Dogra Magra (1988)

 

Director: Toshio Matsumoto

Screenplay: Atsushi Yamatoya and Toshio Matsumoto

Adapted from a novel by Yumeno Kyūsaku

Cast: Yôji Matsuda as Kure Ichiro; Shijaku Katsura II as Prof. Masaki; Hideo Murota as Prof. Wakabayashi; Eri Misawa as Moyoko; Kyôko Enami as Yayako

An Abstract Candidate / A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

Opening with a poem asking a foetus if it undulates with dread, we are in odd waters here from the get-go. Dogra Magra is a curious film in general, which is not a surprise when its director is Toshio Matsumoto, an experimental filmmaker who started with shorts and documentary productions before his debut, his most well known film Funeral Parade of Roses (1969). One of his only films widely available, it is however also a masterpiece, a significant one in LGBTQ cinema as it proudly is avant-garde. Sadly Matsumoto's cinema afterwards is not readily available, a shame as alongside another horror film, the period samurai drama Demons (1971), Dogra Magra is another film missing out of circulation, a shame as this, his last film, is Matsumoto not compromising himself if in the veneer of horror murder mysteries.

It also presents the lack of representation of Japan's history of pulp, horror and unconventional literature, as more readily available in French and Chinese publications, Dogra Magra is also an adaptation of a novel by Yumeno Kyūsaku. First published in 1935, Kyūsaku with just the adaptation of this story feels like a sibling to Edogawa Ranpo in terms of not only writing detective novels, but also known for having both horror and idiosyncratically weird flourishes to his storytelling, with Dogra Magra also tapping in psychoanalysis and a critique of psychology at the same time. Sogo "Gakuryû" Ishii's Labyrinth of Dreams (1997), another film in dire need of more notice, is based on a Yumeno Kyūsaku novel, about a young woman in the thirties to forties, working as a "bus girl", who thinks the young bus driver she works with is seducing and killing women in her job role.

This film does use the detective mystery trappings fully, set within the period it was originally written and with the first shot being a young man (Yôji Matsuda) waking up in a psychiatric hospital. He is an amnesiac, and neither helping is that the hospital is in turmoil as its head, Prof. Masaki (Shijaku Katsura II) has just passed. Openly, and this has to be adapted to, this narrative embraces the tone of a mystery where most of the dialogue is exposition, as Kure Ichiro as he comes to be is the confused figure in the labyrinth of shifting perspectives, even of who he is and whether he was the suggested person in the first place. That there is a young woman in the room next to his claiming he to be connected to him, and reacts when he enters the room, complicates this.

His tale circles around Ching-hsui, a macabre tale of an ancient Chinese painter who strangled his wife, the daughter of the Emperor, and painted her decaying body, turning to another source for a corpse to finish the painted scroll. Having to escape to Japan, with a woman who survives him, his lineage biologically through her is linked to Kure Ichiro, including the original scroll having been preserved as a gristly heirloom. Masaki, a very flamboyant man, may still be alive too, a psychologist who believed that memories and ideas infect the offspring on a genetic level, Kure Ichiro for him possibly an heir to Ching-hsui's lineage. Kure Ichiro is possibly the young medical student who has strangled his fiancée and tried to draw her corpse, repeating history of the far past. Dogra Magra has no clear ending to this, and some will hate this film because it fully invests in a similar trope of everything being a dream and being suspicious.  If you can accept this, then the film becomes a case, particularly with these tropes of morbid horror/thriller stories, where exposition becomes the flavour text.

The title is taken from a chant from a secret Christian sect in Nagasaki, within a novel written by a student and kept in Masaki's office, the parchment if read is meant to drive one mad. This one of the many aspects circling within Dogra Magra's curious brew of ideas, Kure Ichiro possibly the medical student, Prof. Masaki possibly still alive, and the new head of the psychiatric hospital Prof. Wakabayashi (Hideo Murota) possibly is having a power play over the former head. Wakabayashi may be a possible killer in his own right. Masaki's office alone sets this in the horror genre and the strangeness it imbibes from, when it has babies in jars and the head of a cat preserved among the decoration, from a man who attempted to poison his whole family's meal with said animal, embracing the macabre fully. This skirts horror and exploitation, with its gristly premise touching on sensuality against murder and decay. A really gruesome scene, possibly a lie, suggests Prof. Wakabayashi is also a psychopath who, alongside having Ichiro's presumed dead fiancée in the nearby room to him, cuts up women's corpses to mutilate them and fondle their inner organs.

