Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Cast: Isuzu Yamada, Kakuko Mori, Kinuyo Tanaka
Japan/1936-1946/Artificial Eye/377 mins
One of the greatest of all Japanese directors, Mizoguchi is best-known in the West for his late-period masterpieces like Ugetsu Monogatari . But this new collection shows that his most innovative and original work was done much earlier.
Sisters of the Gion follows two siblings who are forced to work as geishas and whose lives depend on wealthy if capricious men. Here, Mizoguchi's mature style manifests itself for the first time. The film opens with a remarkable travelling shot through a house being sold for auction, the first of a series of strategies for opening up space in domestic interiors. The camera is placed at a distance from the protagonists and complex emotional scenes are played out at length so that the actors can reach a new level of nuance in their performance.
Osaka Elegy is even more impressive in this regard; Mark Cousins used it in his documentary series, The Story of Film, as an example of Mizoguchi's artistry. But it's also bold in theme. The heroine is a young woman who decides to pay off her family debts by virtually prostituting herself to a local businessman. But she is no teary-eyed victim of fate; at the end, she strides forward, confidently delinquent, a proto-feminist in the making.
One of Mizoguchi's strangest and rarest films, Five Women Around Utamaro concerns one of Japan's greatest painters, a frequenter of brothels and depicter of courtesans. The film is a coded self-portrait and offers an interesting insight into the relationship between the director and his actresses. But it also indulges in the most erotic – and outrageous – scenes in Mizoguchi's cinema, including a Busby Berkeleyesque sequence of scantily-clad beauties fishing in the bay.
Story of the Late Chrysanthemums has only previously been available in this country in a terribly battered print. Here, its incredible beauty is readily apparent and it emerges as one of the true masterpieces of world cinema. The story of a struggling Kabuki actor supported by his long-suffering wife, it's both a great love story and an unflinching examination of the snobbery inherent in a rigidly traditional society. Its formally audacious but restrained and elegant style has been hugely influential on directors like Hou H'siao-H'sien, and its presence alone makes this collection an essential purchase.
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Starring: Minoru Takada, Tokihiko Okada, Kinuyo Tanaka
Japan/1930-33/BFI/264 mins
Night-time manhunts through deserted streets, confrontations in seedy hotel rooms, girls with guns and men in Fedoras – surely this isn't the same director who gave us the quiet family drama of Tokyo Story? But in his early career, Ozu was in thrall to American films, often aping their style as well as pinching their storylines.
So it is that these three films seem like a whirl of fast-moving tracking shots, noir lighting and crash-zoom reveals. Even when the hero is about to give himself up to the police, he wears his hat at a rakish angle, the epitome of movie poster cool. The real gem here is That Night's Wife, where this youthful zest collides headlong with the more mature Ozu. A father is reduced to stealing to pay for his sick daughter's medical bills. But he's tracked back home by a detective and his wife is forced to take desperate measures. The performances are extraordinarily subtle and there's a communication of character through close-ups of hands that would put Bresson to shame. A minor masterpiece waiting to be discovered.
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Starring: Setsuko Hara, Chikage Awashima, Yoshiko Okada
Japan/1933-1957/BFI/319 mins
Those who have been following the BFI's Ozu series so far might be surprised at the sombre tone of this latest trio of films, especially after the boisterousness of the Student Comedies. Indeed, Ozu is rarely linked with the social issues broached here, including prostitution, teenage pregnancy and office affairs, the kind of hard-hitting subjects usually associated with his contemporary, Mikio Naruse. But after watching this box set - especially the extraordinary Tokyo Twilight, one of the great neglected masterpieces of Japanese cinema – it's clear that these topics were just as germane to his cinema and that, in most respects, he out-Naruses Naruse.
It's a bit of a stretch to call them “melodramas”; neither florid or hysterical, they share the same measured tempo, discipline and quiet poetry of his other films. But they are strikingly more pessimistic, and the tears and anger that erupt are in stark contrast to the usual mood of passive resignation.
A Woman of Tokyo (1933) is a short but compelling tale of a young woman whose sacrifice for her brother is fatally misconstrued. It shares a kinship with Mizoguchi's Osaka Elegy, also recently released on DVD, and is a fascinating record of Ozu's developing style.
The other two films come from a much later period in his career, when he was much more assured as a director, and his focus had changed onto the problems of a post-war Japan coming to terms with Americanisation and new social mores within the family. Tokyo Twilight (1957) is a magnificent example of this later Ozu. Its story of a father struggling to help his two daughters in a time of crisis is shot in beautiful, if often menacing black and white, and brilliantly counterpoints the protagonists' tragedy with the disinterested and often comic interactions of those around them.
Early Spring (1956) is something of an odd one out in Ozu's work, concentrating on the tensions between a young professional couple. But it's an astonishingly complex and modern film, its darker moments recalling the pain in the underrated post-war drama, A Hen In The Wind (1948).
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Starring: Tatsuo Saito, Kinuyo Tanaka, Chishu Ryu
Japan/1929-1932/BFI/316 mins
“Life has become much more complicated.”
