Itami Juzo

Referentiality and Self-referenciality

Itami’s Films• Taxing Woman (1987) - a

female tax inspector investigate serious tax evasions and frauds.

• Itami went on a through research on these issues and made a film on tax and tax inspector (unglamorous topics) borrowing the framework of detective thriller (glamorous genre).

Itami’s Films• A Taxing Woman

Returns (1988) - the tax inspector returns to investigate this time a huge tax evasion by the leader of a religious sect.

• Timely social issues of the late 80s - corporate greed, land shark, land bubble, and the collapse of communities are shown in the mold of detective thriller and action film.

Itami’s Films• A-Ge-Man (1990) - Nayoko, a unhappy geisha is an ageman, who brings luck on anybody who is partnered with. She has an affair with an unfaithful company executive. He is protected by Nayoko’s special power in revealing dirty business deals.

Itami’s Films

• Minbo: the Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (1992) - a yakuza group makes a hotel a place for hangout and a target of extortion. A female lawyer unite hotel staff to face up the threats from yakuza thugs and defeat them.

Itami’s Films

• Minbo made yakuza look greedy, extremely vulgar, self-indulgent, foolish, dim-witted, and dangerous to themselves and society.

• Yakuza was looked at from the point-of-view of ordinary citizen (hotel workers)

• A social critique in the mold of yakuza film

Itami’s Films

• The Last Dance (1993) - a satire on the traditional system and practice of the medicine in Japan, particularly such as informed consent and sharing information with patients.

Itami’s Films

• Supermarket Woman (1996) - the owner of a supermarket, which suffers from price-cutting competition from its rival, employ his former classmate housewife for its survival.

• Revelation of the back-stage reality of the retailing industry and satire on its business practice.

Itami’s Films• Woman of the Police Protection Program (1997) - an actress witness a murder (murder of a lawyer by a cult group ) and two cops go everywhere with her to protect her from the group’s attempt to gag her. In the end, she can give her evidence at court.

Itami as Auteur

• Contemporary social issues, behaviour and manners in Japan: funeral, adultery, culinary boom, economic babble, corporate greed, tax evasion, organized crime (land shark, loan shark, tax evasion, corporatization of yakuza), welfare system, problems in the retail industry, and the protection of witness.

• Cynical and satiric representation of the issues.• Frank Capra like social awareness and

consciousness.

Itami as Auteur• Make ‘un-cinematic’ events and situations the

subject of his film.

• Dealing with social and moral issues, films are by no means preachy

• Un-cinematic events and un-cinematic characters are featured and their stories are told by borrowing the formulae of entertainment (cinematic) film genres - Western, suspense film, detective film, yakuza film, etc.

Itami as Auteur

Reference to films of other

filmmakers.

• Itami as a cine-phile

• Telling his own story in a referential framework, quoting and imitating other films.

Itami as Auteur• Itami ‘While continuing to watch films, I

accumulated in my mind a number of impressive shots: a wonderful shot of a slope, a wonderful shot of a rainy night, a wonderful shot of people running together, a wonderful shot of a finger touching something, a wonderful shot of a thing moving in the air, a wonderful shot of two people staring each other, etc.’

• Interviewer: ‘Then, you had wanted to make your own film full of such shots?’

• Itami: ‘Yes.’

Itami as Auteur

• Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932)

• Itami quotes the mise-en-scène of the vampire coffin in his film Funeral

Itami as Auteur

• Ozu Yasujiro’s The End of Summer

• At the end of The End of Summer, smoke comes out of a chimney as it does in The Funeral.

Itami as Auteur

• George Stevens, Shane (1953) • Tampopo borrows the narrative structure of

Shane. Goro walks into a run-down noodle shop owned by a widow with a boy and helps them out as Shane wanders into a farm managed by a widow with a son.

Itami as Auteur

• Jean-Luc Godard, A bout de souffle (1959)• The man in a white suit in Tampopo is modelled

after Michel Poicard in A bout de souffle and a James Cagney character.http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9ONQLXV1Do

Itami as Auteur

• Louis Buñuel’s film, The Discreet Charm of Bourgeoisie

• The satire on the hypocritical discreetness of the bourgeoisie is inserted in Tampopo referring to the Buñuel’s film. http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z50Gg_16H4

Itami as Auteur

• Chusingura• Taxing Woman and Taxing Woman Returns

base their narrative structure on Chusingura. A group of people bring justice to evil doers.

Itami’s Films

Self-referentiality of Itami’s films

• Refer to itself (film as film) - refer to filmmaking - film is about filmmaking

• Conscious foregrounding of various aspects of filmmaking: what is filmmaking.

• E.g. The Funeral, the scene of the making of TV advertisement; a video tape explaining how to put up a funeral; amateur video recording the preparation for funeral.