KINEMA 2400
Learning the heart of Japan from film
- To Trap a Kidnapper and Toei Tokyo｜The Speed That Survived Toei's DeclineTo Trap a Kidnapper, produced by Toei Tokyo and Nippon Television around the time Toei, once proud of its ninkyo and yakuza films, lost its momentum, drew on a real child kidnapping case. This one film still holds the speed of a Toei that would produce a film the moment an incident occurred.
- Sayurists and the Shochiku Sanbagarasu｜The Oshi Culture That Began in Japanese CinemaPeople who made Sayuri Yoshinaga their oshi were called Sayurists. The strategy of pushing a trio together had already arisen as a convention from Shochiku's Sanbagarasu before the war. The history of oshi is deeply tied to Japanese cinema. To dive into film, find your own oshi.
- Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri｜Movement Within Stillness, and TimeHarakiri, directed by Masaki Kobayashi in 1962, delivered one great shock to films about samurai. Most of it plays in the garden of the Ii house, where Tatsuya Nakadai sits composed and keeps speaking. The phrase "motion within stillness" fits no film so well.
- Masahiro Shinoda's MacArthur's Children｜The Occupation and the Time of the Seto Inland SeaIn Masahiro Shinoda's MacArthur's Children, island children whose textbooks have been blacked out turn baseball, a game of the occupiers, into their own play. The English title is MacArthur's Children. Perhaps the most accurate mirror of war is the eyes of the child who looked up at it.
- Masahiro Shinoda's Clouds at Sunset｜A Film Changes with the Season and Place in Which We See ItClouds at Sunset, which Masahiro Shinoda adapted from Tsutomu Mizukami's novel in 1967, intertwines deep feeling and a nostalgia never experienced. Perhaps many films are better seen at the right time and in the right season. Depending on when and in what setting we see it, a work gains a different effect.
- The Mu Carved on Yasujiro Ozu's Grave Was Something He Found on the BattlefieldOn Yasujiro Ozu's gravestone at Engakuji in Kita-Kamakura is carved a single character, "Mu" (nothingness). The "mu" on the stone was not a beautiful conclusion reached in his later years but something he gained on the battlefield. Ozu made no war film for the next seventeen years and went on filming what remains after people are gone.
- Kazuo Miyagawa's "Bleach Bypass" Was Born in Kon Ichikawa's Her Brother (1960)In 1960, the year color television broadcasts began, Kon Ichikawa gave Kazuo Miyagawa a single request: turn the air of the Taisho era into color. Miyagawa deliberately skipped the process of removing silver and so created what became known as the "bleach bypass." What Her Brother chose was a Taisho without color.
- Kosaku Yamashita's The Great Casino (1968) Portrays the Japanese Heart in FullThe "heart of the past," which survived until only about half a century ago, is stamped on The Great Casino of 1968. Kosaku Yamashita directed and Koji Tsuruta starred. The Japanized Five Constants and Seven Emotions are all in this one film. It goes deeper than reading hundreds of books on the Japanese heart.
- Koji Wakamatsu's Pink Films and the Red Bus Screening Troupe｜Three Routes to the Freedom to Be ScreenedIn 1960, Shochiku cut off the screening of Nagisa Oshima's Night and Fog in Japan without notice. Those who sought the freedom to be screened found three solutions. Ride a different network, like Koji Wakamatsu. Build your own network, like Ogawa Productions' independent screenings and the Red Bus Screening Troupe. Or team up with adults who hold a network.
- The Independent Productions Fought Not for the Freedom to Make Films but for the Freedom to Have Them ShownIn 1950, film people driven from the studios by the Red Purge founded Shinsei Eigasha, and Kaneto Shindo and Kozaburo Yoshimura, who left Shochiku, formed Kindai Eiga Kyokai. But cinemas across the country had been absorbed into the chains of the majors. It was a battle over not the freedom to make but the freedom to be shown.
- The Studio System and the Five-Company Agreement｜How Six Major Studios Controlled Everything from Production to ExhibitionThe six companies that ran postwar Japanese film, Shochiku, Toho, Daiei, Toei, Shintoho, and Nikkatsu, owned studios and held cinemas across the country in their chains. In 1960 they made 547 films. With the Five-Company Agreement of 1953, leaving a company became synonymous with vanishing from the film world.
- Why Did ATG End? With Full Financing, ATG Ceased to Be ATGIn 1974 the Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka ended its role, and ATG went into retreat through the 1970s. In 1979 the new president, Shiro Sasaki, declared that if there was no money, ATG would pay the whole amount. The moment it became the one paying everything, ATG became merely a production company. What it left behind was a way of being.
- ATG's Ten-Million-Yen Films｜Half the Money, and Three Clauses That Promised Never to InterfereIn 1967, from Shohei Imamura's A Man Vanishes, came the "ten-million-yen film," in which ATG put up five million yen and Imamura Productions put up five million. What was decisive among the three clauses was the second, that ATG would not interfere in production at all. In exchange for little money came complete freedom.
- The Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka and Kinshiro Kuzui｜The Underground Sasoriza and Shinjuku in the SixtiesThe Art Theatre Shinjuku Bunka opened in 1962 beside Isetan in Shinjuku 3-chome. In 1967 its general manager, Kinshiro Kuzui, opened the Underground Sasoriza in the cinema's basement. It was named by Yukio Mishima. It stood at the very center of 1960s Shinjuku, where energy with nowhere to go burst out.
