Mizoguchi, whose sudden death we learned about in the middle of the Venice Festival, was the author of the best Japanese films of recent years: The Brave Life of O’Haru, Tales of the Hazy Moon, and others. The Street of Shame, which is being shown at the Festival, seems at first more Western than his others because of its contemporary subject matter and its episodic nature. It’s about the misadventures of six prostitutes who are threatened that they may have to leave the bordello where they are employed. I gather that the public was disappointed by this film, though I liked it as much as Mizoguchi’s others. Mizoguchi, like Ingmar Bergman, is fascinated by luxury and the moral rot that develops in its wake. A good thirty shots show us money being passed from hand to hand, the wages of sin. Notice that the Japanese prostitutes drive around in a 4 CV (Citroen Quatre Chevaux) and talk from evening to dawn about Marilyn Monroe. The scene where the heroine (the girl Mizoguchi clearly prefers, made a pet of, fussed over) offers herself to her father is the best scene in this beautiful movie.
—1956
This Japanese military tale relates the story of a corporal of an elite regiment who plays a kind of Burmese harp during the Japanese invasion of Burma in 1945, and evokes salutary, peaceful, amazing results.
Like the Pied Piper who charmed first the rats and then the children, Mizushima plucks the strings of his instrument and charms the enemy, who stop fighting in order to sing. To his comrades, who owe their lives to him several times over, he is a man of great prestige. When the war ends, he leaves his company to carry the news to the soldiers who are still fighting in the mountains. Along the way he passes decaying corpses which he buries or incinerates. He has to work constantly to overcome his disgust, and he who had been so lighthearted meditates on horror all the time. When he takes the robe off the corpse of a Burmese bonze, he gets the idea that the habit makes the monk, so he puts it on and withdraws from the world. One day, his comrades cross his path, and he turns his head away and continues walking. The soldiers wonder aloud: Was it he or not? They send him a parakeet that repeats over and over the phrase it has memorized: “Let’s go, Mizushima, return to Japan with us.” A few days later, Mizushima, on one side of a barrier, his friends on the other, offers them a parakeet which repeats: “No, I cannot go back, no, I cannot go back.” The prisoners sing “Home, Sweet Home,” and Mizoshima accompanies their song briefly on his instrument, bows low, and disappears.
It’s a curious film which pleased some members of the Venice Festival jury enough last year that they came close to awarding it the Golden Lion. The sincerity of the enterprise is somewhat dubious. In any case, it is always hard to know where one stands about Japanese films. If I have the feeling that the reputation of The Gates of Hell, All the Birds Knew, Shadows in Mid-day is unjustified, I also think, on the other hand, all the Japanese films I’ve had the opportunity to see are strikingly beautiful and intelligent.
The Burmese Harp undeniably seduced me, even if I find fault with it for resembling a bit the sort of postwar works that purposely try to soften up the conquerer, fawn on him, titillate his curiosity.
Indeed, I loved those wonderful Japanese prints, above all for their plastic beauty; the emotion progressively overwhelms us, all the more powerfully because it is diabolically repressed by the authors. The extraordinary dignity of the personalities and the great nobility of the subject capture our interest, as long as a bit of literature and a touch of sentimentality don’t frighten us off. Pervading the whole story there is an immense tranquillity and a mysterious charm that carry the film—which is not to ignore a decorative leisureliness possibly explained by the same legend that holds that any self-respecting Japanese needs at least seven hours to make love.
—1956
Apparently Juvenile Passion was directed by Yasushi Nakahira, about whom we know absolutely nothing, rather than by someone named Ishihara, who, as it happens, is the screenwriter as well as the brother of one of the male stars, Yujiro Ishihara. If you add to that that the two actors in the film play two brothers, and that it’s impossible to tell which of the two is the screenwriter’s brother, you must agree that I have to be terribly fond of this film to publish this hazy review.
