QUESTION: To study cinema, you entered the Centro Sperimentale Cinematografico. Did it bring anything to your work as a filmmaker?
MASUMURA YASUZO: I had the chance to see a lot of films, starting with the first Lumiéres, which gave me a certain taste for cinema, and the desire to do it too. But, back in Japan, I found myself in a rather unfavorable situation. At the time, cinema was not yet considered a profession. It was a "fool's job". Very few chose to become filmmakers. It was my chance!

QUESTION: What generation do you think you belong to?
MASUMURA: I believe I belong the generation of the "end of the war ", because I was mobilized for only the last three or four months of the war.

QUESTION: Do you know other artists of your generation?
MASUMURA: The writer Endo Shusaku, for example. Mishima Yukio is the same as age as me, we were in the same faculty at the University of Tokyo. But I don't feel like I belong to the same generation as him. I understand very well why he was trying to defend the Emperor or the right... but still, I mean we had nothing in common at the start. We found each other suddenly in the middle of the war. This violence, this incredible pressure looked to us like human nature. And we really didn't know how to do it, how to save humanity... we couldn't start from democracy, nor from communism or imperialism. We really had nothing to start with. So I had no confidence in my country, I could only believe in myself, and still I was skeptical, imprecise...

QUESTION: Is there a conflict in between your nationality and the European civilization that you have known during your studies in Italy?
MASUMURA: Want it or not, Europe is there. The problem is to decide if we adhere to it or if we resist it... from the point of view of the history of human evolution, is it better to go through the "European state" or not? Me, I think we have to take this path at all costs, but perhaps most Japanese believe that it's not worth it, because the Japanese temperament doesn't accept the rational. I believe in the rational, in a complex level, but they don't agree with me. There is a group of people, like Imamura, who find in the irrational the strength and a way of living; and there is another group of people like Oshima, who want to believe in a violently progressive rationality. I do not believe in either.
So I come back to this spirit of the "end of the war" generation: who can understand? Even my colleagues don't understand me. But, after all, I end up thinking that I don't care. Therefore, why am I expressing myself? This is a question that bothers me. If somewhere, somebody understood a little what I want to show, after all, that would be enough for me... I may be a little twisted...
In European thought, there is, I believe, two things: rationalism and individualism. Neither suit the Japanese temperament. The Japanese are perhaps more fanciful, they really laugh at the idea of "individual" or "reason". They believe that this cannot give rise to drama or aesthetic emotion. Personally, I am convinced that it is absolutely essential to go beyond this aspect of European thought, even if we fail later. Either way, Japanese people essentially do not believe in the individual. When a Japanese person portrays a Japanese, he generally believes that it is by painting him a Japanese devoid of individuality that it will be the most accurate. It's perhaps the fairest or at least the easiest. But there are people, like me, who think differently. Mizoguchi did not believe in individualism at all among the Japanese, and stood outside the notion of rationality. Even Ichikawa Kon, who apparently does intellectual films that appeal to reason, is, in reality, neither intellectual nor rational. His work is only supported by a certain aesthetic sensation. And can we be satisfied with that?

QUESTION: But couldn't we also say of your heroines that they are constantly trying to overcome their essentially Japanese weakness, as they try to assert themselves?
MASUMURA: We often talk about the assertion of the self in the woman. That's very beautiful, but in my opinion, in the whole world, there are no more cheeky women that the Japanese. There is no country in which women are capable of being as presumptuous and without complexes.
The self of the Japanese woman has been affirmed for a long time. It is not a modern problem. The problem is to know how to express this, to know if we should express ourselves in a rather Asian way, or on the contrary, on a radical way, bypassing the stage of "European" modernism. Imamura is looking for purely Japanese spiritual and physical roots, like the etnographer Yanagida Kunio. As for Oshima, he seems to have skipped this "Japanese" stage to try a radical logic and go beyond the problem of individualism or rationalism. I can't, like Imamura, to go back; or, like Oshima, to deny the current stage. This is a turning point that everyone avoids, but me, I want to try to take it...
For example, living in the middle of Tokyo, I will never believe that we can find a certain harmony in our society. No.  There is no harmony, nor familiar morality. That only existed at the end of the Edo era, in a perfectly codified petit-bourgoise society. In Japan nowadays, this harmony and rhythm or life don't exist anymore.  I can't understand the work of Ozu as it is based on the minds and feelings of the people of the late Edo era and the Meiji era. Likewise, Mizoguchi's films are portraits of Japanese women of the same era.

QUESTION: In that case, what Japanese woman are you portraying, in your films?
MASUMURA: I am not portraying women specifically. But ultimately, it is the woman who is the most human, right? Men only live for women, dragging their burden like a horse drags his cart, all for eventually dying of a heart attack. Men are anti-human, while women act arbitrarily everywhere, say anything, and therefore are extremely human. That means that taking women as objects we can most easily express humanity. Men are beings completely deprived from freedom. It's probably because they don't give birth. Men have to think of Honor, of Truth. But ultimately, men are animals that only lives for women. This is why it is extremely uninteresting to paint the portrait of men. He becomes a "hero" if he is not a failure. The most virile men are not interesting. You only need to read Tanizaki: all his heroes are weak, cowardly, ugly... A great virile man is not human, and that's because he lives for others, for society. Men are so chained by the rules of society that one cannot express the human through them. Therefore, to express the human, there is only the woman. It is not to express the woman that I choose the woman... I am not a specialist in women like Mizoguchi.

QUESTION: What is eroticism for you?
MASUMURA: It is the most human. When a human undresses "in a human way", it becomes inevitably erotic. This eroticism can refer either to Freud, or to Yanagi, or be more complex. But in my opinion, the erotic is first of all very human, because the man is partly an animal. So for me, eroticism, even if it is very "daring", is part of a healthy spirit. The eroticism I imagine is the inherent quality of the female creature. Unlike the man, who is only a shadow, the woman is a being that really exists, an extremely free being - that's eroticism as I see it.

QUESTION: Can cinema be an effective mean for expressing eroticism?
MASUMURA: I don't think so. I think cinema is only secondary as an artistic medium. But I hope that cinema offers other possibilities. This is why I still keep making movies. But anyway, from a purely artistic point of view, cinema is not perfect. Cinema will never reach the artistic purity that others arts have; arts like painting, sculpture or music.

QUESTION: Your films are becoming more and more "aesthetic", excessive, grotesque up to a certain point...
MASUMURA: Yes, that's because you can't trust the image. It is often said that a film like Red Angel is full of grotesque images, but I never search for the grotesque. However, I try to play as little as possible with the technique, which undoubtedly ends up giving an impression of "aesthetic-grotesque". I don't follow the cult of the image. I think that a film must have a construction, a frame, an evolution; in short, its own structure. I don't care about beauty, aesthetics... I will never understand that.

QUESTION: The amount of blood in your films increases more and more...
MASUMURA: It's because blood has a very intimate connection with sex. I believe there is a mystical connection between blood and the female sex. Of course, blood when dealing with the female sex is a very dangerous trap: one would get lost in a bizarre universe, in a domain where it's forbidden to think. I think you should never refrain from thinking... aestheticism is almost the forbidding of thought... Therefore I had a lot of trouble shooting Manji, from Tanizaki; while in Love for an Idiot (based on Naomi by Tanizaki), there is a certain opposition between "Japanese" and "European" (and, surprisingly, in Tanizaki who is European is the woman: the man represents something very Japanese that succumbs to the woman), in Manji, this schema collapsed, one enters a more Asian climate. This is where the blood flows magically.

QUESTION: What do you think of Wakao Ayako, who is the protagonist of most of your films?
MASUMURA: She is a very selfish and calculating woman. At one point, she was full of vitality; I believe I knew how to use her selfishness and her vitality. She is not a pure woman, and she knows it. This vile side of women, she knew how to exploit it in a positive way, but not anymore. It's probably because she started to put on airs of a "star", and I am sad that she has rejected her true nature. Another thing: thirty is the critical age for a Japanese woman. Wakao Ayako, she has also lost her vitality, that's normal. But she's like a car that has lost her engine but it's still moving. Once this spontaneous force is lost, she is finished, because it has no engine and she has no other way to restart. Midori Mako, on the other hand, is a woman who never stops restarting! It's a pretty surprising woman, but not authentic yet.
I also find Kishida Kyoko very interesting, she seems to have a lot of possibilities. There are only one or two films in which she is the protagonist, and I cannot judge well, but I think that she can very well be a protagonist. I like another actress as well, Mizutani Yoshie, but we don't see her in movies anymore...
I repeat, women cannot express the human if they lack vitality; if they are content to be the shadow of men. There are two kinds of actresses: those who understand by the words, and those who don't understand at all by the words. Wakao Ayako belongs to the latter genre and even if she understands the words, it doesn't work. I have the impression that she is currently in the greatest difficulties. Maybe she'll get better at forty.

QUESTION: Your films are all based on [pre-existing] stories. Do you believe that a story is essential to cinema?
MASUMURA: Some people believe more in the image, others believe in the story. I believe in the story. Because the image is not absolute, you cannot express everything with the image. It's impossible. The picture is too ambiguous. I don’t think you can tell a story perfectly with the image alone.
The image itself is never absolute. It doesn't say anything by herself.

QUESTION: How do you conceive the cinematographic adaptation of a novel?
MASUMURA: I think it’s completely impossible. The literary qualities are too different from those of cinema. There is a universe that exists only through words and that cannot be expressed through images. It's because the image is too superficial that we resort to editing.
Using editing, meaning making a construction with shots, we could even transform a sad face into a cheerful face. The image is so insufficient, so ambiguous. I don't believe in the image, but in the photo. An image makes me think in a lot of things. The virtue of the image indeed consists in making our imagination work without limit. The downside is that the image itself is not able to say anything. Being able to suggest without limits is the equivalent of being able to say nothing: the image cannot define anything or anyone.

