【一年一部代表作】BFI日本电影佳作选

评语：In the mid- and late-1920s, Japan produced more than 500 films annually; it’s heartbreaking to think that the vast majority of them have been lost. All the more reason to be grateful, then, for this surviving classic of the chanbara (action-oriented period film), the negative of which was preserved by its star Tsumasaburo Bando, who produced film for his own independent company. Bando gives a haunting performance as the honest samurai adrift in a corrupt world, and the film rises to a stylishly choreographed action climax. In 1965, benshi (silent-film narrator) Shunsui Matsuda devised a brilliant spoken commentary to accompany the film, a version of which is still performed live by his celebrated pupil, Midori Sawato. Once heard, never forgotten. by Alexander Jacoby

评语：Probably the most famous of all surviving Japanese films of the 1920s, A Page of Madness resulted from the unique collaboration between former onnagata (male actor playing female roles) star Teinosuke Kinugasa as director, and Yasunari Kawabata, the prominent novelist of Shinkankakuha (the New Perceptions School), as writer. It’s the first Japanese avant-garde feature, its stunning visuals comprising a magnificent mixture of different modes and influences: modern dance and traditional Japanese masks, the uncanny setting and chiaroscuro lighting of German Expressionist cinema, and the fast montage of that same era’s French Impressionist films. Set in a rural asylum, its psychologically poignant story includes vivid depictions of insanity and the madly rhythmic body. by Hideaki Fujiki

评语：This three-part epic, directed by a key figure in the evolution of the Japanese jidaigeki (period film), was so fondly remembered that the critics of Kinema Junpo (Japan’s Sight & Sound) pronounced it the greatest Japanese film ever made in 1959. By then, it had been unseen for decades and was believed to be lost, like the vast majority of Japanese silent films. The rediscovery of a condensed print in 1991 allowed a new generation of viewers to gain at least a partial appreciation of the qualities of this renowned film. It showcases the outstanding acting abilities of star Denjiro Okochi and the flair and flamboyance of Ito’s cinema, his love of extravagant camera movements, and his tragic vision, which (as scholar Mariann Lewinsky notes), exemplifies a narrative tradition in Japanese cinema stretching forward to Takeshi Kitano. by Alexander Jacoby

评语：Challenging the convention of the jidaigeki period film, the second avant-garde release by the director of A Page of Madness, Teinosuke Kinugasa, abandons sword fighting in favour of bringing a complex psychological drama into the genre. The dizzying superimposition of circular motifs and hyperbolic facial expressions, the setting of a creaky old house and amusement district, and shots from astonishing angles create harmony and tension within the ironic story of a sister who turns to prostiution in order to pay for her brother’s eye treatment. The film is believed to the first Japanese feature to be screened in Europe, brought by Kinugasa himself, to high acclaim in Berlin and Paris. by Hideaki Fujuki

评语：The earliest surviving film by one of the major masters of Japanese cinema, Yasujiro Ozu, Days of Youth is an outstandingly creative intersection of various styles and genres that had emerged in Hollywood, Europe and Japan by the late 1920s. Visual rhymes and gags echo Ernst Lubitsch’s sophisticated comedy and Harold Lloyd’s ludic humour; the theme of student romance during a skiing trip places it within the boom of Japanese student sports movies (and under the influence of its Hollywood equivalent); and the panoramic mountain landscapes resonate with the popular German mountain films of the time. Most striking, however, is Ozu’s appropriation of Frank Borzage’s silent weepie 7th Heaven (1927). Ozu works references to this celebrated Hollywood melodrama into Days of Youth in various ways (including the film’s poster on the wall), while providing a unique twist on its central romance. by Hideaki Fujiki

评语：Representative of the socially conscious ‘tendency films’ of the 1920s and 30s in Japan during a boom in Marxist ideas (Kenji Mizoguchi’s Metropolitan Symphony and Tomu Uchida’s A Living Puppet, both 1929, are other examples), Shigeyoshi Suzuki’s masterpiece showcases not simply the capitalist exploitation of the working class, but a series of the heroine’s struggles with a variety of oppressors. While Eisenstein-like insert shots effectively caricature the privileged, the episodic plot shrewdly reveals the heroine’s gradual transformation from naif to rebel. Perhaps it was the relative smallness of the studio, Teikoku Kinema Engei, that allowed such free reign for this ambitious director to boldly tackle themes of oppression and class. It struck a nerve with the public, causing riots and becoming the most commercially successful Japanese film of the silent era. by Hideaki Fujiki

