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the classical cinema in japan

as China’s Gone with the Wind, the film can still provoke floods of tears from older Chinese audiences when shown today. The film opens with an ideal couple and their son. However, they are separated by the war when the husband retreats with the Kuomintang to the interior. There he is gradually corrupted and becomes the lover of a rich society woman. His faithful wife suffers through the war in Shanghai, waiting patiently for his return, but he comes back as a Kuomintang carpet-bagger, and the film climaxes when his wife discovers that he is the husband of the woman for whom she is working as a maid. He disowns her and she drowns herself in the Yangtze. Disillusion with the Kuomintang and their hangers-on is even more pronounced in the films that depict post-war conditions. Films like Myriads of Lights, Crows and Sparrows, and San Mao (adapted from a newspaper cartoon about an orphan) were all enjoyable and humorous, but none attempted to hide the appalling social contradictions of these years and the resentment those who had suffered in Shanghai felt towards their compatriots who had managed to profit from the war. Stylistically, these films featured more subtle ensemble playing from actors seasoned by many years of stage work. Although less obviously pastiched than the films of the 1930s, they too represent post-colonial appropriation for prerevolutionary ends, but this time drawing on the western spoken stage drama and its cinematic equivalents, rather than popular culture.

The second ‘golden age’ ended China’s pre-1949 cinematic history on a fitting high note. In retrospect, it is remarkable that five years of film-making in the 1930s (1932–7) and three years in the 1940s (1946–9) should stand out so strongly in a total film-making history of forty years (1909–49). However, it would be wrong to suggest that these two ‘golden ages’ appeared out of the blue. Rather, they represented windows of opportunity when talent that had been long developing was able to make itself visible. Some would argue that such an opportunity was not to present itself again for another fortyfive years, until One and Eight and Yellow Earth (both 1984) heralded the arrival of another golden age of Chinese cinema.

Bibliography Bergeron, Re´gis (1977), Le Cine´ma chinois, i: 1905–1949. Berry, Chris (ed.) (1991), Perspectives on Chinese Cinema. Cheng Jihua et al. (1963), Zhongguo dianying fazhanshi (‘History of the development of Chinese cinema’). Clark, Paul (1987), Chinese Cinema: Culture and Politics since 1949. Du Yunzhi (1972), Zhongguo Dianyingshi (‘History of Chinese cinema’). Leyda, Jay (1972), Dianying: Electric Shadows. Quiquemelle, Marie-Claire, and Passek, Jean-Loup (eds.) (1985), Le Cine´ma chinois. Toroptsev, Sergei (1979), Ocherk istorii kitaiskogo kino 1896–1966 (‘Essays on the history of Chinese cinema’).

The Classical Cinema in Japan hiroshi komatsu The Great Kanto Earthquake of the first of September 1923 destroyed Tokyo and the culture it had supported. The Japanese chose not to rebuild the city as it had been and abandoned its old forms for a new appearance. The destruction caused by the earthquake also gave the decisive impetus for the development of new kinds of Japanese film. From 1924 to the early 1930s a number of classics of Japanese cinema were made at Nikkatsu, Shochiku, Teikine, Makino, and some small independent studios. Production and invention were stimulated as archaic forms were abandoned and film-makers embraced new European art cinemas. Although the destruction caused by the earthquake was the decisive catalyst for these changes, they had been underway for several years before. As early as 1922, such films as Reiko no wakare (‘On the verge of spiritual light’, Kokkatsu/Kiyomatsu Hosoyama) and Yoˆjo no mai (‘Dance of a sorceress’, Shochiku/Yoshinobu Ikeda) had appeared in

the New School genre. These were influenced by German Expressionism, partially employing the contorted stage settings featured in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) and From Morn to Midnight (Von Morgens bis Mitternacht, 1920). Formula rather than story had been the important factor in Japanese film-making since its inception, and so the German expressionist style could be incorporated very swiftly. Film-makers took the German imports as a ‘film art’ template; a new formula to reproduce. Kenji Mizoguchi imitated the form in his Chi to rei (‘Blood and Spirit’, Nikkatsu, 1923) completed just before the earthquake and one of the last to be made in Nikkatsu’s famous Mukojima studio. The earthquake did not destroy the Mukojima studio, but it made film-making in Tokyo very difficult. Nikkatsu closed the studio and moved its entire production section to Kyoto, where it would remain for the next ten years. Kyoto, the ancient capital, was traditionally the 413

