[KineJapan] Hara Setsuko

Thu Dec 17 01:22:16 EST 2015

Dear KineJapaners,

A little follow-up here about Hara Setsuko :
as a tribute, the Film theater inside the Kyoto Bunka Hakubutsukan (The
Museum of Kyoto / 京都府京都文化博物館)
will be screening about twelve of her movies, several times for each one of
them, from January 5th to 28th.

And later on, in March, Movix Kyoto will be screening a restored digital
copy of "Tokyo Monogatari".

You'll find the scanned movie list attached to this mail but you can also
find it online at this address :
http://www.bunpaku.or.jp/exhi_film/schedule/

I don't know if anyone from the list will have the possibility to go,
I just thought it's nice to hear that her movies are getting a chance to be
seen on a large screen like this.

Wishing you all a nice and happy day,

Best,

Lucile

2015-12-17 15:19 GMT+09:00 lucile druet <lucile.druet at gmail.com>:

> Dear KineJapaners,
>
> A little follow-up here about Hara Setsuko :
> as a tribute, the Film theater inside the Kyoto Bunka Hakubutsukan (The
> Museum of Kyoto / 京都府京都文化博物館)
> will be screening about twelve of her movies, several times for each one
> of them, from January 5th to 28th.
>
> And later on, in March, Movix Kyoto will be screening a restored digital
> copy of "Tokyo Monogatari".
>
> You'll find the scanned movie list attached to this mail but you can also
> find it online at this address :
> http://www.bunpaku.or.jp/exhi_film/schedule/
>
> I don't know if anyone from the list will have the possibility to go,
> I just thought it's nice to hear that her movies are getting a chance to
> be seen on a large screen like this.
>
>
> Wishing you all a nice and happy day,
>
> Best,
>
> Lucile
>
>
>
>
>
> 2015-12-01 21:41 GMT+09:00 Roger Macy <macyroger at yahoo.co.uk>:
>
>> Dear KineJapaners,
>> The obituaries for Hara Setsuko in the English newspapers are now all
>> published.  Mostly they are not in great depth, were not written by
>> Japanese specialists and do not situate her fame in Japan at all.
>>
>> However, there is one honourable exception.  *The Independent *had on
>> file an obituary written by James Kirkup, whose own obituary in 2009 was
>> noted here.  The piece was written for a full-sized broadsheet, at 2,500
>> words and brings out a nostalgia within me for a style and depth of writing
>> that seems to have irrevocably passed in journalism.
>>
>> For the edition of Thursday 26th November, *The Independent* cut it down
>> to its current page size of 1500 words.  It still unquestionably surpasses
>> the competition and notably addresses Hara's relationship with Ozu,
>> particularly at the end.
>>
>> *The Independent* agreed that I could show the unabridged version to
>> scholars, that would otherwise be lost to the record, so I am providing it
>> here.  I've marked the parts that were cut in blue, but I'm not sure that
>> 'KineJapan' transmits colour, so I'll also attach a doc file.
>> Written some twenty years ago, it deploys some unfamiliar english
>> translations of the titles but these will not distract readers here.
>> Roger
>>
>> The link to the published version is here
>>
>> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/setsuko-hara-actress-adored-in-japan-and-abroad-for-her-sensitivity-and-best-known-for-her-work-with-a6749256.html
>>
>> *by James Kirkup  July 1998  SETSUKO HARA (Masae Aida) film actress.*
>> Born Yokohama 17 June, 1920. Died Kamakura.
>> She was the Garbo of Japan, the great shining star of the golden era in
>> Japanese film making. In his autobiography, the actor Ken Takakura, best
>> known for his role in Sydney Pollock’s The Yakuza, describes the vision of
>> Setsuko Hara walking through the indifferent hordes of commuters in
>> Shinjuku Station: she moved among them within an indefinable aura of
>> mystery, a physical presence so discreet, it could hardly be called present
>> at all. The atmosphere of purity and mystic innocence surrounding her was
>> partly a reflection of her private life, shrouded in the utmost discretion.
>> She was averse to publicity and rarely gave interviews. She never
>> married, and she is not known to have had any love affairs. There was a
>> rumour that she might marry Yasujiro Ozu, who directed her in most of her
>> finest films, but it was only a rumour. Ozu, too, never married,
>> something even now considered abnormal in a Japanese male: he lived with
>> his mother all his life. Women today are more independent of social
>> conventions, and many now prefer a career to marriage. Hara was known
>> affectionately, regretfully, as “The Eternal virgin.”
>>  Setsuko Hara attended the very refined Yokohama Ladies’ Seminary from
>> 1933. In August 1934, her fresh, modest yet ebullient personality and her
>> radiantly simple beauty led her to be recommended as a possible addition to
>> Nikkatsu Movie company’s list of ‘new faces’.
>> Her father, Fujinosuke Aida, was a lowly salaryman, but his second
>> daughter had become an actress and the wife of Hisatora Kumagai, a young