评语：Japan came late to sound cinema; after a number of only moderately successful experiments, Heinosuke Gosho’s engaging comedy was the first feature-length Japanese talkie to win unequivocal critical praise and broad commercial success. The film’s innovative exploitation of the new medium, including imaginative use of off-screen sound, helped it seize the top spot in 1932’s Kinema Junpo critics’ poll. Significantly, the plot actually revolves around sound: an author struggling with writer’s block is further distracted by a series of noises, including the jazz music emanating from a nearby house. Gosho, a distinguished filmmaker neglected in the west, films the slapstick comedy with wit and lightness of touch, creating a convincing portrait of a traditional Japanese marriage threatened by the temptations of modernity. by Alexander Jacoby

评语：The worlds of children and adults are played off against each other through visual rhythm and comic wit in this most celebrated of Ozu’s silent films. The tale of two young brothers’ hijinks in the neighbourhood, and their dawning disillusionment with their dad, I Was Born, But… is also a nuanced satire of pre-war Japanese society. In the children’s carefree world, power relations are changeable and wisdom is important to survive; but in the work-bound world of the adults, hierarchy is fixed and submission to others – your boss, your family – is inevitable. The tension unfolds within Ozu’s elaborately arranged spaces of everyday life – home, school, company, and vacant land – in a suburb of rapidly modernising Tokyo. I Was Born, But… is the zenith of Japan’s petit-bourgeois film genre, offering a virtuosic ensemble of humorous performances, stylistic elegance and subtle social irony. by Hideaki Fujiki

评语：A contemporary of Ozu at Shochiku, Hiroshi Shimizu was also instrumental in the formulation of the studio’s singular brand of cinematic modernism during the pre-war era, reflecting and interrogating the culture of a rapidly industrialising and internationalising nation through a focus on young, often marginalised characters and refining a distinctive style in which camera movement, typically into the frame, predominates. All these elements are much in evidence in his electrifying masterpiece of Japanese silent cinema set in the cosmopolitan port city of Yokohama, featuring two mixed-race Japanese schoolgirls, Sunako and Dora, whose friendship is put under strain by the appearance of a motorcycle-riding charmer named Henry. by Jasper Sharp

评语：Anyone who loves Ozu should also love Yasujiro Shimazu, who pioneered the Shochiku tradition of understated domestic drama of which Ozu was the most distinguished exponent. This subtle, charming, funny and bittersweet story of family life and romance is his representative work, perfectly illustrating its director’s penchant for understated melodrama and his beguiling blend of humour and pathos. It gives the effect (in Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie’s phrase) “of eavesdropping on life itself”. Shimazu’s influence on the Japanese cinema cannot be overstated: Heinosuke Gosho, Shiro Toyoda, Kozaburo Yoshimura, Keisuke Kinoshita and Yuzo Kawashima all served as his assistants, and he fostered a realist tradition that remains central to Japanese film art. by Alexander Jacoby

评语：Although less well-known in the west than his contemporaries Ozu and Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse was a major figure of Japan’s golden age. His directing career began in 1930 and provided many classics up until his sublime final film, Scattered Clouds, in 1967. He already had more than 20 films to his name by 1935 (most now lost), when he turned to talkies. An early peak, Wife! Be like a Rose! traces the story of a fragmented family: a grown-up daughter living with her mum in Tokyo, while dad has absconded to the country with his mistress. The first Japanese film to see a theatrical release in the US, Wife! Be like a Rose! still has a sprightly, modern feel to it, following the daughter Kimiko (played by Sachiko Chiba, who later became Naruse’s wife) as she goes looking for the dad she’s convinced is living in embarrassing squalor. by Kaori Shoji

评语：Although Kenji Mizoguchi had been directing since 1923, he was convinced that he achieved true maturity as a filmmaker in 1936 with a remarkable diptych of films: Osaka Elegy, set in Japan’s commercial capital, and Sisters of the Gion, set in the geisha quarter of Japan’s cultural capital, Kyoto. Isuzu Yamada, best known in the west as Kurosawa’s Lady Macbeth (Throne of Blood), gives an indelible performance as the rebellious geisha who tries to play the system, only to find that it’s too powerful to challenge. Yoko Umemura plays her conservative sister, but neither rebellion nor conformity offers much hope. Mizoguchi perfected his early style, reliant on long shot and long take, with an often static camera, and delivered his social analysis with concision, force, rigour and scalpel-like precision. by Alexander Jacoby

