Anatahan (The Saga of Anatahan)

Death was hunting the jungle…” the narrator of the film “Anatahan” (1953) announces.  “And Keiko was the bait on Death’s hook.”  These phrases, more or less, summarize the plot of Josef von Sternberg’s last film, the eccentric “Saga of Anatahan.”  Of course, the plot is not the film and “Anatahan” is much more than its story:  a curious, unique fever dream, an exotic parable of lust, jealousy and humiliation --  subjects that were central to the director’s greatest work, his symphonies of abject degradation, the two Jannings’ films “The Last Command” (1928) and “The Blue Angel” (1930) and the great cycle of pictures with Marlene Dietrich, including movies like “The Scarlet Empress” (1934), “Dishonored (1932), and “The Devil is a Woman (1935).    A dozen or so Japanese sailors find themselves shipwrecked on a desert island in the Marianas -- the islands are “ a jest of nature” some of them “coral and others volcanic rocks”, stones protruding from “the Marianas trench 35,000 feet deep.”  On the island, a man haunts the ruins of a plantation, living with a woman, the beautiful and fickle Keiko.  Although the castaways believe the man and woman are married, in fact, they are simply living together -- each have families back on Japan “a thousand miles to the north.”  The seamen discover a plane shot down in the jungle and find some guns.  They also erect a mountain-top machine-gun nest with the weapon aimed at the turbulent sea and the brutal-looking rocks that surround the island of Anatahan.  The men brew cocoanut wine, get drunk, and begin to quarrel over the beautiful woman who sometimes teases them by dancing provocatively or bathing while they peep at her or squatting nude on the stony shore of the island.  Three men claim the woman on the basis of the fact that they are armed with the revolvers taken from the plane and knives.  For a time, they enjoy her in a perverse menage a quatre, but, the relationship is unstable and  the menfight and kill one another.  Keiko returns to the plantation overseer, but quarrels with him and he is also stabbed to death.  Another man hunts her next lover with a trident and murders him in the jungle.  A plane flies overhead and announces that the war has been over for five years -- it is now 1951.  But the soldiers stubbornly refuse to leave the island, believing the brochures falling from the sky to be a trick of the enemy.  Keiko knows better.  As the men draw straws to decide who will possess her, she flees through the jungle, dives into the ocean naked, and, apparently, swims to the rescue ship a mile offshore.  A year later, the men are retrieved from the island and return to Japan.  In a delirious final sequence, journalists’ cameras flash their brilliant bulbs at the men as they march from a huge, shadowy aircraft, obviously a rear projection toward the camera.  Keiko then appears in the dense shadow beneath the plane, a spectral figure with a pale face against the darkness of fuselage interlocked with wheels and wings.  The men who died on the island arise from the black shadows and, also, walk toward her, each man’s brow and eyes briefly illumined before he vanishes and von Sternberg’s camera lingers on the ghostly woman’s pale, inscrutable, and beautiful face.  Expelled from Hollywood, von Sternberg wrote and shot and directed “Anatahan”, filming the movie in an abandoned aircraft hangar in Kyoto.  The movie is ridiculously low-budget:  grainy documentary footage of ships at sea and explosions intercut with images of an artificial jungle of tangled vines and tree limbs haphazardly heaped up on the floor, thickets of fronds placed here and there to cast marvelous intricate shadows upon the actor’s faces and bare torsos.  The sets are claustrophobic and like black and white photographs of huge field paintings by Jackson Pollock.  The characters move through a dense haze of light and darkness, a sort of camouflage pattern that covers the entire screen and into which people vanish, sinking as if into murky water, or, suddenly, appear as pale faces, shredded by deep shadow.  The jungle is filmed as a kind of labyrinth, but without depth, a horizontal patterned frieze like a monochrome mural by Pollock.  Von Sternberg shoots the film in Japanese without subtitles but provides an oddly distanced, weirdly eloquent and dispassionate narration for the action.  The director apologizes repeatedly for showing us things that “we can’t know…” admitting that the images are dramatizations based on speculation.  In one sequence, the director adopting the tone of a quasi-Voltaire says that “to invade their privacy would be inexcusable but we do so to learn truths about ourselves.  We are human and nothing human is alien to us” -- these words spoken over torrid shots of Keiko half-naked reclining in a hammock, her face and bosom all dappled with shadow.  The movie contains long sequences of people wandering around the artificial jungle either hunting one another with trident or knife or gun or searching for Keiko.  Sometimes, the characters pray at a Shinto shrine or sing the National Anthem or dance drunkenly with Keiko, the men flopping their arms around like clumsily managed marionettes.  These images are intercut with shots of the machine gun nest on the hilltop, against an obviously painted background -- the men pointlessly defending this nightmare “Gilligan’s Island.”  The entire thing is bizarre, kitschy, a work of art that trembles on the edge of complete folly; although von Sternberg’s narration is anthropological, epigrammatic, and, even, quite eloquent, his words also aren’t that much different from the sort of frenzied, pretentious soliloquies that litter the stranger works of Ed Wood, for instance, some of the hysterical rants in “Plan 9 from Outer Space”.  The bargain basement effects and set decoration is distracting at first, but, ultimately, achieves a kind of eerie grandeur particularly in the last five minutes when the men, and the ghosts of the dead, return to Japan -- in these scenes, the very paucity of resources and the ingenuity of von Sternberg’s staging triumph over his lack of resources.  The castaways have a little cemetery and in one scene they bury one of the seamen murdered in the war over Keiko.  “They laid the dead man to rest in the moist soil and they were sad.  Even an insect that is only an inch long is one-half inch of soul.”  I don’t know what that means, but it’s an extraordinary sentence.