QUESTION: You don't believe in the efficiency of a technique like the close-up, for example?
MASUMURA: I never use the close-up. I hate it. Why focus on the face of an actor or actress? I would agree to make a close-up if it's the authentic face of a peasant, for example. But the face of an actor or actress is not something to show in close-up! Acting has no interest, because it's ultimately a lie and it will only achieve a certain "resemblance". This can exert a certain influence, a certain pressure on the spectators and help to make others understand what we mean. But the close-up, everyone knows it's wrong. I would be ashamed to use it. In fact, you can't find a single close-up in my movies. Mizoguchi never used the close-up, either. He did not believe in the truth of the close-up. He wanted to express an idea or a feeling by a general movement, which was very close to the essential technique of Kabuki or Bunraku. The mise-en-scene of Mizoguchi was essentially expressionist. The characters move, suffer, endlessly torture themselves, and suddenly, stop forever. The camera moves all the time -it's a permanent tracking shot- and then suddenly stops, no longer moving. This is the expressionism of Mizoguchi. It was not through acting that Mizoguchi told a story. Ichikawa, on the other hand, uses a lot of close-ups, but only to create a shock. He does not believe in the actors or the image. Most Japanese filmmakers are essentially realistic, therefore more or less expressionist. The only exception is Ozu. It’s, so to speak, the rhythm of succession of shots, in waves, that drives Ozu’s films. It is through rhythm that Ozu tells a story. A shot means nothing to him. Mizoguchi and Imamura build a drama in overall shots, using a deep expressionism; while Oshima fakes and mystifies by means of radical images and terrifying dialogues. In conclusion, I mean that cinema is not an all-powerful mean of expression, but on the contrary, ineffective and powerless.

QUESTION: Don't you believe anymore in the expressive possibilities of color?
MASUMURA: Some say that color has the same power as sound; but I don't believe it. Even if the image is completely red, even if all the sets and costumers are carefully colored, this doesn't express nothing extra. At some point, we tried to kill the color on purpose to get another effect, a more delicate shade. But I think it's a useless effort. You have to know how to fully use all colors. To use "daring" colors, you have to build a "daring" situation or a "daring" stage set; like in, for example, a musical. We cannot go beyond a certain realism in color. The development of color depends, I believe, on the evolution of cinema itself. The more we create abnormal, extraordinary characters, the more the the mise-en-scene will change and the more the use of colors will evolve.

QUESTION: Does this possibility of the evolution of cinema seems to go in the same direction as Japanese social reality?
MASUMURA: I do not know. But let's assume that Japanese society remains stable, despite student movements, etc; even then people will ask for something different from the movies. Cinema will evolve, it will change a lot. Until now, the public has been content to see it as a reflection of everyday reality. But in the future, for the cinema to be able to be commercially exploited, we will have to find really crazy, really extraordinary subjects. It may be the end of cinema, but without a doubt, it will be also its most fruitful moment. Television has already reached a rather extraordinary stage. It is normal that the public does not bother to go to see the same things they can find on television. When you think about the future of Japanese cinema, it now seems like you have to do something extravagant. "Underground" cinema may be a warning sign, but it is not an authentic sign. Truly extraordinary films must be born, shocking films like The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari which brought German expressionism after the First World War. Why do people go less and less to the cinema? This is because the cinema no longer gives real "shows". The big American show is already old-fashioned. We must now find, or rather return, to the true "show" in the literal sense. In Japanese cinema today, there is nothing left. At one point, having an artificial set was more important than a natural set. Nowadays, it's the opposite! Reality is more luxurious than a set! No company has enough money to make an extraordinary, supernatural set, while our real society has become five times richer than before. Today’s cinema can no longer give the public a “show”. To get out of its difficulties, cinema obviously has a way: shooting small intimate films that bring us a little joy. But it's a cinema to see in a small room, with friends. This kind of film will surely not attract the general public. From now on, I am convinced, there will be a great show which will be the mixture of all advertising films. In any case, the advertising cinema is now the biggest spectacle. I imagine that I could do something by making a mixture of advertising cinema and fiction cinema. Ads in TV are the only revolution in cinema; we can have fun making plans of even three images. Maybe something new will come out of it.

QUESTION: Have you ever thought of leaving Daiei to become independent? Don't you feel like a prisoner, deprived of freedom?
MASUMURA: Assuming that I would leave the company to become independent, I'm sure it would be exactly the same. I have the impression that I will never be satisfied, here or elsewhere. In fact, it’s not a big deal. I never thought of dominating or establishing my own world. I do not care. I always let myself be carried away by the situation and, within the limits that it imposes on me, I search the way to do whatever I want. It may be a logic a little bit bizarre. Anyway, I don't have very healthy ideas.

QUESTION: Therefore you don't want to assert yourself ...
MASUMURA: I don't care about asserting myself. I never worried about it. That's an existentialist problem: the reason for being, or how humans should be, etc... a problem that I really don't understand. Life is ambiguity... Nothing to do.

QUESTION: Are there any projects that you have proposed to the company?
MASUMURA: None of my own projects have been accepted by the company, so far. Obviously, among the projects that the company gives me, there are some that are quite good... But for example, my project The Sea and the Poison, based on a novel by Endo will never happen, it will never be accepted even by other producers.

QUESTION: So what is your motivation, your conscience as a filmmaker? Will you always be content to shoot films that the company will impose on you?
MASUMURA: It’s not like that. This is a question of capacity, of energy. I accept almost all the projects imposed by the company, but it's not that I shoot films without will.

QUESTION: But what is cinematic creation for you?
MASUMURA: It's putting all the energy you have into each work - that's all I can say. I think it is depending on the energy that we put in it, if the film will be good or will be successful with the public. I believe this. If the energy given to a film is weak, the film too will be weak and, it won't work commercially. I cannot believe in the psychoanalytic universe of Imamura, nor in the radicalism of Oshima. In fact, I don't have a method. My films are nothing methodically. But of course, I have some ideas of what man is, what cinema is. You wouldn't understand.

Originally published in Cahiers du cinéma 224. Translation my own. The original interview was done in Tokyo in 1969, by Aoi Ichiro, Shirai Yoshio and Yamada Koichi. The translation from Japanese to French was done by Yamada Koichi and Jane Cobbi.

I shall bring you with me on a trip across the history of the Jekyll & Hyde myth. And I can't think a better place to start this tour than in a funeral.

Mount Vaea, Samoa. December of 1894. You are in a beautiful, quiet spot in the summit of the mount, overlooking the sea. A group of sixty native Samoans arrive, bearing on their shoulders the body of a dead man. The path they have used to get to Vaea's peak is new: the Samoans have spent the night cutting it. And during the night, while the young chopped and slashed trees, the old surrounded the corpse with a watch-guard of honor. That night, one of the elders made a speech:

We were in prison, and he cared for us. We were sick, and he made us well. We were hungry, and he fed us. The day was no longer than his kindness. You are great people and full of love. Yet who among you is so great as Tusitala? What is your love to his love?

Tusitala. That was the name of the dead man. It means "Teller of Tales" in Samoan. Tusitala had died young, at only 44. Nevertheless, he had a longer life than most would have expected: since birth, Tusitala had been sickly and weak, incredibly thin, and being constantly tormented by hemorrhages.
Tusitala was loved by the Samoans, but he was not one of their own. Tusitala was a foreigner. His real name was well-known around the whole world, as the author or Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Tusitala was Robert Louis Stevenson.

Stevenson had made it to Samoa in 1890, 4 years before this scene, after an almost two year trip across the Pacific from San Francisco, on the yacht Casco. In the almost five years he spent in Samoa, Stevenson became the greatest defender of the natives, almost a saint. He publicly protested the behavior of the colonial powers in Samoa, even managing to get some officials recalled.

A legendary writer of boys' stories, the kind side of Victorian colonialism. A protector of the weak. This was Robert Louis Stevenson.

Edinburg, Scotland. January 30th, 1873. You are in the dining room of 17 Heriot Row, the residence of a bourgeois Scottish couple and their only son. The three of them are in the room. At your right, Thomas Stevenson, the pater familias. He is a pious, severe man. He is wealthy, having inherited the business of his father: his family has built most of the lighthouses that illuminate the Scottish coast. Thomas is a strict Calvinist whose faith has been rewarded by God with riches. Unfortunately, God was not so generous with his descendants. His only son, Robert Lewis, is a sickly young man uninterested in continuing the family business. He has very long hair, wears an extravagant velveteen jacket and his hat is so weird that provokes contemptuous laughter from the street urchins of Edinburgh. Unknown to Thomas, his heir has gone much further than wearing weird clothes: he is well-known in the brothels of Edinburgh; he uses the assignation that his father gives him to pay the prostitutes, and he is famous for having a liking on the older ones. His politics are very far from what good old Thomas would have considered acceptable: "a red-hot Socialist" he called himself.

Back in the dining room at 17 Heriot Row, you notice a very uncomfortable silence. There is a good reason: after years of doubt, Robert Lewis has just announced to their parents that he no longer believes in God (“am I to live my whole life as one falsehood?”). This young man has underestimated the effect that this declaration would have on his father. Thomas is barely able to reply, and when he does, he hurts his son deeply: “You have rendered my whole life a failure.”  
Robert Lewis will regret this scene for a long time: "What a pleasant thing it is to have just damned the happiness of (probably) the only two people who care a damn about you in the world", he will write to a friend. This incident will shatter the Stevenson's family life.

Obviously, our present Robert Lewis will become Robert Louis: the creator of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Samoa's Tusitala. Nevertheless, he will never be able to shake off the guilt of this day. Stevenson's work is full of father figures, many of them accusatory: for example, in his final novel, Weir of Hermiston, has a judge condemning to death his own son, the protagonist of the novel.

Stevenson was always a rebel at heart, unable to answer the demands of his stringent, headstrong father; a father that, nevertheless loved him very much, and was loved back. He was probably never a monster, but he very much feared that his father considered him one. Anyway, this was Robert Louis Stevenson, too.

