Hell hath no fury like an enraged Klaus Kinski. The late German actor, who rose to prominence in the 1970s as the combusting supernova at the center of the Wernzer Herzog films Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and Cobra Verde (1987), was as famous for his coruscating off-camera temper as for his onscreen intensity. With Kinski, there is always the near-unanswerable question of to what extent is his performance acting and to what extent is he just being himself. Are we watching someone who has totally, obsessively (unhealthily?) committed to his craft, or a petulant diva whose overinflated ego perhaps bruises too easily?

Klaus Kinski: Jesus Christ the Savoir, a recently rediscovered concert film of a 1971 solo performance, makes a riveting case for all of the above. Filmed a year before he headed to the South American jungle with Herzog, Jesus Christ finds Kinski alone on a spot-lit stage before a packed house delivering a monologue that frames Christ as a persecuted outlaw. “Wanted: Jesus Christ,” he purrs, “charged with seduction, anarchistic tendencies, conspiracy against the authority of the state.”

Sawako Decides, the most recent feature by the talented 27 year-old Japanese director Yuya Ishii, might not be the best film of 2010 that you never saw, but it certainly ranks as one of last year’s funniest — and perhaps more debatably, most feminist.

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Ishii double feature “Lost in Japan,” which pairs Sawako with Ishii’s previous film To Walk With You (2009), is an all- too-brief introduction to a director whose modestly budgeted films about losers, misfits, and the socially marginalized in a Japan as depressed as they are have been garnering critical praise and catching the attention of festival programmers since his 2006 debut Rebel, Giro’s Love. Sawako Decides leaves no doubt that Ishii is one to watch (and to watch repeatedly).

Five years after winding up in Tokyo after a failed post-high school elopement, 20-something Sawako (a wonderful Hikari Mitsushima) has landed herself a thankless pink collar job serving tea at the offices of a toy manufacturer and an equally lame coworker boyfriend, whose young daughter from a previous marriage seems just as indifferent to Sawako as her father is. A human doormat in the extreme, Sawako is the first to agree the chorus of detractors that surround her that she’s, “not really much … a lower-middling type, really.” This routine existence is upended when her boyfriend arranges for Sawako to take over her estranged and terminally ill father’s freshwater clam packing business, and Sawako must face down the rural community — most notably, the pack of sniping older female employees she now oversees — who view her as a selfish deserter.

Although Sawako is a far cry from Emma Stone’s sass-spouting Olive in Easy A (2010), Ishii still wants his underdog to come out on top, and eventually the fates smile kindly, albeit crookedly, on her. By the time the film reaches the climactic scene in which a newly-emboldened Sawako leads her shocked employees in a rousing anti-government anthem, there is no denying that she has — to borrow the title phrase of another recent coming-of-age film anchored by a strong female character — true grit, and that Ishii is not only a wildly inventive filmmaker, but one who possesses a true heart.

Ishii — who also frequently edits and writes his films — combines humor and pathos in a way that mimics his bumbling antiheroes’ oft-failed attempts to integrate themselves within the world around them: jokes are frequently followed up a beat too late so as to go practically unnoticed or are delivered in a deadpan that verges on D.O.A. He also has a penchant for peppering his narratives with absurdist detours, out-of-the-blue dance numbers, and enough idiosyncratic supporting characters to make Miranda July proud.

Unlike July’s work, however, Ishii’s films leave no aftertaste of preciousness. Ishii’s characters are often as laughably insufferable as their peers make them out to be, but Ishii takes their funny-sad struggles to exist quite seriously, putting his work more in line with that of, say, Woody Allen or even Todd Solondz, than of anything Michael Cera has mumbled his way through. Ishii’s films are “existential” — a descriptor they’re frequently tagged with — to the extent that his characters, through much hilarious trial and error, transform their failure to achieve what society expects of them into a new ethics for living.

Thus, Sawako Decides’ most radical proposition is that “nothing special” is not simply a demoted way of being, but grounds for collectivization. Japanese culture’s drive toward upper-middle class exceptionalism is exposed as a myth that should have died with the Bubble Economy (in To Walk With You, the protagonist discovers everybody’s mother wants them to be a lawyer largely for lack of imagination). Like Melville’s scrivener Bartleby, Sawako turns staying within one’s station into an act of defiance. To be the best at being a “lower-middling person” is not defeatist. Rather, it is to embrace one’s stunted potential as a generative constraint. If everyone’s a loser, than no one is.

