an interview with donald richie

8/13/2019 An Interview With Donald Richie

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ossible ffirmations

An Interviewwith DONALDRICHIE

by WilliamCoco and A.J.Gunawardana

RICHIE: The cinema of Asia is mostly primitive,except in Japanand, to some ex-

tent, in India and South Korea. A primitivecinema is one that has not found itself.

Cinemarequiresa lot of money and technical knowledge, as well as an aesthetic.So

a cinemamay be primitivebecause it is either too poor technically to makefilms, as

Burmais, or too poor in imagination,as is the Philippine cinema, where films are

mostly love romancesor adventurestories. In many smallcountries,and sometimes

in larger ones, even if one has the technical equipmentneeded to make a film, the

importantquestionof what the film is to be is left up in the air and one imitatesthekind of pictures-usually American-that one has seen. Of course, such imitation oc-

curs whenever there is no strong creative guidance, but the temptation is even

greater f one has lots of money and equipmentbut no ideas.

TDR: Why do American pictures have such a great influence in these countries?

RICHIE: American distributors n Asia have always been extremely aggressive-even now in Japanthe bulk of the foreign filmsshown is American.Setting up their

own distributionoffices in foreign countries,Americanproducerssold, and still sell,

their product extremely well, which means that American cinematic influence hasalways been strong and will continue to be so. This is true in most of the world, in-

cludingEurope,but it is lessnoticeablein EuropebecauseEuropeanshave their own

cinematic raditions.

Movies travel very well: people all over the world know who Chaplinis, they'veseen Easy Rider, and so forth. As a result, the themes and patternsof the Americanfilms which saturateAsia have a strong influence. Take one patternwe see in Amer-

ican cinema from the very beginning:man (Americanman) thinksmountains, ivers,wastelandare there to be made into cultivatedlands-the West is to be won. This

Renaissance deal is plausible n America, less so in Europe,but not at all in Asia,because the whole system of Asian beliefs holds that man belongs to somethinglarger than himself and that he should acknowledge this, that man should live withnature and that this living together should be amicable, not for the destructionof either. The ideals are completely different;yet American films appeal to Asians.



Chandralekha,Madras,1948

Movies generally tend to appropriate patterns and themes wholesale. This has hap-

pened in Asia-and in every instance to the detriment of the native cinema. When

the American and European cinemas were formed, there were no archetypes, no

places one could go and look at films to find out how they should be made. So

many Western countries invented their own cinemas; they were able to do so with a

kind of freedom which an industry in, say, Latin America, Africa, or Asia would not

have now. Art can't be treated as if it were technology. If a young nation in Africa,

for example, wants a technology, it doesn't really have to contend with nineteenth-

century mechanization. It can go directlyfrom a

primitive stageto a

highly

so-

phisticated one with computers and so on. But an art tradition can't be imported;

many Asian peoples try to import a cinema by copying foreign films and then have

enormous problems.

TDR: How has Japan escaped from imitating Western cinema?

RICHIE: Japan is different because the Japanese believe themselves to be so peculiar

that they will not accept a new idea or even a word without changing it in some

way, to make it more Japanese. They may accept something new from abroad, but

first they will assimilate it. This is part of their national character; this helps to ex-

plain why Japan alone among the countries of Asia has evolved a truly national



DONALD RICHIE

cinema; it also underlies much of the success of Japanese industry. A country must payfor this, perhaps by being torn against itself, as Japan is, a combination of East and

West. The Burmese, for example, would never assimilate a new idea in this way;

they would simply use it in the form it came in, never change it. This, of course,

would work against Burma's ever becoming industrialized: after all, one of the waysan independent nation grows industrialized is by taking what has been learned by

others, copying it, building on it, certainly, to make it better along the way, and

creating in the end one's own version. The British were in Burma for a long time,

putting up factories, bringing in their civilization, all of which the Burmese merely

tolerated, without making any attempt to turn them into something Burmese. It's

the same in India: foreign and native elements exist side by side, never touching. In

Japan it is different: the Japanese distinguish between what is foreign and what is

truly Japanese, but since the Japanese are essentially an empirical, pragmatic people,always intent on using things, this distinction breaks down after about five yearsand foreignness is forgotten.

