Anatahan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anatahan is a little island where a group of Japanese soldiers find themselves in 1944. They are a ragtag bunch with a harsh leader. Already on the island are a severe man and a beautiful young woman. It is assumed at first that they are married but it turns out they have both suffered family losses. As time goes by, discipline disappears. The men begin to lust after the woman and she, at times, encourages them. Eventually, she is in danger. The men begin a sort of "Lord of the Flies" thing as they move to their baser instincts. There is death here and we begin to wonder who will be alive at the end. This is an oddity of a film. The great director Joseph von Sternberg did this in Japan with a Japanese cast in 1953. The strange thing is that he narrates the whole thing in a simplistic way. The characters speak Japanese throughout and we don't get to understand what they are saying. This is certainly worth seeing.

After many months of searching I located Josef's The Saga of Anatahan. It definitely held my attention and was a unique viewing experience. A completely Japanese war tale relayed in english (?) it has a strange beauty that is difficult to approximate in plain text. I don't know how Sternberg decided on this as his last cinematic statement, but it is certainly a fascinating b & w piece.

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

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

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

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

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

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