[KineJapan] The Meiji Era through the Dark Valley at NFAJ

[Japanese Cinema Discussion Forum via KineJapan]

Thank you so much for that detailed report, Roger!

Frako Loden

On Wed, May 2, 2018 at 11:15 PM, Japanese Cinema Discussion Forum via
KineJapan <kinejapan at lists.osu.edu> wrote:

> The Meiji Era through the Dark Valley at NFAJ
>
> Dear KineJapaners,
>
> As reported before, the National Film Center has now become the National
> Film Archive of Japan - NFAJ. The signage inside and out at Takarachō has
> been changed, including the directions in the metro station, The website
> <http://www.nfaj.go.jp/> now has its own domain, which links to the library
> catalogue
> <http://kinbiopac.momat.go.jp/mylimedio/search/search-input.do?mode=comp&nqid=2>,
> which is, for now, still under the wing of Momat.
>
> Some things don’t change so fast though. There are still worryingly few
> staff to administer research, conservation and curation for a major
> national film archive; there are still continuing programmes of films at
> wonderfully low prices; and there are still no more than two screenings
> each day in the cinema. Refreshing for those increasingly blasted by
> trailers at the likes of the BFI, all films still start on the dot after
> precisely fifteen seconds of silent darkness.
>
> After a shorter opening programme, the first major retrospective
> inaugurating the NFAJ is ‘Meiji Period in Films
> <http://www.nfaj.go.jp/exhibition/meiji-201804/#section1-2>’. 2018 is the
> 150th anniversary of the deposition of the Shogunate but, since the
> Emperor Meiji came to the throne the previous year, one can justify the
> squeezing in of some civil war dramas. As the introductory text
> <http://www.nfaj.go.jp/exhibition/meiji-201804/#section1-1> states, it’s
> partly an opportunity to show some films rarely shown. All the films I saw
> were NFAJ prints, with their original ‘NFC’ logos.
>
> Of particular interest to me this last week has been a strand of films
> made in the late 30s and earlier 40s, which I have never had the
> opportunity to see. As they are all to get their second screening in the
> next week or so, I’m flagging them up, should someone care to read on, with
> the proviso that anyone who caught the tonnage of dialogue that passed
> through this non-linguist’s ears might have heard quite different films.
>
> Actually, only one of the six films was mostly set after the Meiji
> restoration, and three were set during the events leading up to it. But
> what interested me was how history was being redeployed and re-narrated
> during this modern era.
>
> The one that was set almost completely in the Meiji era was *Hiwa
> Norumanton Gō-jiken: Kamen no butō*, - perhaps ‘Normanton Incident
> Special: Masked Dance - made in 1943 by SASAKI Keisuke. One might
> reasonably think that the story of criminally racist arrogance by the
> British in the actual events of 1881 was bad enough not to need
> embellishment, but embellished it was. The surviving Indian cabin boy
> becomes Chinese, all the better to show the Japanese supporting him against
> the racism of the British. In a long opening section, which introduces life
> in a western-embracing Meiji era, a young lawyer leads the push-back.  For
> the 1943 filmmakers, this allows the copious display of long-vanished
> elaborate dresses and ball-gowns, whilst also showing disapproval of them.
> The British white-wash at the end is emphasized, and becomes here a vehicle
> to show that the lawyer, and his firebrand friend, are on the right side of
> history. Their expressions of resentment dissolve into a hate-the-enemy
> coda which depicts the 1940s military destruction of British-occupied urban
> areas.
>
> As one might expect in a 1943 Japanese film, the casting of the
> westerners’ roles was decidedly mixed. Some of these actors, by the
> evidence of these films, had something of a living depicting wicked
> foreigners. But earlier in the film, I seem to recall, there were street
> scenes of a western circus coming into town. The point here was that the
> foreign vagrants were unfairly disrupting the living of honest,
> hard-working families, particularly a widow and her two performing
> children. The brash circus was very convincing, fronted by a blonde with
