Hogs and Battleships

Nikkatsu Studios released Shohei Imamura's Hogs and Battleships on January 21, 1961. Before this commercial release, however, the film was submitted as an entry to the 1960 Media Arts Festival. Based on its participation in this event, it was singled out by Kinema Junpo as one of the ten best films of 1960.

Imamura began his career in 1951 as an assistant director at Shochiku Studios. There he had the opportunity to work with the renowned Yasujiro Ozu. He assisted the great master on three films: Early Summer (1951), The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952), and Tokyo Story (1953). Although Imamura would gradually came to respect Ozu, at the time he chafed a what he perceived to be the director's rigid, overly genteel approach toward film.

In 1954 Imamura moved to Nikkatsu, the financially troubled studio that had only recently re-entered the film business. Imamura found himself more at home in this new professional environment, where the commitment to teen sexploitation pics and yakuza movies better fit his freewheeling sensibility than the more refined fare produced at Shochiku.

In 1958 Imamura directed his first film, but it was not until Hogs and Battleships that he made a film that exhibited his distinctive take on life. This view is encapsulated in the director's oft-quoted statement "I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure on which the reality of daily Japanese life obstinately supports itself." This principle is on display in Hogs and Battleships, which focuses on the efforts of mobsters and other low-lifes to eke out a living on the periphery of a US navy base. In particular, Imamura depicts the struggles of his female characters, who, in contrast to the noble suffering exhibited by the heroines in the films of Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi, use every weapon at their disposal to get ahead in life. No shrinking violets, these women are every bit as tough and self-reliant as the men around them (if not more so).

Imamura followed Hogs and Battleships with other examinations of the lower echelons of Japanese society. Never condescending or moralizing, he paints stark portraits of life at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. The Insect Woman (1963) tells the story of a peasant who over the course of her life works as a factory laborer, prostitute, and madam, before eventually ending up as a domestic servant. The Pornographers (1966) chronicles the life of a producer of low-budget porn films.

In the 1970s, Imamura shifted his creative energies from film to TV documentary. Despite the shift in medium, he continued to treat the down and out, representing the experiences of bar hostesses, the so-called "Comfort Women," and ex-pat soldiers.

With Revenge Is Mine (1979), Imamura made a triumphant return to feature-film making. Over the next decade he directed some of his most important works, including Eejanaika (1981), The Ballad of Narayama (1983), and Black Rain (1989), for which he was awarded the Kinema Junpo Best Director Award.

Despite health problems, Imamura remained professionally active until the last years of his life, directing idiosyncratic films that defied easy categorization. He passed away in 2006.

He is currently the subject of a film retrospective at the Pacific Film Archive. For more information, go to Shohei Imamura's Japan.

Shohei Imamura

Ballad of Narayama

Black Rain

Hogs and Battleships Trailer

Our last trailer. Enjoy!

Review of Late Autumn

Click here to go to Weena Pun's review of Late Autumn. The review appeared in the April 13 edition of The Stanford Daily.

Late Autumn

Shochiku Studios released Yasujiro Ozu's Late Autumn on November 13, 1960. It was Ozu's third-to-last film and is considered to be one of his great masterpieces.

In Japan and around the world, Ozu is treasured by cineasts, particularly specialists in film studies. Scholars especially appreciate the uniformity of his visual style and his commitment to a consistent set of thematic issues. In this sense, he readily conforms the notion of a film director as the "author" of his films. This idea that great directors use film as a medium to express their view of life (in the same way that authors use the medium of the written word) lies at the heart of the influential school of film studies know as the auteur theory. I think it's safe to say that Ozu's body of work serves as the ideal vehicle to promote this approach toward interpreting film.

Because Ozu has been the subject of so many scholarly analyses, I will defer to two of the better known statements on his work.

The first comes from David Thomson's Biographical Dictionary of Film.

Ozu’s most important characteristic is his way of watching the world. While that attitude is modest and unassertive, it is also the source of great tenderness for people. It is as if Ozu’s one personal admission was the faith that the basis of decency and sympathy can only be sustained by the semi-religious effort to observe the world in his style; in other words, contemplation calms anxious activity. As with Mizoguchi, one comes away from Ozu heartened by his humane intelligence and by the gravity we have learned.