As Toshio Matsumoto made a horror film beforehand, Demons, he would be aware of how to make the film as it became. The co-screenwriter Atsushi Yamatoya clearly has his influence here too. Together with Takeo Kimura, Yōzō Tanaka, Chūsei Sone, Yutaka Okada, Seiichirō Yamaguchi, and Yasuaki Hangai, as part of the group "Guru Hachirō", he helped write Branded to Kill (1967), Seijun Suzuki's legendary and eccentric crime masterpiece. In mind to his work, including directing and writing the bizarre avant-garde pinku film Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands (1967), Yamatoya adapting Yumeno Kyūsaku fully embraces the dreamlike and a complete lack of a cohesive reality. In terms of this period too, the eighties, you did also find directors from the art house and experimental corners of Japanese cinema enter more openly genre films, not losing their flourishes and unconventionality at all. Funeral Parade of Roses was an Art Theatre Guild release, the ATG a legendary film production company that, originally distributing films, began producing movies for the likes of Nagisa Oshima to Akio Jissoji until the mid-80s. The directors who work were released through ATG did move into genre cinema, even Shūji Terayama with a French-Japanese erotic film Fruits of Passion (1981), and Jissoji, who had worked in pulp beforehand in the sixties, continuing with even a blockbuster in production and spectacle, Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis (1987).

With a film like Dogra Magra, it does not feel a compromise but the creators behind this bringing their styles to the material, especially in mind to screenwriter Atsushi Yamatoya and his history in erotic genre films during the sixties and seventies, stretching themselves to themes of mortality, eroticism, and here the slipping layers of sanity through the style of genre. Dogra Magra, like Akio Jossoji's own Marquis de Sade's Prosperities of Vice (1988), even Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, is also a film which feels and is made as a production that came from the eighties, particularly its use of coloured lighting, but is dealing with the past in Japanese history. Particularly there are films which skirt into genre and surrealism that circle around or are within the time of the Taisho era of 1912 to 1926, Dogra Magra finding itself bedfellows with Seijun Suzuki tackling his "Taisho" Trilogy in films like Heat-Haze Theatre (1981). This helps Dogra Magra greatly as, once you accept the exposition as part of the purple prose, it guards the film in its period setting, and its sombre elegance, only to have its Grand Guignol touches (the jars of body parts in Masaki's office, the slithers of blood, even a surreal moment of a portrait of Masaki having lips superimposed to allow him to talk) stand out greater in its ornate appearance.

Cinematographer Tatsuo Suzuki is a huge factor in mind of this aesthetic too, coming from the Art Theatre Guild era. Having filmed Funeral Parade of Roses for Toshio Matsumoto, a very different film in aesthetic style, he also worked on productions for Shûji Terayama, which this shares touches to with even the use of colour. The film also has flourishes which are unconventional. The tale of Ching-hsui itself, as told to us as it is to Kure Ichiro, is depicted with puppets, which is as extravagant as it is telling a truly gristly ancient tale with a beauty in the aesthetic tone. Masaki himself, an amateur filmmaker, has recordings which bring in black 'n' white silent film storytelling, disregarding logic in that you have intertitles spliced in-between for when patients he was filming talk directly to the camera.

Also a factor to the film's tone, helping it considerably, is that one of the most compelling figures in the film, Masaki himself, is the standout performance but not from a cinematic actor. Shijaku Katsura II was better known as a Japanese rakugo performer of the late 20th century, who often performed in English and wished to bring the art to the West. Rakugo is an art form involving one lone storyteller performing a narrative, with multiple characters and long form tales, and even a semblance of knowledge of this, even if barely scratched on, shows Katsura was the right man for Masaki. Born Tōru Maeda, not only does he perform the lion's share of exposition with Hideo Murota as Prof. Wakabayashi, a prolific actor at this point, but also particularly with Masaki as a character, Shijaku Katsura II was the right choice of someone who could figure out how to present the character. Bald with a pencil thin moustache, Masaki is an eccentric, who believes the mind is an illusion and human beings closer to animals, all the psychological details of the text a critique of such a character, as his therapy practices leads to one of the patients killing another. Katsura can make him both compelling and prevent so much exposition from being flat in tone. Particularly as Yôji Matsuda as the lead has to play a cipher for the most part, until he may start recovering memories and find horror in what he has done, Katsura with Murota have to keep the film suspended throughout, Masaki thanks to Katsura becoming a carnival ring leader of a cult of personality in how he is played.