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production centre of period drama (jidaigeki), and the surroundings of old houses and streets would seem to provide a perfect backdrop for this form. Modern dramas (gendaigeki) were always set in Tokyo, but now Nikkatsu had to shoot them in the Kyoto studio with set reproductions of the city. The Kyoto production base allowed for the development of artificial styles, particularly Expressionism, in the sets of Nikkatsu gendaigeki. The other major company, Shochiku, also moved the work of its Tokyo studio to Kyoto in the aftermath of the earthquake, but they found it difficult to create the right atmosphere for gendaigeki there and returned to Tokyo two months later. The studio-based gendaigeki produced by Nikkatsu in Kyoto were clearly distinguishable from those made in Tokyo by Shochiku and other companies. The Tokyo films emphasized the place of human relationships in modern society by representing the daily lives of ordinary people. Nikkatsu, on the other hand, produced films in its Kyoto studio which depicted a clearly fictive world detached from daily life, similar to that represented in literary and theatrical works or foreign films. Two directors, Minoru Murata and Yutaka Abe, were instrumental in establishing the characteristics of Nikkatsu gendaigeki although they had very different influences and styles. European cultural influences had been felt in Japan since the Meiji period, and it was from

Minoru Murata’s German Expressionist-influenced Osumi to haha (‘Osumi and Mother’, 1924)

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1930–1960

these sources that Murata took his inspiration. His film Rojo no reikon (‘Soul on the road’, Shochiku, 1921) represented the imaginative world and lacked typical Japanese realism. He studied German film and theatre and the impact of Expressionism can be seen in his film for Nikkatsu, Untenshu Eikichi (‘Eikichi the chauffeur’, 1924), in which he partially employed expressionist settings. In utilizing chiaroscuro, added quite artificially on to the theme of the drama, Murata presaged future Japanese films, notably the works of Teinosuke Kinugasa. A scene from Seisaku no tsuma (‘Seisaku’s wife’, Nikkatsu, 1924), in which the heroine in fetters, played by Kumeko Urabe, stands in despair on the street, is similar to the last scene in Kinugasa’s Jujiro (‘Crossroads’, 1928), but was in fact borrowed directly from the snowy night scene in the German expressionist film From Morn to Midnight. Osumi to haha (‘Osumi and mother’, 1924) and especially Machi no tejinashi (‘The conjuror in the town’, 1925), with which he visited France and Germany, showed Murata’s penchant for European art cinema. Yutaka Abe, the other major director of Nikkatsu gendaigeki, had been working as an actor in Los Angeles, and brought Hollywood-style modernism to Japanese film. Abe particularly admired the sophisticated comedy of Lubitsch, and was inspired to put erotic elements into his works. His films can be seen as a reaction to the New School melodrama. Abe’s films Ashi ni sawatta onna (‘The

the classical cinema in japan

woman who touched the legs’, 1926), Riku no ningyo (‘The mermaid on the land’, 1926), and Kare wo meguru gonin no onna (‘Five women around him’, 1927) were welcomed by film-goers, and their popularity led to a fundamental change in the form of gendaigeki. The trend towards modernism can also be seen in the films produced by Shochiku, the company that had imitated the methods of American cinema from its earliest days. At Shochiku the producer Shiro Kido encouraged directors to make films which dealt with the lives of the middle classes, who composed the majority of the cinema audience at that time. Traditionally, Japanese cinema had been based on established plot formulas, the worlds created on screen being detached from the reality of the lives of the audiences. By focusing on the daily life of the middle classes, Shochiku films of this period manifested an awareness of class without overt political implications. However, this deviation from traditional cinematic formula and subject-matter was not wholly revolutionary. The description of ordinary people’s daily lives existed in Japanese literature of the Edo period. American films, particularly those of the Bluebird Company, were popular in Japan in the 1910s and so audiences had seen that the daily life of ordinary people could be an entertaining and attractive cinematic spectacle. Shochiku’s middle-class films were characterized by a message of class-consciousness seen through the scenes of daily life that attracted the middle-class audiences; themes like the problems of a white-collar worker. Gendaigeki was not the only form to change fundamentally after the earthquake. Even the Kyuha (Old School) genre, the most traditional costume drama, changed in this period. While very traditional films continued to be made, a new form developed from its roots and became known as period drama or jidaigeki. This genre too moved away from the repetition of formulas based on familiar and traditional stories. The more modern form of jidaigeki was established around 1923–4, and after the death in 1926 of Matsunosuke Onoe, the superstar actor who had virtually symbolized the Old School style, the new form completely detached itself from the archaism of the traditional costume drama. Since 1909, when he directed his first film at the Yokota Company, Shozo Makino had made many Matsunosuke Onoe films as a specialist Old School director. However, in 1921 he founded his own independent company, Makino, and began to make period dramas that differed in form and style from the formula Matsunosuke Onoe films. Not only did he direct, but he acted as a producer, discovering and nurturing talented directors, script-writers, and actors. Among the directors, Koroku Numata, Bansho Kanamori, and Buntaro Futagawa made jidaigeki for the Makino Company. The writer Rokuhei Susukita developed scripts that had nihilistic and sometimes anarchistic

