Brushed in Light

Front matter

Brushed in Lignt

CALLIGRAPHY IN EAST ASIAN CINEMA

Markus Nornes

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION Theorizing the Calligraph The End

CHAPTER 1. Shufa/Seoye/Shodo Calligraphy in the West Shufa: In the Beginning Was the Law Shodo: The Way of Japanese Calligraphers Seoye: The Geopolitical Character The Stench and Fragrance of Cinematic Calligraphy

Introduction

Had I been born Chinese, I would have been a calligrapher, not a painter.

—Pablo Picasso!

This quote from Picasso exemplifies the rapt fascination modern artists felt for the calligraphy of East Asia. Abstract expressionist painters like Franz Kline and Pierre Soulages integrated lessons from this distant practice into their own art works, mimicking the movements of calligraphers in their brushwork, playing with the broad contrast of black paint on white surface. Their affinities were both felt and real, but the Western artists were ultimately interested in calligraphy’s abstraction. Soulages is exemplary here, as his bold black strokes very gradually took over his canvas until, at the end of his life, the underlying white was no longer visible. These late works cannot affiliate with calligraphy, having obliterated the spaces between lines.

Make no mistake, even conventional calligraphers trade in abstraction. Cursive forms of calligraphy, for example, easily edge toward illegibility for all but the highly trained artist or scholar. And then there are the characters themselves, some of which are pictographs abstracted from the visual world. But the complexities of this linguistic dimension of calligraphy are of little interest to those modern artists who emphasize calligraphy’s material production and basic fascination for the line.

I must admit I shared these fascinations when I took notice of calligraphy in East Asian cinema. It was hard not to miss. Calligraphy is ubiquitous and is particularly prominent in prewar and period films. This is natural, considering the place of the brushed word in both public and private space. As Chang Tsong-zung notes,

Imagine looking at an average Chinese town at the turn of the 2oth century, before the end of imperial rule. Whether entering from city gates, walking around the streets or taking detours into side alleys and private gardens, we would find calligraphic inscriptions as among the key elements of architectural decoration. Carved into wood or set into the architecture in brick or stone, calligraphy would appear centrally over the city gates, on beams and pillars of civil and religious buildings and as poetic decoration in residential and garden architecture. By contrast, a European city of equivalent significance from the same period would have had—instead of the ubiquitous poetic writing— figurative art, such as statues and paintings dominating civic and private buildings.’

The exteriors of films shot in the prewar period are documentary records of this built space decorated with characters, and set decorators for all period films go to great lengths to recreate it. And in contemporary cities, most of this carved calligraphy was replaced by photographic enlargements, neon, and lettering mimicking the calligraphic (Fig 0.1). There is also calligraphic-looking graffito. Interiors are likewise decorated with calligraphy, and the cinema adds credit sequences, intertitles, all manner of props, and, more recently, cybernetic calligraphy. Once one takes notice of the brushed word in East Asian film, its utter ubiquity comes as a surprise.

When I took notice, I was struck by the sheer beauty of calligraphy at a time I myself was illiterate. Like Kline and company, I simply found it strikingly powerful and moving. This was something that my training in film studies was not terribly helpful for understanding and unpacking. But it was also thanks to this disciplinary grounding, notably in the heyday of cine-structuralism and semiotics, that

I took note of calligraphy’s multifarious contributions to East Asian cinema. This project is a natural extension of my obsession with text on and in the image, which I previously explored in Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema.*

Perhaps it is no coincidence that my interest in calligraphy began at the same time as my study of subtitling. This was back in graduate school at the University of Southern California (USC) in the 1980s. Intent on studying East Asian cinema, I haunted the movie theaters of Little Tokyo and Chinatown. I rented pirated videos in Koreatown and Monterey Park. I began to take notice of the calligraphy in the films. It was everywhere. We even see this in the archive for cinema.

Calligraphy was an integral part of daily life for audiences through the 1940s. Letters, government documents, memos, signs, receipts, signatures, and more were rendered with brush and ink. During the immediate postwar era, the preferred writing tools became pens and pencils, followed much later by computers. While people are no longer daily producers of calligraphy, everyone studies it during their education. Furthermore, they remain daily consumers of calligraphy because of its integration into design, advertising and, yes, moving image media. Films are filled with calligraphy. So are their advertising campaigns. And there are also the graves (Fig 0.2).