[Originally published in the SF Bay Guardian]

Kazuo Ohno, who died this past June at 103, probably received the broadest exposure of his long career when Antony and the Johnsons chose Naoya Ikegami’s black and white Ohno portrait as the cover art for their 2009 album The Crying Light. Shot in profile, wearing a black dress with a cluster of white flowers pinned in his hair, the visibly aged Ohno — his head tilted back, mouth slightly agape, and hands thrust forward like twisted branches — appears frozen somewhere between ecstasy and his last breath.

Senator John McCain may have been testing the limits of hyperbole when he claimed in the presidential debates that gazing into Vladimir Putin’s eyes he saw a “K,” a “G” and a “B,” but Russia’s unforeseen and boorish display of military grandstanding in Georgia gave cause for both candidates to make “curbing Russian aggression” a serious part of their foreign policy discussions. A different sort of Russian aggression is at work in Cargo 200, Alexei Balabanov’s latest nasty piece of work. […]

If John Waters is “the Pope of Trash” (according to the gospel of William S. Burroughs) then freelance curator and film fanatic Jack Stevenson is a shoe-in for Cardinal. The last time Stevenson rolled into town in 2006, he arrived with a stack of film canisters that were a veritable Pandora’s box filled with drug scare propaganda, witchcraft and Scandinavian skin flicks. This time he comes bearing amateur blue movies, a gritty portrait of a bisexual hustler, and grainy reels documenting live, nude girls — all shot in San Francisco — for the series “The Superstars Next Door” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I checked in with Stevenson via email before he boarded his transatlantic flight. Here’s what he had to say about his hatred of television, why film preservationists have it wrong, and the most depraved flick ever made in Denmark. […]

In our popular imagination — and especially in film — the request to “stare into the light” is often an invitation to let our waking life fall into submission. The words so often spoken by hypnotists, anesthesiologists, and mystics also describe the act of watching movies, and speak to film’s implicit promise of taking us to some other scene accessed through the flickers on the screen.

The transportive and conscious altering qualities of light were not lost on William S. Burroughs and his compatriot and frequent collaborator Brian Gysin. “We must storm the citadels of enlightenment,” Burroughs wrote to Gysin, “the means are at hand.” The means at hand were Gysin’s revelation about the hallucinatory qualities of flickering light and the device he invented in 1957 to harness its potential: the dreamachine. Nik Sheenan’s hypnotic documentary FlicKer — which makes its U.S. premiere at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — looks into the dreamachine’s pulsating brilliance while also sketching a portrait of its troubled and brilliant creator. […]

Mark Twain’s observation (cribbed from poet Thomas Campbell) that “distance lends enchantment to the view” could serve as a guiding axiom for the languorous, enchanting films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Apichatpong shows more than he tells, and his camera often obscures rather than explicates the minute, alchemical operations taking place before it. […]

In 1960s Japan, Nikkatsu meant a new kind of action. Promotional materials for the studio even spelled “action” in katakana, the syllabary used for borrowed foreign words. Indeed, the studio’s super-stylized films — only a smattering of which are showcased in this all too brief series presented by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Outcast Cinema — reflected many of the postwar period’s cultural sea changes. Played by an exclusive line of marquee names including boyish rake Watari Tetsuya and the chipmunk-countenanced Joe Shishido, Nikkatsu’s lone wolves and hit men hang out at rock and jazz clubs, drive hotwired foreign cars, get in brawls with white devil sailors, and possess the kind of smoldering cool that Elmore Leonard thinks he copyrighted. Similarly, directors such as Toshio Masuda, Takashi Nomura, and the better-known Suzuki Seijun developed a kinetic visual style that cribbed from Jean-Luc Godard, Sergio Leone, and Frank Tashlin in equal measure (Suzuki’s extreme stylistic bravura eventually got him canned). […]

The pull quote snagged by most critics from John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus was Justin Bond’s quip “It’s like the ’60s, only with less hope,” delivered while surveying the myriad sexual couplings and groupings in his salon’s back room. Bond’s pithy line encapsulated the film’s ideal of community through polymorphous perversity, even if that vision is tempered by an awareness of the initial sexual revolution’s blind spots and a hangover from the 20 years of sexual-identity politicking in its wake. Yet Mitchell’s film is neither jaded nor self-serious and never pimps out its graphic sex scenes for purposes of cynical titillation. Reflecting the loose, workshop methods with which Mitchell and his cast developed the film, sex in Shortbus is for the most part something revelatory, experimental, and at times quite playful. But Mitchell draws the narrative parallels a little too neatly: when else could the film’s sex therapist finally achieve orgasm but at the story’s, uh, climax? […]