The intensive viewing of Ozu—and such stylistic rigor encourages nothing less—makes questions of Japaneseness irrelevant. There have been attempts to explain Ozu by reference to his native culture, and it is easy to pin his mysticism to facile notions of the East. Even Ozu himself believed that his subject matter was too provincial to travel outside Japan. Some critics have tried to illuminate his films by reference to Buddhism, Japanese pottery, domestic ritual, and haiku.

All of those are worth considering. But the most useful point to make is that Ozu uses a minimal but concentrated camera style: static, a little lower than waist height, with few camera movements, dissolves, or fades. The intentness of the image, and its emotional resonance, is not only as relevant to the West as to Japan; it is a return to fundamental cinema, such as we can see in Dreyer, Bresson, Lang, and even Warhol, whose characters sit as habitually as Ozu’s. Nor is there anything limitingly Oriental in Ozu’s ability to create deep anguish or joy in the cross-cutting of faces. There are similar moments in Hitchcock or Lang, when we are made to apprehend the unverbalized feelings that rush between people, and which are only defined by the constructive power of editing.

The second comes from Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell's Film History: An Introduction.

After 1947 Ozu began a collaboration with screenwriter Kogo Noda that was to result in a string of major works. These films usually center upon family crises: marriage, separation, and death. In Late Spring (1949) a dutiful daughter faces the necessity of leaving her widowed father alone. In Early Summer (1951) several generations of a family are shaken by a daughter's impulsive decision to marry. Tokyo Story (1953) chronicles an elderly couple's visit to their grown, unfeeling children. In Equinox Flower (1958) and An Autumn Afternoon (1962) a father must accept his daughter's wish to leave the household. Ozu and Noda explore a few dramatic issues from various angles. Usually the film is suffused with a contemplative resignation to life's painful changes—an attitude embodied in the gentle smile and sigh of Chishu Ryu, Ozu's perennial actor of this period.

A comparable calm pervades the director's style. The films adhere to the "rules" he set for himself in the 1930s: low camera position, 360-degree shooting space, cutting for graphic effects, transitional sequences that obey a logic of similarity and difference rather than strict spatial continuity. Ozu forswears dissolves and fades entirely. He stages conversations with the characters facing the camera head-on and looking over the lens. His color design turns mundane settings into abstract patterns. His camera is attracted by humble objects in the corner of a room, down a hallway, or on a thoroughfare. The peaceful contemplation at the heart of the drama finds its correlative in a style that allows us time to look closely at the characters and their world. This quietude, sometimes broken by sly humor, makes Ozu's films seem undramatic. But he came to be recognized as one of the cinema's most sensitive explorers of everyday life.

Here are some shots from a scene early in Late Autumn. The sequence exemplifies some of the features to which these scholars refer. Note especially Ozu's preference for the so-called "pillow shot" (shots of scenery or empty rooms used to set up a scene).

Late Autumn Trailer

Here's the original theatrical trailer for Ozu's 1960 masterpiece, Late Autumn.

Technical Difficulties II

My apologies for the temporary glitch with the sound. According to the projectionist, the problem was with the sound track on the print and not the equipment. He did a quick sound check after the screening was over and everything is fine for next week.

Speaking of which, we'll be showing an absolutely wonderful film by Yasujiro Ozu. The print is from Criterion and it's brand new, so there shouldn't be any problems.

Two reviews of The Island

Here are two interesting reviews of Shindo's film.

Click here to go to Matty Smith's review, which appeared in the April 13 edition of the The Stanford Daily

Click here to see an interesting essay on the movie by Patricia Erens.

The Island

Among the directors featured in this series, Kaneto Shindo is probably the most unfamiliar to international audiences. Born in a small village outside of Hiroshima, he began working in the film industry in 1934. Over the next six years he toiled in various capacities as a technician at a small studio called Shinkyo. Throughout this period his aspiration was to become script writer. He finally realized his ambition in 1941 when the studio used one of his scripts for a B film. After writing scripts for a few more films, he was drafted into the navy.