>> movie director. Setsuko’s playful charm and a certain childlike
>> spontaneity of feeling had made her popular with children, so she had
>> decided to become a schoolteacher. But with the deterioration of her
>> family’s financial situation, she could not envisage a continuation of
>> higher education.
>> In her first casting photos, her skin appeared rather dark. Though she
>> had a fine profile, her frontal shots revealed here as too thin and
>> underdeveloped. So her first attempt to enter Nikkatsu failed. However
>> her brother-in-law Hisatora remained convinced that she had the makings of
>> a good actress. So he invited the movie company’s casting directors to
>> his home in order to meet Setsuko in a more relaxed atmosphere. The subtle
>> aura she diffused on that occasion was enough to persuade the company to
>> engage her.
>> At the time, Nikkatsu had few talented young actresses, so Setsuko seemed
>> likely to fill a need for a certain type of traditional Japanese girl. In
>> April 1935, she joined the Nikkatsu Tamagawa Satsueijo, and in August made
>> her film debut in Tetsu Taguchi’s Tamerau nakare Wakandoyo (Don’t hesitate
>> young people!). She was only fifteen years old. In this young people’s
>> movie, she took the professional name of Setsuko Hara. Later in 1935,
>> she appeared in Fumito Kurata’s shinya no taiyo (Midnight Sun). It was a ‘B
>> class’ movie of the kind that in those days was run in support of the first
>> feature, ‘A class’ film. But she had the leading role.  In that same
>> year, the leading actress billed to appear in Midori no Chiheisen (Green
>> Horizon) committed suicide. Setsuko took over her part in this first-class
>> ‘A’ movie’. Her performance revealed her as a potential star, with her
>> happy smile, innocent, open gaze, wide, sparkling eyes and classic profile.
>> In 1936 she made Sadao Yamanaka’s Kochiyama Soshun. Yamanaka was a very
>> promising young director who had already made a couple of remarkable early
>> talkies, and was soon to leave Nikkatsu to work as Ozu’s assistant in
>> Tokyo. He was killed during the war in Manchuria.
>> In those pre-war days, Nazi Germany had a passion for sentimental
>> adventure movies, love stories set in the mountains. In his book Dr
>> Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer writes about the Nazis “idolatry of
>> glaciers and mountain rock faces as symptomatic of the anti-rationalist
>> romanticism of the German psyche exploited by the German leaders.” The
>> director Arnold Fanck was the chief exponent of his nationalist cinematic
>> cult, and his first opus had been named, significantly, Der Heilige Berg
>> (The Holy Mountain), 1926, starring the ex-dancer Leni Riefenstahl, who was
>> to appear in the five more of Fanck’s movies, none of which achieved the
>> mastery of Die Weisse Holle vom Piz Palu (The White Hell of Piz Palu)
>> co-directed by Pabst in 1929. All Fanck’s movies were photographed by the
>> celebrated operator Richard Angst.
>> Arnold Fanck arrived from Berlin to make a Japan/German/co-production
>> mountain movie with Setsuko Hara and Sesshu Hayakawa. Fanck’s co-director
>> was Mansaku Itami (father of the late Juzo Itami). But there was a lot of
>> friction on the set between them. In the end, to save face on both sides,
>> two versions had to be made: Atarashi Tsuchi (New Earth) and Samurai no
>> musumi (Daughter of the Samurai). In 1937 Setsuko Hara appeared in both
>> versions, which were shown in strict alternation in Japan. The Japanese
>> audiences preferred the German version, as more ‘exotic’. Setsuko, the
>> first Japanese girl to play in a German movie, was a great attraction, and
>> it made her a real star.
>> She went to Germany for the film’s opening there. After studying German
>> for only one month, she managed to speak the language passably. She
>> travelled in a company with the famous Japanese pair of movie buyers for
>> Towa Shoji, Nagamasa and Kashiko Kawakita. Hara’s brother-in-law was also
>> one of the delegation. At Tokyo Station, vast crowds had gathered to see
>> them off on 10 March, 1937. They journeyed through Manchuria and on the
>> Trans-Siberian, to arrive on 26 March in Berlin. Setsuko made her first
>> public appearance at the Capitol Theatre, wearing the elegant traditional
>> women’s long-sleeved Kimono known as furisode. Her grace, her youth, her
>> radiant smile and demure demeanour enchanted the Germans.
>> She met the great Swiss actress Dorothea Wieok, who had played the
>> sensational leading role in Leontine Sagan’s Madchen in Uniform, which had
>> been a huge success in Japan. Setsuko possessed some of the spiritual
>> distinction of Wieck, whom she admired as a model for her own acting style.
>> The Germans preferred the Japanese to the German version of the film.
>> Hara went on to Paris, where she met Louis Jouvet, Annabella, Michel
>> Simon and Julien Duvivier. Then to New York and Hollywood, where she