This is a film of an avant-garde artist, as a semblance of an ending is knowledge, whilst a dream-within-a-dream, our lead is hiding secrets which his mind will never accept and will literally reset once discovered, as obvious as you can depict it without being heavy handed. A shot in a country field full of corpses will mark this, closer to something from Shûji Terayama's Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974) in tone and its complete surreal mood, another film cinematographer Tatsuo Suzuki worked on. Dogra Magra is, honestly, a film I could imagine the Art Theatre Guild would have released if sadly they did not close earlier in the decade. It however says a lot about the eighties in Japanese cinema in general, when there were still other producers and companies who brought films like this to existence, that you could stumble over fascinating works like this to the screen, all in dire need of more awareness of them.

Abstract Spectrum: Abstract/Grotesque/Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)

From http://www.jposter.net/images/products/funeralroses.jpg

Dir. Matsumoto Toshio

I like to write about unconventional films, but there are some cases where the film in question has so much I could talk about, and are truly unconventional, that I feel daunted in trying to type this review. Funeral Parade of Roses is such a film. But, as with this film, there is a reason for this that I can write about if I am unsure what to say - that you could never get a film like these today, which is disappointing because a film like this feels more advanced and progressive than some of today, but a film like this is forty or so years old. Funeral Parade of Roses is playful and provocative in everything it does differently from other films. Set within the political and artistic hotbed of late Sixties Japan, the film follows Eddie, played by real life transsexual Peter, a male cross dresser who is in conflict with a rival drag queen over the affections of a drug smuggling cabaret manager Gonda (Yoshio Tsuchiya). Eddie is a psychologically complex person, flashes of his childhood and adolescence seen throughout the film which show what is bubbling under the surface of his makeup and elegant appearance. Shot in stark monochrome, the film is a hybrid of multiple cinematic forms, a narrative feature which yet has documentary interviews with drag queens and Peter the actor himself spliced in-between, a tone varying from the serious to the cartoonish.

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The film never becomes stale or procrastinates despite its tangent heavy tone, always on an interesting point. It not only has real documentary footage, but porn shoots within the narrative, and reflective the director's avant-garde and installation film making, experimental films within the film that we see by themselves and being created by the avant-garde filmmaker characters that make up the people that Eddie interacts with. The fiction is designed to pull along the reality with it, while the fiction itself is layered and filled with various and different sorts of material shown to the viewer. The result disrupts but also creates a narrative structure which places further importance on story points when they are returned to, that of Eddie's complicated life, as well as flesh the real content, set with Japanese gay subculture, out. It allows the director to be more flexible, to have humour against the serious, to the point of ridiculous, sped up handbags-at-dawn spats and literal dialogue balloons, and have a tone that can even lean on exploitation-like uses of sex and grit. At times the sexuality is pronounced and close to a pinku film. 

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_rUyDhdZLna8/TIGfxWCzS4I
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The open, matter-of-fact view of its gay subject matter is refreshing, having fun with subverting gender - three women at urinals for example - and is also unapologetically erotic and titillating. Peter, when made up in full make-up or when the camera lingers over his body in the shower like it does on actresses in other movies, is unbelievably beautiful, to the point as a heterosexual man I will add him, in this film, as one of the most gorgeous individuals filmed on a camera I've seen. That he is charismatic and a good actor makes this better, something to be proud of that he would later become the court fool, an important side character, in Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985). (It is odd I can say his filmography also contains a Guinea Pig film, but that's why Japanese cinema and its ease in blending different areas makes someone like Sean Penn look lazy). Funeral Parade of Roses enforces on me particularly, as a viewer interacting with cinema in direct communication, that my own personal sexuality is an attraction to femininity, all the things stereotypically attributed to it and when it is reconstructed by women and transgender people - curves, heightened facial features like eye lashes, clothing and textures, the more open ability to express thoughts and emotions than many males etc. The film is as much on the nature of gender by proving beauty is pansexual, seeing the drag queens and transgender women in this, their lovers and clients as well, and how gender and sexuality is fluid even if many of them prefer acting and dressing as stereotypical images of women, wearing the most stylish boots and dresses they can afford, and being immensely glamorous unless a female gang makes derogatory comments and a fight breaks out between them.

