Early Autumn: Masterworks of Japanese Cinema from the National Film Center, Tokyo
September 14, 2005–January 2006

For the first time in its history, the National Film Center of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, is opening its archival holdings to another FIAF institution, giving MoMA a chance to present a groundbreaking series of fifty-three films spanning the classic years of Japanese cinema: 1929–1970. Every print screened in the series will be 35mm and newly struck from archival negatives; in addition, new English subtitles have been created by the National Film Center for each film.

Familiar and not-so-familiar works by well-known Japanese directors will be screened, among them films by Kon Ichikawa, Keisuke Kinoshita, Teinosuke Kinugasa, Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse, Nagisa Oshima, and Yasujiro Ozu. Many lesser-known but no less interesting films by such directors as Heinosuke Gosho, Ishirô Honda, Koreyoshi Kurahara, Hiroshi Shimizu, and Sadao Yamanaka will also be showcased. Taken as a whole, this series will serve as a primer in the history of Japanese film for the uninitiated, and will provide the veteran filmgoer with important new discoveries as well as the chance to see old favorites in fresh, clean prints. All films are in Japanese with English subtitles.

HERE IS THE SCHEDULE THROUGH OCTOBER 2005 –

Kohayagawa ke no aki (Early Autumn/The End of Summer). 1961. Japan. Directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Screenplay by Ozu and Kôgo Noda. With Ganjiro Nakamura, Setsuko Hara, Yôko Tsukasa. The intimate epic of the Kohayagawa clan, a middle-class family whose fortunes are in decline due to the willful neglect of its patriarch. Filled with gentle humor and carefully observed vignettes of family life, Early Autumn is, as Donald Richie has observed, “one of Ozu’s most beautiful films, and one of his most disturbing.” 103 min.
Wednesday, September 14, 6:00; Saturday, September 17, 2:00. T1

Shonen (Boy). 1969. Japan. Directed by Nagisa Oshima. With Tetsuo Abe, Fumio Watanabe, Akiko Koyama. A poor family manages a meager living by extorting money from drivers after faking injuries in traffic accidents. One day, the ten-year-old son is caught at the scam, but loyalty to his family prevents him from admitting his guilt. Working from a script based on actual newspaper accounts, Oshima fashions a work of great emotional force and restrained empathy. 97 min.
Wednesday, September 14, 8:30; Saturday, September 17, 4:30. T1

Arigato san (Mr. Thank You). 1936. Japan. Written and directed by Hiroshi Shimizu. With Ken Uehara, Ryuji Ishiyama, Einosuke Naka. A young bus driver, known as “Mr. Thank You” because of his politeness, regularly travels the Izu-Tokyo route. His experiences during one particular trip form the basis of this early Japanese “road movie.” Famous for making films on location and in contemporary settings, Shimizu stages almost all of the action in Mr. Thank You within the bus itself, creating an environment that is both protective and claustrophobic. 75 min.
Thursday, September 15, 6:00. T1; Sunday, September 18, 2:30. T2

Ninjo kamifusen (Humanity and Paper Balloons). 1937. Japan. Directed by Sadao Yamanaka. With Chojuro Kawarazaki, Tsuruzo Nakamura, Kanemon Nakamura. Set during the Tokugawa era, this is the story of a poor samurai who gets caught up in the ill-fated kidnapping of a rich merchant’s daughter. A master of cinematic form, Yamanaka had already created a substantial body of work by the time this film premiered—on the very day he was drafted into the army. He died in Manchuria the following year, at the age of twenty-nine. 86 min.
Thursday, September 15, 8:00. T1; Sunday, September 18, 5:00. T2

Sugata Sanshiro (Judo Saga). 1943. Japan. Written and directed by Akira Kurosawa. With Susumu Fujita, Denjirô Ôkôchi, Yukiko Todoroki. Kurosawa’s directorial debut tells the story of a headstrong youth who comes to the city to apprentice with a jujitsu master; in the process, he learns satori, the calm acceptance of nature and its laws. An early yet accomplished work by a soon-to-be master, Judo Saga shows evidence of Kurosawa’s interest in a character that would dominate most of his films: the reckless, self-absorbed individual who must struggle to achieve compassion for others and inner illumination. 90 min.
Friday, September 16, 6:00; Wednesday, September 21, 8:00. T1