content, injecting a current of leftist ideology into the jidaigeki. Despite the death of their star Matsunosuke Onoe, the Nikkatsu studio continued to make orthodox jidaigeki. Tomiyasu Ikeda, the main jidaigeki director at the studio, borrowed his themes from well-known and traditional historical stories, and so his films lacked the boldness of Makino’s period films in which the heroes were always heading towards ruin. Ikeda directed large-scale static jidaigeki such as Sonno joi (‘Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians’, Nikkatsu, 1927) and Jiraika gumi (‘Jiraika group’, Nikkatsu, 1927–8), and he became the undisputed master of the most traditional jidaigeki from the late 1920s into the 1930s. However, not all of Nikkatsu’s jidaigeki directors were content with making orthodox period drama. For example, Kichiro Tsuji conducted unique experiments with the form. His film Jigoku ni ochita Mitsuhide (‘Mitsuhide gone to hell’, Nikkatsu, 1926) was a me´lange of jidaigeki, comedy, revue, Expressionism, and gendaigeki. He was sensitive to the influences of film art and introduced them into his own work. In the late 1920s he even approached the proletarian cinema, making the masterpiece Kasahari kenpo (‘The mending umbrella swordsmanship’, Nikkatsu, 1929), but as the Japanese socialist movement was suppressed by state and police he returned to orthodox jidaigeki, building a world that evoked a period feel. However, it was Daisuke Ito who raised jidaigeki of the late 1920s to the heights of what was seen in retrospect to be avant-garde. His films, like the trilogy of Chuji tabi nikki (‘A diary of Chuji’s travels’, Nikkatsu, 1927), have extremely pessimistic themes, but were technically advanced and critically acclaimed for their moving camera, rapid cutting, and refined, plastic beauty. Although famous for avant-garde films like Kurutta ippeiji (A Page of Madness, 1926), Teinosuke Kinugasa also opened a new horizon for jidaigeki by his effective direction. He originally acted as an oyama (the male actor who always played women’s roles) in the New School films made at Nikkatsu’s Mukojima studio, before joining the Makino Company as director. He became acquainted with the contemporary young novelists with whom he made Nichirin (‘The sun’, 1925), a film dealing with Japanese mythology. The influence of European art cinema can be seen in his films Kurutta ippeiji and Jujiro (1928). These films were exhibited in Tokyo in a theatre normally reserved for foreign films and attracted a different audience from the usual for Japanese films. The jidaigeki form, then, was continuously refined in the late 1920s, through the innovation of many directors in different production companies. The films’ contents were constituted not only from the traditional sword plays, but also from the ideas inspired by new ideologies. Daisuke Ito’s jidaigeki of this period described the 415

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oppression of townspeople and peasants, and riots against the ruling classes became an important theme in some jidaigeki. Rebellion by the people was too controversial a subject to be dealt with directly in the cinema, but the jidaigeki were set in a period over 100 years previously and so some ideological content was tolerated. Thus out of traditional period drama a new form of leftist cinema, the tendency film, developed. In 1929 Tomu Uchida’s Ikeru ningyo (‘A living doll’) was released from Nikkatsu’s Kyoto studio. This gendaigeki dealt with the themes of evil and the contradictions of capitalist society, and was one of the first true tendency films. Following this model, Nikkatsu made Tokai kokyogaku (‘Metropolitan symphony’, 1929, directed by Kenji Mizoguchi) and Kono haha wo miyo (‘Look at this mother’, 1930, by Tomotake Tasaka), employing realist forms influenced by Soviet and German cinema. The success of Nikkatsu’s tendency films caused a wave of imitators. Even Teikine, the film company that specialized in entertainment films, followed the trend by making Nani ga kanojo wo so saseta ka (‘What made her do it?’, 1930, directed by Shigeyoshi Suzuki), depicting the life of a povertystricken female arsonist. This achieved particular boxoffice success, largely because it lightened its social criticism with vulgar elements to amuse the audience. The censor interfered with all tendency films, particularly cutting parts that represented the destruction of social order. It was impossible for films to admire revolution or to suggest the legitimacy of Communism, and even the representation of the bare reality of poor people was prohibited. This meant that the degree of realism in these tendency films was weaker than that of their Soviet and German counterparts. Furthermore, to attract audiences the tendency films had to depend on sensationalist subject-matter, which limited the possibility of the ideological development of the film. However, they opened the eyes of Japanese film-makers and audiences to the reality of society, at the same time as influencing the development of the film industry by incorporating the methods of European realist cinema. The production of tendency film indicated the difference in the characters of the two main film companies in Japan: Nikkatsu was a liberal company boldly producing this kind of film in its Kyoto studio, but Shochiku, which was founded on the conformist ideology of American cinema, remained wary of the ‘dangerous’ ideology of the tendency film. However, after the tremendous success of Nani ga kanojo wo so saseta ka, even Shochiku had to make concessions to the new form. Yasujiro Shimazu directed Seikatsu sen ABC (‘Life line ABC’, 1931) for Shochiku, containing scenes of striking workers. The tendency film continued to be immensely popular up to 1931, when the censor began to interfere more severely than ever, until such films became impossible to release. 416