Upon returning to Japan in 1946, he entered the script department at Shochiku Studios. At this point, his career finally took off when he was assigned script writing duties for Kosaburo Yoshimura's 1947 triumph, The Ball at the House of Anjo, which was heralded as the best picture of the year by Kinema Junpo. By 1951 he was able to parlay his success as a script writer into an opportunity to direct his first film, Tale of a Loving Wife, a commercial and critical hit. Aside from marking Shindo's directorial debut, the film is also noteworthy as the beginning of his personal and professional collaboration with the actress Nobuko Otowa. The two married shortly thereafter and she subsequently starred in almost all of his films.

With a contract at a major studio and a popular star for a wife, Shindo could have easily settled into a mainstream, successful career. Instead, though, he left the studio and affiliated himself with a group called the Modern Film Association, which consisted of artists and film makers who felt limited by the constraints of the commercial film industry. He immediately tested the freedom of this new working environment with his next work, 1952's Children of Hiroshima. Made immediately after the US Occupation, it was the first Japanese film to address the effects of the atomic bomb. Despite US efforts to pressure the Japanese government to ban the film, it was released to widespread critical acclaim.

Although Shindo on occasion returned to the major studios to make commercial fare, his heart was in the independent, more personal projects that he directed in association with the Film Alliance. The Island, which was first released on November 23, 1960, belongs to this latter category. The film records the struggles and simple pleasures of a farming family on a small island in the Inland Sea. Inspired by the experimentation of the European New Wave and other film-as-art movements, Shindo set out to create what he referred to as a cinematic poem. Foregoing dialogue, the minamalist film evokes emotion through striking imagery, repeated actions, ambient sounds, and Hikaru Hayashi's simple score.

Financing the film with his own money, Shindo, Otowa, and the rest of the cast and crew, all of whom worked without payment, spent almost two months on the island, during which time they came to embrace the serenity of the isolated environment. This commitment to the place and its people is evident in the dignified manner in which they depict the film's characters and their way of life.

The experimental film was hailed by critics both in Japan and abroad. It was feted at film festivals the world over, winning the Grand Prize at the 1961 Moscow International Film Festival, where it was praised as a tribute to the human spirit.

Since the release of The Island Shindo has continued to surprise and delight cineasts with his idiosyncratic works. Noteworthy films include The Demon (1964), Black Cat from the Grove (1968), Tree Without Leaves (1986), Strange Tales from East of the River (1993), and The Bit Player (2000), his award-winning biography of Taiji Tonoyama, the actor who portrays the husband in The Island. With his most recent film, 2004's The Owl, Shindo entered the record books as the oldest working film director in the world.

Shindo at the 2004 Moscow Film Festival

Nobuko Otowa in The Island

Otowa in The Demon

Kiwako Taichi in Black Cat from the Grove

New Link

I've added a link to the blog Kuzu. If you go there, you can find some intereting reviews of the films we've been screening.

Review of Her Brother

The Stanford Daily didn't review Her Brother, but I found a short piece about the movie on the internet. Click here to go to an informative review of the film by Paghat the Ratgirl (evidently her by-line).

Her Brother

Daiei Studios released Kon Ichikawa's Her Brother on November 1, 1960. The film proved to be a triumph for both the director and the studio. It ended up winning 14 awards, including the coveted Kinema Junpo awards for Best Picture and Best Director of 1960.

The critical acclaim was especially gratifying for Ichikawa, since he had toiled for years in the Japanese film industry, never quite reaching the top tier of directors. In this sense, his status differed from that of Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, and Ozu, all of whom reigned supreme at their home studios. Ichikawa, on the other hand, over the course of his long career moved around from studio to studio, always occupying a position just below these elite directors. Whereas the top directors were free to choose their material, their casts, and their technicians, Ichikawa was typically assigned projects by the front office. Working under these constantly changing conditions, he was never able to cultivate a consistent style in the manner of his more revered contemporaries. But ingenuity and creative flexibility allowed Ichikawa to make the most of this situation, resulting in a body of work noteworthy for its diversity.

Ichikawa began his career in 1938 as an illustrator in the animation division at Toho Studios. Slowly working his way up the ladder, he directed his first live action feature in 1948. Caught up in the labor disbutes of the late 1940s, he decided to follow many of his Toho co-workers to a new studio, Shin-Toho. In 1955 he moved briefly to Nikkatsu Studios. And finally in 1956, he settled at Daiei, where he enjoyed his greatest professional success.