Another reason for Japan's success in creating its own cinema is that the Japanesestarted making films at about the same time as the Americans, and consequently

they had the same initial freedom from foreign influences. The first Japanese film

was made around 1900. The Indian cinema started around that time too, but it

didn't develop. It's a plateau cinema-the Indian cinema today is the same as it was

in the twenties. Most Indian films are a kind of love and adventure story liberally

spiced with comedy, music, and dance. It's only fairly recently that people likeSatyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen in Bengal and Lester James Peries in Ceylon have been

able to detach themselves from this pattern and make films in their own way. That's

very hard to do: it requires the agreement of one's backers, who are generally con-

servative by nature.

TDR: But the best American and European films, not built on Hollywood models,

are also shown in Asia.

RICHIE: There are greatly divided audiences in all of Asia. In India certainly, the

mass audience is and will be content withBombay

talkies for the nexttwenty-five

years. Only a small part of the Japanese audience will go to see films by Antonioni,

Godard, Welles, Bergman.... This creates problems for the filmmaker who wants to

make films which grow out of his own culture. Potential producers have little pa-tience with anything except that which will please a mass audience. To make per-sonal films today you must have an evolution behind you, some kind of cinema his-

tory.

TDR: The truly popular Indian films-those made in the movie capitals, Bombay,

Calcutta, and Madras-are almost unknown in the West, yet they are so popular

amongAsians that the Indian film

industryis often called the

Hollywoodof the

East. What are these films like?

RICHIE: The ordinary Indian films are popular there for the same reasons that the

ordinary American films are popular here: precisely because they do not reflect the

life of the Indian-or the American-as it is. One of the reasons for film's continuing

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POSSIBLE AFFIRMATIONS

popularity everywhere is that film can so easily lie. The Indian films have the same

sort of wishful plotting and gaiety as their American counterparts: benevolent godsand goddesses sing and dance for our delectation; or, to take a scene common in

many Indian films, the son goes out into a kind of Westernized world and makes

good, then returns to his home to affirm traditional values with the girl who's waited

behind. In countries like India where traditions are still strong, the individual feelswithin himself a war between the traditional and the modern. Both make demands

on him and perhaps the isolation of the modern from the traditional helps to keep

society vital. But in the Indian films the either/or's dissolve and the audience is told,

falsely, that one can have both at once.

The films are rigidly and formalistically structured. Once while I was in Egypt, as a

director was taking me to a film studio in Cairo, we were stopped by another direc-

tor who said to my friend, I hear you're working on a new film. Yes, I am.

Have you done your nightclub scene yet? No, we'll do it tomorrow. But

you've done your the dansant scene? Yes, we did it yesterday. I said, It's nicethat you directors know a great deal about each other; you know all about his pic-ture and he just started it. He said, No, no, not at all. I have no idea what kind of

picture he's making, but all Egyptian pictures must have at least one obligatory

nightclub scene, and of course they must have a the dansant scene. Where else

would the hero meet the heroine, and where else would they part? Such formulas,

ever popular in the Middle East and still to some extent in Japan, are typical of Indian

films. The entire structure of the entertainment is put down like a cookie-cutter

over whatever life patterns the scriptwriters want to show.