As a spectator, you have undoubtedly taken calligraphy for granted. Indeed, when I have told people about this project, nearly all Westerners immediately respond, “Oh, you mean like Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996).” To be honest, this was a work I studiously avoided until after writing the book. Upon returning to the film, I find that Greenaway did little that hadn’t been tried before by Asian filmmakers, or theorized millennia ago for that matter. Indeed, calligraphy is everywhere in the media cultures of Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, North and South Korea, and mainland China, and starting from the birth of cinema. Actually, many of the informants for this project were themselves surprised when they became self-conscious of

TEREE i besser es calligraphy’s pervasiveness in cinema—except for the art designers and props men, who knew very well and have been waiting for some recognition of their deep contributions to the art of cinema. Now that I have pointed this out, you, too, will see it everywhere.

Back in graduate school, I was scared off from the topic. My initial foray into the world of calligraphy was quite intimidating. I quickly ran up against the thou-

7" ARIAS

Figure 0.1. Calligraphic writing is ubiquitous in the daily life

and built spaces of East Asia and has been for millennia. In contemporary cities, most of this carved calligraphy was replaced by photographic enlargements, neon, and lettering mimicking the calligraphic. Wallace Chan’s Fonting the City (Zi li chengjian, 2015) is a lovely documentary about the gradual displacement of hand-brushed signs by digital fonts in Macao.

sands of years of commentary written in three languages. Approaches changed over time and were parsed into a multiplicity of styles, and the difficulty of reading those on the cursive end of the spectrum was daunting. To make matters worse, I spoke to prominent art historians at various American universities and each greeted my project with the same response: “There is no calligraphy in Asian cinema.” Films may have brushed text, but it is amateur-

Figure 0.2. The famous grave of Ozu Yasujiro has only the single calligraphic character 1%, or “nothing.” It is surrounded by calligraphy one encounters in daily life, as in films, from the prayers on wooden strips to the labels on the offerings of sake.

ish and never historically accurate, they said. And, in any case, calligraphy affixed to something other than paper is merely photochemical duplication. In the face of all of this, I gave up.

But I never forgot about the project. Just as I was mulling the possibility of writing a dissertation about the topic, I guided a visitor from Japan around Los Angeles. She was amazed that I was writing a graduate school essay about the popular TV series People Whose Work Is Necessary Murder (Hissatsu shigotonin, 1979-1981). I was interested in its representation of violence, but she revealed that her calligraphy teacher was none other than Itomi Keinan, who wrote the show’s title calligraphy (Fig 0.3, right). Everyone in Japan is familiar with this, as it brands not only the TV series but also its endless sequels, movie adaptations, video games, novels, manga, and even pachinko machines. She asked Itomi to make a massive scroll painting with the logo as a wedding present, quite appropriately keeping only the “people who work” ({£-3# A) part of the title (Fig 0.3, left). I looked at Itomi’s striking calligraphy every day,

Figure 0.3. Itomi Keinan’s

famous calligraphy for People Whose Work Is Necessary

Murder (Hissatsu shigotonin,

1972) and the scroll painting a friend gave me, evidencing the iterability built into calligraphy.

A wedding present, Itomi left out the characters for “necessary murder”; however, the vigorous movement of Itomi’s body during the act of inscription is viscerally palpable and points to the show’s violence.

endlessly impressed by the slashing strokes and spitting drops of ink that clearly pointed to the missing characters for “necessary murder” (Yi). This living room decoration kept this project simmering on a back burner over the years. I collected examples of striking calligraphy in film but was never sure what to do with them.

Finally, a couple decades later, I found myself liberated from my fear and hesitation. Director Hara Kazuo introduced me to Akamatsu Hikozo, who is among the most important title designers in Japan.* Akamatsu originally intended to become a cameraman but ended up in title design only because he inherited the family business when his father suddenly died in 1969. As Kimata Kimihiko points out, the timing was as propitious as it was tragic.° The major studios were in steep decline and shutting down their design shops, so title work was migrating to outside design companies. The same industrial conditions were nurturing a lively independent sector. Arriving to the profession with no baggage and little regard for rules or conventions, Akamatsu’s creative genius was unfettered.

