Clint Eastwoods's Letters from Iwo Jima As a Transnational Film
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TRANSMISSIONS: THE JOURNAL OF FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES 2016, VOL.1, NO. 2, PP. 51-67. Łukasz A. Plesnar Jagiellonian University Clint Eastwoods’s Letters from Iwo Jima as a transnational film Abstract: We may consider Letters from Iwo Jima as a typical transnational film. Its concept is based on Eastwood’s discovery of a General Kuribayashi's book of letters and drawings, Picture Letters from Commander in Chief, collected and translated into English by Tsuyuko Yoshida (the original title: Gyokusa soshikikan no etegami). The script for Letters was written by a Japanese-American writer, Iris Yamashita, and Paul Haggis, Eastwood’s previous scripter. Despite having been produced by American companies (DreamWorks Pictures, Warner Bros Company, Malpaso Productions, and Ambling Entertainment), almost entire movie is in Japan. The film functions as the second panel of the war diptych, being a twin to Flags of Our Fathers. Both movies depict the battle of Iwo Jima, but from the different perspectives: Flags from the American point of view, and the Letters from the Japanese one. Shooting his diptych, Eastwood decided to “show the two sides of a battle”, presenting the consequences of war on both sides. It was a feat that had never been attempted by any other filmmaker (except perhaps Lewis Milestone in All Quiet on the Western Front). Eastwood refutes the decades when the Americans demonied the Japanese, which began at the start of the war on Pacific. The director portraits the Japanese soldiers as “young and powerless and driven to madness or suicide” human beings, who are to be pitied, not hated. He tries to escape from stereotypical images of the Japanese society, Japanese soldiers, and Japanese culture, often presented in the American cinema. Main roles are cast with the Japanese while in the earlier Hollywood movies Japanese characters were generally performed by Chinese-Americans or Asian-Americans). This makes the film more authentic. Letters was released in Japan and was commercially successful, receiving warm reception from critics and audiences. An English-dubbed version came out sixteen monts after its Japanese premiere. Key words: transnational film, war movies, combat movies, representation, stereotypes, suicide, Japan, Clint Eastwood 51 ŁUKASZ PLESNAR Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, two movies produced by Clint Eastwood in 2006, are atypical and unusual works. “It was the first time a director made two films at the same time about the same event, which here is the battle over Iwo Jima in 1945”.1 According to historians, this was one of the deadliest fights in the Pacific Campaign. Over the course of 36 days in February and March, the invasion forces of 110,000 Marines fought 22,000 entrenched Japanese infantrymen. Only 1,083 Japanese survived, while 6,821 Americans were killed and almost 20,000 wounded. The Imperial Army troops were commanded by General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, “a unique man, a man of great imagination, creativity and resourcefulness” 2 , a soldier who went far beyond the traditional model of a Japanese officer, and who is one of the main characters of Letters from Iwo Jima. Originally, Eastwood planned to make one film devoted to the battle of Iwo Jima: an adaptation of James Bradley’s book about six Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi. However, while the director was working on Flags of Our Fathers, he discovered General Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s book of letters and drawings, Picture Letters from Commander in Chief, which had been published posthumously in Japanese in 1992 and then translated into English by Tsuyuko Yoshida.3 It contained the General’s letters to his wife and children, including those written on Iwo Jima. “In the letters Eastwood found a Japanese voice”, Rikke Schubart writes. “He first considered adding a Japanese point of view to Flags, but then decided on making a second film instead. A film entirely dedicated to the Japanese point of view. And so, while doing post-production on Flags, Eastwood shot Letters from Iwo Jima in 32 days”.4 Both Flags and Letters are independent movies, but at the same time, as Leo Braudy notes, “both are tremendously enriched by their juxtaposition and should be seen as a diptych”.5 Apart from many similarities, we can also notice numerous differences between Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Firstly, Flags was shot in English with American actors, while Letters, despite having been produced by American companies (DreamWorks Pictures, Warner Bros Company, Malpaso Productions, and Ambling Entertainment), was kept in Japanese and engaged Japanese actors. Secondly, Flags was a 75 million dollar blockbuster movie, while Letters cost only 15 million dollars. Thirdly, Flags was originally aimed at an 1 Rikke Schubart and Anne Gjelsvik, “Introduction: Know Your Enemy, Know Yourself” [in:] Rikke Schubart & Anne Gjelsvik (eds.), Eastwood’s Iwo Jima. Critical Engagements with ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ and ‘Letter from Iwo Jima’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 1. 