Gan (Wild Geese/The Mistress). 1953. Japan. Directed by Shirô Toyoda. With Hideko Takamine, Hiroshi Akutagawa, Jukichi Uno. A young woman becomes the mistress of an unscrupulous pawnbroker so that she can support her sickly father. She falls in love with a young student who passes by her house every day, but he eventually leaves to study abroad. Set in the late Meiji period, the Tokyo of Gan is a world of thwarted hopes and ennobling duty. 104 min.
Friday, September 16, 8:00; Monday, October 10, 4:00. T1

Narayama bushiko (The Ballad of Narayama). 1958. Japan. Written and directed by Keisuke Kinoshita. With Kinuyo Tanaka, Teiji Takahashi, Yûko Mochizuki. According to legend, it was once customary for the young inhabitants of a remote Japanese village to escort those turning seventy years old to Mount Narayama to die, thus assuring the community’s continued economic stability. Orin, the matriarch of a small family, ties up the loose ends of her life and forces her reluctant son to take her on the final sad yet transcendent journey. 98 min.
Saturday, September 17, 6:30. T1

Muhomatsu no issho (The Rikisha Man). 1943. Japan. Directed by Hiroshi Inagaki. With Tsumasaburo Bando, Ryunosuke Tsukigata, Keiko Sonoi. A poor rickshaw driver becomes the surrogate parent of a boy whose father, a soldier, has been killed in the line of duty. The driver gradually falls in love with the child’s widowed mother, but their class differences prevent him from pursuing his deepest desires. Inagaki filmed this story again in 1958, with Toshirô Mifune in the leading role, but this wartime version is the stronger, more affecting work. 79 min.
Saturday, September 17, 8:30; Wednesday, September 21, 6:00. T1

Anata kaimasu (I’ll Buy You). 1956. Japan. Directed by Masaki Kobayashi. With Keiji Sada, Keiko Kishi, Minoru Oki. Rival professional baseball teams compete for a high school athlete, driving a wedge between the young man, his family, and his girlfriend. An exposé of Japan’s corrupt baseball world, Kobayashi’s film also suggests that “sport is not always the purification ritual that many Japanese apparently believe” (Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie). 112 min.
Saturday, October 1, 2:00. T2; Sunday, October 30, 5:00. T1

Bakumatsu taiyo den (Not Long after Leaving Shinegawa). 1957. Japan. Directed by Yuzo Kawashima. With Frankie Sakai, Sachiko Hidari, Yoko Minamida. This light, comic film tells the story of Saheji, who is taken hostage by the owner of a brothel for nonpayment of debts. He soon becomes the brothel’s manager, successfully collecting on the debts of others, settling patron disputes, and generally working the situation to his advantage. 110 min.
Saturday, October 1, 4:30. T2; Sunday, October 9, 5:30. T1

Namida o shishi no tategami ni (Tears on the Lion’s Mane). 1962. Japan. Directed by Masahiro Shinoda. With Takashi Fujiki, Tamotsu Hayakawa, Mariko Kaga. A Yokohama dockworker accidentally kills a union organizer. He becomes even more despondent when he learns that the man was his girlfriend’s father and that his relationship with his boss is based on a lie. A portrait of the suppressed passions and disillusionment of youth. 92 min.
Saturday, October 1, 6:45. T2; Wednesday, October 12, 6:00. T1

Tokaido Yotsuya kaidan (Ghost Story of Yotsuya). 1959. Japan. Directed by Nobuo Nakagawa. With Shigeru Amachi, Katsuko Wakasugi, Shuntaro Emi. A samurai in feudal-era Japan marries the daughter of an older samurai, after having killed the man and his servants. When he decides to poison his wife so that he can marry another, her grotesquely disfigured ghost drives him mad. 77 min.

Saturday, October 1, 8:45. T2; Monday, October 10, 8:30. T1

Mizu de kakareta monogatari (A Story Written with Water). 1965. Japan. Directed by Yoshishige Yoshida. With Mariko Okada, Yasunori Irikawa, Ruriko Asaoka. A boy is raised by his widowed mother with the help of an important man in town with whom she is having a secret affair. The boy marries the man’s daughter, but upon learning of the affair both the marriage and his world fall apart. 120 min.
Sunday, October 2, 2:00. T2; Friday, October 28, 5:30. T1

