Fièvre sur Anatahan

Oh great. I finally obtain this incredibly rare film, a blank tape with a sticker on it, in a clear case, from a tiny town in northeast Wiscons, and I pop in the tape, all ready to enjoy the film...if the narrator would just SHUT the HELL UP! The omniscient voice-over (in English, provided by von Sternberg himself) literally talks throughout the entire film. He vocally provides setting, action, subtext, inner monologue and even dialogue! There are no subtitles in the film, and the film isn't dubbed into English. von Sternberg simply reads the lines for both people, giving the direct action the short shrift as he emotionally distanced it from us with his flat delivery. It felt like I was being treated like a six-year-old, watching Reading Rainbow, with Levar Burton slowly enunciating every line in an aloof, patronizing tone, as if he thinks I'm an idiot, like I'm not smart enough to actually comprehend the goings on, which are fairly straightforward.

But even more frustratingly, he abruptly stops talking, almost as if to say, "FINE, YOU TRY IT WITHOUT ME!" and suddenly I'm left adrift; since all the characters have the same voice, I found it difficult to differentiate between them, and suddenly their voices are gone, and I have no idea what was going on, as I felt von Sternberg derisively chuckling and nodding behind me.

It's an intriguing tale, the story of five Japanese soldiers, thanks to the strong values and refusal of surrender instilled in them since childhood, continue to fight and guard an outpost long after the fighting has ceased. Even if he had one glaring post-production failure, von Sternberg still knows how to direct, and there are a few striking visual sequences, several well-made, interesting setpieces, with the give-and-take between the two, three and four von-Sterberg-sans, including a few exciting conflicts that result in violence. But the narrator kept talking, then hung me out to dry, and I was left flailing unpleasantly.

That was the feeling I got from Anatahan, that I was being talked down to, that he was reading a children's book and showing me the pictures, then got mad at me and stormed out, with any possibility of me loving the film went right along with it. To put it one way, I was overly smothered and babied in the kiddie pool, then abruptly shoved into the deep end without my floaties. I think I would have preferred the film on mute, and I probably still could have figured out what was going on from the outset, completely without his f-cking patronage, thank you very much.

{Grade: 6.5/10 (high C+) / #16 (of 22) of 1953}

June 1944. A group of Japanese sailors and soldiers end up on Anatahan, an isolated island, after their boats are sunk by US planes. The island is not deserted: a man and his wife live there. He is not pleased to see them and she and her beauty will test the group's discipline, cohesion and selflessness.

An interesting drama, written and directed by Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel, The Last Command, amongst others). Shows how easy it is for people to return to their baser, primal instincts and the effect this has on their behaviour and their community. Has a sort of Lord of the Flies quality to it (or more appropriately, vice versa, as this was released a year before Lord of the Flies was published).

The ending is a bit flat, however. It all seemed set up for a powerful, profound ending but then it wrapped up quite tamely and neatly. A bit disappointing, due to that.

The origin of "The Saga of Anatahan" was a trip Josef von Sternberg made to Japan in 1936, during which he met producer Nagamasa Kawakita, while Arnold Fanck was shooting "Atarashiki tsuchi" (1937), a movie Kawakita was financing to promote the image of Japan in Europe. Sternberg was a well-known admirer of Japanese culture, so he discussed with Kawakita the possibility of making a motion picture in the country, about one of their national themes, but war exploded, and the project fell.

Cut to the end of the war. Sternberg and Kawakita had to wait until the end of American occupation in Japan. Kawakita had been scorned for his liking of everything related to China, considered a war criminal, and expelled from the Japanese film industry for five years. However, his lengthy career as producer of films that faithfully portrayed the Japanese culture, and his distribution of Japanese cinema abroad since the 1920s, allowed Kawakita to produce this free retelling of an incident that by 1951 was hot in the Japanese media.

According to Michiro Maruyama's memoirs -which served as starting point for the screenplay-, during World War II he and 29 fellow sailors shipwrecked in the Pacific Ocean and stayed for almost a decade in the island of Anatahan, populated only by a peasant and a woman. With the collaboration of Tatsuo Asano, Sternberg made his version of the story, and concentrated on the power struggle, the triumph of hedonism and the search for sexual favors from the woman (newcomer Akemi Negishi).