Watching this compilation of four features from Ozu's early career is rather like following the development of a young man, moving from the carefree days and boisterous antics of studenthood to the melancholy of the downtrodden businessman with his newfound responsibilities. It kicks off with Days of Youth (1929), a feather light comedy, heavily indebted to Harold Lloyd, with loads of sight gags and fratboy pranks, and ends with Where Now Are The Dreams of Youth? (1932), in which schoolboy humour gives way to a growing disillusionment that culminates in a genuinely shocking – and for Ozu – revelatory moment of violence.
The films, too, grow in confidence. Days of Youth is occasionally heavy-handed and the pacing of the comedy feels slack, while The Lady and the Beard (1931), is a broad farce with decidedly unnaturalistic performances, something of an odd-one-out in this collection and in Ozu's work in general. But by the time we get to Dreams of Youth, Ozu's mature style has manifested itself, and the narrative moves smoothly between slapstick comedy and genuine tragedy.
There's also the sense of a repertory group of actors coming together, as Ozu assembles his favourite performers for the first time. Kinuyo Tanaka appears as the fresh-faced young love interest, Chishu Ryu as a happy-go-lucky pal. This most family-oriented of directors is building a surrogate family of his own, who we will go on to follow as they and their characters age throughout Ozu's career. And these films also offer Ozu the opportunity to portray his extended “family” offscreen, the scriptwriters and production designers, his friends and colleagues, whose breadline wages and ragbag lifestyles parallel those of the student protagonists.
I Flunked But... (1930), the fourth film in this group, is arguably the most straightforwardly enjoyable. Throughout his comedies, Ozu celebrates the slacker or chancer, someone who brazenly cheats at exams or sneaks out of class to enter a cheerleading contest. This joie de vivre reaches its apotheosis here, with a gang of five dancing into class, and their attempts to cheat the teachers taking up the first third of the narrative.
It's also the film that most clearly demonstrates what's wonderful about Ozu. So much is communicated through so little, so that two feet standing on tiptoe, slowly lowering to the earth, convey the brutal disappointment of failure. In one meal scene, the rhythm which which the lads eat their rice articulates feelings which the strongest dialogue would struggle to get near. And Ozu shows that he is not afraid to use dead time, one long scene following the failed graduate as he skulks around at home eliciting an extraordinarily subtle performance from young Tatsuo Saito, that looks forward to the more complex work of Ozu's mature period.
Overall, this is an excellent package from the BFI, rounded out with contextualising essays by major critics – silent cinema curator, Bryony Dixon, and Asian cinema experts, Tony Rayns and Alexander Jacoby – a fragment of the now lost I Graduated But... (1929) and a useful 20-minute primer on Ozu, also from Rayns. One word of advice, though – avoid the newly-commissioned scores. Silence is golden.
Director: Sadao Yamanaka
Cast: Denjiro Okochi, Setsuko Hara, Chojuro Kawarasaki
Japan/1935-1937/Masters of Cinema/260 mins
If Humanity and Paper Balloons is not as well-known as other 1930s masterpieces such as La Regle du jeu or L'Atalante, it's not because of any difference in quality; rather, it's through the ignorance of Western cinephiles, only now catching up with the richness of Japanese cinema. And if its director, Sadao Yamanaka, is not as familiar to us as Jean Vigo, then it's intriguing to find that in his home country he enjoys a similar reputation.
Like Vigo, he died young – at just 29, he fell fatally ill while serving in the Japanese army. But in the six years previous to this, he churned out 22 films, only three of which survive, and which are collected together in this DVD set. His work, like Vigo's, was subversive, but more subtly so, since being a Leftist in imperialist, military-run Japan at that time was tantamount to suicide. So he followed the example of many of his peers and hid his progressive ideas in the jidaigeki, or period samurai film, crafting complex dramas, which were both fun and witty, penetrating in their analysis of corruption and hypocrisy in the ruling elite, sympathetic and boisterous in their portrayal of life in the lower classes.
In The Million Ryo Pot, Yamanaka drops a popular samurai hero of the time – the one-armed, one-eyed, Sazen Tange – into a light-hearted story, where everyone seeks a pot whose carvings form a treasure map. Yamanaka has everyone eventually forget about the money as they pursue more meaningful relationships with each other. Similarly, in Kochiyama Soshun, a stolen Samurai knife simply becomes a McGuffin through which Yamanaka can explore the various layers of Edo society.
Both films bristle with rich and complex characterisations, and the world of pre-20th century Japan is vividly realised, from a brothel where men practise archery between bouts of drinking to a gripping moonlight chase through open-air sewers.
But Humanity and Paper Balloons is something else again. It opens with a kaleidoscopic portrait of a working-class suburb, drifting between characters Altman-style, before finally focusing on two men; one a penniless samurai abandoned by his caste, the other a cocky jack-the-lad intent on a bizarre kidnapping scheme. As in Kochiyama Soshun, it all ends in tragedy, but not before the two have found common cause against the local figures of authority. The complexity of the plotting, the modernity of the performances, the balancing of tone between bawdy comedy, acute satire, and searing melodrama – everything is so perfectly handled.
This film alone would make the set an essential purchase. But with the other two films thrown in, this release represents not just great value for money, but a significant step forward in the appreciation of a major director.