Chelsea the Cinéaste

  Made at the tail end of a decade marked by the nation’s slow recovery from war and its subsequent democratisation, Mikio Naruse’s  When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) addresses a subject at once bold and timely: the travails of womanhood in a patriarchal society. Social commentary was primarily what Naruse aimed for but in place of irony and satire one finds, by turns, empathy and a dispassionate understanding of the still repressive mores of ‘50’s Tokyo. This apparent contradictory tone in a sense parallels the heroine’s central conflict in regards to financial independence and the inevitable loss of dignity and personal values that comes with it.   Keiko, lovingly called “mama” by her friends and customers, struggles to keep afloat as a bar hostess in Ginza, the locus of Tokyo’s cocktail tradition, amidst a growing shift of business trend that promotes a more accentuated fusion of alcohol and sex. Widowed from a young age, Keiko adheres to a strict moral code that ...

Jean Luc Godard’s first feature feels oddly like a swansong: in many respects the film seems a self-mockery of what it ostensibly celebrates – the new, the bold, the reckless; the 60s zeitgeist that resurrects the anguished ghosts of the 1920s, who, according to F. Scott Fitzgerald, grow up to “find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken.” For the children of the ‘60s, their wars are of a kind in which the opponents constantly change roles: sometimes they are the unmerciful authorities bent on making miserable lives out of their inferiors; in other times they are the society at large, weeding out in its insidious and devious way the errant law-breakers. They all seem to be donning the same masks, through which the warriors recognise themselves. This fight with one’s inner demon necessarily evokes concerns of mortality and death - timeless concerns that acquire an added pungency in the 1960s: would a dangerous, unheeding spell of hedonism finally defy life’s in...