{"id":13188,"date":"2022-11-12T18:47:16","date_gmt":"2022-11-12T23:47:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/?p=13188"},"modified":"2023-12-12T03:31:47","modified_gmt":"2023-12-12T08:31:47","slug":"the-female-gaze-at-japan-society-conflagration-a-superb-interrogation-on-impermanence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/?p=13188","title":{"rendered":"The Female Gaze At Japan Society: Conflagration, A Superb Interrogation On Impermanence"},"content":{"rendered":"

Japan Society\u2019s autumn programme features an inspiring array of films in collaboration with the National Film Archive of Japan, with the series The Female Gaze: Women Filmmakers from JAPAN CUTS and Beyond<\/i><\/a>. <\/i>A great classic of Japanese cinema is being shown in this occasion, in a new 4K restoration version. The picture is Conflagration <\/i><\/b>(Enj\u014d<\/i><\/b>) directed by Kon Ichikawa in 1958, born out of the constant collaboration with his wife Natto Wada, who penned the screenplay.<\/p>\n

The film begins with a clarifying statement: it\u2019s a fiction, not a historic account. However, it is inspired by Yukio Mishima\u2019s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion<\/i>, that was loosely based on true events when the Rokuonji\u3000Temple(AKA The Temple of Golden Pavilion) in Kyoto was destroyed on July 2nd<\/sup> 1950 by the arson caused by a novice monk named Yoken Hayashi.<\/p>\n

Conflagration<\/i><\/b> portrays the psychological breakdown of a twenty-one year old apprentice monk: Goichi Mizoguchi (Raizo Ichikawa). The introverted and earnest youngster \u2014 who has a stutter \u2014 goes to Kyoto\u2019s Shukaku temple to overcome the trauma of his father\u2019s death and reconcile the sacred beauty of the sanctuary with postwar reality. The only person who doesn\u2019t mock Goichi, and actually befriends him, is Tsurukawa (Y\u00f4ichi Funaki), who supports his pursuit of absolute beauty: \u201cYou have a beautiful mind,\u201d <\/i>is what he tells him. Yet, Goichi\u2019s idealism gets distorted along his existential path as he is overpowered by utter annihilation. The shrine he so much cherishes seems to have become a sort of paid tourist attraction, the symbol of Japan\u2019s crumbling traditions and vain attempts to conceal changes.<\/p>\n

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Thus, disgusted by how debased the temple has become Goichi feels the only pure action left is to set fire to the national treasure.<\/p>\n

The film stands as a parable, an allegorical example of the profound contradictions of a country in South East Asia that is forcibly westernised as a result of the chaos and devastation after the defeat in the Pacific War. The film is drenched with the decadent and self-destructive spiral that overwhelms the \u201cpostwar kid\u201d who carries out the heinous crime.<\/p>\n

Many characters become emblematic in representing the frailties of the protagonist and the state of society\u2019s degradation. There is Gochi\u2019s nagging and smothering mother Aki (Tanie Kitabayashi); Tayama Dosen (Ganjir\u00f4 Nakamura), the abbot of the temple who treats him like a son but entertains himself with geishas; the club-footed Tokari (Tatsuya Nakadai) who instills in the naive apprentice pessimistic ideas. Goichi\u2019s reverence towards the Shukaku temple was nurtured by his father, who considered it the most beautiful place in the world due to its immutability. But Goichi confronts the hard way how this paradigm contrasts with reality. His crippled friend, by finding links between Zen and nihilism, forces Goichi to come to terms with a great realisation. Tokari cynically asserts there\u2019s been a metamorphosis in society\u2019s demarcation between good and evil: \u201cPeople, history and morality changes. Anything alive changes.<\/i>\u201d These words have a devastating effect on Gochi\u2019s mental sanity.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Conflagration<\/i><\/b> opens and closes with an interrogation, cadenced by the intersection of glances between the pressing questions of the police who want to shed light on the arson story and the stubborn silence of the main character. In western culture, guilt can be relieved through confession, but in Japanese culture shame cannot be removed until a person does what society expects, which is what leads Goichi to attempt suicide.<\/p>\n

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Kon Ichikawa brings forth the various philosophical layers in the narrative with a marvellous cinematic composition, as he poetically orchestrates his cast and crew. The poignant storytelling is rendered in stunning black and white by cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, and the sublime partial dissolves are masterfully edited by Shigeo Nishida upon the enticing music of Toshiro Mayuzumi.<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

To this very day, Conflagration<\/i><\/b> is a film about the way transience can ignite the \u201cFlame of Torment\u201d (which was one of the early versions of the title in English-speaking countries). In this way, the film is an act of timeless social criticism: a meditation on the human spirit\u2019s adaptability to the upheavals in life.<\/p>\n

Conflagration will be showing at the Japan Society on Nov.14th at 7pm.\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Final Grade: A<\/p>\n

Check out more of Chiara\u2019s articles<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Japan Society\u2019s autumn programme features an inspiring array of films in collaboration with the National Film Archive of Japan, with the series The Female Gaze: Women Filmmakers from JAPAN CUTS and Beyond. A great classic of Japanese cinema is being shown in this occasion, in a new 4K restoration version. The picture is Conflagration (Enj\u014d)…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":13399,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[12365,12425,12432,2855,12429,12426,12427,12430,12431,11402,12434,12428,12435,12433],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Female Gaze At Japan Society: Conflagration, A Superb Interrogation On Impermanence | Cinema Daily US<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The film is inspired by Yukio Mishima\u2019s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, that was loosely based on true events when the Shukaku temple in Kyoto was destroyed by the arson caused by a novice monk.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/?p=13188\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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She is a dedicated ARTivist, donating her works to the causes and humanitarians she supports, and is Professor of Phenomenology of Contemporary Arts at Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan.","sameAs":["https:\/\/www.cinemadailyus.com"],"url":"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/?author=6"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13188"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13188\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cinemadailyus.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}