Few of Japan’s nice photographers had a profession as daring and multifaceted as Masahisa Fukase. Although largely outlined by his black and white magnum opus Ravens (1986), a ebook of images during which the photographer casts himself because the grim black chicken, Fukase managed to precise aspects of himself by way of many various proxies. He shot photographs of his spouse in a slaughterhouse and of himself within the tub. He returned steadily from Tokyo to his household picture studio in Hokkaido to shoot his members of the family in numerous poses and states of undress. His autobiographical method contrasted along with his extra voyeuristic friends like Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki; because the critic Nada Inada wrote within the introduction to his ebook (Yugi) Homo Ludens (1971), Fukase “prefers to stand in the light and expose himself to others.”
In Japan, Fukase continues to be a legend many years after a drunken fall rendered him comatose (he died in 2012). Nami, the bar in Shinjuku’s Golden Gai district the place he suffered his accident, nonetheless shows considered one of his raven photographs on the wall. And this yr has seen elevated curiosity in Fukase’s work due to a brand new biopic: Ravens (2024), starring Tadanobu Asano of Shogun (2024–26) and Ichi the Killer (2001) fame.
On paper, a film about this mysterious and erratic artist sounds fascinating, an opportunity to ramble by way of the shadowy thicket of Fukase’s life. However director Mark Gill, who helmed the Morrissey biopic England is Mine (2017), hinges the movie on the completely baffling choice to personify the photographer’s darkness within the type of an anthropomorphic raven.
Movie nonetheless of Ravens (2024), directed by Mark Gill
I don’t imply an precise speaking chicken. As an alternative, a younger Fukase, locked in his father’s picture studio as punishment for daring to use to artwork faculty, begins seeing a top-hatted man-bird in a gothic raven costume. Carrying a beaky masks and all, and talking in Spanish-accented English, this ridiculous character follows Fukase all through the movie, whispering candy nothings that bid him to behave on reckless and violent impulses.
It’s all too absurd. Fukase was an actual particular person, not a Haruki Murakami brief story protagonist. As an alternative of actually partaking with why he was so drawn to morbid material and the way he might make such nice artwork whereas dwelling so chaotically and behaving so badly, this ridiculous magical-realist flourish fully cheapens his story and flattens the movie’s engagement along with his artwork. It implies that he was merely pushed by a supernatural drive of malevolence. Worse, it makes a joke out of the very actual psychological well being struggles that drove the photographer to alcoholism and tried suicide.
It’s not the one dangerous choice made by the director — the extremely on-the-nose musical cue that ends the movie is one other — however the imposition of this devil-on-the-shoulder hallucination is very confounding contemplating how properly Gill manages to pathologize Fukase’s shut relationships. The photographer’s marriage to Yoko Wanibe, a mannequin who aspires to develop into one of many only a few feminine performers in Noh theater, is marred by sexism and jealousy. He makes use of her as his muse however resents having to take business work to assist her coaching. And when the photographs he takes of her find yourself in a 1974 present on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, his jealousy at being upstaged by his feminine topic additional destabilizes the connection.
That insecurity is proven to have roots in household. The movie depicts Fukase as a person dwelling endlessly within the shadow of his inflexible and abusive father, the supply of each his photographic vocation and his self-doubting nature, to whom he’s all the time making an attempt to show the validity of his inventive pretensions. We see their relationship shift through the years from spiteful distance — Fukase scandalizes his mother and father when he marries Yoko with out informing them — to, ultimately, a begrudging mutual respect. When his father dies, he even takes photographs of his cremated stays. Not all of us can merely lower our poisonous members of the family out of our lives, not even artists. It goes to point out that Fukase was such a captivating, sophisticated particular person and artist that Ravens can solely give us a style of his world.
Movie nonetheless of Ravens (2024), directed by Mark Gill
Movie nonetheless of Ravens (2024), directed by Mark Gill
Movie nonetheless of Ravens (2024), directed by Mark Gill
Ravens (2024) is screening as a part of the New York Asian Movie Competition at Walter Reade Theater (165 West sixty fifth Road, Higher West Facet, Manhattan) on July 20.