Bournemouth, England. Autumn of 1885. It's 9 years before Tusitala's funeral; 12 after the scene in the dining room of 17 Heriot Row. Robert Louis Stevenson is on the peak of his creativity. He recently married Fanny, an American divorcee ten years his senior (oh, poor Thomas!). Louis lives with her and with Lloyd, her son from her previous marriage. Against all odds, Fanny caused a great impression to Lewis family: he reconciled with them, to the point that old Thomas Stevenson has bought a house for them to live in.
One morning, during breakfast, the author claims to be "working with extraordinary success on a story that had come in a dream". He will write a first draft of 30.000 words in three days; following Fanny's advise, he will burn this draft, and rewrite the whole story again from a different point of view: the dream's story has to be an allegory. This story was Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The plot of Strange Case Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is quite simple. Gabriel John Utterson, a lawyer, discovers by chance that a sinister-looking man, Mr. Hyde, is associated somehow to his friend and client Dr. Jekyll, a very reputable gentleman. Eventually, Hyde kills a person; he mysteriously disappears. For two months, Jekyll returns to his former sociable manners, but he slowly reverts back to refusing visitors. Finally, Utterson and Jekyll's butler hear a stranger's voice coming from Jekyll's laboratory; after forcing the laboratory's door, they find the body of Hyde, who committed suicide, apparently to avoid punishment. Through two letters, the truth is revealed: Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. Jekyll transformed to Hyde and back using a potion, but finally lost control, as subsequent batches of the serum stopped working. Realizing that he would eventually stay transformed as Hyde, he wrote a confession and killed himself.

That was the plot. Then... what's the point of it? It's obvious that the main theme of Jekyll & Hyde is the duality of man; Jekyll himself says so "that man is not truly one, but truly two". But what type of duality do these characters represent? Since its very successful release as a "penny dreadful" in 1886, dozens of readings have flourished. The Scottish Church celebrated it as a parable of the wages of sin; Victorians read it a moral tale on the horrors of the sexual appetite unleashed; elementary Freudianism see it as the battle in between the self (Jekyll) and the id (Hyde); nowadays, the most popular allegorical reading in Britain see it as a reflection on the divided identity of Scots in the United Kingdom. None of those interpretations are wrong. Moreover, all those readings are right in a way: that's something that only great allegories have.

Nevertheless, I do believe that some interpretations fit better the original text than others. Let's get back to the text. The following is taken from Jekyll's final confession:

the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition [...] I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high [...] Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures [...] I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. [...] Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured

This is the personal problem that Jekyll was trying to fix: he was tortured by the fact that he needed to conceal his pleasures. Jekyll (and therefore, Stevenson) never clarifies which pleasures were those that needed concealment, that was left to the imagination. Nevertheless, it's easy to see the connection in between Stevenson's reckless youth and the prude environment in which he was raised up, particularly his father. In this direction, one needs to add that Hyde's mischiefs are particularly targeted to faith and family:

Hence the apelike tricks that he would play me, scrawling in my own hand blasphemies on the pages of my books, burning the letters and destroying the portrait of my father.

On this line, the novella establishes that Jekyll's only faults may have been in the past:

He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. Ay, it must be that; the ghost of some old sin, the cancer of some concealed disgrace: punishment coming, years after memory has forgotten and self-love condoned the fault.

Is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde an attempt by Stevenson to exorcise his bad deeds when he was young? It's a possibility. Nevertheless, now the story had been given to the public, and the public would change its meaning forever.

How Mr. Hyde became Mr. Hyde

We started our trip with a funeral. It's only fair that we shall continue with murders. Five of them.

London, England. August 1888. Two events this month guarantee the immortality of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The first, the London premiere at the Lyceum Theatre of a play based on it in August 4, 1888. Richard Mansfield, a popular English stage actor, famous for his performances in Shakespeare plays, had taken an early interest on Stevenson's tale: the possibility of playing both Jekyll and Hyde fascinated him. He will co-write a stage adaptation that, while not brilliant, will introduce a very important element in the Jekyll mythos: women. There are no females of any importance in the original story; the play introduces a love interest for Dr. Jekyll. This element will later become more important in the long history of adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde. Unfortunately, the rest of the play innovations on the original story are far less successful: comic scenes catering to the taste of the times, and an unnecessarily big dramatis personae, big enough to supply work for a whole theater troupe, dilute the impact of the tale.

The other event of this month is far more memorable than the premiere of a mediocre adaptation to the stage, an event that would become forever intermingled with Jekyll and Hyde. On August 31, 1888 the body of a prostitute, Mary Ann Nichols, was discovered in the East London district of Whitechapel. She was the first of the "canonical five" victims of the legendary Jack the Ripper. Her throat had been severed by two cuts, and the lower part of the abdomen was partly ripped open. Soon, more murders follow, with similar gruesome mutilations. The nature of the wounds suggest that the author had a strong knowledge of surgery. A doctor, meaning a well-off man, venturing into the slums of London for committing crime: the public of London can't stop themselves of connecting the horrid murders to this new, morbid play. Many Victorians saw the connection with the apparently cordial Dr. Jekyll. Richard Mansfield, the author and protagonist of the play is accused of being the murderer: as one of the anonymous accusers claimed: "no man could disguise himself so well"! Fortunately, Mansfield was never arrested.

One of the many theories around Jack the Ripper is that the Dr. Jekyll and Mr., Hyde could have triggered his murderous actions. In any case, it's certainly an amazing temporal coincidence; anyway, we will never know. What we do know is that the gruesome murderer and the great duality tale will become forever linked for the Anglo-Saxon public. Many cinema adaptations, particularly after the 1960s, will have Hyde becoming a serial killer focused on murdering women.

Jekyll and Hyde, at the movies

We move forward in time. It's the 18th of March of 1920. Stevenson died 25 years ago, but his tale refuses to die. We are in New York City, and we are going to attend the premiere of an adaptation to the silver screen of Jekyll & Hyde, a film that will start a beautiful tradition.

The American film industry has produced three great adaptations of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The three share the novella's title. The first one was filmed in 1920 by John S. Robertson; the second one in 1931 by Rouben Mamoulian; the third one in 1941 by Victor Fleming. The three of them differ from the original tale, but, in a fascinating turn, they do it in an extremely similar way. Their digressions, based on the addition of a female interest in the theater version by Richard Mansfield, will pile up.
We could summarize that digression in between the American adaptations and the Stevenson's novella as follows: the origin of the Jekyll/Hyde division is sexual repression. In the three adaptations, Jekyll is engaged to a lady of high society (Martha Mansfield/Rose Hobart/Lana Turner). In the three of them, Jekyll is clearly haunted by lust: he wants to marry as soon as possible to fulfill his desires. In the three movies the father of the bride, slightly suspicious about the nature of Jekyll's studies, delays the wedding. Most importantly, in the three movies we found a new character that did not exist in the novella or in the play. This novelty is an attractive woman that captivates Dr. Jekyll, a temptress: an exotic dancer (Nita Naldi), a bar singer (Miriam Hopkins) or a waitress (Ingrid Bergman). This temptation pushes Jekyll into the creation of the transforming potion, allowing him to succumb to it through Mr. Hyde. Unfortunately, as time passes Mr. Hyde becomes both more powerful and more violent: he always ends up murdering the temptress, and eventually, committing suicide.

1920's version by John S. Robertson is the version that stablished this departure. It's also the least daring one. Nevertheless, it becomes a fascinating portrait of America's social fears in the early 20th century. In particular, anti-Catholicism; it sounds insane now, but the second Ku Klux Klan (1921-1925) targeted Catholic immigrants, that were depicted as non-white and therefore as a threat to the nation moral health. Good old Thomas, always worried that his son was spending too much time in Southern France surrounded by impious Catholics, may have understood.
In John S. Robertson version, the temptress that tantalizes Dr. Jekyll is a dark-skinned Italian. She is a dancer, performing something that it certainly looks exotic, but not very much Italian. The similarity in between how Southern Europeans were depicted in the 20s and how Latin Americans are depicted now, a century later, results obvious. And to make the whole issue even more revealing, the actress playing the role was not Italian, but from the other demeaned origin of Catholic immigrants during this era: Nita Naldi was Irish.

The greatest of this trio of masterpieces is the version created by Rouben Mamoulian in 1931. It's a movie that is only conceivable to have been done in the glowing Hollywood pre-code; it belongs to a rare breed of works, films in which American cinema was at the same time innocent and free. After industry moral lines created by Will H. Hays started to be enforced in 1934, Hollywood became prude; even nowadays, it's still the most self-conscious artistic industry in the world.

Nevertheless, we are now in 1931, and American cinema it's still a wild business. Mamoulian didn't plan to film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a horror tale, with a villain and a moral to be learnt; in fact, he openly sympathized with Hyde. The following is extracted from an interview with him by Thomas R. Atkins for The Film Journal, recorded on November 28, 1972, at his home in Beverly Hills. I quote Mamoulian extensively, as I find his re-interpretation incredibly interesting:

In Stevenson's original work, which might be called a horror story, Dr. Jekyll is a florid man of 55 -a big plump guy who is irked by the restrictions of morality. I wouldn't even say Victorian morality- just morality. He'd like to indulge in all sorts of sexual excess and debauchery but can't do it as Dr. Jekyll, without losing face. His aim is to separate the two parts of his nature so he can have one hell of a good time and still keep up his hypocritical virtuous facade. I thought this interpretation was not interesting enough and not pertinent enough for the spectators who were going to see the film. I thought that a more interesting dilemma would be no that of good versus evil or moral versus immoral but that of the spiritual versus the animalistic which are present in all of us. That is our common dilemma.
Therefore, as a prototype for Hyde, I didn't take a monster but our common ancestor, the Neanderthal man. Mr. Hyde is a replica of the Neanderthal man. He is not a monster or animal of another species but primeval man -closest to the earth, the soil. When the first transformation takes place, Jekyll turns into Hyde who is the animal in him. Not the evil but the animal. Animals know no evil; they're completely innocent and much better morally than we are. Animals never kill except to eat. They don't torture each other. The first Hyde is this young animal released from the stifling manners and conventions of the Victorian period. He is like a kitten, a pup, full of vim and energy. He knows no evil, he simply gives vent to all his instincts.
One of my favorite scenes is when Hyde leaves the house and walks out in the rain. I had it raining very hard. The average Englishman would have opened an umbrella, but Hyde not only enjoys the rain, he takes his hat off and luxuriates in the rain falling on his face -like a young, innocent animal.
But, of course, he's not only an animal. He's partly a human being, and a human being -let's face it- is a very perverse creature. So because he is part human and possesses a human brain, which on one hand reaches heaven and on the other wallows in depravity, he begins to refine his unorthodox pleasures -cruelty, sadism, and murder. Gradually Hyde changes from an innocent animal into a vicious -I won't say beast because beasts are not vicious- human monster, a monster that is part of us but which we usually keep under control. Throughout the film you see Hyde getting worse, both physically and psychologically; and you also see Jekyll, instead of becoming liberated as he had hoped, deteriorating with Hyde. It's a sad story.

