Since we already tried this once, we do not need to start from a blank slate. In fact, rather than writing a new introduction, I will point you to my earlier introduction to Sanshiro Sugata for some basic background reading. For pointers to some more in-depth background reading, there is always the regular Kurosawa books, which of course are not compulsory reading.

Back in May, our discussion centred on four topics, which you may also like to look at:

- The Jujitsu Teacher’s Daughter
- The Lotus, Truth and Beauty
- The Mother of Martial Arts Movies?
- A Movie-Like Movie

Feel free to add to those discussions! And of course, if you have something else in mind, your are very much encouraged to start new topics.

That should then cover Sanshiro Sugata. But what about Sanshiro Suhata II, which we will also be discussing this month?

To be honest, there is not all that much to be said. Kurosawa himself lacked any real interest in making the film, which Toho pressured him into doing following the success of the first one, and as Yoshimoto notes, “[i]t might be said that among Kurosawa’s works, this film is least satisfying artistically and perhaps most overtly propagandistic. Almost all the characters are cardboard figures, and if we still find some of them interesting, it is only because of our familiarity with Sanshiro Sugata, the original film.” (89) And as Prince notes, this cardboard like treatment extends also to the “flat visuals”: “Sanshiro Sugata, Part II exhibits a close conformity to Hollywood codes of continuity cutting and none of the radical violations of spatial perspective that typified the first film.” (55)

Most critics agree with these views. Richie in fact declares that “as a film, it is so very bad that its deficiencies will further explain the excellences of [Sanshiro Sugata]“, and that in it “we have what the original Sugata might have been had an ordinary director done it.” (24) As Richie goes on to point out, the sequel — which Yoshimoto suggest should perhaps rather be called a “remake” — is almost parody of the original, tracing the same characters, motifs and fights, but without the passion or the care.

All this is not to say that the film isn’t interesting. It does have its moments, and includes for instance the first case of Kurosawa’s use of Noh influences in his works. It is also a fairly straightforward propaganda picture in many places, so there should be plenty to discuss.

But speaking of propaganda films, on September 15 we will be introducing Kenji Mizoguchi’s The 47 Ronin (1941) into the mix. Copies are available at least from eBay and Amazon.com.

For the full schedule of our Film Club, see here.

These four prints, while not on par with Criterion’s regular releases, are the best versions of the films currently available for the English speaking world. Even if the films have not gone through extensive clean-up, the overall picture quality is good and the sound works well. Even more importantly, the subtitles are excellent. These films have previously been available as part of Criterion’s massive AK100 box set.

The First Films of Akira Kurosawa box set is now available for purchase from places like the Criterion store, Amazon.com and Amazon.ca.

Remember that our Kurosawa film club will restart in September with the two Sanshiro Sugata films, and will then continue chronologically. If you wish to join the discussion, this box set is definitely recommended!

For more information about Kurosawa releases, see the Kurosawa DVDs and Kurosawa blu-rays pages.

Tokyo Chorus (1931) is a bittersweet depression era comedy about a man who is doing his best to support his family while trying to maintain his dignity. In his seminal work Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, David Bordwell famously suggested that the film marks the point in Ozu’s career when he truly graduated: “from this point on, Ozu is a major director” (p. 222).

I Was Born, But… (1932) is a very socially conscious film about two young brothers and perhaps the best known of the three films in our this month’s selection. Subtitled “An Adult’s Picture Book View”, Donald Richie called it Ozu’s first masterpiece (Japanese Film, p. 275), but I will be calling it a gangster film with kids. I will also be calling it a definite masterpiece, and probably the greatest film that I have seen with children in leading roles. Ozu himself liked it so much that he decided to revisit the story later with his 1959 work Good Morning. A restored print seems to be circulating in US cinemas, recently playing at New York’s IFC Center, so those of you in the US may wish to keep your eyes open for a chance to see the film on the big screen. In any case, if you only have time for one film this month, make it I Was Born, But…, and while you do so, thank Coco for insisting that we must include it in our film club schedule!

Finally, Passing Fancy (1933) is a film about a father-son relationship and the first of Ozu’s works featuring Kihachi, a character played by Takeshi Sakamoto and somewhat resembling Chaplin’s Little Tramp, who would go on to make an appearance in three later Ozu films. It shares many themes with the other two films, while further exploring Ozu’s favourite topic, family, and more specifically the complex relationship between a father and his offspring, which is at the very heart of all three of our this month’s works.

