L'isola della donna contesa

More of less ten years before making a film and twenty years after his great Marlene Dietrich seven films, Josef von Sternberg was out of luck. Then the Japanese offer him money over there and him to work with people in Japan. The dialogue is all Japanese and rather than subtitles Sternberg narrated the whole film. He found a dancer for the part and she in her first film is really good and ends having a decent career. The story is okay but not really very wonderful although we are surprised to get a couple of nude scenes although it was usually censored. Unfortunately as usual the director is without real locations other than a couple of a shots of the sea and two rocks with talk of the war and a plane. It's a sad end as more of less his film career is all over.

This film actually had a run in Paris outside the Cinematheque and it attracted considerable attention. It's an audacious,in-your-face sort of quirky film that works on many levels. Sterberg's autobiography "Fun in a Chinese Laundry" spells out some of techniques he employed but the film needs to be experienced beyond a mere description. It was shot in an airplane hangar to begin with, with all the tinsel and tin foil representing an island jungle. The limited number of players (all non-professional) and space (on an island) make this more of a chamber work rather than the Hollywood cast of thousands and its subdued drama will disappoint some who want things to be more explicit. It's purely artificial and looks that way deliberately. The film is in Japanese without subtitles and the narrator in English is none other than Sternberg himself. He warns the audience of what will happen BEFORE it happens, thus leaving us free to discover the camera-work, the scenery and the atmosphere minus the drama. Drama there is, of course, but detached from what's happening on screen. Everything in the film - minus the very last shot, alas - is artificial, dream-like and absolutely fascinating. What a remarkable end to a remarkable career. I highly recommend it although I wouldn't know how to find it. Good luck!

Curtis Stotlar

After many months of searching I located Josef's The Saga of Anatahan. It definitely held my attention and was a unique viewing experience. A completely Japanese war tale relayed in english (?) it has a strange beauty that is difficult to approximate in plain text. I don't know how Sternberg decided on this as his last cinematic statement, but it is certainly a fascinating b & w piece.

Sternberg's famous swan-song (at the time of writing his equally notable autobiography in 1965, he had hoped to direct again but died 4 years later!) was considered a rarity until a few years back: in fact, I first watched snippets from it as a kid in the 1990 documentary Hollywood MAVERICKS on local TV; then, it eventually turned up on late-night Italian TV. I later acquired a low-grade and problematic copy of it but subsequently upgraded to a serviceable one, albeit still plagued by the occasional audio drop-out and accompanied by forced French subtitles!

Disillusioned with Hollywood by this time, Sternberg tried his luck abroad and, while he described the circumstances of shooting this one as ideal (in that he was free to exercise his well-documented autocracy!) in his autobiography, it was far from easy since the film was directed through interpreters and sometimes had to resort to storyboards in order to get across what was required of cast and crew! Sternberg writes bemusedly about the complexity of the Japanese language, the hiring of a kabuki actor for one of the main roles and his being gradually seen by all and sundry as a father-figure (being even asked by her family to protect the virtue of the virginal{!} leading lady). In any case, it is interesting that, being set and shot in Japan, this came at a time when that country's cinema was enjoying world-wide recognition largely through the works of Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi.

Incidentally, though the film features Japanese dialogue throughout, this is not translated into English – instead, we get the writer-director himself supplying intermittent commentary to expound on the action! Even so, this and the ghostly parade of victims at the finale constitute the only stylistic flourishes within the film. Indeed, the picture is unusually stark for Sternberg – treated almost like a documentary, with superimposed dates indicating the passage of time, and utilizing stock footage of returning Japanese WWII veterans. Opting as always to shoot entirely within the controlled environment of a studio, he took his traditional artificiality to new levels – with sets and props sometimes being no more than just drawings (including the titular Pacific island!) and deploying copious lighting equipment, given that most of the proceedings occur in the daytime!!

With this in mind, the premise is simple enough: at the tail-end of WWII, the crew of a sunken ship are stranded on an apparently uninhabited island in the Philippines; however, it transpires that a couple are living on it and, soon, the battle-weary and sex-starved soldiers begin to disobey the orders of their commanding officer (who insists they keep vigilance over potential attack by the enemy and in the hope of spotting a salvage vessel) and contend over the sole female presence, a vixen-ish girl who actively encourages their attentions despite the stern monitoring of her consort! In this respect, the film anticipates the likes of Seth Holt's STATION SIX SAHARA (1962), Edgar G. Ulmer's THE CAVERN (1964; the last effort by this cult figure, too) and John Derek's ONCE BEFORE I DIE (1965), all of which dealt with a similar situation of one-woman-to-several-men in already-sticky surroundings – for the record, I recently watched the first of these but, while I own the others as well, I still need to check them out. Still, inspired as it was by a true story, there were some initial protests that such a sensitive Japanese story was to be told by a foreigner (even if his work was well-known); in retrospect, its people are depicted in reasonably realistic fashion – so much so that it would later become a clichéd view! – as honorable citizens, prone to making merry but also driven by lust.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the film was badly received in Japan but, then, it ended up being overlooked everywhere else as well (dismissed as an eccentric foot-note to a great directorial career)…except in France, with the glowing "Cahiers Du Cinema" assessment being reprinted in full in Sternberg's memoirs! Personally, I feel that its dramatic and artistic power are undeniable and, after all this time, still very much undiminished. The last word, however, goes to the director who unreservedly called it "my best film" and one that he believed ahead of its time, especially in the way it attempted to make cinema patrons reflect beyond what was on the screen.

Anatahan is a little island where a group of Japanese soldiers find themselves in 1944. They are a ragtag bunch with a harsh leader. Already on the island are a severe man and a beautiful young woman. It is assumed at first that they are married but it turns out they have both suffered family losses. As time goes by, discipline disappears. The men begin to lust after the woman and she, at times, encourages them. Eventually, she is in danger. The men begin a sort of "Lord of the Flies" thing as they move to their baser instincts. There is death here and we begin to wonder who will be alive at the end. This is an oddity of a film. The great director Joseph von Sternberg did this in Japan with a Japanese cast in 1953. The strange thing is that he narrates the whole thing in a simplistic way. The characters speak Japanese throughout and we don't get to understand what they are saying. This is certainly worth seeing.