The one person whose biography no longer holds any secrets for me is the writer, Shintaro Ishihara, who was born in 1933, and is already at such a young age a thoroughbred in the René Julliard stable. The publishing house presents the author of this roguish saga as the Japanese equivalent of Françoise Sagan, if you please.
I read his The Season of the Sun in a French translation by Kuni Matsuo, published in the Collection Capricorne. This too was a collection of short stories that are very filmable, four novellas in which the spirit of Juvenile Passion is already evident.
In 1956, Ishihara won the Akutagawa literary prize—the Japanese Goncourt—and it caused a scandal. It is true that Ishihara writes with his feet, which may be irrelevant, even though the Japanese wash theirs more often than we do. We know that old refrain—it’s sung just as often in the West. Certain faded guardians of the public morals suggested that Ishihara, under the pretext of realism and novelty, courts scandal and publicity by perverting the young, attacking sound morals, and exalting violence and sex. “The Sunshine Race” is an expression that was invented by some commentator to pillory these depraved young people. One story, “The Season of Sunshine,” answers the charge, and it is a bitter answer indeed. Ishihara feels akin to Hemingway, and like him is concerned with speed, ellipses, allusions. Within a few months, five successful films have been based on his stories, and Ishihara, a handsome lad who stands about five feet three inches, has played in several of them.
In short, you will have guessed, Ishihara is called in Poland the Marek Hlasko of Japan, and in France the Sagan/Vadim/Buffet of Japan. The second is certainly warranted, since it seems clear that Juvenile Passion was influenced by And God Created Woman (Et Dieu créa la Femme), which played in Japan at the same time it was released in France.
As in Vadim’s first film, we are shown two brothers who are successively the lovers of a young woman unhappily married to an American. I find the Japanese film superior to its French model from every point of view: script, direction, acting, spirit.
The character of the young woman is remarkable. In the beginning, when the two boys meet her on the railroad platform, she is wearing a white corsage, a wide skirt, dark glasses, and we really believe along with them that she is a famous minx, inaccessible. Later, we guess that she is in love with Haruji, the timid brother, but we’d gamble our head that he is a virgin (if I had been taken at my word, I would have to take a leaf from Ishihara’s book and write this article with my feet). Only later will she marry; this scene is played so finely that we will reproach ourselves for not having figured out the truth. To buy the brash brother’s silence, she gives herself to him, and then she will give herself also to the timid one, who loved her from the start. There is nothing of the hussy about Elri. We can readily accept that she is unhappily married; she is in love with the timid Haruji for the purity of his heart; she is also in love with the rash Natshuhisa because he excites her physically. There is nothing either aggressive or paradoxical about the situation. Vadim is defeated on his own turf, for director Nakahira effortlessly allows us to sympathize with each of his characters in every circumstance.
The direction is to be admired for its inventiveness and nonconformism. Almost all the transitions are awkward as shots that do not at all resemble each other follow one another. It would seem clear that there was a great deal of improvisation; the shooting is full of ideas that could not have been foreseen; the ideas that spring up in the acting could not possibly have been indicated in a script.
In most films, one beautiful shot is introduced by two uninteresting ones and followed by two more; the idea is that the whole meshes harmoniously, flows into the film’s mold like a smooth cooking sauce. Nakahira works entirely differently. When he’s about to film a couple lying on the sand, he first shows us the girl as we would see her if we were lying behind her: an oblique perspective of her body, a little glimpse of her breasts through the gap in her bathing suit, very pretty, and not edited out for the screen. Having filmed that view, now he frames the faces vertically; two glances: the boy looks at the girl, whom he believes to be asleep; he is euphoric; next the girl glances at the boy, who has closed his eyes; then the camera returns to its original position behind the couple on the ground; the girl’s hand moves slightly from her thigh and brushes against the boy’s hand; a shot of the boy’s body, lightly turned on his side, and a discreet glimpse of his bulging trunks.