2 Eastwood quoted from the press material for the film Letters from Iwo Jima, “Letters from Iwo Jima Production Information”, 4. 3 Another book that influenced and inspired Eastwood was Kumiko Kakekashi’s Letters from Iwo Jima (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007), originally published as Chipuzo Kanashiki (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 2005). 4 Rikke Schubart, “Eastwood and the Enemy” [in:] Rikke Schubart & Anne Gjelsvik (eds.), Eastwood’s Iwo Jima. Critical Engagements with ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ and ‘Letter from Iwo Jima’, p. 174. 5 Leo Braudy, “Flags of Our Fathers / Letters of Iwo Jima”, Film Quarterly; Summer 2007; 60, 4; p. 17. 52 CLINT EASTWOODS’S LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA AS A TRANSNATIONAL FILM international audience, while Letters was directed above all at Japanese moviegoers. It is significant that an English-dubbed version of the film came out sixteen months after its Japanese premiere. The participation of Japanese actors speaking subtitled dialogue led to certain confusions. American spectators regarded the movie as a Japanese production. On the other hand, Letters won the Japanese Academy Award for the best foreign language film, which was an obvious paradox. Differences between both Eastwood’s movies are not limited to the aspect of production, but go much further, referring also to the content. We could say, quoting the statement of Aaron Gerow, that Flags is “about how to remember the war, giving a new view on an incident everyone knows”, while Letters is “about listening to those who fought it, trying to create a memory tableau of something most people, including the Japanese, know little about”. Flags is also an attempt to deconstruct the Hollywood genre of war and combat films, while Letters “appears more simply as an American effort to understand the complex human beings on the other side, to tell the world that they were brave too”.6 Apart from the circumstances of the production process, we can list three reasons why Letters from Iwo Jima should be recognized as a transnational film: 1) adoption by the director of a Japanese point of view; 2) portrayal of Japanese soldiers—against the tradition of American war films—as simple, normal people, not as barbarians or even bloodthirsty wild beasts; 3) setting up the audience’s identification with some of the young soldiers by focusing on their individual stories and their unfolding relations.7 We may say that the way Eastwood builds the plot of Letters, describes its characters, and defines their motives leads him to the denial of a number of stereotypes that exist in American culture. Although these stereotypes primary refer to images of an enemy, they also relate indirectly to images of every „other”, whether racial or national. Nonetheless, the director is famous for the blunt attitude towards such stereotypes that he has demonstrated a number of times. He fought against the stereotype of a Native American as a tomahawk-wielding savage thirsty for the white man’s blood and living in the wilderness or on reservations (men) and a beautiful maiden (women) in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976). He questioned various stereotypes of Afro Americans (as thugs, domestic workers, or a best friend of a white man) in Bird (1988) and that of an African as a naked black guy brandishing spears and fighting with their neighbours in White Hunter, Black Heart (1990). Finally, he waged a war with the stereotypes of Hispanic American women as maids, sexpots, or immigrants in Blood Work (2002) as well as with the stereotypes of Asian Americans as kung fu fighters or a technical experts (men) and prostitutes (women) in Gran Torino (2008). 6 Aaron Gerow, “From ‘Flags of Our Fathers’ to ‘Letters from Iwo Jima’: Clint Eastwood’s Balancing of Japanese and American Perspective”, online: http://apjjf.org/-Aaron- Gerow/2290/article.html (accesed 26 July, 2016). 7 See Sara Anson Vaux, The Ethical Vision of Clint Eastwood (Grand Rapids, Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012), p. 157. 53 ŁUKASZ PLESNAR The majority of stereotypes are of national nature in two senses of the word. Firstly, they frequently come into existence and are formed within a group we call a nation. Secondly, they often refer to nations. Obviously, stereotypes differ according to both their subjects and objects (for instance, Poles have quite different stereotypes of Russians than do Serbians 8, just as Jews see Palestinians completely unlike Egyptians or Saudi Arabians). I want to stress that stereotypes might sometimes be modified over the course of time, but usually they are relatively stable. Cinema is a domain where stereotypes occur very often. We may even say that the history of film is the history of disseminating stereotypes. Rejection of national and racial stereotypes is not so easy when you consider viewers’ expectations and their cultural training as well as a filmmaker himself being trapped in the stereotype network of his own culture.