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As tendency films disappeared, propaganda of a different kind took its place. In 1932 Shochiku and some small companies began to make films that glorified war and nationalistic ideology, particularly supporting Japan’s Manchurian policy.

the move to sound Sound and silent film coexisted in Japan for many years, with silent films being made up until 1938. There were several reasons for this, both financial and cultural. First, Japanese film companies of the early 1930s tended to be insufficiently financially developed to equip their studios with the machinery for sound film production. Even if the studio was so equipped, it took time and money to install the necessary sound film projectors and amplifiers in all the cinemas. As long as some could only show silent films, these had to be made in parallel with sound films. The second reason for the slow transition to sound was the resistance of the benshi (who explained the filmic image to the audience). They fought the transfer to sound film production in order to protect their jobs and positions. Indeed in Japan some of the audience went to the movies for the pleasure of hearing the skill of the benshi. Japanese audiences had been used to the role of the benshi, which had given films a vocal commentary from their earliest days, and sound film was therefore not experienced as so revolutionary in Japan as it was in Europe and the USA. Despite these obstacles, sound films were produced in Japan from a relatively early date. In 1925 Yoshizo Minagawa acquired the rights to Lee De Forest’s Phonofilm ˆkii), and several and renamed it Mina Talkie (Mina To sound films were produced by this system from 1927 to 1930, including Kenji Mizoguchi’s first sound feature Furusato (‘Hometown’, Nikkatsu, 1930). In 1928 Masao Tojo invented the Eastphone (Iisuto Fon) system that reproduced sound on discs, in a similar manner to Vitaphone. Using this system, sound films began to be made at the Nikkatsu and Teikine studios. These two methods of sound production were dropped when superior systems were invented. One of these, the Tsuchihashi sound system developed by Takeo Tsuchihashi, came to be widely used, notably on one of the first complete sound films made in Japan, Heinosuke Gosho’s Madamu to nyobo (‘The neighbour’s wife and mine’, Shochiku, 1931). However, the production of sound films was not realized systematically, and even at Shochiku it took four months to produce Madamu to nyobo’s successor: Gosho’s Waka ki hi no kangeki (‘The deep emotion in one’s youth’, Shochiku, 1931). Shochiku and Shinko Kinema adopted the Tsuchihashi process. Nikkatsu, however, forced to abandon the primitive Mina Talkie system and lagging behind its rivals in sound film production, adopted the Western Electric system, but did not produce a film with it until Daisuke Ito’s Tange sazen in 1933. PCL developed a system and

the classical cinema in japan

A scene from Heinosuke Gosho’s comedy Madamu to nyobo (‘My neighbour’s wife and mine’, 1931), one of the first Japanese films with synchronized sound

recorded sound for news films and the features of Nikkatsu. This proved successful and the company launched its own sound film production section in 1933. By the middle of the decade there was effectively a two-tier system, with the small companies continuing to make silent films, while all the films made by PCL and most of the output of the big studios Shochiku and Nikkatsu were shot with dialogue. By 1937 PCL was reorganized as Toho and had the best equipped sound studio in Tokyo. Many important Japanese directors did not make sound films until well into the 1930s. Yasujiro Ozu’s Mata au hi made (‘Until the day we meet again’, Shochiku, 1932) had music and sound effects but was still structured as a silent film with intertitles. During the 1930s his films became tinged with a kind of gloomy social consciousness, and this culminated in his first sound film Hitori musuko (The Only Son, Shochiku, 1936). However, unlike the tendency films of the previous decade, Ozu portrayed this gloom not as the result of the social structure, but rather as the loneliness of the human condition. This outlook, characteristic of Ozu’s films, emerged from Shochiku’s Kamata studio and its petty bourgeois tradition of films lacking an overt political ideology. However, Ozu’s films reached beyond the standard studio fare and attained a unique view of the depths of human loneliness. There was another director at Shochiku’s Kamata studio who found new and original expression through the

medium of the sound film. Working as a director since 1924, Hiroshi Shimizu had established himself as one of the most original stylists in the Japanese cinema of the time. His famous silent film Fue no shiratama (‘Diamond’, Shochiku, 1929) displayed avant-garde techniques with rapidly changing and unexpected camera angles, and the use of dream-like settings. The most remarkable of his sound films were the ‘Road Movies’ series, such as Arigatosan (‘Mr Thank-You’, Shochiku, 1936) and Hanagata senshu (‘A star athlete’, Shochiku, 1937), in which the camera becomes the eyes of the characters with the passing landscape shown through subjective shots. Shimizu refined this technique into a kind of abstraction. Mikio Naruse had been directing silent films for five years in Shochiku. His films were characterized by unique frame composition and character movement, which, with his relatively static direction, created the illusion of deep space, and films of great pictorial beauty. Shochiku was the starting-point of Naruse’s career, but even after he moved to Toho in 1935, his films carried echoes of the Shochiku style. These directors absorbed contemporary modernism from western cinema and in adapting it uncovered a modernist impulse in Japanese culture and cinema. Despite this shift to new film forms by many filmmakers, there were more orthodox directors working at Shochiku; notably Yasujiro Shimazu and Heinosuke 417