From http://41.media.tumblr.com/89afa54a82055662dbc28204acd32c51/
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Structurally, the narrative is as playfully put together as the experimental sequences, chronology out of order for large portions of it, built up as more is revealed, a pastiche of Streets of Shame (1956) or A Woman Ascends The Stairs (1960) with a subversion of a famous tale I cannot actually name because it'll be a spoiler for the ending. Together they create an enticing character drama as it's build up with flashbacks in Eddie's life. The film throughout always feels bold, still daring today. It comes from an era that may have been terrible for many things, for things that feel quaint now - of pot smoking and equal opportunity nudity - but the film is as much a view of the melting pot of art, social interaction and sexuality that is vibrant. The direct references to real life art and subculture "happenings" in the film add a historical importance, documentary on the period in Japanese society, particularly footage of a protest/conceptual art piece in the middle of a street, the titular parade of the film's title involving men dressed in tinfoil gas masks and black clothes. It's also a film catching when the tide would roll back, to paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, the spot where this parade becoming empty, paper banners left scattered on the ground, or the isolated and wounded protestor stuck in an apartment complex corridor by himself with no one of his group to protect him from the police. As we take interest in Eddie's life, we have as much interest in the (real) world around him in digressions on various topics. This is something badly missed in most art cinema of the present, the layers of culture that would be embedded in the background of the main narrative. Viewing this film, and those in the same vein like Throw Your Books Away, Rally In The Streets (1971), feels like an adrenaline shot.

 

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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

It's subject matter is still unconventional, in the climate that we still occupy where the notion of transgender, though respected, is in the realm outside of conventional gender politics rather than fully embraced as many would desire. But that is not enough for an abstract rating, as it could mean a film as good as this or a patronising drama with less than good quality filmmaking depending on what was made. What does so here is a presentation which, on another viewing, is still unpredictable and throws new angles on the material. It's a film with a lot to take in. It has a consistent, fascinating, and most importantly, engaging drama in its centre, but Funeral Parade of Roses is also different still in what you'd presume cinema is in the modern day, a difference somewhat needed again. Suddenly there are repeats of a man sneezing, in the middle of a dramatic beat, the frame almost slipping, unexpectedly in one moment, not connected to the main story, what would be seen as redundant in modern cinema, but fills and expands the tone of the film here for greater impact. Snippets of interviews and footage from other sources are intercut into scenes, disrupting and effecting them, adding texture and character. The blend of fiction, reality and artificiality creates an unpredictable tone, such as a dramatic scene suddenly turning into a Japanese period drama through a character's preferred dress and a specific music cue chosen, without becoming ironic, always empathetic to all the characters. Whilst retaining a straight forward narrative, the film's structure is inherently unconventionally.

From http://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3vd15BsmF1qb5tu1o1_1280.png

Personal Opinion:

What makes the Sixties in art in general enduring for me is, while a lot of it could be self indulgent and pretentious, it still possesses art that is still original and fresh today to see or listen to. The indulgence is enchanting, backing away from the predictable, and in cinema, even a wobble of a handheld camera feels like a flourish, accidents or things done on purpose bringing technical and aesthetic style rarely seen today. In the case of this film, it means a lot to take in on multiple viewings, a film that is easily accessible but also revealing new things on each viewing I have of it. Once it gets to the end, capping off with an unsettling yet poetic ending that reinterprets a legend in a pansexual light, it also succeeds as existing in its own type of cinema, the blurring of genre and tone you get in cult cinema, particularly art films like this, where it never becomes tedious even if one found it frustrating. Moments feel like they wouldn't be carried on into filmmaking of later decades but they stand out nonetheless as very distinct filmmaking which I wish was still frequently done.