评语：Of the 22 features Sadao Yamanaka directed between 1932 and 1937 only three remain. He’d directed his first six in 1932 alone, all of them – like the other 16 – jidaigeki, or period dramas. Humanity and Paper Balloons was his final film, a downbeat tale of suicide and disgraced ronin that spoke as much to its contemporary climate (the film was released domestically following a period of intense political violence) as it did to the feudal misery of its 18th-century Tokugawa-era setting. Despite being a devout student of American cinema, it’s Jean Vigo with whom Yamanaka is often compared. Like the French master, he died tragically young, at 28, closing his will with the imploration, “Please make good movies.” by Matthew Thrift

评语：Considering the time it was made, the rarely seen Fallen Blossoms is astonishingly bold in both style and content. It revolves around the fears and interactions of the all-female inhabitants of a geisha house in Kyoto’s Gion district while they batten down the hatches as the civil war leading to the Meiji Restoration reaches their front door. The drama unfolds as if in real time over the course of a single evening through a succession of unique shots in which the camera positioning remains inconspicuous yet is never once repeated. The result is a rigorous articulation of a living and working space in which, beyond the sounds of battle raging outside, any male presence is conspicuous by its absence. The film’s current obscurity is simply bewildering. by Jasper Sharp

评语：Set in Japan’s 19th-century theatre world, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums is Mizoguchi’s most precious pre-war film, and one of his masterpieces. It traces the doomed love story between a spoiled young kabuki actor (Shotaro Hanayagi) and a nanny (Kakuko Mori) who sacrifices everything for her lover’s career, while he casually takes her kindness and devotion as his due. Mizoguchi’s signature ‘one scene, one shot’ method reached its apogee here, with his gliding camera movements elegantly exploring the film’s backstage world. One evocative tracking shot following the lovers as they walk home at dawn is one for the ages. As so often in Mizoguchi’s work, Chrysanthemums is also a commentary on the sidelining of women in Japanese society. by Kaori Shoji

评语：Constrained by the draconian Film Law, which imposed restrictions on content and expression, Japanese cinema faced profound ideological challenges in the early 1940s. Three cheers, then, for this delicate and compassionate story of a woman doctor (Shizue Natsukawa) working in a leper colony, which, as Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie comment, “ignored national policy” in order to pronounce “a cry for humanism in an age marching toward militarism”. Director Shiro Toyoda remains unjustly neglected in the west; he was to go on to craft a string of postwar masterpieces, among them Wild Geese (1953), the atmospheric account of an unhappily married woman’s love for a student, and Marital Relations (1955), a wonderfully delicate account of the affair between the son of a wealthy family and a geisha. by Alexander Jacoby

评语：Like his 1938 charmer The Masseurs and a Woman, Hiroshi Shimizu’s Ornamental Hairpin takes place at a mountain spa, unravelling a simple, short-story-like tale that builds to an emotional wallop. It’s a brief-encounter drama in which a soldier on leave (played by Ozu favourite Chishu Ryu) injures himself by treading on a hairpin in the hotspring. Seeing only poetry in the situation, he begins to speculate on what the woman who dropped it might be like, whereupon the lady in question (Kinuyo Tanaka) returns to the spa from Tokyo in contrition. Favouring outdoor shooting and improvisation, Shimizu’s films of this period are often deceptively slight and agreeable; like a revivifying glug from a mountain stream. Ornamental Hairpin gains its quiet power from the picture it traces of the world beyond this forest idyll: the war to which the soldier must return, and the patron who awaits Tanaka’s geisha back home. by Samuel Wigley

评语：It’s a shame that the name of Kajiro Yamamoto, Akira Kurosawa’s early mentor at Toho, is most regularly invoked in relation to one of Japan’s most notorious pieces of war propaganda. Nevertheless, given the national industry’s output at a time of governmental control over it, and the dearth of titles ever circulated abroad or surviving to this day from the Pacific War years, we should certainly consider this celebration of Japan’s military might as the most historically significant and, by some definitions, ‘best’ of 1942. Released in the week of the anniversary of Pearl Harbour and given a human hook in its narrative involving the training of two brothers, its dramatic reconstruction of the aerial attack using model work by Eiji Tsuburaya, the special effects wizard behind Godzilla (1954), was considered so convincing that the US occupation authorities reputedly assumed the footage was genuine and seized all prints of the film at the end of the war. by Jasper Sharp

评语：This tender account of a humble rickshaw man who falls in love with a young widow is one of the finest and most moving films produced during the war years. A renowned director in pre-war days, Mansaku Itami (father of the late 20th-century satirist Juzo Itami) was too ill to helm this project, but nevertheless furnished it with a superb script that gave full expression to his liberal principles. Indeed, it was cut by the militarist censors, who disapproved of its unabashed humanism. Director Hiroshi Inagaki imbued the film with convincing period atmosphere and elicited a superb central performance from Tsumasaburo Bando. He would remake the film in 1958 with the great star Toshiro Mifune in the lead; for most viewers, though, this earlier version remains the definitive one. by Alexander Jacoby