Kenji Mizoguchi (1898–1956)

Mizoguchi became internationally famous only in the last years of his life. Outside his native Japan his reputation still rests almost entirely on his films of the 1950s— mainly on the lyrical dramas with medieval settings such as Ugetsu monogatari (1953), Sansho dayu (‘Sansho the bailiff’, 1954), or Shin-heike monogatari (‘New tales of the Taira clan’, 1955), but also (to a lesser extent) on sensationalist modern dramas such as his very last film Street of Shame (Akasen chitai, 1956). But his career stretches back as far as 1920, when he first entered the Nikkatsu Mukojima studio as an assistant to New School (Shinpa) directors such as Eizo Tanaka, and it is to his roots in the New School of the 1920s that one must look for an understanding of his art. New School films were melodramas in the western sense. Derived from the urban drama that emerged in the Meiji period (particularly in the 1890s), they used male actors (oyama) to play female roles, and their stories typically focus on the sacrifice of women for the sake of the family. Mizoguchi began to direct his own New School dramas, employing oyama, at Mukojima in 1923, and the formula at the heart of the genre was to form the basis of his art throughout his career. During his early years, Mizoguchi worked in a wide variety of genres and styles. Outside the New School melo-

418

drama, he made detective films, expressionist films, war films, comedies, ghost stories, and proletarian films. During this period he also borrowed boldly from the expressive repertoire of American and European art cinema. In the scenario of Nihonbashi (1929), for example, he specifically called for a scene to be directed like a scene from Murnau’s Sunrise (1927). Using the formula of the New School as a foundation, he practised a variety of expressive techniques, which changed from film to film with each new-found enthusiasm. Throughout this early period he was a director with a multitude of faces, who cannot be easily grasped under the western notion of an auteur. It was with Kaminingyo haru no sasayaki (‘A paper doll’s whisper of spring’, 1926), from a script by Eizo Tanaka, that he first revealed his own accomplished Japanese style, inheriting the spirit of Tanaka’s own masterpiece Kyoya erimise (‘Kyoya, the collar shop’, 1922). But he also made a number of mediocre films, both then and later; even in the post-war period he continued to work outside his favoured mode (as in the Americaninfluenced Wara koi wa moenu—‘My love has been burning’, 1949), with somewhat uneven results. In spite of this diversity of output, his concern for persecuted women inherent in the New School tradition is consistent to the end. This is particularly evident in the trilogy of films adapted from the novels of Kyoka Izumi: Nihonbashi, Taki no shiraito (‘The water magician’, 1933) and Orizuru Osen (‘The downfall of Osen’, 1935). But the influence of New School schemas can also be seen in his

‘tendency’ films (realist, political dramas), such as Tokai kokyogaku (‘Metropolitan symphony’, 1929) or Shikamo karera wa yuku (‘And yet they go on’, 1931). Involvement in the tendency film seems to have changed Mizoguchi’s attitude towards women. In New School films, women end up destroyed victims of male society. But in Mizoguchi’s work from the 1930s onwards the women characters are vital enough to fight for their own survival against the social system, as in Naniwa erejii (‘Osaka elegy’, 1936). His later films are often centred on women who are resilient and even powerful. In the early period Mizoguchi absorbed many stylistic influences from foreign cinema, beginning with the expressionist Chi to rei (‘Body and soul’, 1923). In the late 20s he experimented with bold devices like rapidly changing scenes, frequent dissolves, and (in the trilogy of Izumi adaptations) a unique use of flashback. These traits are the opposite of what was to become his mature style, characterized by long takes and unobtrusive direction, as it emerges in Zangiku monogatari (The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, 1939) and Genroku chusingura (The Loyal Forty-seven Ronin, 1941). If one sees the New School film form as at the heart of Mizoguchi’s work, his most famous post-war films can be more richly interpreted. The suffering women of Ugetsu monogatari and Sansho dayu, and the vital women of The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, 1952) and Music of Gion (Gion bayashi, 1953), may seem different, but they share the same roots. The static and yet lyrical images in his post-war works were only created after passing through the diverse film forms of the foreign avantgarde and the New School films of the Mukojima studio. HIROSHI KOMATSU Select Filmography Kaminingyo haru no sasayaki (1926); Tokai kokyogaku (1929); Nihonbashi (1929); Taki no shiraito (1933); Orizuru Osen (1935); Naniwa erejii (1936); Zangiku monogatari (1939); Genroku chusingura (1941); The Life of Oharu (1952); Music of the Gion (1953); Ugetsu monogatari (1953); Sansho dayu (1954); Shin-heike monogatari (1955); Street of Shame (1956) Bibliography Freiberg, Freda (1981), Women in Mizoguchi Films. Kirihara, Donald (1992), Patterns of Time: Mizoguchi and the 1930s. McDonald, Keiko (1984), Mizoguchi.

