Absolutely. Some directors give out strong iconoclastic vibes through style, some give it out through the material they choose to work with... some give it out through both and originate the vast bulk of the source material which usually earns them the appellation 'auteur'. Kobayashi for me and only me (maybe many of you too) is a curious variant because I see him as pure auteur (though I could easily be "proven wrong" via my blatant bastardization of the term) in that the style is so fiercely & relentlessly distinct, so completely and explosively original, and the films cannot help but present Kobayashi himself in all his glorious style as well as the eternally vigilant & faithful nature of his heart and soul as exposed through the subject matter despite his not having penned the bulk. But they Become Him via this consistent thrust towards personalized themes, the process that usually define & identify auteurs in a more offhand, less "scholarly", yet often more personally compelling way... auters being thus beause they in some sense ARE the material, that it all flows from them. For Kobayashi, of course, the issues are those of purity; exposing hypocracy & pulling away the false public veneer of wisdom & special strength cultivated by Official Authority; yet, again, the majority of his films came from existing novels or were penned by screenwriters. Now, I'm one of those people who sometimes gets annoyed by how little the public gives a damn about screenwriters, how much actors & directors bathe in riches & public adulation & worship for "creating memorable stories" and "creating memorable chatacters", whereas the man who has in many many cases supplied the vast bulk of the creating-- the imagining & originality, actually created the whole thing, words & world & all-- is usually unknown & underpaid gets short shrift in the Free Pussy dept.Gregory wrote:I agree completely with Herr Schreck. Harakiri could have been one of the most outstanding releases of last year, and of course it's still an essential purchase solely on the strength of the film even at the higher price. I can only hope that this problem will be remedied with future Kobayashi releases. Much as I'd like to see a re-release of Kwaidan with the full cut, I think it's even more urgent that they release any they can from the following list (in no particular order).
Human Condition Trilogy: This was a highly personal project for Kobayashi, who in addition to directing helped write the screenplay from Gomikawa's novels about the ways people and their values and ideals are transformed and destroyed within inhuman systems. It's striking the way Kobayashi's wartime experiences seem to have brought this project to life in a special and perhaps more complex way than an autobiographical text.
...etc etc...
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Then you get a guy like Kobayashi whose identity completely soaks a film thru & thru despite his not having penned it. You can feel so much of the essence of Kobayashi's character regardless of the authorship of the source material. This goes from the mechanics of the style itself-- aside from the oft-celebrated geometry of his compartmentalized widescreen designs, you have the completely cinematic use of stage (miraculously un-self-conscious & non-distracting) conventions such as dimming all fill lights on the set to reduce the lighting down to a single spot picking out a character or object... as well as the blatant, before-your-eyes color-shifts in set-lighting to expressionistically adjust for mood or room-temperature-- and it goes just as much for the story as well as the way the story is presented. Deliberate, quiet (on the audio track only, but rumbling everywhere else) stretches of screen time to portray the processes of mindlessness turning into seeting rage, using closeups and lighting and composition and those utter Kobayashi-quietnesses, making you shift in your seat due to discomfort... when a character becomes furious, registers betrayal or breaks out in grief in a Kobayashi film, it spills out of the screen and registers in the viewer's room with a flood of clenched guts, nobody dares crunch a chip--
this utter Kobayashi-ness of Kobayashi films is why I see Masaki as a true auteur, the true author of his films with the genuine fullness of unique personal construction of his finished product that constitutes the use of the term so bandied about these days. Of course Hashimoto is in the same rarified class, and should be regarded with the same reverence, and suffers from the same lack of appreciation (beyond industry & cineastes) that most of the best screenwriters do (who talks enough about Carl Mayer? Can someone buy me a single book in english-- or more than 1 in German-- about Carl Mayer, perhaps the key figure in the German silent cinema?)