Zatoichi monogatari (The Life and Opinions of Masseur Ichi). 1962. Japan. Directed by Kenji Misumi. With Shintaro Katsu, Shigeru Amachi, Masayo Banri. A blind masseur turns legendary master swordsman, an Everyman with extraordinary fighting skills as well as a personal integrity reminiscent of the greatest heroes of the Western. This was the first in a highly successful series of films and television programs featuring the character Zatoichi. 96 min.
Sunday, October 2, 4:30; Friday, October 21, 6:00. T2

Irezumi. 1966. Japan. Directed by Yasuzo Masumura. With Ayako Wakao, Akio Hasegawa, Manbu Yamamoto. Exquisitely photographed by the great cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, Irezumi tells the story of a rich man’s daughter sold into service as a geisha. Like the black widow spider tattooed on her back, she seduces a succession of partners and sends them to their deaths. 86 min.
Monday, October 3, 6:00; Sunday, October 16, 5:30. T2

Aru koroshiya (A Certain Killer). 1967. Japan. Directed by Kazuo Mori. With Raizo Ichikawa, Yumiko Nogawa, Mikio Narita. Employed as a cook in a restaurant, a man supplements his income by working as a contract killer. When he murders a Yakuza boss, he must go into hiding in a shabby suburb. A gritty morality tale that finds its emotional core in the lost dreams of the postwar generation. 82 min.
Monday, October 3, 8:00. T2; Saturday, October 29, 6:30. T1

Gion no kyodai (Sisters of the Gion). 1936. Japan. Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. With Isuzu Yamada, Yoko Umemura, Benkei Shiganoya. Two sisters work as geishas in the Gion district of Kyoto. The older one is bound to tradition and remains loyal to her bankrupt suitor, while the younger sister flits from man to man, exploiting the system in order to increase both of their earnings. 69 min.
Wednesday, October 5, 6:00; Saturday, October 15, 4:30. T1

Ototo (Her Younger Brother). 1960. Japan. Directed by Kon Ichikawa. With Keiko Kishi, Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Kinuyo Tanaka. In this tender melodrama, Ichikawa explores the unbridgeable pit of loneliness at the heart of familial love. A young woman, pressured by her severe and ailing stepmother, sacrifices herself to the needs of her profligate brother, developing an affection for him as he falls ill with tuberculosis. 98 min.
Wednesday, October 5, 8:00; Saturday, October 8, 2:00. T1

Entotsu no mieru basho (Where Chimneys Are Seen). 1953. Japan. Directed by Heinosuke Gosho. With Kinuyo Tanaka, Ken Uehara, Hideko Takamine. A childless married couple, living under the factory chimneys of an industrial section of Tokyo, finds a baby abandoned on their doorstep. Filled with exquisitely observed details of everyday life, this film sparked a revival of the shomin-geki genre, which explored lower middle-class life in postwar Japan. 108 min.
Thursday, October 6, 8:30. T1; Sunday, October 9, 2:00. T2

Ani imoto (Ino and Mon). 1936. Japan. Directed by Sotoji Kimura. With Chieko Takehisa, Sadao Maruyama, Heihachiro Okawa. Mon returns to her family after working as a maid in the city, and reveals that she is pregnant by her former employer’s son. Her brother Ino beats the boy up, further alienating Mon and disrupting the fragile ties that bind the family together. A subtle exploration of the stresses of working-class life in prewar Japan. 60 min.
Sunday, October 9, 4:15. T1

Gendaijin (The Moderns). 1952. Japan. Directed by Minoru Shibuya. With Ryo Ikebe, Isuzu Yamada, So Yamamura. A naïve young man involved in a bribery scandal becomes deeply disillusioned by the corruption of modern life. Shibuya presents an indictment of postwar Japanese life and elicits powerful performances from his cast, especially the young Ryo Ikebe, whose work here as the idealistic protagonist won him wide acclaim. 111 min.
Wednesday, October 12, 8:15; Thursday, October 27, 5:30. T1

Narayama Bushiko (The Ballad of Narayama). 1958. Japan. Written and directed by Keisuke Kinoshita. With Kinuyo Tanaka, Teiji Takahashi, Yûko Mochizuki. According to legend, it was once customary for the young inhabitants of a remote Japanese village to escort those turning seventy years old to Mount Narayama to die, thus assuring the community’s continued economic stability. Orin, the matriarch of a small family, forces her reluctant son to take her on this final journey. 98 min.
Saturday, October 15, 2:00. T1

