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Ikebana (1956)

Posted By: Someonelse

Date: 26 Mar 2011 12:35:21

Director: Hiroshi Teshigahara
Stars: Tomoko Naraoka and Sofu Teshigahara

Traces the history of ikebana, flower arranging: its origins, its formalization 500 years ago, the emergence of the rikka or standing flower style with its heaven-earth-man trinity, and the influence of Rikyu's simplicity. Enter the modern era, embodied at the Sogetsu School, where flower arranging is taught alongside modern sculpture and pottery. We visit a weekend class of flower arranging with novice and experienced students evaluated by a master, Sofu Teshigahara, the director's father. Then we watch the master prepare for his annual one-man show. If life is an unceasing spiritual journey, says the narrator, then art gives us the courage to go on.

Note: Sofu Teshigahara (1900–1979), Hiroshi's father, was the founder of the Sogetsu School of Ikebana flower arranging.

IMDB

Teshigahara's second early film was Ikebana, a documentary about the art of flower arranging and its evolution into various forms of modernist art and abstract sculpture — and especially these disciplines as practiced at his father's Sogetsu school. Made a few years after Hokusai, it's already obvious that Teshigahara's filmmaking has advanced considerably, and not just because the film is in color (a virtual must for any film about flowers). The film traces the development of the art of ikebana, an ancient art form that continues to change and evolve in response to the changing world. The film then goes from this general introduction to a focus on the Sogetsu school, run by Sofu Teshigahara, who himself developed from traditional ikebana to increasingly abstract and experimental forms, especially with large-scale abstract sculptures of metal and wood.

Ikebana (1956)

Ikebana the film itself follows an artistic path akin to this transition from one form to the next. Starting out as a traditional documentary, with a voiceover narration describing the art form's history and current status, the film increasingly moves into abstract and experimental territory of its own, exploring the nature of form and the parallels between art and the modern world. Teshigahara cuts back and forth from the ikebana sculptures of Sogetsu students and images of buildings under construction, neon-lit city streets at night, and public parks. His editing reflects an interest in drawing out the connections of lines and colors that link such images of reality to artistic constructions which are supposedly "abstract." The film's central premise, unspoken but heavily implied, is that even abstract art is a reflection on the world and on life — the name of one of Sofu's sculptures, a huge construction of knotted vines, makes this explicit. It's called simply "Life." Still later, Teshigahara's follows an image of a real human skull with an impressive series of permutations and variations on its basic shape, some cut from construction paper, others carved out of rock or assembled from a jigsaw of found materials. This series of meditations on mortality serves to point out how malleable our ideas of a particular form can be, and how even the most abstracted of images can suggest a familiar shape, especially the ubiquitous human face.

Ikebana (1956)

The joy that Teshigahara takes in this documentary is obvious. Ikebana was not only his father's obsession but his own; he took over as the headmaster of the Sogetsu school in 1980, dedicating much of his later career to the art of ikebana and focusing less and less on the cinema. In this film, though, he combines these two passions in a way that creates something new from the fusion of the two mediums. There's a real playful sensibility at work here, especially in the sequence in which Teshigahara overlays ikebana sculptures on his images, inserting a huge floating sculpture into a nighttime sky or replacing a statue of a samurai horseman with a jagged metal tower. It's especially interesting, since I've otherwise only seen Teshigahara work in black and white, to see how much attention he gives to color here, especially in the rich hues of flowers. This is a tribute to his father's artistry and skill, a history of ikebana, and an exploration of form and abstraction. That the film does so much in a mere half-hour, and does it so well, suggests a career that might have been for Teshigahara in this kind of exploratory documentary, a distant relation of the essay-film pioneered by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker in France around the same time.
Ed Howard, Only The Cinema