FORCE

Et OBR

What’s more, the first jobs he took on were in the ultra-low budget, soft-core porn sector called pink films.® Producers like Wakamatsu Koji were fine with anything as long as it was fast and cheap, so Akamatsu did things like titles brushed on freely available street pavement. Over the years, he came to be the go-to designer for independent

Figure 0.4. Titles by Akamatsu Hikozo include (starting from upper left): Fireworks (Hanabi, 1997), Face (Kao, 2000), Dolls (2002), Water Boys (Wata boizu, 2001), Hikari (2017), The Chrysanthemum and

the Guillotine (Kiku to girochin, 2018), This Road (Kono michi, 2018), One More Time, One More Chance (Tsuki to kabetsu, 1996), The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (Yuki yukite shingun, 1986), Zen (2009), Sekigahara (2017), International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo saiban, 1983), The Eel (Unagi, 1997), Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit (Seiei o mamoribito, 2016), and Kids Return (1996), and An Artist of the Floating World (Ukiyo no gaka, 2019).

filmmakers, such as Wakamatsu, Hara, Kuroki Kazuo, Suo Masayuki, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, and Kitano Takeshi (Fig 0.4).

When I asked about the history of calligraphy styles and told him about how intimidating I found it all, he surprised me by revealing he could care less. He brushes calligraphy, but he also proudly displayed the tool he used for

Kitano’s Brother (2000): a then 20-year-old waribashi chopstick whose tip was now bulbous with layer upon layer of dried ink (Fig 0.5). Many years later, Akamatsu’s relationship to tradition was summed up very nicely for me by Li Xianting, a Chinese art critic and calligrapher famous for his promotion and protection of modernist artists in the People’s Republic of China (and also a noted calligrapher who will play an important role in the following chapters): “Tradition doesn’t matter much in the end. It’s all the same because it all comes down to the expression of the individual within a tension between convention and innovation.”’

Li and Akamatsu allowed me to put the blanket condemnations of those art historians into both perspective and brackets. The conventions and rules undergirding their narrow definitions of calligraphy are, first and foremost, constructions of the present. They are informed by the accretions of millennia of practice but often serve present-day needs and desires.* Too often these contemporary motivations protect conservative power structures, such as artistic schools, clans, and associations. I will have a thing or two to say about this in a moment. Needless to

Figure 0.5. A disposable chopstick, one of Akamatsu Hikozo’s beloved writing instruments, sits on the original calligraphy for Brother (2000). Its tips are bulbous from layer upon layer of dried ink.

say, transformations over time usually have to do with new factors in the field of writing: new instruments or media, the appearance of a powerful artist, top-down initiatives to change character styles or even invent new writing systems, schools, and factions. Calligraphic styles coalesce around these new elements, then harden into convention and the prickly defense thereof.

It should be no surprise that the very different attitudes of Akamatsu and Li are connected to modernism. As Gu Gan wrote in an influential essay concerning the “three steps” of modern calligraphy, “The ultimate aim of modernist calligraphy is to provide aesthetic pleasure linked to an idea, rather than following the path of traditional calligraphy, where often lengthy textual content is an essential element of the overall effect.” Filmmakers shared this modernist impulse. More important than towing to traditional style was the contribution a given work made to the “idea”—the atmosphere of a set, a twist in plotting, or the instant and lasting impression made by a title card.

Film, the newest modern art form and one that gathered and integrated all other art forms, was a new factor in the history of calligraphic writing. A major thrust of this book is this: rather than protecting and preserving some invented tradition, cinema expanded calligraphy’s possibilities. It provided a new platform for a proliferation of approaches to calligraphic writing. Calligraphy and cinema were made for each other.

My conversations with Akamatsu and Li were liberating. They came during a year at Harvard, which also provided an opportunity to revisit the work of film theorists Stanley Cavell and David Rodowick. These encounters pointed me and my newly unfettered thinking about calligraphy in unexpected directions. Upon returning to Michigan, I collaborated with several students to assemble an image corpus of frame grabs from our DVD collection. Working off of this corpus of nearly 3,000 images—which the University of Michigan Press has put online in conjunction with this book—I began talking to filmmakers, props men, and calligraphers in China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. This book is the result of all these wonderful travels and encounters.

Theorizing the Calligraph

Western avant-garde film theorists and practitioners have famously connected cinema with the art of handwriting. Their thought has roots in the Western enchantment with the hieroglyph. Before the Rosetta Stone enabled their translation, hieroglyphs could only be seen as encrypted with meaning. Long after their decryption, an air of mystery accompanied them, attracting people as disparate as the transcendentalists and modernist poets like Ezra Pound. One of the first theories of film, Vachel Lindsay’s Art of the Moving Picture (1915), inherits Walt Whitman’s love of hieroglyphs. Meaning is “mystic” in hieroglyphs, a “new Universal alphabet” or “Esperanto.”"' Lindsay thought the silent cinema returned humanity to “primitive,” visual writing systems like the glyphs of Egypt and

China, which in his imagination was nothing other than a union of (visual) style and meaning.”

