Gate Of Hell
Director : Teinosuke Kinugasa
Japan, 1953
An interesting question is how real a film should be, how close to reality in its look? We now possess stunning digital technology making tiny details visible at high definition 1080p resolution. In the Blu-Ray conversion of '2001 : A Space Odyssey', some of the African savannah backgrounds in the Dawn Of Man sequence can now be seen gently fluttering in a breeze, revealed for the fabric studio props that they were. Though I haven't yet seen it in action, I can only imagine 4K resolution will stun us all over again, making it possible to pause and fixate on the tiniest trivial details. The digital process does not fade or wear, cannot be bleached or tarnished; for as long as there is computer technology, a moving image can be stored and viewed precisely as intended. What we have now is the closest we have yet possessed to transmitting reality. But is this what we want? Evidence would suggest no. With precision digital photography we have seen the rise of Photoshop, images being routinely adjusted to make people look better, thinner, clearer-skinned. With digital film comes CGI, meaning that in a way our hyper-realistic filming technology is producing some of the least realistic images yet produced by cinema. A film is not quite reality, for most of us it remains an escape from it.
Colour film has a longer history than many people realise. For almost as long as there has been moving pictures, there has been colour. Early adopters such as George Melies used the most basic approach; features were shot using black and white film and the film frames were then coloured in by hand. Melies employed a team of women to colour his films, and many studios did the same. The colours used could, of course, not be said to present an accurate vision of reality. The colour applied to any one area of the frame could not be consistent from one to the next, leaving varying intensities and depths which have a fascinating life of their own.
Technicolor were among the first companies trying to develop colour as a feature of the film itself rather than a hand-painted process. Their first attempt used a two-colour system; the light beam was split by a prism inside the camera itself to record two images simultaneously side by side onto the film - one through a red filter, the other through a green filter. Playback required a special projector with a double aperture, one red and one green, and film had to be run through at twice the normal speed. The result was a passable attempt at colour recreation, but the results were still far from accurate. Red and green shades still saturated the picture, and while it was undeniably colour, it was far from the right colour.
The problem was that two colours is not enough. Colour theory tells us that from three colours (red, green and blue) you can create all other colours. Technicolor now worked on a three-colour film camera, developing one by around 1929. For the technically-minded, I will add an explanation of how this worked :
"The new camera simultaneously exposed three strips of black-and-white film. The light passing through the camera lens was divided into two beams by a prism block beam splitter. One beam passed through a green filter, which blocked red and blue light, and formed an image on a strip of panchromatic film. The other beam passed through a magenta filter, which blocked green light, and formed an image on a bipack consisting of two strips of film running through the camera with their emulsion sides pressed together. The front film was sensitive only to blue light and recorded only the blue end of the spectrum. Its emulsion had a superficial coating of orange-red dye that prevented blue light from reaching the panchromatic film behind it, which therefore recorded only the red end. The three negatives that resulted were used to produce three printing matrices, which in turn were used to print superimposed cyan, magenta and yellow dye images on a single strip of film, creating a full-color projection print."
Got all that? Good, you're doing better than me. And better than Technicolor, whose new expensive colour process coincided with the arrival of America's Great Depression. In the early 1930s, Technicolor convinced Walt Disney of the merits of their new colour system (known as Process 4), and he signed an exclusive contract for use of the technology from 1932 to 1935. From 1936 onwards, the technology was open to all, but the process was still far from ideal for film producers. It required extremely bright studio lighting to produce acceptable footage. Set temperatures were often recorded close to 40C, with actors and actresses suffering dehydration and claims of permanent eye damage. Worse still for the studios, Technicolor controlled every aspect of production. You could not buy a Process 4 camera, only hire it from Technicolor, for which you also had to hire Technicolor staff to operate it. They would shoot onto Technicolor film, which would then be developed by Technicolor. The monopoly created led to an anti-trust suit being filed, and Technicolor were ordered to release their technology to other companies. By the 1950s, Eastman-Kodak had produced Eastmancolor, a process that allowed full colour filming on a standard camera that studios could develop themselves. The last film to use Technicolor's three-strip process was filmed in 1954. Eastmancolor was cheaper, and produced better results under natural lighting, allowing cheap, simple location filming. The technology quickly spread around the world, and in 1953 Japan exported its first colour film; 'Gate Of Hell'.