>> encountered Josef von Sternberg, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyk and the
>> Austrian actress Luise Rainer. It would have been interesting to see
>> Hara in a film by Duvivier or von Sternberg, but apparently no attempt
>> was made to put her under contract in Paris or Los Angeles.
>> When she returned to Japan, Setsuko Hara joined the Toho Movie Company
>> where in 1937 she made Tokai bijoden (Tokai Beauty Legend) directed by
>> Takizo Ishida. She also played in a version of Les Miserables, in which she
>> was a very natural, appealing Cosette. In 1938, Satsuo Yamamoto directed
>> her in Kyojinden (Legend of a Great Man) adapted from Andre Gide’s La
>> Symphonie Pastorale. As the tremulously sensitive blind heroine, Setsuko
>> was superbly cast, an interpretation deeply-thought out. It was Setsuko’s
>> use of the marvellous myopic gaze in her brilliantly expressive eyes that
>> confirmed her as a great actress, far superior to Michele Morgan in
>> Delannoy’s1946 version. The Japanese loved these films with Western
>> backgrounds and characters. Fanck had seen in her a typical Japanese
>> beauty. To the Japanese she seemed to represent a more European type.
>> But during the Pacific War, rigid anti-Western propaganda compelled her
>> to play typical Japanese young lady parts, and she made few movies during
>> this period.
>> It was therefore not until the, end of the war that her career really
>> began to take off, in Kuresawa’s first post-war film, Waga seishu ni
>> kuinashi (Mr Springtime, No Regrets) in l946. She acted with real passion,
>> and was an impressive leading lady. The film was voted No. 2 on the list
>> of the year’s best movies. In 1947, she left Toho and joined the new
>> Shin-Toho Movie Company. She became an independent actress and played only
>> in parts that she felt were suited to her, beginning with Kimisaburo
>> Yoshimura’s Anjoke no butokai (The Anjo Family’s Dance Party), which was
>> chosen as the best film of 1947. Setsuko’s popularity started to soar.
>> She always appeared on screen as an intelligent, refined, elegant, serious,
>> young lady. She was untouched by social revolutions in Japanese post-war
>> life, and in that depressed period her enchanting smile seemed to give
>> people consolation and hope for a better future. In the confusions of
>> post-war society, her delicacy and tenderness were an inspiration.
>> As an actress, she had begun with a rather stiff, mechanical technique,
>> but experience softened her style and in Yasujiro Ozu’s Banshun (Late
>> spring), 1949, with the support of the great Chishu Ryu, she touched
>> everyone’s heart as a motherless daughter living with her professor father,
>> taking care of him with true affection and self-effacement, thus missing
>> her chances of marriage, which she finally is persuaded to embark upon at
>> the end. There is a wonderfully touching scene between her and Ryu as
>> she leaves him for the marriage ceremony, wearing a superb traditional
>> wedding kimono. This film, the first of several she made with Ozu, was
>> elected No.1 on the year-end charts.
>> In the came year, Keisuke Kinoshita directed her in O-jo-san kampai!
>> (Cheers, old girl!) which was only No. 6 on the box-office list. But her
>> performance the same year in Aoi san miyaku (Blue Mountain) was No. 2 in
>> the annual list. In 1949 again, she went on to win the Best Actress Award
>> in the Mainichi Newspaper’s Movie Concours.
>> Setsuko Hara’s most famous films belong to the 1950s. In 1951, she
>> played in Kurosawa’s Hakuchi, based on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, co-starring
>> with Toshiro Mifune and Masayuki Mori. She was Natasha, and the whole
>> film was shot in northern Japan. Hers was a very dramatic character, the
>> mistress of a wealthy man but longing to lead a purer life.
>> In the same year, her next film with Ozu, Bakusha (Early Summer) became
>> the year’s No.1 hit, followed by the No.2, Mikio Naruse’s Meshi (A Bowl of
>> Rice) in which she gave one of her best performances. Those three films are
>> classics of the Japanese cinema, constantly screened at film festivals
>> and retrospectives. Her director, Ozu, said: “She can act from the very
>> depths of her being, and always has a quick understanding of her part. When
>> I am giving her direction, she always responds intelligently and
>> instinctively, a wonderful natural actress.” Ozu’s traditional Japanese
>> interiors, shot from tatami floor level, were perfect settings for her.
>> In 1953 the greatest of the Ozu/Hara films, Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo
>> Story) was made. The shooting began in June, directed by Hara’s
>> brother-in-law as Ozu’s assistant, and with her second brother as
>> cameraman. The latter was taking a shot of an approaching train in Gotemba
>> station when the train failed to stop in time: he was run over and died on
>> June 6th. In these very sad circumstances, which intensified the