There are two main kinds of films in India. One is a sort of mythological or histori-cal musical comedy (now fast losing popularity) with stories illustrated by songs

and dances which are usually anachronistic. The other genre is the heavily, predictably

plotted Indian melodrama film, which compares with the Hollywood films of the

Shakuntala,Bombay, 1943

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DONALD RICHIE

thirtiesand forties. Take a JuneAllyson/Dick Powell housewife comedy. The audi-

ence knows there are only so many things Allyson can do in such a film. Usually,since it is a woman'spicture, she's out to prove herself: she alone is able to get her

husbandthe contract,or she becomes a very, very good secretaryand surprisesherhusbandwith her businessacumen. But in the end she's happy to get back to the

kitchen. Indian films still use such formulas.The reason we don't recognize them is

that we don't often think to find the Indian equivalents.But the approach is the

same: they both are about what most troubles most people in a given society at a

certaintime. In America in the forties,what troubledpeople was the place of wom-

an: how could she reconcile her native femininity with the demandswhich male-

oriented society made upon her, with her own need to be a person, and with her

own competitive urges? This complex problem was smoothed out, tidied up, and

answered in the woman's films of this period. In India, as in Japan,one contem-porary questionwhich must be solved is, How can one live balancedbetween a tra-

ditional and a contemporarysociety, each with its own differentdemands?All the

Indianfilms I've seen dwell on this theme, even many fine films-for example,those

of Satyajit Ray. He treats the problem very honestly, but of course most Indian

films,beingmassentertainment,haveto simplifyit mendaciously.

TDR: In what ways does theatreinfluence the film in different countries in Asia-

say, in JapanandIndia-not just in contentbut in style and structure?Do these films

tend naively to copy the theatrethe way the early Americancinema did?

RICHIE: In all cinemas-American,European,Indian,Japanese-the influence of the

theatreis strong, almost baleful;the history of all cinemais the history away from

the stage, for no two forms of art are further apart.In Japanthe influence of the

theatreon the film is perhapsnot what you'd expect if you didn'tknow the country.There is no influencefrom Noh, Kyogen, or Kabuki; he influence-and to a certain

extent in India also-is exerted by nineteenth-centurymelodrama.This is no differ-ent from the Americanfilm, which came not from genuine English-Americanroots,but directly from nineteenth-centurymelodrama.In Japanthe stage influence most

evidentevennow is a style calledShingeki.(To defineShingeki-if Kabuki s Dryden,

and if Shimpa s Pinero, then Shingekiis Eugene O'Neill....)

In the early films of most cultures,the influencetheatre has upon cinema is usuallyclearest in the staginessof the acting style. (This is still prominentin Indianfilms.)Film exposesstaginess n instanceswhen on the stage it would perhapsgo unnoticed.Most actors anddirectors(usuallyunknowingly) bringa stage consciousness o films.This is true especiallyin countrieswith theatrical raditionsas lively as India's.EveryIndian has certainly seen, if not taken part in, much more theatre than has hisAmericanor Europeancounterpart.

Early American films were usually structured according to a three-part divisioncorrespondingto the three-actmelodramastructure.At intervalsof about one-thirdof the way through the ordinaryAmericanfilm of the twenties or thirtiesyou willfind a ringing line, or, if the film is silent, a ringingtitle, followed by a long fade-out-a curtain o end the act. This occurs even in original cripts not adaptedfrom

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the stage.Indianfilms use the sametechnique,but an Americanwouldn't easilynoticethe analogousdivisions becauseIndiandramasgo on for so long and have so manyacts. Still, parts of the films'action are grouped under such rubrics,divided by dis-

solvesasthey would be in the West.

The nineteenth-centurystage psychology used in Indian and some Japanesefilmsresults in overacting,on a double level: in the rhetoric of the lines themselves,andin the melodramatic acial contortions and actions which illustrate the lines. Melo-drama lends itself very well to didacticism,which is another element the Indiancinema borrows from the stage (though the Japanesedon't). Indian theatre-par-ticularly the historicaldramas-is meantto teach. The Indiantemperament s didac-

tic, and, except in the dance,the idea of dramaticart for its own sake is not too high-ly developedin India,at least not to the extent that it is in China or Japan.