Gosho. Although Shimazu did not develop such a personal style as some of his contemporaries, he made many largescale star-vehicles within the Shochiku studio system. He was often conservative in his direction, but he came to be considered one of the most trustworthy directors at Shochiku by making sensitive films such as Tonari no yaechan (‘The girl next door’, 1934). Heinosuke Gosho was another of the more orthodox directors at Shochiku, and he was entrusted with the company’s first two sound pictures. His personal cinematic style developed after the war, when his films began to display a tendency towards literary idealism, while his contemporary Naruse’s postwar films were still very much in the Shochiku studio style. From the mid-1920s onwards makers of jidaigeki were at the forefront of developing innovative forms of Japanese cinema. In the 1930s, two directors particularly became renowned for creating a new age of jidaigeki. Mansaku Itami directed nihilistic jidaigeki, making such films as Kokushi muso (1932) and Yamiuchi tosei (‘The life of a foul murderer’, 1932). Sadao Yamanaka introduced elements of the gendaigeki (modern drama genre) into the jidaigeki. In addition to these two, Nikkatsu’s director Tomu Uchida brought modern elements from his previous work to the sword film Adauchi senshu (‘The revenge champion’, Nikkatsu, 1931). The high-quality jidaigeki of the early 1930s incorporated the ironical content and style of contemporary European cinema. For example, Sadao Yamanaka’s jidaigeki, Hyakuman-ryo no tsubo (‘The pot worth a million ryo’, Nikkatsu, 1935) was directly inspired by Rene´ Clair’s Le Million (1931). Kenji Mizoguchi, who had developed many different themes in the course of his career, deployed his mastery of mise-en-sce`ne in a series of films that took the Meiji period as their setting. In the mid-1930s his film-making methods in Naniwa erejii (‘Osaka elegy’, Daiichi Eiga, 1936), Gion no kyodai (‘Sisters of the Gion’, Daiichi Eiga, 1936), and Aienkyo (‘The gorge between love and hate’, Shinko Kinema, 1937) heightened his fame as the maker of realist gendaigeki. This realism attained the highest stylistic beauty in Zangiku monogatari (The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, Shochiku, 1939). In an uneasy atmosphere of nationalism and war, Mizoguchi escaped into the world of traditional Japanese beauty, a direction he would successfully pursue for most of the rest of his career.

the war and after

Opposite: The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (Zangiku Monogatari, 1939)

The war cast a dark shadow over the whole Japanese film industry. A law was passed in 1939 which laid virtually all Japanese cinema under the control of state power. It became difficult to make films which did not praise the war or actively promote Fascist ideology. Yasujiro Ozu confined himself to a world unrelated to that of contemporary politics by making Chichi ariki (There was a Father, 419

Yasujiro Ozu (1903–1963)

At first an assistant cameraman, Yasujiro Ozu began directing for Shochiku Films, one of Japan’s largest studios, in 1927. When he died in 1963 at age 60, he had made fifty-three films, nearly all for Shochiku. By common consent, he had become Japan’s greatest director. During the late 1920s, Japanese cinema was in the process of ‘modernizing’. Studio heads had built a vertically integrated oligopoly comparable in many ways to America’s. Directors adapted many stylistic and narrative conventions of Hollywood cinema in an effort to compete with the slick, smooth films that attracted Japanese audiences. The young Ozu flourished in this milieu. Confessing himself bored by most Japanese films, he absorbed the lessons of Chaplin, Lloyd, and Lubitsch in order to create comedies that combined physical humour with social observation (I Was Born, but..., 1932). He made films about college life, street thugs (Dragnet Girl, 1933), and domestic tensions (Woman of Tokyo, 1933). In all of them he displayed a mastery of close-ups, editing, and shot design. His distinctive style was based on placing the camera at a low height and intricately intercutting objects with facial reactions. Ozu also displayed a quirky humour

which could create nansensu (‘nonsense’) gags around the circulation of a pair of mittens (Days of Youth, 1929) or an empty coin purse (Passing Fancy, 1933). He could also turn modern Tokyo into a landscape of mysterious poignancy. A shot may dwell on a scrap of paper fluttering down from an office building, a secretary’s compact on a window sill, an empty sidewalk. All of these tendencies came to focus in his first talking film, The Only Son (1936), about a country woman who comes to Tokyo and finds that her son has failed to make a career. By this time Ozu was already considered one of Japan’s top directors. His output slowed during the war period as a result of military service, but he did make such ‘home-front’ films as Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941) and There Was a Father (1942). His first post-war film was a ‘neighbourhood’ movie reminiscent of his 1930s work, Diary of a Tenement Gentleman (1947), but his most famous films would be elaborations of Brothers and Sisters—patient studies of an extended family undergoing a quiet crisis that brings out contrasts across generations. The most famous of these extended-family films is Tokyo Story (1953). Like the mother in The Only Son, an elderly couple journey to Tokyo. Their children, preoccupied with their jobs and families, treat them coldly; only their daughter-in-law Noriko, widow of their son lost in war, shows them affection. On the trip back, the grandmother falls ill; she dies at home. The grandfather gives

