Obayashi First Draft

Complete first draft written for Hyperallergic.

If you know the name Nobuhiko Obayashi, it’s probably because of his 1977 debut feature House, which achieved cult status during its theatrical tour and Criterion Collection disc release in 2010. This veritable canonization, while likely well-intentioned, was also one of the greatest crimes against cinephilia perpetrated during this decade. While House is indeed a marvelous film, both its promotion and reception ogled over surface-level gonzo weirdness, willfully ignoring any deeper reading or appreciation of the film or the titan director who created it. For Obayashi is one of the signal Japanese directors of his era, who made some 40 features over a period of 60 years, in addition to numerous short films, television and advertising work, and film scholarship, none of which have been officially released in the United States, by Criterion or any other boutique label. Against this willful mischaracterization and neglect, a wave of cinephilia has emerged: spearheaded on Twitter in large part by Evan Morgan, Eli Berger, and Esther Rosenfield (full disclosure: I count all of them as very dear friends) over the past few years, Obayashi has achieved far greater renown and recognition in America. Upon his death at 82 in April of this year — after an improbably long battle with lung cancer that allowed him to complete two more features, including his passion project Hanagatami (2017), which had been in development since before House — the appreciation of his work was far more multifaceted and representative than it might have been just three or four years ago. To commemorate his passing, this year’s edition of Japan Cuts is showing his final film, the mammoth Labyrinth of Cinema (2019), along with a documentary about him and his wife and producer and a number of online conversations about his work. Labyrinth of Cinema is a fitting capstone, a riotous tour through the various manifestations of Japanese war cinema through the eyes of four teenagers, who exist both in the audience of a theater’s last picture show and as a host of avatars within the films, who shift between a dizzying number of genres while attempting to outrun histories of violence and destruction. In order to understand what this summative work is actually summing up, it is necessary to look back into Obayashi’s sizable oeuvre for a few of the more apparent commonalities; though of course this article cannot be in any way exhaustive, some of the greatest films of his career do provide a vital lens into his consistent concerns and interests. Foremost among these was Obayashi’s interest in the vitality and dreams of youth. The vast majority of his films heavily feature in some capacity young people, from the anarchic schoolchildren of Bound for the Fields, the Mountains, and the Seacoast (1986) to the biker gangs of His Motorbike, Her Island (1986), frequently in the sun-kissed bliss of summer. Even a film like Beijing Watermelon (1989), which focuses primarily on a shopkeeper who befriends successive classes of Chinese students studying abroad, is careful to ensure that all of the students come alive as individuals in their own right, never merely symbols for a bright future or a far-off culture across the sea. Not that Obayashi is resistant to the symbolism that the young provide: especially in Hanagatami and Labyrinth of Cinema, they stand in for a certain purity and optimism, an innocence that is threatened by the passage of time and the ravages of war. The degree to which this innocence is lost varies from film to film. In perhaps his most straightforwardly optimistic film, The Rocking Horsemen (1992), the cover band of rock-obsessed high schoolers is dismantled upon graduation, but it is never depicted with the thudding strife of traditional music dramas; even before their performance at the school festival, the boys know that this will be their only truly significant show, and simply resolve to enjoy it while they can, playing their hearts out with abandon. That kind of freedom finds its perfect correlative in Obayashi’s sense of form, which is among the most innovative and eye-popping in cinema. It reaches its zenith in the digital extravaganza of his final films, all odd green screens and discomfiting, cramped close-ups, the better to capture the bracing haze of unreality that war brings. In the case of Labyrinth of Cinema, these are further alloyed by an overload of text boxes and obvious digital compositing; the result is something which renders the myriad recreations of something like a dozen different styles of filmmaking deliberately uncanny, a gap which points to the film’s level of metatextual involvement; past, present, and future are indistinguishable inside the projector. But such touches are present even in the less stylistically obtrusive works: the intensely disruptive edits of Labyrinth appear in the otherwise more conventional The Rocking Horsemen; Bound for the Fields features a gorgeous evocation of 1930s Shochiku filmmaking in grainy black-and-white; His Motorbike, Her Island frequently uses a dazzling technique where, in a film that moves with abandon between black-and-white and color, most of the frame is rendered in monochrome save for the center. This willingness to experiment stems in large part from perhaps the most crucial element: Obayashi’s radical sense of humanism. Amid the excesses and chaos of Labyrinth of Cinema, a stark, passionate message emerges: “a movie can change the future if not the past.” Obayashi very clearly believes in the healing potential of cinema, its capability to represent humanity and Japan at its most harmonious and to argue against war and self-destruction. All of his films carry this immovable truth, whether it’s in the virtual uprising of Bound for the Fields, the ebullience of music-making in The Rocking Horsemen, or the complicated, uncertain transcendence of Hanagatami. And the most powerful of these comes in Beijing Watermelon, in circumstances forced by reality: after plans to film the finale in Beijing were dashed by the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Obayashi filmed it on a series of studio sets in Tokyo, repeatedly breaking the fourth wall and characterizing the events as a dream of China, never openly stating the reason but making clear his solidarity with the students and their struggle in both his own voiceover and the to-camera monologue of the main actor. In doing so, he lays bare the illusion of moviemaking and its ability to capture something truly intrinsic and universal: the goodness of his characters, their essential resistance against brutality, and cinema’s power to honor them. Throughout his career, Obayashi never wavered in this conviction, nor his own artistic ability to harness and give life to this idea; there are few other directors as ripe for rediscovery as him.