These three films, which we will be discussing simultaneously, are conveniently available from a Criterion Eclipse box set. Please note, however, that the discs are in region 1, and at least to the best of my knowledge unavailable in other regions with English subtitles. Apologies to those who cannot join the discussion because of this. Do note, however, that there may be ways to make your player region free — ask, if you would like to know more.

For background reading, I would definitely recommend David Bordwell’s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, which is available as a free download from the University of Michigan. The PDF file is quite big, but definitely worth a look. If you want to read more, another book often recommended for those interested in Ozu is Donald Richie’s Ozu: His Life and Films, although I have not read it.

Ozu’s Wikipedia page is also a fairly competent introduction, and while there don’t forget to check out the individual pages for our three films and the link sections on those pages. Finally, to the best of my knowledge Ozu-san.com is the most comprehensive English website dedicated to Ozu and his works. Let me know if you know other sources which you would like to recommend! I have also listed some resources to Japanese cinema in this forum thread.

Please note that there will be no new film on August 15, as Ozu’s three films take our entire month (Humanity and Paper Balloons is still on, however, so feel free to join the discussion). On September 1, we will restart the Kurosawa part of our film club with Sanshiro Sugata and Sanshiro Sugata Part II. For information about the availability of those films, please see the Kurosawa DVDs section. For our full schedule, see the film club page.

On a personal note, I will be travelling for the first half of August, during which time I will most probably not be able to contribute much to the discussion. Comment moderation may also take slightly longer than usual. That, of course, is no reason for you to stay silent!

Written and directed by the internationally recognised American theatre artist Ping Chong, it takes Kurosawa’s Shakespeare adaptation and transforms the story onto the stage and into the English language. The production will play in Oregon until October, after which it will appear at the BAM Next Wave Festival in New York.

If you are interested in the new production, for more information check out:

• An interview with Ping Chong
• Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s page for the production (don’t forget to check out the “video” section of the page)
• The festival’s programme for the production (pdf)
• BAM Next Wave Festival’s page for the production (includes a video)

The interview is particularly interesting reading, as is the festival’s programme, which also includes information about Kurosawa, Noh theatre and Shakespeare’s Japanese adaptations.

Update: See the comments section for links to some reviews.

Update 2: Some video footage from the performance can now be found at the festival website. Especially the preview video gives a good glimpse into what the production looks like.

The 160 page book is titled Император японского кино (or Emperor of Japanese Cinema), and includes material from Vasilyev and Yuri Solomin, the actor who played captain Vladimir Arseniev. The book is illustrated with previously unseen photos from the personal archives of Solomin and Vasilyev.

You can watch a news video that coincided with the publication here. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find an online store that would sell the book and ship internationally. Can you? Although the book is in Russian and I don’t really speak the language, the book interests me quite a bit.

Finally, on a somewhat related but still totally unconnected note, I can also reveal that I was recently contacted by some documentary film makers who have made an hour-long documentary on the making of Dersu Uzala, and are currently looking for a way to release it. Having seen the documentary, which includes plenty of new information and loads of brand new interviews with the Russian crew, I must say that it would be a crime against all things nice if the work did not get a release. So, if you happen to know an outlet for a Dersu Uzala documentary looking for release, let me know!

Update: OZON.ru and biblio-glob.us now seem to stock the book. Both also ship internationally. (I haven’t actually used either yet, so I cannot comment on how it works.)

What’s the big deal, you ask? Well, most of the best Kurosawa DVDs and blu-rays are Criterion releases, so if you are looking to fill your collection with those missing Kurosawa films, this is a golden opportunity. The sale lasts until August 1, and Barnes & Noble has fairly reasonable shipping rates both in the US and internationally, especially if you order more than two items.

The sale doesn’t actually include quite everything — unreleased things such as the upcoming First Films of Akira Kurosawa box set and the Seven Samurai blu-ray are not discounted, but then again those will only be released in August and October, respectively.

What the sale does include, however, is just about everything else. This for instance means that the AK100 box set is now priced $199 — surely a steal for 25 films, even if the discs don’t come with any extras! That’s $8 per film.

Or, if you already own all of Kurosawa, how about stocking up with our film club films, many of which are available in Criterion editions? This year alone we will go through the silent Ozu box set, the Hiroshi Shimizu box set and 24 Eyes, all now half price. If you were planning to join the discussion but don’t have the films yet, this really is as good as time as ever to get them. In addition to those, there are many other Criterion releases that we will be watching next year: if you have the cash and wish to save long-term, take a look at out schedule.

I better stop here, before I scare you all away with my sales speeches!