Yasujiro Ozu

Noriko his wife’s watch and resigns himself to a life alone. This bare anecdote becomes, in Ozu’s hands, an incomparable revelation of the varied ways in which humans express love, devotion, and responsibility. A child grows up and leaves the family; friends must separate; a son or daughter must marry; a widow or widower is left alone; an aged parent dies. In film after film, Ozu and his script-writer Noda played a set of variations on these elemental motifs. Each film, however, reworks the material in fresh ways. Late Spring (1949) is a largely sombre study of the necessity for father and daughter to part; Ozu’s last film, An Autumn Afternoon (1962), integrates the theme with a satire on consumerism and a nostalgia for pre-war values. Early Summer (1951) also centres on the daughter marrying, but here the action is embedded in a network of domestic comedy and lyrical evocation of suburban life. Ohayo (1959), in some ways a remake of the children’s comedy I Was Born, but..., treats domestic conflict in a more vulgar key, giving us a boys’ farting contest which Ozu and Noda compare to the aimless pleasantries of adult conversation. Throughout these works, Ozu’s style remained crisp, rigorous, and capable of great modulation of emphasis. His static shot/reverse-shots, often frontally positioned, match characters within the frame across the cut, so that the screen becomes a field of minutely changing masses and contours. His camera movements, often virtuosic in the 1930s work, are eliminated completely in the colour films—a decision which only throws into relief the vibrant hues of tiny props arranged carefully in the sets. Above all, his famous low camera height remains obstinately there, as if he aimed to show that across nearly forty years a single, simple stylistic choice could yield infinite gradations of composition and depth. The subtleties which Ozu found in apparently simple technique have their counterpart in the emotional richness of dramas which seem as close to everyday life as any the cinema has given us. DAVID BORDWELL Select Filmography Tokyo no gassho (Tokyo Chorus) (1931); Umarete wa mita keredo (I Was Born, but...) (1932); Tokyo no onna (Woman of Tokyo) (1933); Hijosen no onna (Dragnet Girl) (1933); Degigokoro (Passing Fancy) (1933); Hitori musuko (The Only Son) (1936); Todake no kyodai (Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family) (1941); Chichi ariki (There Was a Father) (1942); Nagaya shinshiroku (Diary of a Tenement Gentleman) (1947); Banshun (Late Spring) (1949); Bakushu (Early Summer) (1951); Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story) (1953); Higanbana (Equinox Flower) (1958); Ohayo (Good Morning) (1959); Samma no aji (An Autumn Afternoon) (1962) Bibliography Bordwell, David (1988), Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. Burch, Noël (1979), To the Distant Observer: Forms and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. Hasumi, Shiguehiko (1983), Kantoku Ozu Yasujiro (‘Director Yasujiro Ozu’). Richie, Donald (1974), Ozu

Shochiku, 1942), and Mizoguchi’s Genroku chusingura (The Loyal Forty-seven Ronin of the Genroku Era, Shochiku, 1941–2) was also a refuge from the war. But lesser directors could not avoid producing films that supported national policy. The Japanese cinema suffered in other ways in the war years; the number of productions decreased because of the lack of film stock, and by August 1945 40 per cent of all the cinemas in Japan had been destroyed by fire bombs. Problems continued after the war. In December 1945, four months after the Japanese surrender, the film law of 1939 was revoked, and in 1946, at the demand of the occupying forces, war criminals in the film world were expelled. The occupation army also prohibited the production of nationalistic films and ordered the burning of 225 films from the pre-war era. In this situation it became difficult to make jidaigeki, as they were based on traditional Japanese forms and took place in the past, and often appeared to promote fidelity to the feudalist system. Thus the studios produced films for democratic education and films attacking past nationalistic tendencies. Despite such externally imposed requirements on the content of films, the film industry enjoyed a freedom that had not existed in the war years. In the period just after the war hedonistic films of a kind never permitted before were produced. Mizoguchi was one of the directors who took advantage of this new freedom to express sensuality. Shochiku’s veteran directors reflected these developments in their own ways: Ozu’s films developed in the direction of static formalism, taking the daily world as their subject; Shimizu became interested in depicting the lives of children; Naruse, who had been working at Toho since 1935, continued to make melodramas from a realistic viewpoint; Gosho became an idealist director who made films that adopted the current ideology—existentialism for example—in a schematic and predictable way. The most important of the new directors of the postwar period was Akira Kurosawa. His films adopted a western style of construction to examine dramatically the subject of human nature. His mise-en-sce`ne was accessible to a foreign audience, and drew world-wide attention to Japanese cinema. Tadashi Imai’s films were concerned with the problems of Japanese society, although he sometimes presented them in a naı¨ve or simplistic manner. From the post-war period of democracy and enlightenment his films began to take on the ideology of the labour movement and leftwing politics. Keisuke Kinoshita continued to make traditional melodramas in the Shochiku style, but he opened audiences’ eyes to the possibility of new forms of art cinema in the 1950s. He also made the first Japanese colour feature Karumen kokyo ni kaeru (‘Carmen comes home’, Shochiku, 1951). Kaneto Shindo wrote many scripts for the major studios while he established an independent 421