> bare limbs and shoulders, straight out of Hollywood casting. I’d love to
> know more about where they got these players from. Come to think of it, the
> people of all classes in the street scenes of 1881 were unrealistically
> well-clad - presumably all the better to depict the ‘nakedness’ of the
> westerner.
>
> *Seiki no gasshō-ai kuni kōshinkyoku* - *Century Chorus - Patriotic March*,
> 1938, was a biopic of the musician SETOGUCHI Tōkichi. Since he lived on
> to 1941, his life, by definition, covered far more than the Meiji period,
> although there is a substantial section set in that era. As a naval bandsman
> with composing ambitions, we eventually see him get his sea-legs. To the
> sound and back-drop of active gunnery in rough seas, he composes his *Battleship
> March* with full notation. To those wary of over-exposure to
> *Gunkan-kōshinkyoku*, I’d say there are many films of the period that
> employ the tune far more blatantly. In the sound-track, we first get it in
> fragments and, indeed, much of the sound-track uses a backdrop of silence
> to illustrate the sounds that Setoguchi hears and imagines. After his naval
> retirement send-off, to the unavoidable accompaniment, we see Setoguchi
> entering civilian life, and hear his new world - that of Taishō modernism.
> Setoguchi’s reception during his Western tour in this era is off the menu
> in this film. He seems, if I got it right, to be living above a record
> store. This long episode, of a fish-out-of-water, I found highly
> imaginative. But the authors had their own reason. Taishō becomes Shōwa and
> a new generation enters military service.  They are finally able to
> report to his bedside that his music is back in fashion, and he’s big - in
> Italy and Germany. We hear *Gunkan-kōshinkyoku* again, which the visuals
> cut to be an accompaniment of a march-past of Hitler. Taishō modernism gets
> to be shown here as a historical mistake that has been corrected.
>
> More exposure of *Gunkan-kōshinkyoku* could be heard in another ‘naval’
> film in the same programme, *Sugino Heisō-chō no tsuma* - perhaps *The
> Widow of the Honoured Heiso Sugino*, 1940. Only three of five reels
> survive. We follow a widow of a casualty of the Russo-Japanese war as she
> struggles to bring up three sons. The arithmetic of that makes this film
> also a Taishō drama, but set rurally. I didn’t ascertain exactly which
> reels survive, but we seemed to get the end, even though I didn’t spot the
> ‘end’ character. Perhaps at the beginning of that reel, there is an
> extraordinarily beautiful and evocative scene. An elegiac, long-phrase
> accompanied song, different from any gidayū I have heard, accompanies a
> slow sweep over landscape of considerable beauty. The camera eventually
> pans down on a memorial visit to the father’s grave. After the rituals are
> completed, the family walk back down the road. The three sons are in naval
> uniform, the mother in formal attire. The mood lightens, the pace quickens
> and the four of them are marching proudly ahead - to *Gunkan-kōshinkyoku*.
> This, I thought I was being told, was how honourable people had spent their
> Taishō era - preparing for the next joyful march to war.
>
> There was a fine restoration drama, *Ishin no kyoku *- *Melody of
> Restoration*, made by USHIHARA Kiyohiko in 1942. It was the prestige
> commencing drama of the new conglomerate Daiei company with an all-star
> cast and staff. To me, it had something of the feel of 1950s epics. That
> might be partly due to the different feel of the grand scenes of marching
> armies that punctuated long interior dramatic scenes, seemingly made by
> different units. The excellent acting was well photographed. There had
> clearly been a move away from the placing of characters in ensemble scenes
> of many 1930s films to a style more familiar to modern eyes, of easily
> readable characters in the foreground. The print was also in very good
> condition (it does not appear to have been preserved via the ‘captured
> films’), apart from a few minutes of cyclical lightening, probably at the
> beginning of the penultimate reel, which was starting to give me a headache
> before it abated.  Made in Kyoto, it seemed to me that several scenes