All of this, which I explain more or less well, has absolute simplicity and clarity on the screen. These are, all of them, full, rich shots because each has equal value; none is there merely to introduce the next one. Obviously, such shots do not and cannot intertwine, since it is the actual taking of the first shot that suggests the next one in a certain way to the filmmaker, and then one more in another way. When he edits his takes, he finds one more beautiful than the other and sets them in succession to serve the scene and the film as well as possible.
We should understand that there are two ways to make films, and this way is not in any sense inferior; it is Vigo’s method, and sometimes Bergman’s and Fellini’s. It is always a matter of sacrificing the film to the film, and everything depends on what we mean by the film—whether it means expressing the greatest number of ideas with the minimum of elements or whether it means showing the greatest number of elements with just enough ideas.
One would have to say that the greatest filmmakers are over fifty, but it is important to practice the cinema of one’s own age and try, if one is twenty-five and admires Dreyer, to emulate Vampyr rather than Ordet. Youth is in a hurry, it is impatient, it is bursting with all sorts of concrete ideas. Young filmmakers must shoot their films in mad haste, movies in which the characters are in a hurry, in which shots jostle each other to get on screen before “The End,” films that contain their ideas. Later on, this succession of ideas will give way to one great, overriding idea, and then the critics will complain about a “promising” filmmaker who has grown old. So what?
Mr. Tessonneau, the general administrator of the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques, should buy a copy of Juvenile Passion and show it to his flock on the first Monday of each month to keep them from acquiring the mentality of assistants. And what is the assistant’s mentality? It can be summed up: “I am finally going to make my first film; I am terrified of falling on my face; I have allowed a script and actors to be imposed on me, but there is one thing I won’t give in on, and that is time; I demand fourteen weeks of shooting, thirteen of them in the studio, because if I can use time and film as much as I want, I will be able, if not to make a good film, at least to prove that I can make a film.”
Juvenile Passion was shot in seventeen days.
—1958
We know that quite a large part of Japanese film production is intended for export. This was the case with Gate of Hell, for example, which the Japanese critics quite rightly did not find important. The confusion about the first Japanese films to be released in France, with the worst mixed indiscriminately with two or three masterpieces, all of them being presented as masterpieces, has compromised their distribution in France in the art and experimental theaters. The most beautiful Japanese film that we have been able to see, indeed one of the most beautiful films in the world, Mizoguchi’s Tales of the Hazy Moon, which has French subtitles, is still waiting for some distributor with perspicacity enough to show it commercially in Paris.
The Legend of Nayarama, by Keisuke Kinoshita, is a film that is difficult to distribute in Europe. It is less plastically beautiful than the Mizoguchis we have seen at the Cinémathèque or at the festivals, although in the same tradition. It reminds us of Ophuls through its daring use of CinemaScope, colored projectors, and, extravagantly, of moving cameras.
When the old people of a certain village where a bowl of rice feeds a man for several months reach seventy, they are left on the summit of Nayarama mountain so they will no longer burden their families. When the moment comes, and she asks, the dutiful son must carry his aging mother there on his back. The hero of this film, too, must carry his father to the mountain top on his back like a mountaineer’s knapsack. He puts the old man down in a crevice in the rocks and descends to the village, lighter in his body, if heavier in his heart. Vultures begin to fly around the summit. When it begins to snow, the hero, filled with remorse, turns and goes back to find his father dead, frozen, turned into a statue. It is a sight we don’t see every day.
The astonishing thing is that this cruel and inhuman legend is treated only in its most human aspect. There are evasions, exceptions, procrastination. The old man doesn’t want to go to the mountain and so again and again he delays his departure. The old woman wants to go, but before she does she breaks her teeth on a stone so that she will no longer be able to eat solid food. We are reminded irresistibly of Beckett’s Endgame and last meals of gruel when we confront this grandiose and terrible portrait of human ruin. Indeed, these are not pictures we want to look at from five to seven, but later in the night, before we go to sleep…perhaps forever. My God, what a beautiful film!
—1958