In Mamoulian's view, the point of the story was that Dr Jekyll "would like to indulge in all sort of sexual excess and debauchery". Hyde, his hidden self, was brought into existence to give him license to do so.

Nevertheless, this version is not great only because of Mamoulian's point of view, or even because its visual power. Despite the fact that the acting of Fredrich March on the double Jekyll/Hyde role made him worthy of an Academy Award in 1932, the modern viewer feels more persuaded by Miriam Hopkins, playing the illicit sexual interest that "awakens" Hyde. Hopkins was a Lubitsch actress who played the sensuousness of the role with delightful subtlety. The scene in which she playfully tries to seduce Jekyll in her room is a beautiful part of the history of cinema. Later in the movie, a fade-in of Hopkins' leg will be the symbol of Jekyll's repression.

And now, for the last of the trio. We are in 1941, with WW2 devastating Europe; the US is still not in the war (it will enter it in December, after Pearl Harbor). In a social environment in which very real monsters kill millions, MGM decides to remake Mamoulian's film: Victor Fleming will direct it. Despite the fact that the obvious similarities detract a bit from its viewing, Fleming adds a fantastic casting to the equation. Moreover, this version added the most memorable image ever inspired by Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. After taking the potion for the first time, Jekyll hallucinates himself riding a chariot, a chariot pulled not by horses, but by two women: his sweet fiancee Lana Turner and the tempting Ingrid Bergman. This is a clear -and very smart- references to Plato's chariot allegory, in which the human soul drives a chariot with two horses: one representing the rational or moral impulse, while the other represents the irrational passions and appetites.

As commented before, one of the peculiar beauties of this version is the cast: not only for it being all-star (Tracy, Bergman and Turner!) but for the cross-casting of Bergman and Turner. Initially, Bergman was supposed to play the virtuous fiancée of Jekyll and Turner the "bad girl" Ivy. However, Bergman, tired of playing saintly characters and fearing typecasting, pleaded with Victor Fleming that she and Turner switch roles. After a screen test, Fleming allowed Bergman to play a grittier role for the first time. It was certainly a great decision, as she is the most memorable of the trio.

And now, for the last stage of our trip. We will make a series of short stops across different interpretations of the myth during the last 50 years. After the sexual revolution that took place in most of the West during the 1960s, this interpretation of Jekyll & Hyde lost appeal: it did not make sense to depict sexual desire as the great evil other once sexual repression stopped becoming a major actor. Nevertheless, during the last 50 years two adaptations clearly stand out.

The first one is Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. Produced by Hammer Film Studios in 1971, it was the third attempt by the venerable British company to adapt Stevenson's tale. Third time's a charm, they same, and it was certainly the case for Hammer: Sister Hyde keeps the spirit of the original, but brings it to a different place, a place of gender-bending and with the most murderous Hyde that we had seen until then. It would be easy to accuse Sister Hyde of misogyny, as the criminal persona of Jekyll happens to be a female, and one that happens to be as sexually active as Jekyll is prude. Nevertheless, it's clearly a much more complex film that it seems.

Dr. Jekyll et les femmes (1981) is the most distinctive take ever done on the original. This film, titled Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne internationally, may very well be to Stevenson's fable what Zulawski's Possession is to Lovecraft's cosmic horror. It's a period piece, a slasher, a soft-core and an auteur film, all at the same time. Its direction in particular is incredibly idiosyncratic, even more taking into consideration that it's a horror movie; the movie won Best Direction at the Sitges Film Festival in 1981.

Beyond this two extraordinary films, there have been many others. Two of the most legendary names in Spanish horror cinema are also linked to the myth. León Klimovsky and his inevitable lycanthrope tried their hand in Dr. Jekyll and the Wolfman (1971). Jess Franco has been related to the myth through a rebranding his El secreto del Dr. Orloff (1964) was retitled The Mistresses of Dr. Jekyll.

In the 21st century the duality myth per excellence still inspires new adaptations across the world, particularly on TV. One of them is Jekyll, a very successful TV miniseries created by BBC in 2007, that adds a science-fiction spin to the classic tale and surprising parallelisms to the videogame Assassin's Creed, released the same year. A more recent one coming from Britain was created on 2015 by ITV, with the title Jekyll & Hyde. And the myth doesn't only attract admiration in old Europe: adaptations have also been done out of the Western world, inspiring a 20 episode K-Drama in 2015 (Hyde, Jekyll, Me).

A farewell

And with this, our little tour ends. What should we take out from the story of Jekyll & Hyde, and most importantly, of its development? J&H was written in a very open, abstract way; however, its readers, many of them living in Victorian Britain, gave it a sexual interpretation. Stevenson hated that; he once wrote: "people are so filled full of folly and inverted lust, that they can think of nothing but sexuality". Nevertheless, a piece of art always belongs to the public: J&H was a tale on the dangers of sexual repression because a big part the public decided so. And yet, others decided that this interpretation was wrong: Jekyll was a strict Lutheran facing the voluptuosity of Catholicism, or a good old Scottish gentleman fighting the English influence on the motherland or...

This, exactly this. I cannot think of a bigger praise for a work of art than allowing itself to an almost infinite number of interpretations. J&H survived the test of time because it is, as Fernando Pessoa would say, plural like the universe. Stories like this one are our archetypes, the basic pieces with which all the others are created of. Great works of art, like Shakespeare create humanity, transform society via changing its imaginary in an essential way. Jekyll & Hyde is one of these.

We all wanted to be Bresson.
Louis Malle

Robert Bresson was one of the first film-makers I was interested in. He was part of my first period of interest in film, when Godard's A bout de souffle opened to me the doors of cinema. After JLG, I followed with the films of the Nouvelle Vague and its closest associates: Melville and Bresson. However, despite the admiration that Truffaut and Godard had for Bresson, his aesthetics and themes were very far from the youthful bliss that identifies the NV. His style is ascetic; his themes are religious and centered on grace, martyrdom, and redemption.

In this article, we are going to try to divide Bresson's works into two blocks opposed ideologically. Before these two blocks, his works formed part of a formative period in which the former painter got the ropes of the profession and started exploring his thematic and aesthetic interests. Then he started his first period as a mature artist, once in which Bresson consistently produced a series of Catholic films that were focused on the idea of Grace. This period starts with Diary of a Country Priest in 1951 and ends in 1965 with Mouchette. After this film, Bresson oeuvre changes ideologically: his films in this period are focused on the troubles of the modern man. In this phase, he seems to forsake the possibility of redemption. The period starts in 1969 with Une Femme Douce and ends with his last film, L'argent. One of my targets writing this article is to celebrate these late Bresson films, in particular Une femme Douce, which are not much discussed in comparison with his previous ones. Nevertheless, they may be the best he ever filmed.

Apart from these blocks, there are two movies that stand alone in his oeuvre, two films that are important in his filmography for different reasons. One is Bresson's universally acknowledged masterpiece, A man escaped; in an interview, he called it the first film in which "I began to understand what I needed to do". It is true that A man escaped could be seen as part of the Catholic period; however, it is not so openly religious as the others, and I prefer not to include it with the rest.
The other film that stands alone, is a project Bresson tried to get done for more than 20 years, Lancelot du Lac, Bresson's only period piece.

Learning to paint in film: the formative years

Originally a painter, Bresson had his first experience as a film director in 1933, with the short Public Affairs (1934). This short film was not succesful, and stopped his career for a while. During World War II, he spent over a year in a camp as a prisoner of war. Once freed, and still during the Nazi occupation of France, Bresson directed the two movies that form the bulk of his formative period: the feature films Angels of Sin (1943) and Les Dames du Bois de Bologne (1945). In these movies, one can find elements that Bresson would reject later; for example, professional actors, and plenty of "music from an invisible orchestra" (non-diegetic), as Bresson would say.

Despite being quite mainstream in its form, Angels of Sin is incredibly Bressonian in its themes. The film is focused on a group of nuns that rehabilitates former convicts. Expiation, prison, faith: c'est Bresson. Unfortunately, its form makes it a pretty conventional picture, with actors that (the horror!) act. Bresson still had to master that, in his own words:

It is impossible to copy life, you don't create life, you create something false. I believe that mechanization provides a way to get to truth, even to reality. [1]

Notice that, for Bresson, truth comes before reality.

The second and last film of this period, Les Dames du Bois de Bologne, would be the last time Bresson would use professional actors. The movie is an adaptation of Diderot, a drama of seduction and misunderstanding, a la Dangerous Liaisons. One can hardly imagine a subject further from the interests of its author. And yet... the film is the first great Bressonian masterpiece. Les Dames du Bois de Bologne is a masterpiece of emotion and psychological depth through contention.

