keats died at 25 of tuberculosis). Bright Star is an oddity, old-fashioned, apologetically romantic - about dreamers and their heartfelt love. Any sniff of wits is of no use here. The brightest moments in the film are where the lovers are together and feel the bliss, sometimes reading poetry and sometimes doing nothing, these quite moments of romantic ecstasy are deeply felt and treasured by lovers. Jane Campion creates elaborate period details without fanfare and her use of nature (all four seasons, bees, butterflies, flowers, fruits, lush trees, lakes, snow, rain, countryside, sounds of the nature) and poetry as a backdrop gives it a distinctive contemplative mood, a whiff of immortality (Fanny walks and disappears in woods as Whishaw read Keats' poetry in the last reels) to this unusually passionate and brutally short love affair.

24 City

24 City chronicles 9 first-person recollections (out of which 4 done with professional actors) of their lives and times in a state-run military factory complex in Chengdu, China that is being demolished to erect luxury futuristic apartments (eponymous 24 City). Jia Zhangke, a master of composition, records passage of time by juxtaposing the old and the new - a lady retelling an old story as the new constructions overlooks in the background, a modern young girl in designer clothes chokes while telling about her parents, getting a breath and strength by saying "I am the daughter of workers". Also Jia Zhangke takes notice of how fast landscape of China is changing. One thing which cinema is good at doing is preserving past. It should be noted that where as in Still Life Jia Zhangke was trying to preserve a collapsing landscape though camera, here in 24 City, it is mostly memories (untold and soon to be forgotten) attached to the factory complex. And when you deal with memories there is always a re-creation of past, and which involves imagination. So it is no wonder that 4 of the 9 interview are fictional accounts. It is not a post-modern approach to make it a pseudo-documentary but its like connecting unfinished story segments (Jia Zhangke took numerous interviews) and use fiction and imagination to fully comprehend and convey the feelings of the people involved. It also connects with the Jia Zhangke's use of pop culture to evoke collective memory of their times. Also, Jia Zhangke does something which I coined as "moving portraits". Moving portrait is a shot created when a subject stands for a still portrait but the portrait is captured as a moving image. The worst thing about photography is its lack of depth in terms of time, usually I am more interested in the space and time before and after the pose. Jia Zhangke does exactly that in his "Moving Portraits". It captures the sublime - the uneasiness, the pre and post-pose person, and by definition if camera lingers, it invariably captures some truth. The pose in the moving portrait is a hint of unreal but it helps reveal something real. Jia Zhangke’s 24 City too reveals more than it shows.

You, the Living

You, the Living is the big mama of A Serious Man. While A Serious Man opens with a zoom in, it ends with a massive zoom out. Like Roy Andersson's last masterpiece Songs from the Second Floor, You, the Living is a collection fifty absurdist, loosely connected long shots of Swedish life. What emerges is, to use a cliche, bigger than sum of its parts - a sincerely-sad, bleakly-funny and enlightening human concoction. Something here to be said about how bleakness of vision not translated into screen dullness like last year's Synecdoche, New York which totally failed to do so. This year both You, the Living and A Serious Man showed us how vital emotions like sorrow and humor are connected with a dotted line.

The Silence of Lorna

Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), a young Albanian woman living in Belgium, is a part of a immigration scam - a sham marriage with a Belgian junkie Claudy (Jérémie Renier) with a plot to get rid of him to marry a Russian mafia-boss to get him Belgium citizenship and her lots of money so that she can marry her boyfriend and start her own business (a snack bar). The plan goes almost alright but our heroine gets all weak and human. Here the director duo follows the cracks of humanity in an otherwise perfect scheme, which as the title suggests, opens as Lorna's moral and human silence breaks away slowly. More suited for my taste, Lorna's silence is more static than handheld (unlike Dardenne Brother other films), helping us to understand our heroine's psyche and her slow inner change, and her final (almost dreamlike) act of revolt and redemption. There is something painfully true yet consoling in the Lorna's journey of humanity and liberation showing a slight hint of madness.