TADANOBU ASANO AND KUMI TAKUCHI IN RAVENS

MARK GILL: RAVENS (2025) New York Asian Film Festival

A renowned Japanese art photographer gets a rock star biopic

Biopics. Can't live with them, can't live without them. There is often something tiresone about the constant drama and deeply troubled nature of Masahira Fukase in the biopic Ravens, but "brilliantlhy gifted and deeply troubled Japanese photographer." He may be a great artist. The Japanese who made this biopic think so. And just from looking at his work online and as richly sampled here (the filmmakers had full access to the Fukase archives, which is all-important), he's definitely a gifted, original photographer well worthy of a film, and how nice that he got one. feature And how cdol it is to see an art photographer celebated as a superstar, worthy of a dramatic film, and starring Tadonobu Asano, of Thor, Shōgun, and Ichi the Killer, known for Maborosi, The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi, and Mongol but ow most famous as Lord Kashigi Yabushige in the FX series Shōgun. This is a star. And his disturbed, drunken art photographer is a rock star. (In fact Mark Gill, the English filmmaker, is known for England Is Mine, a 2017 biopic of the early life of the singer Morissey.

There are some pretty cool Americna fims about great photographers, but mostly documentaries, a notable redent one beingDawn Porter's The Way I See It, about Barack Obama's official White House photographer, Pete Souza. Of dramas recently we have had Anton Corbijn's Life, about the photographer Dennis Stock and his bond with James Dean.

This is Gill's second feature, and it's an adventurous piece, however it may be doomed to the ups and downs of the tormented artist biopic. Fukase is known for his book Ravens, literally a series of rather wild images of the named birds, big, black, wild, and sometimes tihy and distant. In the film at hand, Fukase, who from childhood talked to himself, is depicted as talking rather, in Japanese, to a very large raven (voiced by José Luis Ferrer) that speaks to him in English. On this basis Mark Shilling, film critic of The Japan Times[/i, says that this is "not a conventional biopic." But I think it is, only it's a good one, and attractively tweaked by addiing the talking rabbit--sorry, raven. Schilling points out that Asano already stared way back in 1999 in Sho Igarashi's biopic [i]One Step on a Mine, It's All Over, of the war photographer Taizo Ichinose, who died in Cambodia.

Fukase's father Sukezõ (Kanji Furutachi), who was a small-minded and conventional commercial photographer, continually undermined his son's efforts to be an artist, and wanted his son to take over the family photography studio in Hokkaido and was disappointed that instead he went to Tokoyo. He told him that if he didn't accomplish something by the age of forty he should kill himself. Fukase, who was a heavy drinker as his fathe may have been (and Yoke seems to have been one too) often thought of killing himself, but at the age of forty, in 1974, he was prominently included in MoMA's New Japanese Photographers show, and he and Yoko went to New York for it, an experience he of course thoroughly recorded with his camera. Fukase's importance has only grown since his death in 2012, despite the fact that for some years at the end of his iife he was disabled due to an accident. There have been numerous shows of his work recently - at MoMA, which first featured him.

The raven is the inner demon that prods Fukase to be original and unconventional, to test himself and never do what is easy, to seek uniqueness and greatness. It's a surreal, if not silly embodiment, but it's obvious all the way that Fukase was neve easy, never content; there were inner demons inside him. Gill makes him memorable even if, as usual, the process of being an artist is always just beyond the reach of film. In fact when questioned Fukase amusingly says at one point that he "has no process"; his process, he suggests, is getting drunk in a dingy bar and brooding. Perhaps it was. But the idea that an artist to be great must be shrouded in a cloud of doom is a romantic, suspicious one that we have no budiness subscribing to, though we can enjoy this film for what it teaches us about this significant Japanese photographer.

Gill was the director, screenwrier, and production deisgner.

Ravens レイブンズ ("Ravens") 116 min. premiered at Austin Oct. 25, 2024, at Tokyo Oct. 30, showing also at Taipei, Red Sea, Malaga, and Hong Kong. Screened for this review as part of the New York Asian Film Festival. Showtime:
Sunday July 20, 9:00pm
Film at Lincoln Center
Premium screening. Intro and Q&A with director Mark Gill, cinematographer Fernando Ruiz and actor Tadanobu Asano


TADANOBU ASANO IN RAVENS

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.