The moment of this writing was important. Lindsay was advocating an approach to cinematic narrative that was newly taking shape in America, thanks to the innovations of directors like D. W. Griffith. Thus, it may come as some surprise that a film theorist and practitioner like the modernist Sergei Eisenstein struck a remarkably similar position fourteen years later. His most famous use of hieroglyphs appeared in the 1929 essay “The Dramaturgy of Film Form.” Eisenstein had encountered Japanese writing in 1920 in Minsk, where he was making propaganda posters after the revolution.“ He met a Japanese language instructor and became fascinated by Japanese. He studied hundreds of characters and decided to become a professor of Japanese. Back in Moscow, the university had yet to reopen, and he got sidetracked into theater and cinema. However, his encounter with Japanese writing was the springboard for his theorization of montage.

While Lindsay saw meaning encrypted behind the glyph—literally on the backside of hieroglyphic cards in his imaginary scenario writing method—Eisenstein emphasized the copula-like mechanics of (some) Chinese characters. Naturally, he focused in on the pictograph. For example, the character for mountain is I. As the intertitle in Fig 0.6 (right) demonstrates, pictographic characters look like their signified. Here the word “mountains” mimics a mountain range; the calligrapher emphasizes the pictographic qualities by making the three vertical strokes with broad bases and pointy tops, adding a wisp of clouds for good measure. In a more modernist spirit, Taiwanese calligrapher Tong Yang-tze used calligraphic techniques to simultaneously obscure and emphasize the pictographic aspect of the character “face,” or hig (Fig 0.6, left) for Tsai Ming-liang’s eponymous film. A similar example is Akamatsu Hikozo’s title for Sakamoto Junji’s Face (2000; Fig 0.4, top row, second from left); this uses the more copulative, less pictographic, Japanese character #i, suggesting how readers of the Chinese character do have an inclination to look toward the pictographic.

This figural dimension quite naturally opens itself up to such play, and play is what Eisenstein was very good at. He pointed out how pictographs attach to each other to create a transcendental result that is then combined with other copulating characters in a heady proliferation of meaning. These can be as disconcerting as they are fascinating. For example, the character WE (C: niao, J: naburu) means “tease,” “mock,” or “torment.” This is written by surrounding the character for woman (2) with two men (E). Perhaps this could be taken in various ways. Is it a woman teasing two men on either side of her, or two men harassing a woman?” The etymology suggests the latter, which indicates how the copulative power of characters can be as ideologically charged as it is imaginative. As we will see below, it is precisely this multivalent nature of the character that allows calligraphers, especially in the film

Figure 0.6. These examples capitalize on the pictographic qualities of the Chinese character. The intertitle writer for Japanese Girls at the Harbor (Minato no Nihon musume, 1933) uses lettering to turn the character for mountain (LL) into a pictograph of three peaks. On the left, calligrapher Tong Yang-tze uses calligraphic techniques to bring out the pictographic character for “face” Hi for Tsai Mingliang’s 2009 film.

world, to play with characters and creatively exploit them as resources for enhancing their narratives.

For Eisenstein, this copulative nature was itself essential to cinematic image making. Shots, like Asian ideograms, were depictive, figural, and intellectual or conceptual. However, what Lindsay and Eisenstein share is what David Lurie has called a fascination for the a-phonic nature of pictographic glyphs motivated by the visual world; like cinema, they seem to promise a dreamlike communication without the foreignizing and alienating bother of language itself.1¢

There are good reasons to drop Lindsay and Eisenstein at this early moment in Brushed in Light. First, this kind of position is extreme and ignorant of the nature of East Asian writing systems. As William Hannas points out, beginning students of these languages love pictographic characters, but it is not long before they realize there are literally thousands of characters that are simply abstract and phonetic.’ Characters started out pictographic in the years after the invention of writing, but attempts to model characters on material objects quickly gave way to an orientation toward the alphabetic. While Hannas privileges speech over writing that would handily lend itself to a Derridian deconstruction, it is true that the origin of most ideographic characters is far from obvious.’* Show the character #t—or its simplified version, Mj—to people from other parts of the world and few could guess it is a pictograph for “picture.” Furthermore, while there are plenty of figurative Chinese characters, the pictographic aspect is a diminutive factor in actual reading. Indeed, in all the images collected in this book, few are pictographic. So let us move on. Obviously, my interests lie elsewhere.