The shooting methods used in Indian films are much like those used in America

through the twenties, and to some extent in the thirties. While a filmmakermay notbe trainedin theatre,he will insist on a numberof theatrical onventions. A storyis first written and then divided into scenes; these scenes are not divided internallyto take into account the camera'sabilities to delete or abridge scenes or to showseveral actions at once-the script is written as though it were meant to be per-formed on a stage. Once the story is divided into scenes, it is given to a dialoguewriter (a very importantfigure in the Indian cinema), who writes the lines whichare to make the

pointsin each

scene-pointswhich, as I said

before,are also made

visually. Then all the dialogue is mouthed,spoken, and photographed;and, finally,the scenes are put together end to end. The result is a photographedplay, not afilm.

In this process, traditionalstories are modernized. The original,usually a sacred orhistoricaltext, is rewritten like, say, Lamb'sversions of Shakespeare; he charactersand events are given an absolutely believable and expected psychology. Thus, be-fore filming, the story which is to serve as the basisfor the film is alreadyone crucial

step away from the original. The writers then do free variationson the rewritten

story, contemporizingand

debasingit

so that there remainshardly a trace of theoriginal.Ironically, the originaloften has an open-endedstructurein which actionsgo and on and the only conjunction used is not because but simply and -veryfilmlike. The open-ended, free-flowing original is reduced to melodrama,the an-tithesis of cinema.

TDR: What techniquesor approaches o filmmakingdo directorslike Ozu, Peries,and Ray use to replace the melodramaticschema of the popularfilm?

RICHIE: As an art, film presentsthe audiencewith a personin such a way that the

psychology of plot-makingis unnecessary.Everything you need to know about the

person is shown in his face and in his activities. All a filmmaker need do is watchthe person very intently and perhapsgive him some guidance.There's no need forhim to perform as an actor does onstage.The films of Ozu, Peries, and Ray are the

opposite of the theatricalizedcinema I have described. These directors share a

knowledge of the uses to which cinema is best put. Their films are realistic rather

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Ozu's Banshu Late Spring 1949Ozu's Banshu (Late Spring), 1949

Akibiyori (Late Autumn), 1960




than naturalistic; their cameras look on the action with an extremely watchful eyebut rigorously refuse to make any kind of comment on the scene being filmed.

Very early in his career, Ozu said that he disliked and distrusted plot because it

uses people. He felt that to use people is to misuse them. He thought people so

precious, he could not maim them by binding them to plots contrary to their natures.

A typical scene in an Ozu film might be done this way: there is a placing shot (he's

very careful to orient the audience geographically), perhaps first outside and then

inside a house; someone comes into a room, or else is already there; and amid the

general talk that goes on is whatever in the story needs to be said at this particular

point. The information is given quite casually-sometimes you might not realize its

import until two or three scenes later-then there is more talk, perhaps about the

weather, and then a silence; the talk stops naturally, but the camera goes on. Ozu

has said that he refusesto do what any ordinary director would do at such a point,that is, immediately start a new scene to hurry along the story. Instead, he wants the

story to disclose itself.

This reticence shows a reverence for people and is the opposite of the cookie-cutter

techniques used in most films. Ozu uses only the straight cut to punctuate his films,because it is the most invisible of technical devices. He gave up using the devices

other directors depend on heavily for psychological effects-the fade-in, the fade-

out, the dissolve. Such technical devices aren't interesting, he felt; they're attributes

of the camera and have nothing at all to do with the nature of film. Later, he also

decided never to pan or to dolly. His scenes are composed of series of shots, con-nected by straight cuts, from an invariable angle. Often he opens a scene with a shot

from a level three feet above the floor, the viewing angle of a person sitting on a

tatami mat. The camera becomes a kind of ideal viewer; it may in the next cut

move closer to the speaker or move back again, but it never moves within the shot

itself. Ozu says that to move the camera is to intrude upon, or to editorialize, a feel-

ing. He realizes that one of film's great virtues is its ability to capture the essence of

things, and he meticulously selects from a mass of possible scenes exactly those

which will show the essence of whatever he wishes to show. This requires a greatamount of tact-to show only so much, and to take for

granted

that the audience

can follow and appreciate it.

