Japan

A rarely seen but important 1965 work by Heinosuke Gosho.

Some remarks by Arthur Nolletti, in his book The Cinema of Gosho Heinosuke: Laughter Through Tears:

Gosho’s most critically acclaimed film of the 1960s… Ranked seventh in Kinema Jumpo’s “Best Ten” poll, it is rightly considered to be one of his most powerful works. Set on the Shimokita Peninsula in the northernmost area of Honshu, the film tells a stark and harrowing tale. Oshima Ayako (Yoshimura Jitsuko), a young woman in her teens, lives in a small, impoverished fishing village. Her father, Matsukichi (Yoshida Yoshio), is too ill to work. As a result, her mother, Kikuno (Sugai Kin), sells her to a nearby brothel. There she quickly is stripped of her innocence and illusions…Read More »

This is the second of three major film adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s famous novel from the 1940s, the first one being the 1950 version directed by Yutaka Abe, the latter one being Kon Ichikawa’s The Makioka Sisters from 1983. Shima’s version stars Machiko Kyo, Fujiko Yamamoto, Junko Kano and Yukiko Todoroki in the roles of the sisters. The novel (and the films) follow the lives of the wealthy Makioka family of Osaka from the autumn of 1936 to April 1941, focusing on the family’s attempts to find a husband for the third sister, Yukiko. It depicts the decline of the family’s upper-middle-class, suburban lifestyle as the specter of World War II and Allied Occupation hangs over the novel.Read More »

Considered to be one of the best Japanese films of the ‘70s, Tatsumi Kumashiro’s The World of Geisha is a keen examination of the swirling nexus that attracts sex to money and money to power. Set in a geisha house just before the Russo-Japanese War, a beautiful Geisha spends the night with a first-time customer who is about to be married. As an experienced geisha, she is not supposed to become personally involved (or sexually excited), but does anyway. Her fellow geishas, both young and old, become involved with a variety of relationships as Kumashiro boldly analyzes the politics of the period using images of rice riots, Korean uprisings, and the eventual Japanese invasion of Siberia.Read More »

A true-life tale of a broken woman whose hedonistic tryst with a high-class restaurateur resulted in a horrific crime of passion that littered Tokyo headlines in 1936.Read More »

An early documentary to portray the experiences of disabled people with compassion and complexity, Kazuo Hara’s searing debut is also one of the most unflinching films ever made about what it means to be an outsider. Produced in collaboration with the Green Lawn—a group of activists with cerebral palsy who work to raise awareness of the condition—GOODBYE CP blends jagged, shot-on-the-fly footage of the members’ seemingly Sisyphean struggle to take their message to the streets with raw, sometimes confrontational interviews in which they reveal the torment of living in a society cruelly indifferent to their existence. In making his subjects active participants in the film’s creation—a practice he would continue throughout his career—Hara powerfully asserts the humanity and agency of those who have long been denied both.Read More »

Two women in training to become deadly ninja assassins decide to use their skills to pickpocket a wealthy looking samurai. However, they soon find themselves caught up in a dangerous situation that requires a very special secret weapon to escape-specifically, their impressive physical attributes.Read More »

Tane, a female clerk of a rubber company in a corner of an industrial area facing Tokyo Bay is a quirky woman, also living on the second floor of the company warehouse.Read More »

Equally successful was Yoshimura’s 1955 The Beauty and the Dragon (Bijo to Kairyu), a period-film in which the famous Kabuki play Narukami was brought throughly up to date. Somewhat in the manner of Henry V, the film opens with a reconstruction of a classical performance of the play, accurately recreating a historical presentation in the proper style; it then moves, as a film, into a more cinematic interpretation. As in the Olivier movie, the acting style shifts from stage technique to cinema technique, and Yoshimura’s aim, like Olivier’s, was not a total reconstruction of the past but the use of a historically literal presentation as means toward something more modern in conception.Read More »

Quote:
Kato (Ittoku Kishibe) is a small time TV producer. He has a wife Masako (Naoko Otani), and a young son Taro. Kato also has a friend Yamazaki (Akira Emoto) who he knew since college. Yamazaki has a girl friend Riko (Eri Ishida) who lives with her younger sister Yuko (Hitomi Takahashi) who’s an actress. Yamazaki is a lyric writer/womanizer and he starts to have an affair with Masako, but he’s still going out with Riko. Riko really isn’t too enamored with Yamazaki or to any man as for that matter. She has some deep rooted distrust for men in general. One day, Katoh comes home when Masako and Yamazaki is having an affair. Masako is in a skimpy negligee and claims that Yamazaki “just happened to drop by in the morning after getting drunk”. Read More »