To Grace through Martyrdom: The Catholic period

I am Catholic. That isn't a question I ask myself. Faith is in me, it is me. [2]

Robert Bresson's Catholic period lasts from 1951 to 1968 and includes all the films done during these 18 years, with the exception of A man escaped (1956), of which I have already talked. These films are:

• Diary of a Country Priest (1951)
• Pickpocket (1959)
• The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962)
• Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)
• Mouchette (1967)

Four of the five movies of the period adapt important Christian texts. The period opens and closes with adaptations of the Roman Catholic, monarchist Georges Bernanos. The second film, Pickpocket, is an original story; however, it is clearly derived from the most famous novel of a very Christian writer; Dostoievski's Crime and Punishment. The third film, The Trial of Joan of Arc portrays the last days of the Christian martyr and saint by adapting the original text of Joan's trial.
The fourth film is the only one that does not adapt a text: Au Hasard Balthazar, is a completely original story. Nevertheless, it may be an even finer exploration of the idea of martyrdom present in each and every movie of this period. In it, Bresson traces a parallelism in between the unfortunate life of a donkey and the misfortunes of a young woman.

I like to summarize the ideology of Bresson during these years with the following sentence: to Grace through martyrdom. All the main characters can be understood as martyrs; in the last 3, this martyr figure is particularly clear. The three of them are young, innocent women that suffer in the hands of a society that overpowers them. They don't fight, they just suffer.
Grace is the other important concept. Grace in the context of Bresson works needs to be understood as a kind of spiritual redemption: like in Pickpocket (or in Crime and Punishment), the character may still be punished, but his soul is already saved. Again, 3 films end with a particularly clear depiction of Grace: Pickpocket, The Trial of Joan of Arc and Mouchette.

Mouchette contains both the clearest depiction of martyrdom and of Grace in the whole Bresson filmography: in a way, it's his most representative film. Its dramatic closure also marks the most important change in the whole trajectory of its author. In the ending of Mouchette, the eponymous child-martyr protagonist commits suicide. Just after the fact, still in the same shot Bresson plays Monteverdi's Magnificat: one of the rare examples of non-diegetic music in his works. This is probably the greatest apparition of Grace in his cinema; it's also the last. In the future, Bresson will continue being interested in the "inner movements" of the human soul, but in a much more somber way.

Beyond Grace: The sorrows of the modern man

I used to be able to separate myself from the preoccupations of our times, but I can't any longer. [3]

Bresson's last period lasts from 1968 to Bresson's death in 1999. It includes four films; all the ones he directed during this period with the exception of Lancelot du Lac (1974):

• Une femme douce (1969)
• Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971)
• The Devil Probably (1977)
• L'argent (1983)

Like in the previous period, all the films are adaptations, with the exception of one. This phase is completely dominated by Russian literature: if in his Catholic period Bresson had adapted Bernanos twice, in the last 15 years of his career he will adapt Dostoievski twice, and Tolstoi once. This is an important change from a theological perspective; neither Dostoievski, nor Tolstoi were Catholics: both were Orthodox, and both had very personal views on religion, far from the more traditional Bernanos. Tolstoi's faith was deeply humanistic and unorthodox, something that brought him into conflict with the religious authorities and Russia, and caused him to be excommunicated 9 years before his death. Dostoievski's case is more complicated, as his faith was mystic, of an almost shamanistic nature that would have fit the concept of martyrdom so important on Bresson's Catholic phase.

Formally, this new period does not only show a change in themes but a technical one too. Before Mouchette, all of Bresson's films had been in black and white. From now on, all of them will be in color.

The period opens with the suicide Elle, the main character of Une femme douce. If Bresson had ended his stage of Catholic angst with the suicide of a female heroine, Mouchette, he decides to open a new period in his artistic life will start in the exact same way. Nevertheless, a lot of things had changed in between these two suicides. There is no monterverdian harmony to cradle Elle into Grace/Heaven; there is just the nothingness. Une femme douce is a psychological masterpiece of nihilism and despair: the movie starts with a suicide, and it's all about explaining the reasons for that suicide. There is never a justification of it, but at the same time, it is impossible not to feel that it's the only appropriate response that innocent, gentle creatures such as Elle can give to the wicked human nature. Une femme douce is the best adaptation of Dostoievski ever done, and one of the deepest psychological movies I have ever had the pleasure to watch.

The other three films of the period widen the schism with his previous views on humankind. The three of them have martyrs of sorts: but all of them refuse their destiny, and take action to avoid their destiny. There is no more willing acceptance of fatality in the name of Trascendence; there is struggle. In this regard, Bresson's last movie, L'argent, is particularly interesting: the fatality that devours the martyr protagonist is of a social type. L'argent could have opened the door for a non-religious, social Bressonianism.

Addendum: Simone Weil, editing and T/truth in Bresson's cinema

The following ideas are not directly related with the main idea of the article, but lately I have been thinking about Bresson's style, and I think it's worth sharing my speculations.

While researching for this article, I found an article with this very interesting quote about the relationship in between Simone Weil's thought and Bresson's art. For reasons of time I couldn't explore this more, but I think it's worth sharing it with you:

In Weil's religious thinking, the possibility of achieving a state of automatism in the soul, and thus leaving room for God to occupy all, was central. “Decreation,” her term for this principle, sounds like a will to suicide (a recurring theme in Bresson) but she explains it as motivated by love. [4]

Next. The following is a very interesting quote from an interview with Bresson. It shows how much his art is based on editing:

If there's one thing of primary importance in a film, as I understand the art, it must be rhythm. Everything is communicated through rhythm. [...] But everything you see happening did not happen before the camera; it happened in the editing room. It's in the editing process that connections appear. Editing creates. The camera is a recording tool, with the -happily!- indifferent precision of a machine. But the drama is created during the editing. Only when the images are put in contact with each other, and with sounds, can love arise. [1]

Another great quote on editing, this time from Notes about the Cinematographer:

An image must be transformed by contact with other images as is a color by contact with other colors. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation.

Bresson's editing is very far from being spectacular, a la Eisenstein or Leone. Still, it's probably the central element of his cinema.

The other point I wanted to touch before closing the article is Truth. Truth, in Bresson, is something bigger than reality, a reality that I like to call truth, with small "t". It is true that Bresson firmly believes in the incredible power of the camera, but he is certainly not close to realism.

In my Trial of Joan of Arc I have tried to avoid “theater” and “masquerade”, but to arrive at a non-historical truth by using historical words.

A non-historical truth. Bresson depicts the trial of Jeanne of Arc in a non-historical way, which means non-realistic. That summarizes Bresson's philosophy and art: Truth beyond, over, reality/truth. And for that Truth to exist, we need a God, or at least, the Spirit.

[1]: "For the Pleasure of It", Radio-Television Française, 1966
[2]: "The Cinema According to Bresson", Les Nouvelles littéraires, May 26, 1966.
[3]: "Interview with Robert Bresson by Serge Daney and Serge Toubiana", Cahiers du cinéma, June-July 1983.
[4]: "What does it Matter? All is Grace", Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Volume 17, 2012

As part of a special number of Klowns Horror Fanzine on "The End of the World in Cinema", Jolanta Norbutaite and Cristian Planas had a talk about a pretty divisive movie: A Boy and his Dog, the 70s apocalyptic flick. Continue further for a conversation on feminism, dystopias and cute dogs.

Cristian: 1975's A Boy and His Dog. A movie based on a rather famous novella by Harlan Ellison. The novella won the Nebula Award and was nominated for the Hugo, the two most important awards in literary science-fiction. It's about the adventures of Vic (Don Johnson), a teenager, and Blood, his telepathic dog in a post-apocalyptic world after World War IV.
A boy and his dog is not only known for the fame of its literary author, or its own cinematic virtues. It's considered a misogynist film: in its time there were even protests against the movie by feminist groups. And... I think we can agree that the movie is, at least, problematic in that regard.

Jolanta: I am not surprised that the movie raised protests by feminist groups. It should have been boycotted and did (does) not deserve a cinema screen. It is like a slap to the face for any woman, full of misogyny and man's chauvinism. The movie focuses on a male character, a solo, whose main target is to get sex, through rape. The movie starts with a conversation between Vic and his dog Blood, where one complains about needing food and the other about needing sex. In this dystopic world where everyone needs to fight for a shelter, food, and survival, all Vic wants is to satisfy his sexual urge, by any means necessary.
In one particular scene, we are shown a naked dead woman's body. To this, Vic complains: "They didn't need to kill her, she could have been used at least a few times more". Women in that world are just tools, screaming bodies to be hunted, raped and killed seemingly for sport.

Cristian: I basically agree with what you are saying. However, I want to point that my problem is not so much with the movie depicting violence against women: you could do exactly the same, but denouncing it. Mad Max: Fury Road does exactly that in a very similar context. A Boy and His Dog is problematic because of its tone: in the first two-thirds of the movie, the film works as a buddy movie, with a slight comedic tone. Moreover, despite the fact that the movie implies that the main characters have murdered and raped, it's much easier to empathize with Vic and Blood than with Quilla, the woman. In fact, this character becomes some kind of a villain in the last third, which introduces us to a very different kind of dystopic society. What did you think about the last section of the movie?

Jolanta: In the first place, I can understand the existence of violence against women in the movie; after all, it is a dystopia. However, apart from this, the general tone of the movie and the portrait of women in it are very problematic. If in the "surface world" (the one of the first two thirds of the movie) women are raped and murdered for pleasure, in the "underworld" (the one of the last half hour), women have a reproductive use; in one scene, a group of female teenagers are waiting in line for their turn to be inseminated.
Quilla, the main female character, is a good example of the movie ideology. It is the only women that is not raped, nor is waiting patiently her turn to be a mother; she has its own will. Unfortunately, the movie depicts her as a selfish, stupid and manipulative person. She uses her body to seduce Vic; in the beginning, we are made to believe that she enjoys him; however, it's just part of her manipulations. And it gets even worse: in the last act, Quilla has a group of followers, which may have been seduced in the same way. It's absolutely impossible to empathize with her.
Ironically, the only character which has everyone's sympathy is Blood, the dog; he is smart and funny. However, even the dog is a misogynist: Blood sees a danger in Quilla. And in a certain way, Blood is right; Quilla is interfering in the "bromance" in between Vic and Blood. For Blood, Quilla is a villain that is not only putting their lives in danger; she is forcing Vic to choose her in place of his companion and friend.

