Filmmaker Kumai Kei (76) passes away

Alexander Jacoby a_p_jacoby
Wed May 23 12:12:33 EDT 2007


It seemed that Kumai had retired, so we weren't likely to see any more films by him, but that's very sad news. He was barely known outside Japan, except for Sandakan 8, which has a marvellous late performance from Kinuyo Tanaka as a former karayuki-san recounting her youth. I was able to see some of his rarer films during the course of my research last year at the Japan Foundation, and I now feel that he merits proper retrospectives in the West. His reputation has perhaps suffered because he made films of a quite unfashionable type; he didn't join his contemporaries in New Wave experimentation, but simply made intelligent, compassionate, socially aware films. His early thrillers, The Long Death and Chain of Islands / Japanese Archipelago, touched intelligently on the legacy of the war and on Japan's relations with the United States. But he was probably at his best during the early seventies. In addition to Sandakan 8, Rise, Fair Sun is a sharp indictment of the modern
 Japanese construction state, its devastation of nature for financial gain, and its indifference to the plight of the farmers that the government had originally encouraged to farm remote land, but now seen as an inconvenience in the face of expanding tourism. Less political, but humane and engaging, is The Long Darkness / Shinobugawa, a delicate study of the relationship between two disillusioned people, shot in austere black and white against the backdrops of the decaying lumberyards of Tokyo's Fukagawa district and the snowscapes of Tohoku.
   
  Kumai was less at ease in jidai-geki, although he made two versions of the story of tea master Sen no Rikyu, and filmed one of Kurosawa's last scripts in The Sea is Watching. His more recent films were generally less consistent in quality than his work of the early seventies. To Love is a sentimental melodrama about a woman who may have leprosy; in contrast to Kumai's usual awareness of the social realities of his time, it feels like it could have made forty years earlier by Kinoshita. However, Darkness in the Light was another intelligent, subtle and compelling account of a cause celebre - the case of the man unjustly accused of plotting the Matsumoto sarin attack really committed by Aum Shinrikyo. In the latter half of his career, Kumai also directed two films based on novels by Shusaku Endo, with whose earnest moral attitudes he had a clear temperamental affinity. To end this tribute on a high note, I'd like to comment that his version of The Sea and Poison,
 interrogating the motives of medical staff who took part in the vivisection of American military personnel during World War II, is, as far as I'm concerned, one of the outstanding Japanese films of the past quarter century. The choice of black and white and the exquisite timing of the editing ensure that one sees just enough - never too much - and therefore one's response is always of moral revulsion rather than simply physical revulsion. Kumai explains everything while excusing nothing, and I imagine it was an act of bravery to make this film in the face of the boys with the black vans... I found it a film of astonishing intensity, and I was shaking when I walked out of the screening room.
   
  In sum, Kumai at his best made films that mattered and will continue to matter; he was politically committed while never allowing ideology to cloud his humane sympathies; and he opted for a restrained style which refused to tell the audience what to think, instead letting the facts speak for themselves. He was a director of intelligence and integrity, and his death is a sad loss to the Japanese cinema.
   
  ALEX
   
  

Don Brown <ryuganji at gmail.com> wrote:
  Kumai died of a subarachnoid hemorrhage this morning at a Tokyo hospital. Earlier this month he was found collapsed at his home in Chofu by a newspaper delivery person and was rushed to hospital, but later regained consciousness. 

http://www.mainichi-msn.co.jp/today/news/20070523k0000e040081000c.html
http://www.sankei.co.jp/culture/enterme/070523/ent070523001.htm

Don Brown
www.ryuganji.net


       
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