Getsuyobi no yuka (Monday Girl). 1964. Japan. Directed by Ko Nakahira. With Mariko Kaga, Akira Nakao, Takeshi Kato. Yuka is a “good-time girl” from Yokohama who is persuaded by her papa to sleep with a foreign business executive so that he can close an important deal. Nakahira presents a shrewdly observed portrait of a modern, sexually assertive woman—an unsettling character for a changing but still patriarchal society. 93 min.
Sunday, October 16, 1:30; Thursday, October 27, 8:00. T1

Furyo Shonen (Bad Boy). 1961. Japan. Directed by Susumu Hani. With Yukio Yamada, Hirokazu Yoshitake, Koichiro Yamazaki. Hani’s first feature, set in a reformatory, tells the story of an eighteen-year-old boy arrested for the attempted robbery of a pearl shop. The director has written that this film “is about the spirit of totalitarianism, which is deeply rooted in modern Japanese behavior.” 89 min.
Sunday, October 16, 3:30; Saturday, October 29, 8:30. T1

Matango (Attack of the Mushroom People). 1963. Japan. Directed by Ishiro Honda. With Akira Kubo, Kumi Mizuno, Hiroshi Koizumi. Best known in America as the director of Gojira (Godzilla, 1954), Honda was proficient in a variety of genres. In Matango, a holiday cruise ship carrying a group of pleasure seekers is blown off course and lands on a mysterious deserted island. What ensues is a cult classic of cinematic terror. 89 min.
Monday, October 31, 6:00. T2

The Lady Vanishes
Monday January 10, 2005
The Guardian

Larisa Shepitko was glamorous and gifted, and in her heyday she had the movie world at her feet. Why has everyone forgotten her, asks Larushka Ivan-Zadeh

On June 2 1979 one of cinema’s greatest female directors was killed in a car crash outside Leningrad. She was 39. Her name was Larisa Shepitko, and, even if you’re a film buff, the chances are you’ve never heard of her. Barely any of Shepitko’s mesmerising films have been screened in Britain. None is available on DVD. In fact they’re scarcely shown, or known, in Russia. Yet, at the time of her sudden death, Shepitko was hot property on the international film circuit: she was young for a film-maker; she was strikingly attractive; her exquisite masterpiece The Ascent had won the prestigious Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin festival. She had all the live-fast-die-young glamour that would ensure instant icon status for far inferior artists.

So why has Shepitko’s work remain buried for so long? For the answer, look no further than Lenin’s declaration that “film for us, is the most important art”. Shepitko did not find it easy to satisfy communism’s cultural commissars.

Born in Ukraine in 1938, Shepitko was one of three children raised by her schoolteacher mother. Her father, a Persian officer, had abandoned his family through early divorce – an act that Larisa never forgave. When she enrolled in the Moscow film academy in 1955, her dramatic eyes and dark, cheekboned elegance attracted much attention. However, her sole focus was film-making, and in 1958 she studied direction at the State Institute for Cinematography (VGIK), a few years behind Andrei Tarkovsky. Her tutor was Alexander Dovzhenko, a towering figure of early Soviet cinema and contemporary of Eisenstein. His poetical imagery and passionate celebration of Ukranian folk culture were a marked influence on the young Shepitko, who called him “my mentor” and took to heart his motto: “You have to approach each film as if it were your last.”

Shepitko’s graduation film, Heat (1963), was an extraordinary first undertaking. A daring fusion of political drama and Western-style showdown between an idealistic high-school youth and a Stalinist farm leader, it was shot on the barren steppes in such extreme climate conditions that Shepitko fell dangerously ill. Stretchered off set, she called in another young film-maker to help complete the project; this was her fellow VGIK student Elem Klimov, whose war film Come and See (1985) Stephen Spielberg would later cite as an influence on Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.

Elem (named from the first letters of Engels, Lenin, Marx) had previously proposed marriage to Shepitko, but, like all the others, been rejected. Now he was accepted – but only after he vowed he wouldn’t try to influence Shepitko’s work.

United by intelligence, introspection and a certain dash, the Klimovs, along with Tarkovsky, were at the forefront of the Russian “New Wave” that flourished under Khrushchev before the cultural clampdown of 1967-8. In 1966 Shepitko was able to create her controversial second feature, Wings, which drew a stellar performance from Maya Bulgakova as a once-famous Stalinist fighter pilot now a disenchanted provincial schoolteacher.