Cristian: The dog is wonderful. I understand that his "performance" is mainly produced by the dubbing and the editing, but nevertheless, it's memorable.

On the misogyny issue, Harlan Ellison always considered that the problem was not in his novella: the responsible was L.Q. Jones (the director). In particular, Ellison complained about the joke that ends the film; a joke that does not exist in the novella. He believed that this had caused the protests against the film. You and I have read the novella; do you think that Ellison was right? In my opinion, not at all; the movie changes slightly the plot of the novella, but it captures really well its tone. It is true that the final pun (which we won't reveal) empathizes more the plot's misogyny, but it is also true that this ending is absolutely congruent with everything that has happened before.

Jolanta: I don't believe that the novella's ending is less insulting than the one on the film. I actually think the opposite: the novella underlines even more the election in between the female-man relationship and... let's call it "the bromance". These are the four last sentences of the novella: "It took a long time before I stopped her calling in my head. Asking me, asking me: do you know what love is? Sure I know. A boy loves his dog". I can't even think of anything more "bro"!

If I had to define Corto Maltese, I would call him the ultimate romantic hero. Corto, a comic character created by Hugo Pratt in 1967, represents the most beautiful heroic ideal: the caring cynical, the honorable rogue, the unrepentant globetrotter. His adventures, in the first decades of the 20th century, bring him to the most exotic places in the most interesting moments: Siberia during the Russian Civil War, Arabia during World War I, Ireland during the Irish War of Indepencence... and Venice, always Venice. He becomes a friend of Jack London and Stalin, Butch Cassidy and Ungern-Sternberg. Corto's comics are travels through time, full of erudition. High literature.

No more Corto's adventures have appeared since the death of Hugo Pratt in 1995. And now, 20 years after its author's death and 27 since the last Corto story (Mu), we get a new album: Under the midnight sun. This new Corto Maltese is in the hands of the spaniard Juan Díaz Canales, the creator of the acclaimed series Blacksad.

How does it perform this new adventure of Corto, more than 20 ans après? In general, surprisingly well. Díaz Canales recovers the most adventurer Corto, with a story that feels like a sequel to La Giovenezza, one in which Corto's friendship with Jack London is the main reason behind the plot. As in any adventure of the Venetian sailor, we find many historical characters crossing their paths with our protagonist: Matthew Henson (the first African-American Artic explorer), Waka Yamada (a pioneering feminist) and many others. The story has multiple historical references, but Díaz Canales has been able to avoid the excessive erudition of some Corto's albums, like Fable of Venice or The Helvetics. It's fortunate that, like in the case of Jack London, Pratt's easiest to imitate works are the best ones.

Another of the virtues of this new Corto is the modernization that Díaz Canales has been able to carry away. Corto's morals are more progressive in this album. There is one subplot facing a German proto-nazi scientist against an African-American explorer and an Inuit scientist. And the main plot revolves around Corto fighting the prostitution mafia, like in Tango. The violence -always present in Corto- is more brutal, with multiple murders in cold blood and surprising deaths.
The drawing, by Rubén Pellejero, works perfectly well, feeling very close to Pratt's, but still not a copy.

Díaz Canales first take on Corto is really good, but it still falls short from the best Pratt. Technically, there are some issues with some ellipsis, that feel accelerated and awkward. And despite its good intentions, the adventure lacks the exacerbated romanticism of the best Corto: The Ballad of the Salt Sea, The Celts or Corto Maltese in Siberia.

At the end of the day, one question remains: does this Corto reappearance deserve to be continued? Certainly so. One should understand this Under the midnight sun as the first contact between a new author and a legendary character. The relationship looks promising. Let it give us more satisfaction.

In Spanish media is very popular to make many arcane assumptions about the Eurovision Song Contest. The most popular -beyond the obvious alliance of neighbour countries- is the importance of the order of appearance. Somehow, the Spanish candidate always seems to have the worst place possible. If he starts, he will be forgotten quickly. If he appears in the end, the audience already have their favourite at that point. And if he sings in the middle, somehow he manages to be early AND too late.

Well, I decided to use some data to find the truth on all this. These are the results:

Turns out that order may matter: appearently singing in the last third of the contest is correlated with a better outcome.

Methods

I got most of the data from this Github repository. However, the singing order was missing. I had to add it using Nokogiri and scraping through ESC-Database. I picked 1994 as the start of the sample. I thought it was a good year, with the first post-Soviet countries (Estonia and Russia) entering the contest for the first time.

The samples have been normalized, as there has been different a slightly different number of participants in each final: from 23 to 26. Unfortunately, this took longer than expected: I was not able to find a library in Ruby that would give a tool to downsample or upsample arrays of floats. Finally, I decided to jump to Python and use scipy.ndimage.zoom to resize the samples. I also normalized the quantity of points, as they were different in each edition -different number of countries voting-.

The graph was created using Gruff.

I had been wanting to learn some basic datamining for a while, in particular with social media, specially Twitter. With the last Barcelona vs Madrid game, I had the opportunity to play around a bit. This is my datamining of #ElClasico.

Tools

For this article, I decided to use Python. As far as I know, the two main languages for datamining are R and Python: I chose the latter because of its proximity to Ruby, my main language.

As DB, I picked MongoDB. I needed something that I could modify easily, so my choice needed to be schemaless. And I did some very minor things with Mongo some time ago.

You can find the methods I developed for this article in my Pipper repo.

The sample

Taking tweets from the Twitter API is not so simple. Without a paying access, I decided that the best way for me to take tweets was using search. The tweets you can get through search are limited and you can only fetch tweets from until 10 days before the search, but I thought this would be enough to get a good sample.
For getting it, I used the twitter python package for creating an API access. With it, getting tweets was as simple as using the getSearch method. After some documentation reading, my query evolved to this:

api.GetSearch(query + " -filter:retweets", count=100, result_type="recent", include_entities=True, max_id=final_tweet)

• The first, unnamed parameter is obvious: the search query. The query will be anything that we want, in the case of this exercise, we used "#ElClasico". We add the -filter:retweets flag to avoid getting repeated tweets through retweets.
• The count option limits the quantity of tweets we will get from the query. Unfortunately 100 is the maximum. It defaults to 15, so we set to max.
• The result_type parameter sets which tweets will be returned in the search, the most popular ones or the most recent. There is also a mixed option, which is the default.
• The include_entities option defines if we will get related entities of the tweet, like hashtags and mentions to users.
• The max_id parameter lets us to set the maximum id of the tweets we will get. Given that the id tweets has a direct relationship to its time creation, we can use this to filter our results by date.
• You can find the full documentation here.

For getting the sample, we picked two random tweets; one some hours before the game (start tweet), and another some hours after (end tweet). The start tweet of the sample was written at 17:08:35 and the final at 00:01:24. We set a loop, that starts with the final_tweet parameter as the id of the end tweet, resets it to the earliest picked one, and only finishes when we have a tweet written before the start tweet. With this, we got a full sample of exactly 92.918 tweets.

This number is not so big as it might sound. I have read that during the game around 5.000 tweets were written: that means 450.000 only during the game. Of the 92.918 tweets, 42.865 were published in between the start and the end of the game. That means that the sample is less than 10% of the full quantity of tweets. However, I think that it's still a pretty good aproximation.

In our DB we saved the tweets with the following fields:

• lang: The language of the tweet.
• favorited: If the tweet has been marked as favorite by the authenticated user.
• text: The text of the tweet.
• truncated: If the value of text has been truncated.
• created_at: The time of the creation in String format.
• hashtags: An array of entities with information about the hashtags of the tweet.
• retweeted: If the tweet has been retweeted by the authenticated user.
• source: A link to the source type of the tweet.
• user: An entity with information on the author.
• id: The id of the tweet.

However, you can get more information on any tweet from the Twitter API. You can read a full overview of this in the Twitter documentation.

Stratifying

Of course, this data needs to be stratified, at least in some basic way. The most obvious way is to define which tweets were written during the game, and in which of its two parts.

For stratifying our little DB, we will add the following attributes to all the tweets:

• datetime: The created_at attribute of the tweet with Datetime type.
• minute: Dividing the full sample in minutes and starting at 0, in which minute was the tweet published. It gets to 413.
• during_game: If the tweet was published in between the start and the end of the match.
• game_half: The half of the game in which the tweet was published if any.
• minute_half: The minute in the half of the game in which the tweet was published if any.

For defining the start and the end of each half, we used some selected tweets. In this, the official account of Real Madrid, @realmadrid, was very useful: they followed the game in a slightly more precise way that their Barcelona counterpart.

Start of the game tweet. (20:02:35)

¡Comienza el Barcelona-Real Madrid! ¡Vamos a por el liderato! #ElClásico #RMLive— Real Madrid C. F. (@realmadrid) marzo 22, 2015

Half-time tweet (20:47:56).

DESCANSO: Barcelona 1-1 Real Madrid (Mathieu, 19’ / Cristiano Ronaldo, 31’) #ElClásico #RMLive pic.twitter.com/XNolfSby2p— Real Madrid C. F. (@realmadrid) marzo 22, 2015

Second-half tweet. 21:03:27

¡Comienza la segunda parte en el Camp Nou! Barcelona 1-1 Real Madrid #ElClásico #RMLive— Real Madrid C. F. (@realmadrid) marzo 22, 2015

End of the game tweet. 21:51:44

FINAL: Barcelona 2-1 Real Madrid (Mathieu, 19’; Luis Suárez, 55’ / Cristiano Ronaldo, 31’) #ElClásico #RMLive pic.twitter.com/Ypb6t7FB6N— Real Madrid C. F. (@realmadrid) marzo 22, 2015

With this, we can start to get some statistics.