- Why the Art Theatre Guild Was Born｜The Defeat of Anpo and Kashiko KawakitaThe 1960s began with the defeat of the Anpo struggle. Young people carrying questions that politics had left unanswered ran into art films in dim cinemas. Centered on Kashiko Kawakita, the Art Theatre Guild, known as ATG, was born on November 15, 1961.
- Kashiko Kawakita Put "Conveying" into Practice Through Film Preservation and the Founding of ATGAI and no-code tools have opened making to everyone, but nothing has changed about conveying. Kashiko Kawakita, who conveyed Japanese film to the world, went on to take up film preservation and the art-film screening movement, and in November 1961 the Art Theatre Guild (ATG) was born.
- Kashiko Kawakita｜The Towa Intermediary Who Carried Japanese Cinema to the World's Film FestivalsKashiko Kawakita was neither director, actor, nor screenwriter, yet no one has quietly supported the skeleton of Japanese film history as she did. She carried the works of Kenji Mizoguchi and Teinosuke Kinugasa to film festivals worldwide, and sent out to the world even Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse, who had drawn little notice.
- Toei's Ninkyo Film Jinsei Gekijo Hishakaku (Theater of Life)｜The Stillness of Koji Tsuruta and the Motion of Ken TakakuraWhen the stage of chambara swordplay moved to television, what Toei found as its new form was the "ninkyo" film. The turning point was Theater of Life: Hishakaku in 1963. Where Koji Tsuruta, who had lived through the war, was stillness, Ken Takakura was motion, and audiences could entrust their pent-up frustration to either.
- Why the Five-Company Agreement Was Made｜A Pact Against Poaching to Hold Back NikkatsuThe Five-Company Agreement, concluded by the five major studios in September 1953, was a pact aimed at preventing the poaching of contract talent. The direct trigger was Nikkatsu's attempt to resume production in 1954. With no stars or directors under contract, Nikkatsu had no choice but to poach from the existing companies.
- Why the Silver Screen Was Silver｜Screens Coated with Silver and Aluminum, Utsushi-e, and the BenshiProjected onto plain white cloth, light scatters and the image blurs. So screens mixed with aluminum or silver came into use, were called the silver screen in English, and the translation "ginmaku" took hold. In Japan, a remnant of utsushi-e, the narration of the benshi became one with the silver screen.
- Sadao Yamanaka｜The Finest Director of the 1930s, Dead at 28 in the War, and His Three Surviving FilmsSadao Yamanaka ended his life at only 28. Hailed as the finest director of the 1930s, he was drafted in the Sino-Japanese War and died of illness in China. Of his 26 films, only three survive in full: The Million Ryo Pot, Kochiyama Soshun, and Humanity and Paper Balloons.
- Haruko Sugimura, the Greatest Actor in Japanese Film History｜The Acting Found by Yasujiro Ozu's GumiJapanese film once had the custom of the "gumi," in which particular staff stayed with a particular director. Yasujiro Ozu thought actors who wanted to act were in the way, and the one he trusted without reserve was the great Shingeki actress Haruko Sugimura. Her acting is the very person living in the town.
- Why Is Mikio Naruse So Little Studied? The Craftsman Who Made 87 Films and Never Showed His StoryboardsMikio Naruse, who made 87 films before dying at 63, has hardly become an object of study. He never let others see his most important storyboards and shooting plans. He was a craftsman who worked backward from the finished image in his head and kept to deadlines, budgets, and working hours.
- A Good Film Is One You Can Watch to the End｜Masaki Kobayashi's The Human ConditionA good film is one you can watch to the end. After Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai proved that audiences will watch even a long film, Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition appeared, running about nine and a half hours in total. The sense of mission shared by its crew and actors produced a supreme work in which time goes unfelt.
- The Golden Age of 1950s Japanese Cinema｜An Explosion of Expression Born of a Gap in CensorshipThe military in the 1930s, the GHQ in the 1940s. After these dark ages of censorship, the Korean War rendered GHQ censorship effectively void, and the film industry grew explosively. The golden age of the 1950s was an explosion of expression brought about by a miraculous "vacuum of power."
- Where to Begin with Classic Japanese Cinema｜Tokyo Story, Seven Samurai, and UgetsuJapanese films released in theaters since the dawn of cinema in 1896 number about 48,000. For anyone who does not know what to watch first, the way in is the masterpieces of the great directors of the second golden age. Shochiku's Tokyo Story, Toho's Seven Samurai, and Daiei's Ugetsu are the three starting points.
- Japanese Cinema as the Manyoshu in Moving Images｜Following the Kokugaku Scholars in Search of "the Japanese Heart"The Kokugaku scholars of the Edo period felt uneasy about the worship of foreign things and found "the Japanese heart" in the Manyoshu and the Kojiki. About 160 years after the Meiji Restoration, with Europe and America still the model, that heart is sought in Japanese cinema. For the Japanese, film may have been the Manyoshu in moving images.
Project 2049, a weekly essay by the philosopher Takahiro Mitsui
In English, every Friday at 5 p.m. Japan time. No likes, no comments, no rankings. Just the essay and you.
SubscribeProject 2049, a weekly essay by the philosopher Takahiro Mitsui
In English, every Friday at 5 p.m. Japan time. No likes, no comments, no rankings. Just the essay and you.
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