Bodacious Space Pirates: "The Final Battle is at Midnight"

The Odette II continues on its voyage, although it becomes clear that the ship is being tailed by another vessel. Marika discovers that the entire class knows she's under consideration to become a pirate captain, and together they agree to fight the enemy vessel once their teachers are asleep.

The battle might be at midnight, but it sadly doesn't begin in this episode. It's actually a little crazy once you think about it. An anime like Blue Submarine No 6 was done and dusted after four episodes. This anime has barely started in the same time. We've now spent three episodes on a school space yacht cruise, and we're clearly going to be spending a fourth one there as well. It's kind of frustrating.

Silent Japan IV: Apart from You (1933)

For my second Japanese silent film, I figured I would stick with Mikio Naruse and watch one of his more dramatic works. Apart from You was released by Shokiku Films in 1933, and is a full-length feature with a much more serious tone than the light playfulness of Flunky, Work Hard.

Kikue is a middle-aged woman who works as a geisha to support her teenage son Yoshio. Yoshio in turn resents his mother for what he sees as a disgraceful profession, and he rebels by getting drunk, dismissing her affection and joining a local street gang. Terugiko is a young geisha who works with Kikue, and forms a tentative friendship with Yoshio while harbouring a deep resentment against her parents for forcing her into her profession. Apart from You follows these three character relationships in a solid and mature melodrama. It's not perfect, but it's outstanding how watchable it is after 80 years.

Harvest (2013)

I've written many times in my Pull List column about the extraordinary quality of Image's comic books in recent years. In many ways they're the perfect publisher: they do a lot of the production legwork for creative teams who remain in total control of their own product. While I do still love my corporate-owned superhero titles, in terms of storytelling quality Image very often can't be beaten.

Harvest is a case in point. It's a five-issue crime miniseries that follows a disgraced, drug-addicted surgeon as he enters the shadowy world of human organ trafficking before starting an attempt to rise out on the other side and make things right. It's a mean, gritty work of pulp fiction featuring a tight script by A.J. Lieberman and stark, character-filled artwork by Colin Lorimer.

Silent Japan III: Flunky, Work Hard (1931)

While there's a lot more to explore in terms of the history and cultural context of Japanese silent films, I figured it would be worth diving in and actually watching one. For my first viewing experience I selected Flunky, Work Hard (1931), the earliest existing film by director Mikio Naruse (or Naruse Mikio, to use the Japanese format). This short feature (it's only 28 minutes long) follows a day in the life of harried insurance salesman Okabe and his tearaway bully of a son.

This is a surprisingly modern and genuinely funny little comedy. The performances are generally naturalistic, and the humour much more sophisticated than the broad slapstick you'd normally find in a silent comedy. It also has much more developed camerawork, including smooth tracking shots, interesting shot compositions and a few experimental moments. There is a moment late in the film where Okabe discovers his unruly son has been hit by a train. His moment of sudden panic and grief at the news is represented with a sudden 20-second montage of shapes, faces and kaleidoscopic effects. The montage runs at about one shot per second, which is a much faster editing speed than you'd expect from a film made at the start of the 1930s.

Silent Japan II: The Lack of Realism

The Water Magician (1931, d. Kenji Mizoguchi)

Before diving into some Japanese silent films, I think it’s important to understand the enormous differences between Japanese and French and American culture at the turn of the 20th century. Cinema as we know it is a French invention, developed by the Lumiere brothers and toured around the world by their father from 1895 at sideshows and expositions. While there were motion pictures prior to that year – going all the way back to the invention of the pinhole camera in the early 11th century – it was the Lumieres who developed a system of taking a sequence of photographs in rapid succession and then projecting those photographs in similarly rapid succession for an audience.

Motion pictures were, in essence, a progression of photography. That technology was also developed in France, with Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre’s invention of the daguerreotype in 1822. Over the course of the 19th century, the technology and materials used to create the photograph were developed and refined, and ultimately led to a popular and accurate method of reproducing images of family, significant events and the world at large. Photography was a great saviour for fine art, since up to the point of its invention there had been a general and centuries-long push within Europe towards a realistic mode of painting. Once the photograph perfected the realist reproduction artists was free to explore non-realist forms of art. Put all of these successive inventions into order, and you can see a slow, inevitable movement from the Middle Ages through to the late 19th century away from abstract expression to realistic reproduction.

Now consider Japan.

Silent Japan I: The One Per-Cent

Tokyo Chorus (1931, d. Yasujiro Ozu)

I have decided to watch some Japanese silent films. Exploring the earliest motion pictures of any country is relatively difficult. They were printed using nitrate-based film stock, which was not only highly perishable but also highly flammable – so much so that an old nitrate film sealed in a canister for long enough can, at sufficient temperatures, spontaneously and explosively combust. Being a projectionist used to be a considerably more dangerous job than it is today.

The generally received wisdom is that approximately 75 per cent of all silent films produced in the early decades of cinema have been lost forever. There are two primary reasons for this. The first is simply the perishable nature of nitrate film and the age of the motion pictures in question. The second is lack of care, plain and simple, combined with a general failure to appreciate the value of those early films.

Who50: "Dalek"

Who50 counts down to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who by reviewing my favourite episodes and serials over the history of the programme, counting down from #50 to #1. Today, #18: "Dalek", a 2005 episode written by Robert Shearman and directed by Joe Ahearne.

The Doctor and Rose arrive in the private museum of the eccentric American millionaire Henry van Statten, filled with alien relics and artifacts. Locked inside a room at the centre of van Statten's archive is an alien; terrified and alone, in excruciating pain. Rose wants to help it, because that's what the Doctor would do. Isn't it?

"Dalek" is the episode that took the 2005 relaunch of Doctor Who and cemented it as a worthy replacement to the original series. It's the best episode of Christopher Eccleston's brief time as the Doctor, and one of the best episodes of the entire 50-year franchise. It achieves this for a couple of reasons, and it's worth going through them one by one.

Popular Posts: June 2013

June 2013 was the most successful month in the history of this blog, thanks in no small part to the enormous number of people who read the post on sexual harassment at science fiction conventions. After two days it is already the sixth most popular article ever on this website. Thank you for your support.

1. Sexual harassment at science fiction conventions (link)
2. My picks for the next Doctor Who (link)
3. Babylon 5: "Midnight on the Firing Line" (link)
4. Judging the New 52: Supergirl (link)
5. The best Christmas TV episodes (link)
6. Under the Dome: "Pilot" (link)
7. Babylon 5: "Deathwalker" (link)
8. Who50: The Bottom 20, #1-3 (link)
9. Who50: The Bottom 20, #4-6 (link)
10. Who50: "Remembrance of the Daleks" (link)