The more interesting writing models for cinema equate the camera to writing instruments. A little known instance is from Shen Fu, a mainland director best known for Myriad of Lights (Wanjia denghuo, 1948) and Crows and Sparrows (Wuya yu maque, 1949).*° Shen compares the camera to a pen. If the camera simply records movement, the result is not cinematic. There must be an effort to focus on human beings and draw up characters. At this point, Shen rather messily mixes metaphors and adds music to the equation because of the centrality of rhythm and editing. It is not simply like music, but about writing music, so for Shen the camera is ultimately akin to the pen. The lines drawn by Shen’s camera-pen require assemblage through cinema’s unique properties to make meaning, just as random lines do not make meaningful Chinese characters.

A more famous metaphor comes from Alexandre Astruc’s “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra- Stylo.” This was the same year as Shen Fu’s essay, suggesting that one may have known about the other. Astruc was interested in the cinema as a means of personal expression. This would de-emphasize the mechanical automatisms of photochemical reproduction—what he called the “tyranny of what is visual”—in order to express human thought, and in this, he harks back to Eisenstein’s cinema of copulation. Astruc wrote, “The filmmaker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen,” calling for an essayistic cinema that turns its back to conventional cinema that simply records and shows the world.” In an essay from later that year, he writes,

So this is where we are, what we await, and what we believe: a camera in the right trouser pocket, recording on an image sound track the wanderings, the slow or frenetic unfolding of our imaginary universe, confession cinema, essay, revelation, message, psychoanalysis, obsession, the machine that can read the words and images of our inner landscape, the totality of things, objects, creatures, stones, cities, gestures, and cries of the universe brought to the status of material, the art where we paint with agitated faces and write with the guttural sounds of butchered seals; the pen which pumps out directly, as part of the same universe, the most formidable vocabulary that any artist has ever had at his fingertips, the human reality which stages the ballets of our imagination on the stage of the universe, the crushed rocks reconfigured according to another order, making us like God since we are remaking, in our own image, the entirety of creation; the caméra-stylo or camera-pen, this art in which the entire universe is our material.”

Astruc’s thrilling essay hardly hints at how this works beyond asserting it has something to do with technique. In spirit, however, it does point to the direction our inquiry into East Asian calligraphy will ultimately take us. Both cinema and calligraphy are filled with automatisms that are specific to their respective media and beyond the control of the humans behind the work of representation. At the same time, they register states of mind, human thought, and all manner of conditions at the “scene of writing.” Unfortunately, Astruc never elaborates this beyond the caméra-stylo metaphor, and his later works (and those following in his footsteps) focus in on a relatively straightforward conception of mise-en-scéne and cinematic authorship.”

Another interesting example is David Bordwell’s work on silent Japanese cinema. Noting the period films, “where swordsmen hurl themselves into combat at hyperaccelerated speed, popping in and out of the frame unexpectedly, glimpsed in swift, often bumpy panning and tracking movements,” Bordwell identifies what he calls a “calligraphic style” in silent era Japanese film.” While modest in comparison to the silent era theorists’ ambitions, Bordwell is ultimately like the others. Their work has remained as suggestive as it is isolated: it has not prompted systematic studies of calligraphy in film history in the same way that calligraphy has influenced other scholarly endeavors, including the history of the letter and book writing, philology, literary biography, typography, and the artistic avant-garde, not to mention graffiti and popular culture. To my knowledge, no one has written on the subject of calligraphy and cinema in any concerted or interesting way.

The same could be said of the printed word in cinema. A provocative early attempt is Tom Conley’s Film Hieroglyphs: Ruptures in Classical Cinema from 2006. His set of close textual analyses are as playful as they are frustrating. The subtitle indicates the central problem with his book. Conley deploys a resistance model that sees onscreen text as rupture enabling against-the-ideological-grain readings. These are, in the end, more radically idiosyncratic than radical, more about an écriture that levels all cinematic representation with the actual written word, and this is rather uninteresting for our purposes.

There is also Michel Chion’s fascinating Words on Screen.” However, in the end, his considerable efforts amount to little more than an exhaustive taxonomy. My book has a bit of this as well, but I hope it is not exhausting. There are decisive differences between the two writing cultures—historical, linguistic, aesthetic, and ontological—that naturally invite a more considered approach.

