Pico Iyer, known for his travel writings was Guest Director this year. Iyer, a South Asian brought up in England, is married to a Japanese woman and has written about the country and culture. The first film we saw was When A Woman Ascends a Staircase. (Mikio Naruse 1960)
The films have started and the great irony is that both have been about women, about Japanese women and emo labor, and class. (the TCFF entries were also about emo labor: short definition: work in which attention to the (emotional) needs of the people being served are a large part of the what must be performed by the worker. It is generally not acknowledged, so uncompensated. Good teaching for instance, depends on it, and many other parts of the economy of care, and of course women do a great deal of it in relationships) In Naruse’s film the subject matter and cinematography reveal the women character’s concerns about how they must appear and entertain men, and meanwhile, wonder about how they will get by. This film When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, is like a text book on emotional labor. The Giesha is the ultimate in “emo” labor, especially since they don't usually sleep with the men, they just smile and nod, and provide beautiful companionship. I made a note (I take notes before and after the films) of the incredible male privilege, to have an entire class of women who are there to serve the emotional needs of men. The filmmaker emphasized the work that went into the woman’s appearance: there were may shots of her made up face very flat like a mask, which is almost a trope in Japanese culture. But the real subjects of the film were the struggles behind the smile; the woman’s inner life and her economic predicament were forgrounded. She is no longer young, so her beauty is even more dependent on artifice, another labor intensive activity. The film ends with her putting on the smile as she ascends the stairs to the bar where she must work after a series of discouraging attempts to make more for herself. The film was shot in lyrical black and white, with many establishing and reestablishing shots of the Ginza neighborhood at night, the electric lights going into deep street space.
People tend to go on about Japanese film, Ozu, blah, blah blah, not that it isn’t all true. My question is: what did you learn?
 
Iyer also showed The Makioka Sisters, introduced as the Sense and Sensibility of Japan based on a novel by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’ from 1943, which the notes say is about the influence of the West after the war. I saw the issue of what to do with women, marry them off or let them be free—one is an artist, as paramount. So economics. I was not able to watch the entire film which was shown while we were working and tired but one moment of it was charming: one of the sisters refuses to marry an eligible bachelor because he is obsessed with his work with fish—a biologist—and she says “I am not a fish,” predicting that he would never be able to give a woman his attention.
 
I am going to interpolate comments about Werner Herzog’s film Family Romance LLC. not just because it is about Japan, but because in a sense the man in the film is the inverse of the Giesha: serving the unmet needs of women and children.
One of the films I want to write about is Herzog's Family Romance LLC, because in some ways, it is more than a documentary/story about a business in which a man rents himself out as a surrogate father, companion, or other functions, it is a study of acting. The man is extremely charming and the story that seems to be at the center of the film concerns his stand-in as a missing father. He is able to draw out the shy, possibly lonely child and their relationship, and the crisis of the film, is that the situation becomes almost too real. Herzog wanted to make a documentary about the actual business, but was not able to do it; he made a fiction film instead. Like much of his work, there is an edge of strangeness, a look at marginal situations telling us something about the dissonance in our own lives. T.S. Elliot pointed out that travel tells us something about home: We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. So Herzog’s film, about Japan reminds us that when we lose faith in one another, we act to get on with things, rather than destroy them. And when we are with children we act joyful and loving even if inside we have to overcome some problem or sorrow. In the Western tradition, Lust is personified as a person with a mask, do we wear a mask when physical attraction pushes us to act as someone more splendid than we really are? Another approach to these films might be to think about the way in which they reveal performances of gender. (for you non-Judith Butler initiates: performance of gender is a theory that we learn how to act out the gender roles specific to our lives or from the Wiley online library: The main point of gender performance is that neither gender nor sex is completely natural, and both are performed and become naturalized over time: we act and walk and talk in ways that consolidate the idea of “being a man” or “being a woman.”
This film presented an inverse situation to When A Woman Ascends a Staircase in the sense that the Geisha is also a study in acting, in providing surrogate to fulfill needs that can't be met otherwise. The woman in this film absolutely must act, rather than succumb to her very real anxieties about how she is going to get by, and the final frame of the film shows her putting on a smile as she ascends the stairs to greet her customers. 

The man in Family Romance LLC acts much like a Geisha in the sense that he is acting out and filling in something in an intimate situation. Do we have a parallel to this in our culture? I'm not sure.
More Herzog: I missed Nomads: In The Steps of Bruce Chatwin. But I did manage to see the newly restored 1976 Les Blank film, Chulas Fronteras which Herzog, a friend of Blank and Chatwin, introduced at the Backlot. The film was a study of the people who live on the borderlands of Texas and Mexico in 1976, and has special resonance at the moment. Herzog lived near the border of Poland and Austria, so had another point of view on mixtures of ethnicities and cultures. There is possibly no happier film (except, of course 24 Hours of Happy) than Chulas Fronteras. Blank and co-director Chis Strachwitz photographed every detail of the lives of Tex-Mex people. My favorite was a celebration in which we saw exactly how and with what joy the tamales were made by a roomful of women.  The camera roams and shifts and cuts away from detail to room or landscape, from fore, middle and backgrounds cutting the shots to the vibrant music of the Tehanos.  Jason Silverman's description in the catalogue compares Blank with Alan Lomax as a collector of music. There is no controlling voice over, the music and some interviews tell the story. Some moving Corridos lament  the loneliness of workers who leave their families to labor in Texas, others express the joy of the families who live there. Tex-mex music borrows its rhythm and the accordion from German dance hall music, so the om pah pah accordion sound permeates the film in an endless syncretic, if you want to use the ethnographic term, or just a multi-layered, joyous multicultural polka.