>> peculiar melancholy of the story, Setsuko Hara began playing her greatest
>> part, that of a young war widow, on 20 July. Here again she appears as a
>> devoted daughter-in-law who kindly takes care of her ageing parents-in-law
>> when they leave their remote country home to spend a few days with their
>> son and his rather abrasive wife (the inimitable Haruko Sugiyama) in
>> their cramped Tokyo home.
>> It is a deeply moving film, in which Setsuko’s fine performance is backed
>> by the excellent characterisations of Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama as
>> her parents-in-law. Tokyo story is universal in its appeal, and one of the
>> greatest masterpieces of Japanese cinematographic art.
>> In 1954, Hara made another film with Mikio Naruse, a sensitive version
>> of Yasunari Kawabata’s best novel, Yama no oto (A Rumbling in the
>> mountains). Setsuko now 34, and still unmarried, was at her peak period
>> as an actress, and the very fact that she chose to remain unmarried seemed
>> to add an extra almost ethereal dimension of spiritual distinction to her
>> art. Her lovely eyes were still full of tenderness and sparkles of
>> mischievous humour. But she had developed cataract in her left eye: this
>> was successfully operated on at Keio University Hospital. It seemed an
>> omen of coming decline.
>> Her favourite director, Ozu, had only another ten years to live. Her own
>> father died in 1955.  Hara next appeared on the screen in Hisatora
>> Kumagai’s 1955 Non-chan kumo ni noru (Non-chan in the Clouds), based on
>> a well-loved children’s classic by Momoko Ishi. Newspaper headlines
>> joyfully announced: “Beautiful Eyes Return to the Screen!” The film marked
>> another significant step in her career: it was the first time she had
>> played a mother. There followed a succession of almost elegiac autumnal Ozu
>> masterpieces: Tokyo boshoku (Tokyo Twilight) in 1957; Aki biyori (Autumn
>> skies), 1960; and Kohayagawake no aki (Autumn of the Kohayagawa Family),
>> 1961. Though Setsuko did not appear in it, Ozu made his last film, Samma
>> no aji (usually billed as The Taste of Sake) in 1962. In several of Ozu’s
>> later movies, he had used younger actresses: Keiko Kishi in Soshun (Early
>> Spring), in 1956; Ineko Arima in Higanbana (Equinox Flowers), 1958; Mariko
>> Okada in Samma no aji, 1962. None of these women could equal the qualities
>> of Setsuko Hara, her spell-binding quiet intensity and her grace. She
>> began to seem to belong to another age.
>> Hara and Ozu: there is an underlying sense of some disturbing secret that
>> emanates from these two unmarried artists, the sadness of an emotional
>> difference that their condition arouses in the spectators, and indefinable
>> strain of sexual perversity. They seem to be telling us that human lives
>> are not what they seem, and that an acceptable social exterior is not
>> everything.
>> In his recent enthralling book on Ozu, the critic and scholar Shigehiko
>> Hasumi argues, against critics like Paul Schrader, Donald Richie and Audie
>> Bock that all was not simple sweetness and light in those films made with
>> Setsuko Hara. She was apparently in love with her much older director, a
>> father-figure who had no intention of marrying anybody, and so treated her
>> rather distantly. Unlike Hasumi, I see their relationship more like that
>> between the dutiful daughter and the father in Banshun: one of pure
>> devotion, with a sublimated sexual need.
>> In 1962, Setsuko appeared in her last movie, one of the countless
>> versions of Chushingura, a historical epic in which she is obviously ill at
>> ease. She retired from the screen when she was only forty-two, feeling
>> there were no more parts for her to play. The type of young girl and woman
>> she had portrayed to such perfection was already vanishing from modern
>> Japan. Like Garbo and Dietrich, she retired not only from the screen, but
>> also from public life. The Japarazzi managed to take only one shot of her
>> at home. She did not want her fans to witness her beauty in decline. The
>> Eternal Virgin remained one to the end of her days, her veil or mystery
>> unbroken.
>> *Masae Aida (Setsuko Hara), actress: born 17 June 1920; died Kanagawa,
>> Japan 5 September 2015.*
>> *James Kirkup died in 2009.*
>>
>>
>> * = Bakushū
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>> *From:* Gerow Aaron <aaron.gerow at yale.edu>
>> *To:* Japanese Cinema Discussion Forum <kinejapan at lists.osu.edu>
>> *Sent:* Wednesday, 25 November 2015, 14:29
>> *Subject:* [KineJapan] Hara Setsuko
>>
>> The news services report that Hara Setsuko, the star of so many great
>> Japanese films, is dead at age 95. She actually died September 5, but her
>> passing was not announced.
>>
>> http://www.asahi.com/articles/ASHCT7KPNHCTUCLV01B.html?iref=comtop_6_01
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>>
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>
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