While Criterion has not confirmed full details, it looks like no new material will be included in the box set compared to their 2006 DVD package. But considering the awesomeness of that package, the region A (the Americas, parts of East Asia) blu-ray release should nevertheless be nothing less than one of the best high definition releases ever!

More information about the release can be found at Criterion’s website and Amazon.com. Both already accept pre-orders, with Amazon’s price tag of $34.99 curiously almost a fiver lower than their price for the DVD version.

If you are looking for more Kurosawa films in high definition, check out Kurosawa on blu-ray. For information about DVD releases, I have compiled a Kurosawa DVD guide.

Thanks go once again to Blah for the heads-up!

The ensemble film, somewhat reminiscent of The Lower Depths, is perhaps best described as a dark, pensive and realistic “presentation of a world in which the martial codes of bushido no longer have any meaning” (Tony Rayns, 2005). Mimura Shintaro’s script was based on the kabuki play An Old Story About a Wet-Wadded Silk Coat (Tsuyu Kosode Mukashi Hachijô, a summary of which can be found here), but was heavily reworked. In Rayns’s view, whose essay I would call recommended reading, the story became through these changes a commentary of the rising “militarism and the worsening impoverishment of working-class people in the 1930s”. The seriousness of the film’s approach to the period film genre was also highly influential, Richie in his A Hundred Years of Japanese Film calling Yamanaka possibly “the finest of the directors of the new jidaigeki” of the late 1930s, whose “ambition was to further modernize the period picture”. (71)

Humanity and Paper Balloons was actually the last of Yamanaka’s 24 films, three of which have survived to us. The number of films he directed is impressive, considering that he was less than half a year Kurosawa’s senior and died more than four years before the latter’s own debut film. Yamanaka’s career in total lasted for only seven years. A draft note arrived to him on the day Humanity and Paper Balloons premiered (or possibly on the next day, depending on whose version you believe), and the young director would be dead a little over a year later in a Japanese field hospital in Manchuria of an inflammation of the intestines. News of the 28-year-old’s death left the Japanese film industry grieving, not least Yamanaka’s close friend Yasujiro Ozu.

Sadao Yamanaka, who based on his dressing style was
most probably simply a time traveller from the 1990s.

Based on the little I have read about Yamanaka (the Master of Cinema booklet is a good place to start, as is the Richie book mentioned above and Wikipedia), he comes across as a quiet man, yet one who knew what he wanted from his work; one of those free spirits whose life and career was cut off tragically by forces out of his control. I will leave you with the intriguing last will and testament that he wrote while in the army, and which is printed in the Master of Cinema booklet:

THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF
YAMANAKA SADAO

I have nothing to say as an Infantry Corporal in the Japanese Army. I have done my best as such.

A word as a member of the Association of Film Directors in Japan:

If Humanity and Paper Balloons should prove to be the last film by Yamanaka Sadao, I would feel a little aggrieved. It is not a loser’s grief.

All my insurance money goes to Mr. Inoue Kintaro.

I am very sorry that Mr. Inoue has to take the trouble for me. Pay all my debts at P.C.L. [film studio which would later become Toho] and Naruse, the restaurant. Probably my money will not cover them all. Cheat them to make them content with the result.

If there should be a surplus, share it among the Association and the Zenshin-za [a left-wing theatre group with whom he made two films, including Humanity and Paper Balloons].

Lastly, I say to my seniors and friends:

Please make good movies.

18 April, 1938
YAMANAKA Sadao

Humanity and Paper Baloons is available in region 2 (Europe and Japan) DVD from Amazon.co.uk. Unfortunately, I have no knowledge of releases in other regions, but you can always check if your stand-alone player can be made region free with a simple press of a button (try videohelp.com), or you can try to modify your computer’s DVD drive with software like AnyDVD.

Finally, don’t forget that a little over two weeks from now, on August 1, we will be beginning our silent Ozu month, with Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Chorus (1931), I Was Born, But… (1932) and Passing Fanzy (1933). All films are conveniently available in Criterion’s region 1 (North America) silent Ozu DVD box set, in case you need to rent or purchase them.

More information about our film club, including the full schedule, can be found here. Join the discussion!

One major challenge that writers on early Japanese cinema face is that very few actual films survive from the period. This is evident also with Visions of Japanese Modernity, which at no point enters into a close reading of a film. In fact, the number of films even just passingly mentioned in the book is probably well under twenty. As a result, the discussion stays very much above any individual film throughout the entire 323 page book. Yet, this never constitutes a problem, as Gerow has much interesting to say.