> were shot in Nijō Castle’s interior. The music was mostly, if not all
> diegetic.
>
> The two other tales of restoration were filled by the derring-do of the
> then familiar character of Kurama Tengu, the legendary man of the people,
> who had been appearing in films since 1928. His July 1941 outing, directed
> by SUGANUMA Kanji, *Satsuma no misshi* - Envoy of Satsuma - is a
> hate-the-French vehicle, elaborating an attempt at that time by French
> agents to arm the Shogunate. Redeploying Kurama Tengu, along with his
> popular star, ARASHI Kanjurō (‘Arakan’), who had played this role since its
> film debut, was a well-trodden propaganda move. It recalled for me the
> deployment of long-playing heroic character, Maxim, in the first 1941
> U.S.S.R. ‘Fighting Film’, *Meeting with Maxim*, *Vstrecha s Maksimon*.
> Who better to gain quick approval of a patriotic hating of the enemy than
> an already well-established popular hero? This is shown most obviously in *Satsuma
> no misshi* in a sequence where the resentful face of Arakan gets step
> closing-ups, montaged with step close-ups of the tricolor on the French
> ship that was bringing the armaments.
>
> There are overwhelming reasons why neither could have been a direct
> influence on the other, and there is also a very important difference in
> their contexts. The U.S.S.R. had then been invaded, whilst Japan was not
> at war with France, and would not be so for most of the war. It’s also
> worth noting that this anti-Gallican piece appeared just as those, I think,
> of more liberal complexion, were extolling all things French in journals
> like *Eiga Hyōron*. I’ll go further: I’d say the scriptwriter of *Satsuma
> no misshi*, MARUNE Santarō, here under the pseudonym, 来栖重兵衛, had the same
> idea as me that interest in  the French was a proxy for a wished-for
> opposition. And it’s not just the French who are selling the country, but
> their Japanese collaborators, shown in extended scenes of wine-drinking,
> rather than cheese-eating. Despite photography by MIYAGAWA Kazuo, it looked
> cheaply made with unconvincing sound. The print, a bit flecked, appears on
> the L.o.C. lists of captured films.
>
> Kurama Tengu’s next outing the following year, still with Arakan, was
> under the script and direction of ITŌ Daisuke. This was easily the
> best-preserved print of the set and looked as if it had never been through
> a projector before (although ja.wikipedia refers to a 2010 NFC screening).
> In fact, it was the best preserved print I’ve ever seen, with sparklingly
> clear images and sharp sound throughout. As you might expect for a film by
> Itō, there’s a spectacular sword-fight, this one being set in a
> multi-floored, brick-built warehouse and filmed by a camera that roamed
> vertically and horizontally. As in Suganuma’s film, there are nice flashes
> of light on Kurama’s sword-blade, but in this film we see it on the
> revolver, and even, flamboyantly, on the point of a pin. That pin,
> belonging to a blinded woman, has strong connotations in the plot.
>
> Every suspense-and-rescue trope, and then some, is thrown at the final
> denouement. The British, and probably others, are linked orally to the
> nefarious arms dealers, but the over-whelming direction of hate in this
> film is something so deplorable that it should require far more
> contextualisation than that given. The arms-dealers are called ‘Jacob’ and
> have grotesque false noses and habits. Such gratuitous promotion of
> anti-semitism, during the very maelstrom of the Holocaust, surely needs to
> be overtly acknowledged and commented on at any screening. The film was
> projected and billed with its original title, *Kurama Tengu: Kogane Tengu
> - Kurama Tengu - Golden Hell*. I seem not to be the only one who sees
> that trope of avarice as part-and-parcel of the anti-semitism, since, at
> some point, the film’s title in Itō filmographies got changed to *Kurama
> Tengu: **Yokohama** ni arawaru - Kurama Tengu Appears in **Yokohama**.*
> The film does not appear in any list of captured films and, at this point,
> I know nothing of its history of preservation.
>
> Roger
>
> macyroger at yahoo.co.uk
>
>
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