Languages

One of the most basic things that you can say about a tweet -and any piece of text, really- is in which language is written. This shows which languages were used for tweeting with #ElClasico:

Some of the main conclusions:

1. As expected, the two main languages were English and Spanish. As a Spaniard, it surprised me seeing English as the most used language with such a distance.
2. Indonesian gets an unexpected third place. This fact is clear as some Indonesian accounts are into the most mentioned ones (#fcbarcelona_id). Another language that does unexpectedly well is Tagalog, the main language of the Philippines (8th).
3. From then on, the next languages are the ones that you would expect: Portuguese (4th), French (5th) and Italian (6th).
4. Surprisingly, German is not even the 10 most used languages.
5. No, so far I haven't counted wrong. und stands for undefined. ht is a code that I haven't been able to decipher, but its tweets don't have a common language, and usually are in English or Spanish.

But this data has not been stratified at all. It still has a lot of things to say. The most obvious division that I could think of, was to divide the tweets by time. Specifically, I wanted to take the tweets that were written between the start and the end of the game.

This points to something interesting: apparently the Spanish-speaking community does not tweet as much during the game. Two possible explanations come to my mind. One, that this community is not so used to live-tweeting as their English-speaking counterparts. The other, which I prefer slightly, is that they are just too engaged in the match, so they just want to focus on the game.

Locations

Another interesting issue about the #ElClasico tweets is its location. Twitter offers us a way to locate the tweet, but only a minority of the tweets have it available: around 8% in a tested subsample. However, we can get from the location of a user. This doesn't cover the 100% of the cases, but an important quantity: 63.005 of the 92.918 (67.81%). It may be of interest to say that there are some users in the sample that appear more than once: 62.748 users wrote our 92.918 tweets.

However, finally I decided not to do an analysis of this. The main reason is lack of time: it's already been more than one month since the match, and I wanted to publish this as soon as possible. The location analysis presented a particular difficulty: the field is only a string set by the user, and it can contain anything. Los Angeles can be showed as "L.A.", "LA, CA, US" or "Los Angeles, United States of America". However, ordering this it's not impossible and probably not even hard: I just preferred to publish earlier.

Mentions

Of the 92.918, only 26.774 contain at least one mention (28.81%). In the mentioning tweets, we count 41.731 mentions (1.56 mentions per tweet). This is the tweet with most mentions:

@messi10stats @Samir_FUT @FlFAKlNG @TomInceYT @Wagers_ps4_FUT @futmo66 @BzBookies_ @FUT15_PIRANHA @GuarinFUT @ImAxron who👆 #ElClasico— Evauliò (@Evaulio) marzo 22, 2015

After giving some glory to @Evaulio, let's get some more data. This is the list of the most mentioned accounts:

1. @LaLiga - 6497
2. @FCBarcelona - 6099
3. @realmadrid - 6032
4. @FCBarcelona_es - 5058
5. @3gerardpique - 1746
6. @LuisSuarez9 - 1442
7. @Cristiano - 1155
8. @realmadriden - 969
9. @neymarjr - 408
10. @Benzema - 251
11. @GarethBale11 - 199
12. @elclasico - 174
13. @kobebryant - 148
14. @FCBarcelona_cat - 114
15. @TheSportMatrix - 109
16. @RayHudson - 99
17. @beINSPORTSUSA - 98
18. @SergioRamos - 97
19. @fcbarcelona_id - 91
20. @MarceloM12 - 81
21. @Squawka - 78
22. @TeamMessi - 72
23. @jamesdrodriguez - 71

Some observations:

1. Barcelona wins the mention fight!
2. Yep, Messi does not have a Twitter account. This fact shows an obvious weakness for any kind of analysis based on Twitter mentions: whatever does not have an account, does not exist.
3. The curious case of @elclasico. Apparently, many users don't understand the difference between a hashtag (#) and a mention (@), and they mentioned an empty, private account with 20 followers. He got 12th, just after Gareth Bale. What a genius.

Only with players:

1. @3gerardpique - 1746
2. @LuisSuarez9 - 1442
3. @Cristiano - 1155
4. @neymarjr - 408
5. @Benzema - 251
6. @GarethBale11 - 199
7. @SergioRamos - 97
8. @MarceloM12 - 81
9. @jamesdrodriguez - 71
10. @officialpepe - 58
11. @CasillasWorld - 53
12. @andresiniesta8 - 45
13. @IllarraOfficial - 44
14. @isco_alarcon - 41
15. @MrAncelotti - 38
16. @Mascherano - 33
17. @IvanRakiticFCB - 31
18. @DaniAlvesD2 - 29
19. @C1audioBravo - 24
20. @_Pedro17_ - 24
21. @LUISENRIQUE21 - 23
22. @ToniKroos - 22
23. @jordialba - 18
24. @DaniCarvajal92 - 16

Some players got many mentions without even playing. For example, James, that was injured and didn't even travel to Barcelona: I do suspect that this is related with Colombian users tweeting a lot, as shown in my preliminary (and unpublished) analysis of the tweeters location. Also Illaramendi and Pedro didn't get to play.

However, it may be more interesting to check the most mentioned accounts only during the game (two halfs).

Most mentioned players during the game:

1. @Cristiano - 703
2. @LuisSuarez9 - 304
3. @Benzema - 141
4. @neymarjr - 123
5. @GarethBale11 - 103

During the first half:

1. @Cristiano - 635
2. @Benzema - 105
3. @GarethBale11 - 92
4. @neymarjr - 42
5. @LuisSuarez9 - 35

During the second:

1. @LuisSuarez9 - 269
2. @neymarjr - 81
3. @Cristiano - 68
4. @Benzema - 36
5. @isco_alarcon - 22

A curious issue: Piqué got, comparatively, much less mentions during the game. And the fact is that he did a pretty good match.

In this analysis of mentions we found out something basic: an analysis of any event is fundamentally flawed if the protagonists don't have an official Twitter account. In this case, this is very obvious for Messi, and probably for other players that had an important role during the match. We will go further on this issue in the next section.

Goals and its effects in Twitter

What happens in Twitter when a team scores a goal? Well, first of all, people tweets more. Let's see a tweets by minute graph:

Yes, the peaks match closely the goals (1st part: 19' and 31'; 2nd part: 10').

But hypothetically it could be that tweets increased for some other reason. What are the tweeters saying? Are they shouting "GOAL"? For detecting tweets containing "goal-like" words, we will use the following regular expression: ".*?(\s+|\A)goa?l?(\s+|\z).*". This basically means that we search for "goal" and "gol" (Spanish). For making it case-unsensitive I used the following command: re.compile(".*?(\s+|\A)goa?l?(\s+|\z).*", re.IGNORECASE).

These are the results:

And the percentage of tweets with a "goal-like" word per minute in each half:

In the first graph I found an unexplainable mystery: the peak in goal percentage at the end of the 1st half. However, I read the tweets and this is what I found:

GOAALLLLNO: Bale with the goal but was given as offside! Still 1-1 #ElClásico— 850 Sports Digest (@850sportsdigest) marzo 22, 2015

Yes, Gareth Bale had a goal disallowed by a close offside in the last minutes of the 1st half. I had forgotten completely about this fact. The disallowed goal was enough to increase the quantity of "goal-like" words, but not enough to excite the users for creating a peak in total number of tweets.

Let's continue. Could we even guess the name of the scorers? Well, let's check the mentions per minute of the 5 most mentioned players of each half:

Yes, you can guess who scored at 31' of the first half and at 10' of the second. Actually, the results are kind of spectacular. More than half (50.7%) of the mentions to @Cristiano were tweeted in the three minutes after his goal. 59.1% of the mentions to @LuisSuarez9 were published in the 4 minutes after the goal.

But what happens with the first goal? Well, the weakness of the mention analysis appears here again. The scorer player, Jérémy Mathieu, does not have an official account. This is what happens if we check for tweets including his name ("Mathieu") during the first half:

Since the beginning of this little game, I wanted to prove something: that is pretty easy to get the result of a game through datamining. I believe that the data I just presented proves it upto a certain point.

Conclusion

I think I have learnt a few things about datamining Twitter. First of all, mentions are much less important than I thought. This is because -as I wrote before- not every concept and every person is represented by a Twitter account, which makes the analysis unbalanced. By contrast, I realized that text analysis of the tweets . I must admit that the little hipster in me wanted to avoid something so classic as an analysis of the text, but in this case, classic rocks.

If there is a second edition of this, I would center more on the text analysis. I would also work on a way to stratify the tweets by location, that, as I said, would take some time at the beginning but it's not extremely complex. I would have liked to do more stats checking percentages of tweets doing something, as the goal graph was very surprising for me.
An interesting idea would be to use some natural language processing on the tweets. Recently, in a Hackathon, I was able to use AlchemyAPI, in particular its sentiment analysis feature.
In any case, I developed some tools and got some experience that will be useful next time.

As you can see, it's a field with plenty of possibilities. This was just a little introduction. If you arrived until here, thanks! And please, comment. :)

The times they are a-changin' for Japanese animation. Studio Ghibli is probably going to close, and its two lead directors, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, are well into their 70s. Satoshi Kon, a genius that should be vindicated more often, died in 2010 leaving us too soon at only 46 years old. There is no one in the position of the main animation director of Japan, a post of the utmost prestige.

The main name that comes to mind when talking about the next big name in Japanese anime is Mamoru Hosoda. Born in 1967, and therefore 26 years younger than Miyazaki, he started his career in animation as key animator in popular series like Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon and Slam Dunk. At only 33, Hosoda got the position of director working on films of some of the most famous animes: Digimon and One Piece.