Visions of Japanese Modernity is primarily concerned with the Pure Film Movement, which in the early years of Japanese cinema aimed to give it an identity that would be unified in essence and not derivative of other art forms, especially theatre. Gerow traces the development of Pure Film Movement through three major and often antithetical forces: film critics, film censorship and benshi, or silent film narrators. He shows that each of these, together with many other smaller forces, had a large part to play in the development of Japanese film identity and the art form’s growth by the mid-1920s into something that could be considered to possess a set of its own unique qualities and challenges.

Gerow’s introduction (39 pages) provides the basis on which he lays the rest of his book, and initiates a dialogue with earlier studies that he maintains throughout the work. Chapter 1 (“The Motion Pictures as a Problem”, 26 pages) begins the main part of the work by illustrating how difficult it is to define any meaningful starting point for Japanese cinema, largely because of an initial lack of a unique voice or methodology, and shows how the art form began to acquire a fully separate identity only after the first major Japanse censorship case, that of the French 1911 film Zigomar. Chapter 2 (“Gonda Yasunosuke and the Promise of Film Study”, 28 pages) traces early efforts to find that missing unique voice and methodology, with Gerow specifically concentrating on the writings of early film scholar Yasunosuke Gonda, who among other things published the first full-length Japanese study of cinema in 1914. In chapter 3 (“Studying Pure Film”, 39 pages), the Pure Film Movement is introduced, with Gerow pointing out the movement’s conscious efforts to suppress certain types of films in favour of a specific class-based and authoritative vision of modernity and cinema. Chapter 4 (“The Subject of the Text: Benshi, Authors, and Industry”, 41 pages) moves on to discuss the central place that benshi had in contemporary Japanese cinema, and how they together with the increasing commercialisation of the Japanese film industry influenced the development of the art form, despite (and partly because of) the criticism that the Pure Film Movement launched against them. Finally, in chapter 5 (“Managing the Internal”, 48 pages) Gerow discusses early Japanese film censorship and how it contributed to give cinema a unique identity in the eyes of both policymakers and audiences following the Zigomar case discussed in chapter 1. This is followed by a 13-page conclusion, which summarises the discussion and provides final comments.

Gerow’s book is very thoroughly researched, which is evident also in the fact that it contains a 54-page notes section and a 14-page selected bibliography. In fact, at times the book feels almost too well researched, with the number of examples given by the author to support his discussion briefly crossing the border between exhaustive and exhausting. This, however, makes the book only more valuable as a research volume for later use, and thankfully for that purpose the book is also equipped with a very thorough 21-page index. As regular readers of my reviews may have noticed, I highly value a book that comes with a good index.

Considering that Visions of Japanese Modernity covers an era of Japanese cinema that for the most part took place more than two decades before Akira Kurosawa’s debut as a director, one might assume that it has very little to do with Kurosawa. But this is far from being true. The identity formed for Japanese cinema by the critics, censors and other developmental forces of the 1910s and early 1920s is to a large extent the identity that directors like Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu inherited and within which they worked, passing the torch in turn to directors of Kurosawa’s generation. Secondly, the figure of the benshi was certainly central to Kurosawa’s own personal experience of early Japanese cinema, as his brother worked as one at the time. Finally, one may even pose the question how much Kurosawa’s own ideal of “cinematic beauty” was directly or indirectly influenced by the efforts of the Pure Film Movement to define through cinema a uniquely visual narrative art form.

While I have admittedly little with which to compare Visions of Japanese Modernity, I feel that I emerged from the reading experience with a fairly good understanding of early Japanese cinema, and a desire to know more. Even more importantly, the book has a wealth of information and is easy to go back into, whether for research purposes or simply in order to dip into any of the individual subjects that it discusses. I can therefore warmly recommend Gerow’s book to anyone who is interested in the development of Japanese cinema, in film theory, or simply desires to have a more solid historical background within which to appreciate Kurosawa’s works.

Visions of Japanese Modernity was published in May, and is available in paperback, hardback and ebook formats. Try for instance Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr, Amazon.de, and Amazon.co.jp or The Book Depository.

The full schedule — projected all the way to 2013 — can be found at the Akira Kurosawa Film Club page.

Of course, we are still discussing Naruse’s Flowing, which we started in mid-June. Copies are available in the region 2 BFI box set.

And don’t forget that in July 15, we will start the discussion of Humanity and Paper Balloons, a highly influential 1937 film from Sadao Yamanaka. It is available in region 2 from Amazon.co.uk, and there are also some region-free copies floating in eBay, although I have no idea what quality they are.

You may also want to start planning for August, when we will have a silent Ozu month! I know, we are just spoiled with goodies here at ak.info!