Ichikawa first made his mark with a film version of Soseki Natsume's timeless novel, Kokoro (1955), starring Masayuki Mori. One year later, he directed another literary adaptation, The Harp of Burma. With these two successes, Ichikawa came to be seen as a director especially adept at translating literature to the screen. He continued in this vein for the next few years, working from novels by Yukio Mishima, Shotaro Ooka, and Jun'ichiro Tanizaki.

The culmination of this series of literary adaptations was Her Brother, based on Aya Koda's autobiographical tale of her troubled family during the Taisho era (1912-26). Although assigned the project, Ichikawa was able to work with some first rate talent. His cast was headlined by four of Japan's most popular and talented stars: Keiko Kishi, Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Masayuki Mori, and the incomparable Kinuyo Tanaka. Also assigned to the picture was Kazuo Miyagawa, one of the most skilled cinematographers in the Japanese film industry. Over the course of his career Miyagawa had lent his talents to Kurosawa's Rashomon, Ozu's Floating Weeds, and all of Mizoguchi's great masterpieces of the 1950s.

The collaboration with Miyagawa was especially fortunate, since it provided Ichikawa with an opportunity to satisfy his penchant for creating visually innovative film narratives. Although never associated with a signature style, Ichikawa's early days as a cartoonist made him particularly attentive to the visual impact of his films. Always willing to experiment to give his movies a distinctive look, he and Miyagawa created a new technique known as skip bleaching. By treating the film stock with chemicals that muted the palette, Ichikawa lent Her Brother the air of a faded picture postcard. In recognition of this achievement, Miyagawa was awarded the Best Cinematography Award at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival. Since then, their process has become a standard practice in the film industry.

After Her Brother, Ichikawa went on to other successes, most notably An Actor's Revenge (1963), a highly stylized historical drama, Alone in the Pacific (1963), a biography of Kenichi Horie, the young man who sailed alone from Osaka to San Francisco, and Tokyo Olympics (1965), a cinematic record of the 1964 Oympics.

As the Japanese studio system began to disintegrate in the late 1960s, Ichikawa once again displayed his adaptability. In contrast to his contemporary Kurosawa, whose output after 1970 slowed to a rate of about one film every five years, Ichikawa continued to direct one or two movies per year. His greatest success during these latter years was the tremendously popular Makioka Sisters (1983), based on Tanizaki's wartime novel. Ichikawa's most recent film was released in 2006.

Here I'd also like to take an opportunity to provide some information about Masayuki Mori, one of the stars of the film. The eldest son of the acclaimed author, Takero Arishima, Mori established his own professional reputation as a popular film star. He is especially cherished by cineasts for his participation in two of the masterpieces of world cinema. In 1950 he played Kanazawa no Takehiro, the murdered warrior, in Kurosawa's Rashomon; and in 1953 he played Genjuro, the haunted potter, in Mizoguchi's Ugetsu. 1960 was a banner year for Mori, bringing him roles in three important films. It's a credit to his versatility that he managed to excel in such divergent parts. Hearkening back his early days as a "pretty boy" (nimaime) star, he brings glamour to the role of Fujisaki in Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. Channeling villains from the kabuki stage, he oozes corruption as Iwabuchi in Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well. And perhaps tapping into his own family history, he perfectly portrays the distant, self-absorbed author/father in Her Brother.

Ichikawa in the 1960s

Ayako Wakao in An Actor's Revenge

Tokyo Olympics


Masayuki Mori's 1960 rogues gallery

Her Brother Trailer

Here's the original theatrical trailer for Kon Ichikawa's award-winning film Her Brother.



Subtitles by Andre Haag.

Nishi's tune

After The Bad Sleep Well, two members of the audience commented on the tune that Mifune's character whistled throughout the film. Does anyone recognize the song or know if it had any particular significance? Or was it composed specifically for the film?

Thanks.

Map of Stanford

Here's a map of the Stanford campus. You can also click on the "Map to Cubberley Auditorium" link on the right side of this blog. It will connect you to a searchable map of the campus.

Review of The Bad Sleep Well

Click here to read Marco Hernandez's review of The Bad Sleep Well. The review appeared in the April 13 edition of The Stanford Daily.