Peries's films are more directly poignant because, unlike Ozu, he wants to show the

spiritual states and progress of his people. Ransalu (The Yellow Robe) concerns a girlwho becomes a nun. She has lived the usual life of a well-to-do girl in Colombo,but slowly she becomes aware of a spiritual dimension beyond her self. In one sceneshe watches herself taking off her jewelry in front of a faceted mirror. This is donewith no comment by the camera: the mirror shows three different views of the girl,and we realize that she is going through a spiritual crisis. The film ends as the girl,alone,

proceedsto the

nunnery;a

long, elegiac sequenceshows where her

stepsare

taking her-to God.... Ray's films have a similar concern with people; his films show

the person to be more important than his problems; if a solution is to be reached, it

will come from within the person himself and not from a dramatic event outside.

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DONALD RICHIE

All three of these directors are intensely personal filmmakers. They follow what

I call the true Asian tradition of acceptance. This is not simply a Buddhist attitude

but something more amorphous; it's a general attitude found among the people.

TDR: In many Asian countries intellectuals are calling on the cinema to serve im-

portant social functions, promoting education, for example, or helping to bringabout socialism in those countries with socialist aspirations. Film is already being

used for instructional purposes in China and probably in North Korea.

RICHIE: Naturally the cinema is used in such ways; it is an extraordinary social

catalyst. It can teach and indoctrinate as no other medium can-it's persuasive by its

very nature. It's always in the present tense, instantly believable. Also, cinema can

enable one nation to speak for itself, quite apart from any political considerations,

regardlessof what

partyis in

power.This is much more

important,much less

tangible than propaganda-that's why I dislike to see propaganda used in the

Chinese films, for example. Ironically, I think we'll not find anything peculiarlyAsian about such films; they will answer only current questions, and we will

eventually find them as oblique as those Russian qualities in Eisenstein's Strike.

Socially aware people know that there is a revolution going on-and that we are

taking part in it. But I've always admired Asia's brave admission that life is tragic

by its very nature, a series of negations ending in the final negation. This is the greatlesson of Ozu, Ray, and Peries, and it's the great lesson of Asian art: the acceptance,the even

joyful acceptanceof evanescence. This is Asia's

heritage (whetherAsia

wants to admit this now or not) arguing for a wisdom which vaunting Western man,

collapsing in his own ruins, is only now beginning to see as wise. As we are going

down, our ideas of ourselves are going down, and it's only natural that Asians-the

Indians, or the Japanese, for example-would find in their wisdom a kind of faith,

a possible escape from life, possible answers to problems which we in the West all

agree are impossible to solve.

TDR: But as Asia becomes more and more industrialized, shouldn't we expect to see

the same degree of fragmentation in Asian art and cinema witnessed in the Western

art of the last three hundred years?

RICHIE: Soon whatever is best in Asian art or in the Asian mind will simply not be

able to maintain itself. In Japan now everything is as much out of hand as it is here

in America. Technology has begun to rule, and it's no longer possible to stop the

various kinds of machines-including the human sort. Yet the only hope is in art.

In other mannerist ages-ours is certainly one-art has led the way and people have

recovered. Right in the middle of the last mannerist age, in the fifteenth century,there was Tintoretto, pointing the way to the New Baroque. Today there are peo-

ple like Ozu or Bresson leading us directly through this veil of Maya into some-

thing else. If you draw a line from the Lumiere brothers through Dreyer, Flaherty(romantic though he be), right on through Rossellini, Bresson, Ozu, Ray, Peries-and

of course many others-you will find a line of cinema which does lead to a kind of

affirmation. If this line can continue in the face of fragmentation-which is what the

world is offered now-then again art will have performed its standard function; and

if it doesn't, it won't make any difference anyway.

0 1971by William Coco and A. J. Gunawardana.All rights reserved

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an interview with donald richie

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