The opening action scenes of 'Gate Of Hell' are something of a misdirection, they exist only to set up the main plot. A rebellion has taken place against the Emperor while he is away. His father and sister who have remained behind must be smuggled to safety, and a plan is hatched to send a false decoy. A woman called Kesa comes forward to volunteer, and Morito is assigned to protect the decoy. The rebels quickly bite on this fake and a battle ensues, during which Morito fights bravely and leads the decoy wagon to the safety of his own home. He finds Kesa to be very beautiful and saves her life once more. Kesa escapes.
Japanese stories can often be intimidating to foreigners because of their incredible density. During the opening scenes we are bombarded with historical background, then find out that Morito's brother has joined the rebellion. Morito is horrified at this betrayal of honour and says he will fight his brother to the death. At this point you would be forgiven for thinking we are seeing the setting up of the main story; brother against brother, but this turns out to be almost incidental detail. Morito travels to the Emperor to inform him what has happened, and that his sister and father have ended up captured by the rebels. The Emperor arms his troops, comes back and defeats the rebellion. We next meet Morito under the Gate Of Hell by a burial ground, recently the scene of another piece of incidental detail; a priest had his head severed and hung from it. We now receive further incidental detail that this was some sort of reprisal for him having done the same to hundreds in the past. Again, this has no bearing on anything to come. We then find that Morito's brother has been killed. So what the hell is this film going to be about? Our arrival at the titular arch gives a clue. Here Morito meets Kesa again, who introduces him to her aunt. It is from the aunt that Morito finally learns Kesa's name. He invites them to his house, but they cannot go, Kesa is required back at court. From here, the action fades out and we settle into an evocatively-coloured Greek tragedy.
Here Eastmancolor is in its glory. The fantastically coloured armours and silks give new life to the samurai film, more commonly brought to mind by Kurosawa's black and white classics. The slowing of the story's pace allows us more time for the scenes to soak into us - the green coloured screens that hang, the traditional Japanese architecture of houses that are almost entirely open, merging exterior and interior together. The robes, the haunting music, the hypnotic flow of the Japanese language. Even the movements of the characters have a languid flow to them; the way people merge from standing to a cross-legged sit in a single movement. The highly ritualised flow of Japanese life, demonstrated perfectly by the Emperor at the Bugaku dance:
Though you have news of a dire emergency, you do not speak to the Emperor directly. You must speak to his son behind him, and because the Bugaku is going on, you must do this behind a fan. From here the son has the authority to call his father's attention, but even here the emergency news cannot be openly broadcast, the Emperor must completely move from his position in order to be spoken to. If this is your first pre-modern Japanese film, you are probably a little bewildered. Don't be. Sit back, take another sip, let the colours flow into the absinthe mind.
The tragedy plot is soon revealed. The Emperor is rewarding his samurai for their assistance in quelling the rebellion. Despite the shame brought on him by his brother, Morito is told that the Emperor will grant any request. He requests the hand of Kesa in marriage, to laughter from his fellow samurai. The Emperor admonishes them for their lack of honour, saying it is brave for Morito to display his feelings. But there is a problem; Kesa is already married, to Wataru. Now Morito questions the honour of the Emperor for failing to fulfil his request. The Emperor says he cannot very well give him another man's wife. Morito stews in silent fury - it is apparent he is becoming unbalanced.
We know nothing of Wataru at this point, and we have seen Morito only as a brave and honourable warrior. In a switch to the Wataru home we learn that Kesa is married to a high ranking noble, her friends and servants frantically telling her she is too high ranking to be doing cleaning or tidying. When we meet Wataru, he is drinking with friends ahead of the following day's horse race. The friends remind him of his glory in winning it last year, but he deflects all glory, reminding them that the event is dedicated to the gods.
The Emperor (whether through concession to honour or for amusement isn't made clear) now sets up a meeting between Kesa and Morito, telling Morito he has one chance but the decision will be made by Kesa. He enters to her playing the koto with great skill, and soon makes a mess of things. She doesn't want to listen to him, and refuses to stop playing. Displaying the rage we saw earlier, he smashes the instrument. Kesa is summoned away, her decision is obvious.
Morito challenges Wataru more and more directly as he is consumed by his emotions, and stirs up a Shakespearean end which I will not spoil for anyone here. It's also a particularly Japanese ending, with each character being admonished for failures in their honour. The central message of the film is perhaps that voiced by someone at the temple banquet from which Morito has to be expelled after a violent outburst; "The wise man never courts danger", though it could equally be that in an impossible situation, everyone loses. The defeatist air that runs throughout the film is a common one in post-war Japanese cinema, with people still working through their sense of shame and failure while under American occupation.