评语：An early film from Keisuke Kinoshita, the celebrated master of humanist cinema behind Twenty-Four Eyes (1954) and The Ballad of Narayama (1958). Made during the final stage of the Pacific War, when the film industry was under state control and subject to strict censorship, Army is intended to convey the patriotic commitment of an average family. The father (Chishu Ryu) and mother (an astonishing Kinuyo Tanaka) are proud to send their son to the Manchurian front for the glory of the empire and the honour of the family. And yet, right at the end, the mother can’t help but run desperately among the crowd to see him marching off, perhaps for the last time. Debunking the ideological illusion of self-sacrifice and duty of the rest of the film, the last scene not only presents the love and suffering of a mother, but also becomes a milestone of emotion, ambiguity and resistance against the dehumanising representation of jingoism in propaganda films. Of course, Kinoshita paid for his audacity and did not direct another film until after the war. by Alejandra Armendáriz-Hernández

评语：This perplexing piece of war propaganda, funded by the Imperial Japanese Navy to promote a martial spirit among the young, is considered the country’s first feature-length animation. At 74 minutes, it’s double the length of its predecessor, Momotaro, Eagle of the Sea (1943). Its similarly slight narrative unfolds as a series of comic vignettes set to rousing military songs as the eponymous hero, born from a peach in a Japanese folktale, oversees the battle preparations of his airborne and seaborne squadrons of pheasants, monkeys, rabbits, dogs and other animals. Proceedings take a darker turn as they head off to rout the western devils – their designs modelled on Popeye’s adversary Bluto – from their island base of Onigashima (‘Devil’s Island’). Chilling stuff, but fascinating nonetheless. by Jasper Sharp

评语：Depictions of the floating world (ukiyo) – the culture of pleasure and decadence centred around the red light districts of the Edo period – had been central to Japanese cinema since the pioneering days. Yet in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the occupying American forces banned period films for what was seen as their nationalistic celebrations of the past. For his second postwar production, Kenji Mizoguchi seems to have broken the cordon with this self-reflexive biopic of the 18th-century printmaker Kitagawa Utamaro, known for his portraits, scene-painting and erotica. Episodes from the artist’s life are presented in Mizoguchi’s customarily immersive style, his roving camera joining the dots of a stratified world of power and play. But the opening anecdote in which an Utamaro woodcut is seen to conceitedly assert the painter’s superiority over the prevailing style has left critics with little doubt which artist Mizoguchi is really tackling here. by Samuel Wigley

评语：The signature work of a director still too little appreciated in the west, Kozaburo Yoshimura’s striking Chekhovian drama of the postwar decline of an aristocratic family boasts inventive camerawork, a telling script by future director Kaneto Shindo and a clutch of superb performances. Those used to Setsuko Hara’s understated acting in Ozu’s films may be startled by her vivacious and assertive persona here; likewise, those who know Masayuki Mori from Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) and Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) will be surprised to see him as an ‘angry young man’. Stylish and compelling, the film is both a moving drama and an intelligent study of Japan’s postwar transition. by Alexander Jacoby

评语：Though a versatile filmmaker who worked in many genres, Shimizu is celebrated above all for his films about children. This independently produced masterpiece, shot against the backdrop of a Japan scarred by war, is certainly the most urgent and probably the most moving of them all. It tracks the journey of a group of war orphans led across western Japan by a demobilised soldier to the orphanage where he himself was raised. The film parallels the then fashionable tradition of Italian neorealism in its location shooting and use of non-professional actors (the children were real-life war orphans), but Shimizu’s sympathetic understanding of his young protagonists is all his own. by Alexander Jacoby

评语：Yasujiro Ozu’s distinct brand of gendaigeki (contemporary drama) reached a point of exquisite refinement with a trio of films – completed by Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953) – known as the ‘Noriko trilogy’, all featuring Setsuko Hara as a daughter figure called Noriko. There’s no Ozu Cinematic Universe at play here – these are three different Norikos that simply have the same name – but each of the films finds Ozu tilling his characteristic themes of filial responsibility and the changing face of the family in a modernising Japan. Late Spring is among the finest and most affecting films made anywhere in the 1940s, featuring Ozu regular Chishu Ryu as the widower who nudges his devoted daughter into marriage, even though he knows he’ll be left alone as a result. The backdrop of springtime underlines the sense of necessary change as time moves on, but as the camera lingers in hallways and rooms after the actors have left them, the sensation of absence is crushing. by Samuel Wigley