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 pictures wherein the photographer casts himself because the grim black chook, Fukase managed to precise aspects of himself by way of many alternative proxies. He shot pictures of his spouse in a slaughterhouse and of himself within the tub. He returned continuously 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 together 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 face within the gentle and expose himself to others.”
In Japan, Fukase continues to be a legend a long time 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 one in every of his raven pictures 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 determination to personify the photographer’s darkness within the type of an anthropomorphic raven.
I don’t imply an precise speaking chook. 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 participating with why he was so drawn to morbid material and the way he might make such nice artwork whereas residing so chaotically and behaving so badly, this ridiculous magical-realist flourish fully cheapens his story and flattens the movie’s engagement together with his artwork. It implies that he was merely pushed by a supernatural power 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 determination 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 particularly 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 pictures he takes of her find yourself in a 1974 present on the Museum of Trendy 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 residing 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 at all times attempting to show the validity of his inventive pretensions. We see their relationship shift over time 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 pictures of his cremated stays. Not all of us can merely minimize our poisonous members of the family out of our lives, not even artists. It goes to indicate that Fukase was such an enchanting, difficult particular person and artist that Ravens can solely give us a style of his world.
Ravens (2024) is screening as a part of the New York Asian Movie Pageant at Walter Reade Theater (165 West sixty fifth Avenue, Higher West Facet, Manhattan) on July 20.