However, I find the result a bit confusing and whimsical. Besides directing, co-producing, co-writing, co-editing, and co-photographing the film, Sternberg opted to narrate it (himself) in English, while the voices of the Japanese players were recorded and heard performing. The effect of the first-person narration disorients more than distances from the action: it seems to be the reflection of one of the main characters, but the narration is never associated with anybody. Moreover, Sternberg's commentaries contain ethical and moral views and perceptions that we cannot tell if they are more pertinent to Occident than to Japanese culture.

In 1953 the film opened and was rejected in Japan, for it dealt with recent war events that had traumatic effects on the population, who had a different moral view. The film was a failure in the United States, Sternberg went to teach cinema, and Kawakita released the movie in Europe with a new narration told by a young Japanese actor.

However, Sternberg kept working on it, asked cinematographer Kôzô Okazaki to film additional shots (including a nude Akemi Negishi, sitting by the sea), and in 1958 made the version I am reviewing, which he gave the title of "The Saga of Anatahan", and stated that this was the definitive version. I believe that, instead of identifying it simply as "Anatahan", we should respect his decision, as we do with George Lucas' final retitling of his original "Star Wars" trilogy.

So, since 1958, "The Saga of Anatahan" was reconsidered as among his best works. It does not lack interest but is far from his silent masterpieces, "The Blue Angel" and other titles with Marlene Dietrich.

This has to be one of the strangest films I have seen and its sheer oddity is one of the reasons I enjoyed it so immensely. "Anatahan" is based on the "true" story of Japanese soldiers who were shipwrecked during World War II and refused to believe that the war had ended until six years after Hiroshima. On the island with them, the soldiers find a man and woman who did not leave with the island's former inhabitants and the movie's intrigue centers around the soldiers' murderous lust towards the woman. What is so odd about the film is that the actors only speak Japanese and the viewer is led through the story by an English-speaking narrator (Sternberg, himself) who variously refers to himself as "I" and "we" but never clearly identifies who that "I" might be. The narrative is further complicated by the fact that at several crucial moments the narrator admits that no one knows what happened while we watch those events occur onscreen. These constantly shifting levels of "truth" make this film always compelling as we are overtly challenged to question what it is we are seeing and hearing. Like Orson Welles' "F for Fake," truth and artifice interact to create a complicated web of meanings which--at least in my one viewing--never provided easy answers. "Anatahan's" brand of "truth" is a precursor to more recent films like "Fargo," whose truths are meant to be taken ironically rather than as literal fact. Although this film is hard to find, try to get your hands on it if only to see the final piece in a genius director's long line of work.

By the time Josef von Sternberg made "The Saga of Anatahan" you might as well say his career was over. His glory days working with Dietrich were in the past and since the critical disaster that was "The Shanghai Gesture" in 1941 he had made only three other features, one of which, "Jet Pilot", wasn't released until after "Anatahan". He filmed "The Saga of Anatahan" in a studio in Kyoto 'especially built for the purpose' as an opening credit tells us, with a Japanese cast acting out a drama in an artificially constructed jungle, speaking Japanese but without subtitles. Instead von Sternberg himself narrates the film in English; he also wrote the film and photographed it in a black and white as evocative as that used in "The Scarlett Empress" or "Shanghai Express".

The story is a familiar one; a group of men find themselves stranded, in this case, on an island on which there is only one woman and set about destroying themselves over her. It was quite an erotic film for the period, featuring female nudity, something rare at the time. Indeed it was just the kind of film you might have found in a Soho or 42nd Street porno cinema rather than in the mainstream and for years it was thought of as a lost work but no von Sternberg movie, especially one as strange as this one, is going to remain lost for long and today is often considered something of a masterpiece.

It is certainly extraordinary; an avant-garde film totally unlike anything the director had done before and von Sternberg himself though it was his best film, a bold experiment that may have failed commercially but not artistically. If the acting is closer to Kabuki Theatre than mainline cinema it's because most of the cast came from the Kabuki Theatre. What audience did von Sternberg think would be attracted to such a film? Surely he knew it would be a flop but equally he must have known that a film as imaginative and as bold as this would not pass unnoticed. Although von Sternberg was never to work again he would live another sixteen years yet not long enough to see this extraordinary film reassessed and given its rightful place in his canon. See it and marvel for yourselves.