However, Hosoda still had not been able to direct his own movies out of the safe tracks of a well-established anime franchise. He was originally chosen as the director of Howl's Moving Castle, before Miyazaki would come out of his retirement and ended up directing it. It wasn't until 2006 that he was able to develop as an author, directing his first non-franchise movie: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.
The movie was a surprise hit, winning prizes from the Japanese Academy and the Tokyo Anime Awards. It was not left unnoticed out of Japan, getting the award for Best Animated Film in Sitges, the biggest fantastic movie festival in the world. Three years later he gave life to his second^[1] movie, Summer Wars, which also was a hit with critics and audiences.
This success allowed Hosoda to found his own production company, Studio Chizu. In it, he created Wolf Children, with which he surpassed the success of his two previous movies. So far, his career has been outstanding: each one of his three movies has won the Animation of the year award by the Japanese Academy.

Mamoru Hosoda has been successful, but he managed to achieve something more important: to create his own artistic space. He is one of the few animation directors in Japan working with his own stories: in 2012, Wolf Children was the only animation movie released in Japan that was based on original material. Moreover, his films have a strong identity, one based on themes surprisingly far away from the topics that live in the most popular teen-directed animes. Yes, he talks about youth, but his universe is far more calmer and mature. His cinema is centered on three themes: love, family and time.

Spoilers of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars and Wolf Children ahead.

Love

In each of the three movies authored by Mamoru Hosoda a couple dwells in the center of the story. As in any love story, the couple does not exist in the beginning: they may be friends (TGWLTT^[2], Summer Wars) or may not know each other (Wolf Children). The events of the story bring them together sooner or later. In any case, the protagonist couple love is the engine that moves forward each and every of his movies.

However, there is nothing further from Hosoda's characters than a classical story of passion and romance. They live love in another way, one in which love is the cornerstone of life, but not a purpose in itself. This is particulary striking, as the characters youth would apparently discard this kind of maturity. They are high school students (TGWLTT, Summer Wars) or early college undergraduates (Wolf Children). Their lack of passion can seem unnatural if you stop to think about it, but it's perfectly integrated in their world, in their way of thinking. It's natural to them, as strange -and weirdly refreshing- as it may seem to us.

Love as a strong, stable cornerstone of the world: this is one of the most important themes in Hosoda's universe.

Family

If love is the cornerstone of the world, family is the everlasting house that is built on it. Like an old-fashioned conservative, Hosoda seems to understand family -and not the individual- as the basic unit of society.  Family is the definitive protection for the individual, able to know even the most mysterious things: in TGWLTT, after unexpectedly gaining the power of time-travelling, only her aunt can teach Makoto how to use her new powers. Moreover, family is also society in scale: in Summer Wars, Wabisuke's conflict with his family scales up to a problem threatening to destroy the world.

This focus on family is particulary interesting, and could appear conflicting, given the youth of the main characters. Maybe because of that, the three movies have something of Bildungsroman^[3]. However, if the classical Bildungsroman always has an inmature protagonist that learns how to outgrow childhood and get independence from family, only TGWLTT works as one. In his two latest movies, Hosoda distorts the Bildungsroman concept in very original ways. In Summer Wars the main character growth brings him to integrate into a big family, not to break with it. And Wolf Children is a perfect example of Bildungsroman, showing the growth of two children into adulthood, only that the point of view is the one of the mother/tutor.

Hosoda's ability to talk about family is excellent. Watching Kenji struggle to be accepted by his beloved's family reminded me of The Quiet Man. Not a bad thing, to bring John Ford to mind. Exploring family nowadays is difficult, doing it from commercial animation movies that are supposedly directed to teenagers is extraordinary.

Time

Time is the last dominating theme. In Hosoda, time is not a succession of events or ages, but a succession of generations. People passes, family stays. Family holds up time through  parenthood, and at the same time, it provides strength to put up with the misfortunes brought up by time.

Despite those misfortunes, there is no tragic feeling in Hosoda's work. The main element of tragedy, death, is present in his movies: sometimes in a very gruesome way. However, like in the case of love, the death of an individual does not mean anything by itself; it's only important as how it affects the future of the family. The conflict in Wolf Children is not the death of the werewolf itself, but how it leaves Hana alone upbringing their two children. After the cruellest of events, family survives and therefore life goes on.
Time may bring adversities but it also gives tools to overcome them. The family in Summer Wars prepares a strategy to defeat the evil AI Love Machine based on a battle the clan fighted hundreds of years ago. The powers of Makoto in TGWLTT can only be explained thanks to the experience of her aunt, who had the same powers before. The loss of the knowledge of how to be a werewolf is the main problem that Hana faces in Wolf Children.
Finally, time cures everything. May it be that Hosoda's characters get their unnatural maturity from time, from the idea of being merely a piece between their ancestors and their descendants?

If TGWLTT had only marginal connections with the idea of family, it's also the one that illustrates best the idea of time in Hosoda. At the beginning of the story, Makoto is unable to accept the passing of time. This is literal: she leaps through time trying to create a better version of the world she lives in. But this attitude goes against the nature of Hosoda's universe, and in the end, she has to pay for it: TGWLTT is the only movie with a sad ending. Makoto is only able to discover love when she is strong enough to endure losing it. However, time -again- offers an open door for happiness: "I will be waiting for you in the future" are the last words that Makoto's beloved tells to her.

Conclusion

Since the 50s, there has been two opposed tendencies in Japanese cinema: Mizoguchi's passion against Ozu's zen. Hosoda is firmly in the side of the latter. His cinema is mature and calm, not given to any kind of visual exhuberance. In this, he resembles Miyazaki.
However, Hosoda is much more conservative ideologically than the co-founder of Studio Ghibli: the individual freedom celebrated in Porco Rosso or Princess Mononoke is very far from his familiar traditionalism. Even aesthetically we can observe a difference between Hosoda's CG clear lines and the buoyant watercolours favoured by Ghibli.

This is troubling. Hosoda's works obviously longs for the old Japan, and not only in a folklorical way: they also miss its values. So far, this conservatism is so deeply impregnated by melancholy that makes it politically unactive. But Hosoda has the greatest strength that a filmmaker can wish for: talent. He is also young. For his talent to develop further, his cinema will have to become more vigorous. Moreover, we need it, as there is almost no one else in the field. Can a great filmmaker be conservatist and energetic at the same time, specially in anime? We shall see.

For clarity's sake, in this article I will only count as part of Hosoda's filmography the movies he made out of any franchise after leaving Toei: The girl who leapt through time, Summer Wars and Wolf Children. ↩︎

The girl who leapt through time. ↩︎

A Bildungsroman is a novel that focus on the growth of the main character from youth to adulthood. ↩︎

Roberto Saviano is an international star. His first work, Gomorra, was a thorough description of the activities of the napolitan Camorra. The book got unanimous praise, won many awards and was the source for a successful movie. But Gomorra angered the mafia, who threats Saviano's life: since then, he is forced to live under police protection. Roberto Saviano has become something in between a literary star and a national hero.

In his second book, ZeroZeroZero, Saviano describes the life cycle of cocaine, from the plantations in the Colombian jungle to its arrival to Europe and the US. Many characters cross the pages of the book. The Zetas and their savage cruelty in the Mexican narcowars. The London brokers that buy cocaine asking for an unexisting wine in their favourite pub. Mamadu, a "mule" from Guinea-Bissau that saves his "salary" for inviting girls to classy restaurants. Semion Yudkovich Mogilevich, a boss of the "Mafiya" who got rich defrauding Russian Jews who wanted to move to Israel from the USSR. Ágata, a Colombian police dog who has a 10.000$ reward on her head offered by the narcos. And yes, also the Camorra, bringing cocaine to Europe with complicated entrepreneurial networks as cover. Cocaine is global, and so is its portrait.

ZeroZeroZero is written in a very particular way. Most of the time it looks like a hard reportage, but suddenly it passes to pure narrative and then, for some pages, continues with sociological and even philosophical reflections. Saviano uses no established literary form: his books are very personal. ZeroZeroZero is the expression of the author's ferocious compromise, the product of his obsession. Saviano writes dominated by a devouring passion, the passion of rectitude, the passion for the destruction of Evil. Saviano is Ahab:

Now I know that I have the same obsession as Captain Ahab. My white whale is cocaine. She is elusive and sails all the oceans, too.

In this way, he is very much alike one of his influences, the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline*. They share their view on Evil: an intransigent, tireless hatred for it. But Céline helped us, poor readers who can't stand his devouring fervor, with laughter.  Unfortunately, nothing is further from ZeroZeroZero than any kind of sense of humour.

ZeroZeroZero is too much the product of a monomania to be a good book. Saviano crushes the reader with his details, his enormous quantity of data, his disquisitions. Moreover, he doesn't seem to care. In Addicted, the second-to-last chapter of the book, he confesses:

Writing on cocaine is like consuming it. Every time you want more news, more information and the ones that you found are great, you can't do without them anymore. You are "addicted" [...] That's why I continue gathering them ad nauseam, more than it would be necessary, without being able to stop.

It's only then, after completing his hunt of the White Whale, when Saviano opens his heart and talks about his personal situation, living hidden from the mafia. In the last chapter of the book we can read:

I didn't want sacrifice, I didn't want reward. I wanted to understand, to write, to explain [...] That's what I wanted. But the wound of those stories have shallowed me. For me it's too late. I should have kept distances that I haven't been able to maintain.

Saviano calls himself an heretical saint, a monster.  He reflects on what he has become: an uncomfortable hero for everyone. This part is barely connected with the rest of the book, but it's the most interesting one. Saviano's literary talent is uncommon in a journalist and shines the most when talking about his personal experience: his célinism, again.

No, I don't believe that ZeroZeroZero is a good book. Nevertheless, it brings to the light the true face of drug traffic, so it may be an important one. In any case, ZeroZeroZero has something that makes it unique: the unexpected, almost unbelievable honesty of a just man.