Out in the hall this week, Yamabuki is the director's latest film Yamasaki Juichiro. Selected at ACID, it presents in the form of a choral film the fate crossed by characters living in a small mining town in western Japan.
The sign in title
Everything is often the story of an apparition. When a film starts, it often starts only with its title, and some filmmakers, like some novelists, slow to make appear what must be the sign of a beginning. The title is the master signifier of a beginning and often he points his finger at the spectator that the story has finally begun. The title then becomes the sign that allows it to be the sign of what begins.
In a painting the title becomes the thought of the image. The painter can finally write what his painting thought. In the cinema the story lies in an image and perhaps the title would contain all the image and therefore its entire history. The title tells the story without saying it or at least it Deicctity Which announces it.
Building a Landscape
In the film of Juichiro Yamasaki the black screen is the first image. It is a surface on which everything is still to be said but above all to be drawn. The sign appears. It is a hand drawn trait, like that of a painter who lets us contemplate the gesture of a coming sign and a landscape to be built. Yamabuki is a flower, a Japanese corete in its bending language translation (Western language). It is a yellow flower that grows in the shade of the sun and it « Turn your back like sunflowers do », borrowed and descriptive speech that this young high school girl pronounces of the film whose she shares, with this flower, identity and name. Comparison that binds these flowers and speaks a secret language.
Yamabuki is therefore also a girl in flower like all the women and girls of this film whose floral dresses make visible this sign which is displayed in body, thing and figure. Japanese queens are discreet, they speak non-solar language. His language is rock and grey. Its yellow colour did not mean yellow except by its opposition, and therefore its complementarity, to the grey of the rock of the mountains. That's what the filmmaker tells us.
The appearance of the sign and its colour (yellow) overlaps the image of a greyish and desaturated rock, that of a mine (grey). A place in which no flower can survive. And yet the queen lies in the same space, not in the same place, on the other side of the mountain, on a hillside, hopeless and discreet, waiting for a look that already circulates around it without making it the optical center of the landscape.
Variance theory
Yamabuki is a flower of differences and hostile spaces. You have to put yourself in danger to see her and bring her back. Yamabuki's father is well aware of this, he who will dig up one of them on the mountainside because his people die in his garden. The corete does not survive the tamed spaces, it does not support the approbation of a too tidy world. She makes it known in this scene of deterritorialization where the father detachs her from her territory. It causes the fall of stones that will rock Chang-Su, the other protagonist of the film, into a dramatic destiny.
This character is also apart. From South Korea, this father of a recomposed family seeks the trait that will allow him to create a secure and stable space. A space so far for the character because he is locked in closed places, at a good distance from a feeling he tries to find: happiness. Here he is struck inside this landscape. The queen dug up by this other father, a policeman, leads with her the fall of this character. She shares the consequences. The landscape then finds its place and all its color, made of contrasts and movement of going-and-coming between these faces enclosed in the images.
Yamasaki travels within this landscape and describes its contours without putting boundaries in this community that cannot communicate. The eyes of the characters are blocked at the centre of the crossroads of this urban landscape in which everything is only passages. The demonstrations are « silent standing », they are silent and should not disturb. They are granted only the benefit of a glance cast and perhaps perceived by others who pass. Nothing more. And yet Yamasaki tells us that emancipation is there, not hope because hope is already a sign too close to its object.
Hope is a further enslavement because salvation makes the subject enslaved to his object. Emancipation, however, passes through this opening of the eye. The one of this Chinese escort in his hotel room who looks at the window and finds in a desolate backyard landscape this flower, always discreet but which offers him space for a moment his color and a clear horizon. In the shadow of the landscape is a metaphor that allows the eye to open. The image becomes a flower, the metaphor becomes the sign of a metaflora.
« The sadness will always last »
From this construction of the landscape, we can finally return to the title Yamabuki. The sign becomes a figure that circulates inside this landscape and gives to see the silent color of what Brecht called the « melancholy ». The anger is silent but above all it says the melancholy of a community that will always last.
Between yellow and grey, Yamasaki digs his metaphor without digging it out. Rather, it tells us that it must be allowed to breathe on the mountainside, in the shade of the sun and the way, offering anyone who can look at it. The daughter's gesture contrasts with that of the father, one hollow and the other digging, but these landscape contradictions give the gesture of a community the whole of a landscape. Yamasaki's metaflora finds its style and image, the only one finally able to give « an eternity in style » As Proust suggested.
Trailer of Yamabuki
Interview between Juichiro Yamasaki, director of Yamabuki and Thomas Paulot, director of ACID
The photograph of the film captured in 16mm seems to particularly stick with Yamabuki's words. The melancholy as you say. Nice analysis by the way!
Very nice analysis that makes you want to discover the film (which unfortunately does not come out by home...), will have to wait for the bluray 😉
Bravo for your analysis Loïc, she directly made me want to discover it. 😉
By the way, the (superb) 16 mm capture seems terribly appropriate.