My own fascinations, admittedly informed by my work and interest in Asian cinema, are anchored in the actual practice of cinema’s calligraphers, the properties of language, and the specificities of East Asian brushed writing. The chapters following will introduce you to the basics of East Asian calligraphy, starting with the history of writing and its spread from China to Japan and Korea, where it was articulated in linguistically and culturally specific ways. I will chart how calligraphy appeared in cinema from the silent through to the digital eras. The middle chapters examine the legacies and powers of convention, both calligraphic and cinematic, wrapping things up with a case study of Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien and his City of Sadness (Beiging chengshi, 1989). Finally, the book culminates with a contemplation of the complex semiotics and ontology of the cinematic calligraph that enable one to energize the other. The very new art of cinema has democratized and freed the very ancient art of calligraphy.

The End

Let us wrap up this introduction by looking at a term familiar to everyone: “The End” (zhong &, owari #400, kkeut €). It is the typical way in which films in all three languages announce the finish of a film. There are variations. Japanese films sometimes deploy the alphabetic hiragana BDV owari. Chinese films often add the character for theater/drama/opera: ŠI% ju zhong. The Korean & kkeut (fig. 0.7) never appears as a Chinese character because it is a purely Korean word. “The End” of East Asian cinema hints at many of the avenues of inquiry we will follow in the chapters that follow.

First, “The End” is written in an astounding variety of styles. Sometimes titles reference historical period. Consider the lovely end title for Mizoguchi Kenji’s The Water

Figure 0.7. Many Korean films use the hangul for “end”

(Œ) rather than the Chinese character. This is from Genealogy (Jokbo, 1979) by Im Kwon-taek, one of the directors in Asia

that deeply cared about the calligraphy in his films.

Magician (Taki no shiraito, 1933; fig. 0.8). The characters on either side are cursive in the manner someone would write in the Meiji era (1868-1912), the film’s setting. Squiggly lines ornament the vertical text on either side of “The End”; these are ioriten (REW), marks that go back to the Noh theater but by Meiji indicate lines that are supposed to be sung. Indeed, the film was invariably shown with benshi narration so it is possible a song was actually sung in the theater. At the very least, they indicate the Meiji period, as does the style of the calligraphy.

The calligraphy of end titles frequently registers genre. Water Magician is a touching melodrama, and the delicate hand of the end title is perfect for this kind of woman’s film. In contrast, the bold red strokes of the “end” of Blind Woman’s Curse (Kaidan nobori ryu, 1970) were accomplished with a brush loaded heavily with ink, visually echoing the thick splash of human blood from the film’s climax, the red being a typical convention of genre films from the era. This prickly style with its spikes and slashes is typical of the yakuza or horror films. Similarly, the vanquished bad guy from Afraid to Die (Karakkaze yaro, 1960; fig. 0.9), dead as the fish next to him, stares vacantly at “The End” with delicious irony.

These examples amply attest to how beautiful calligraphy is in and of itself, as well as to its semiotic productivity.

Figure 0.8. The end title for Mizoguchi Kenji’s The Water Magician

(Taki no shiraito, 1933) uses cursive calligraphy and is ornamented with joriten, the squiggly lines framing text which indicate period and invoke the narratives of traditional theater and song.

Figure 0.10. The main character in Face of Another (Tanin no kao,

1966) spent much of the film with bandages wrapping his face. At the end, his face is still covered, this time by calligraphy—his eyes peeping out of two holes in the character.

Figure 0.9. With delicious irony, the vanquished character in the yakuza film Afraid to Die (Karakkaze yaro, 1960) played by Mishima Yukio stares at “the end” title.

As such, they are important compositional elements. They call for careful placement. Teshigawara Hiroshi used modernist calligraphy for the ending of Face of Another (Tanin no kao, 1966; fig. 0.10). The main character spends a good portion of the film with his face wrapped in white bandages. At the end, the renown art designer Awazu Kiyoshi playfully superimposed the calligraphy over the main character’s face, precisely framing the face so his eyes peep out between the gaps between strokes. This calligraphy itself is stunning, and written by the director’s father, Teshigawara Sofu, the founder of the Sogetsu Ikebana school. His painting responds to cinematic composition; as we will see in chapter 4, calligraphy also can exert a novel pressure on the art of cinematographers.