An ill-fated omnibus called Beginning of an Unknown Era was Shepitko’s first real loss to censorship. Commissioned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, its unsentimental depiction of the early days of communism was hardly the banner-waving Bolshevik propaganda the Party had hoped for – particularly Angel, the segment directed by Andrei Smirnov, where a worker menaced by an officer with a gun comments: “How simple it is to kill and to condemn in the name of the revolution.” The film was not shown until 1987.

The banning of Beginning depressed Shepitko. However, her primary concern as an artist was not political protest, but the more intimate exploration of the individual in society, struggling with that eternal question: “Why do we live?”

You and Me (1971), set in contemporary Russia, is her most experimental feature, and her only one in Technicolor. This is an existentialist narrative about two male surgeons in crisis about their ideals, balancing individual despair with hope in a wider humanity and responsibility. “I always used to think it was all or nothing,” Dr Pyotr says to a suicidal girl, “But there’s always somebody who needs you.”

Now 35, Larisa took time off from work to have a child. It was a life-changing moment. As she said in her final interview in June 1979, “I saw death very closely. I had a serious spine injury, and at the time I was expecting a child. I could have died, because I decided to keep the child. At that time I was facing death for the first time, and like anyone in such a situation I was looking for my own formula of immortality.”

The result was her numinous masterpiece The Ascent (1976). Drawn from Vasily Bykov’s novella Sotnikov, it’s the tense tale of two starving partisans crawling across the hostile snows of Belarus during the 1942 Nazi occupation. The film is outstanding not just for its ravishing aestheticism, but its Dostoevksian soul-wrestling and gripping central performances. The final scenes, where the Christ-like hero Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) dies because of his own stubborn convictions, form one of the most hypnotically powerful moments of 1970s cinema.

Despite The Ascent’s success – international as well as national, although the Soviet authorities banned export of other masterpieces such as Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev – Larisa was increasingly preoccupied by death. Highly superstitious, she had her fortune told in Bulgaria in 1978, after which she immediately took her friend to a nearby church and made her swear that, should anything happen to her or Elem, she must look after their young son, Anton. A few months later, she was killed.

It was so abrupt; the Soviet film community was stunned into numbness. Tarkovsky wrote in his diary: “Larisa Shepitko was buried, and so were five members of her team. A car accident. All killed instantly. It was so sudden that no adrenaline was found in their blood.”

Shepitko had been on location for a new film, The Farewell. Just a week after the accident, her husband was on set to complete it. The film, in which a traditional Siberian peasant village is condemned in order to facilitate the march of progress, is another implicit critique of modern communism. Interesting though it is (it was allegedly a favourite of Gorbachev’s), Klimov’s Farewell lacks the perfect pitch of the best of Shepitko’s work.

Today, 25 years after Shepitko’s death, her films have finally reached Britain. Leeds International Film festival, working with Soviet Export Film, has organised a retrospective of her entire oeuvre, from her four finished features to her prize-winning shorts (plus The Farewell and a tribute from Elem Klimov). All, particularly the last features, deserve an audience not as dated curiosities from another era, but because Shepitko’s mysticism is rooted in an ever-relevant sense of humanity. It’s time this long-lost Soviet visionary was brought in from the cold.

Actor, director, character, doppelgänger

By Joan Dupont
International Herald Tribune

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2005

PARIS — The versatile Japanese actor-director Takeshi Kitano is competing at the Venice Film Festival with “Takeshis,” perhaps his most baffling film. It is the story of a deeply split self, in which he plays the two “parts.”

Despite the title, “the film is not really about me,” he said in an interview in Paris before the festival opened.

A master of the Japanese yakuza, or gangster, movie since “Violent Cop” (1989), Kitano perfected the genre, then put down his weapons to make the elegiac “Hana-bi,” which won the Golden Lion in Venice in 1997. Then Kitano, who directs and stars in his films, went on to make “Zatoichi,” a period piece about a blind swordsman, a tribute to samurai movies of the 1970s that won him the Silver Lion for best director in 2003.

Just when his fans and Kitano’s producers were hoping for a follow-up to “Zatoichi,” his latest film, about a famous star and his obscure look-alike, defies the very notion of genre. “I wanted to make a movie that can’t be pigeonholed,” he said. “I want audiences to come out of this film not knowing what to say or what to think.”

Read the rest of the interview….