sound cinema

production company to direct his own films. After the release of his most famous film Hadaka no shima (‘The naked island’, 1960) he tried, often unsuccessfully, to bring some experimental elements to his work. Television broadcasting began in Japan in 1953, and to cope with this new competition Japanese film companies moved towards the adoption of colour and the widescreen format. Nikkatsu made its first colour film in 1955, and Toei made the first widescreen film in 1957. By the late 1950s colour and widescreen were prerequisites for a film’s commercial success. In the Japanese cinema of the 1930s the coexistence of sound and silent film had continued for many years due to insufficient capital and special cultural circumstances. The 1940s cinema can be divided into two completely opposing periods; the Fascist ideology films of the war years and the films of democracy from the second half of the decade. The ideological changes established by the occupation did not add anything fundamentally new to

1930–1960

the form of Japanese cinema, as the assimilation of the American cinema style had already been achieved by the 1930s. The majority of film art in post-war Japan was created by directors with an occidental vision, like Kurosawa. However, at the same time Mizoguchi and Ozu, two important, if very different, directors from the pre-war period, could carry on developing their Japanese aesthetic in the post-war era. The war and liberation gave Japanese cinema the opportunity to foster both occidental and Japanese sensibilities. Bibliography Anderson, Joseph L., and Richie, Donald (1982), The Japanese Film: Art and Industry. Hirano, Kyoko (1992), Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo. Nolletti, Arthur, Jr., and Desser, David (eds.) (1992), Reframing Japanese Cinema: Authorship, Genre and History. Sato, Tadao, et al. (eds.) (1986), Koza Nihon Eiga, vols. iii–v. Tanaka, Junichiro (1976), Nihon Eiga Hattatsu Shi, vol. iii.

The Emergence of Australian Film bill routt pioneers and early features Projected films were first commercially exhibited in Australia on 22 August 1896 by an American magician, Carl Hertz, using British films and apparatus obtained from (R. W.) Paul’s Animatograph Works, Ltd. If this event may be considered the ‘birth’ of Australian cinema, the infant’s parentage is both unquestioned and significant. Like other parents, the United States and Britain came to be simultaneously loved and hated by the film industry they fostered, and to serve their progeny as models of patronage and exploitation, to be imitated and overcome. The film business in Australia was at first chiefly a business of exhibition. Many of the ‘pioneer’ Australian exhibitors T. J. West, Cozzens Spencer, and J. D. Williams (all of whom branched into production in some way) were British or American. For the first thirteen years the most successful and influential exhibitor and producer, however, was the Salvation Army, whose Limelight Division toured the country with shows featuring non-fiction and fiction films, slides, lectures, and live music. Birmingham-born Joseph Perry conceived, produced, and organized these elevating evenings of entertainment, becoming in the process Australia’s premier, if not absolutely its first, filmmaker. Perry’s evening-long programmes sometimes contained more than one hour of footage on a single non-fiction topic—what today would be called ‘feature-length docu422

mentaries’—and in 1904 he made a short fiction film about Australian bushranging, almost undoubtedly the earliest example of ‘an Australian cinema par excellence’, blending movement, landscape, and mythology in a kind of counterpart to the American Western. Within two years William Gibson, Millard Johnson, and John and Nevin Tait had combined Perry’s multi-reel documentaries and the bushranging legend into The Story of the Kelly Gang, a show featuring four reels of film tableaux glorifying the bandit rebel Ned Kelly along with a lecture commentary, musical accompaniment, and sound effects. The critical and commercial success of the Salvation Army and The Story of the Kelly Gang provided the impetus for six years of local multi-reel production before such lengthy films were common in most of the rest of the world, and set the pattern for the peculiarly Australian genre of bushranging films, which flourished until such films were banned by the state government of New South Wales in 1912 for their supposed pernicious (social and political) influence. Bushranging films have continued to be produced sporadically, at times secretly, to the present day. The vogue for bushranging films seems to have contributed to a short-lived boom in early Australian production. Between the release of John Gavin’s bushranging melodrama Thunderbolt in November 1910 and July 1912 some seventy-nine titles were released, at least nineteen