studio:
Shochiku Kinema Kenkyû-jo
director:
Yasujiro Ozu
screenwriter:
Tadao Ikeda, James Maki (original story) cinematographer: Shojiro Sugimoto art director: Yonekazu Wakita editor: Kazuo Ishikawa duration: 100 minutes cast: Takeshi Sakamoto Nobuko Fushimi Den Obinata year: 1933
a number of humorous occasions, including one amusing scene in which the boy acts as a makeshift alarm clock for Kihachi and Jiro by giving their shins a good whack.
Ozu devotes much of his film to character and setting. The silent format ideally suits this purpose, allowing him to smoothly establish his desired ambience through small visual details: Tomio working on a sketch of a clock; torn leaves lying on the floor as the result of a temper tantrum; laundry fluttering in the breeze; a tall silo standing imposingly in the background. They are not unlike the famous ‘pillow shots’ he would later use in films such as Tokyo Story (1953), piec- ing together snippets of ordinary life to great poetic effect. Eventu- ally, the small area where Kihachi, Tomio and Jiro live becomes an equally familiar locale for the viewer – the restaurant, apartments and neighbors all forming a friendly, close-knit community. Amid its inviting atmosphere, Passing Fancy tells a story of mixed interests and duties. Upon her arrival, Harue becomes the object of much conflict and jealousy, disrupting not only Kihachi and Jiro’s friendship, but also the relationship between Kihachi and Tomio. Consequently, Kihachi undergoes a great reassessment of his role as a father while managing his troubles with both love and money, struggling to decide how he can best provide for his son. With his regular theme of family dynam- ics explored through the new perspective of single parenting, Ozu offers in Passing Fancy a film as entertaining as it is touching.
mark saint-cyr
Synopsis
At the Rashômon Gate in Kyoto, a woodcutter and a priest are discussing an event so horrific that the priest is in danger of ‘losing my faith in the human soul’. A peasant seeking shelter from the rain joins them and asks to hear their story. They describe how a man has been murdered in the woodlands and his wife raped by a notorious bandit named Tajômaru. What has filled the pair with horror is that, at the trial, each witness gave an entirely different account of what happened after the woman was raped. Just as the priest is despairing of man’s untrustworthiness, they hear an abandoned baby crying; the woodcutter offers to take care of it and this act of altruism restores the priest’s faith in humanity.
Critique
Arguably the film that first bought Akira Kurosawa and Japanese cinema to a Western audience, Rashômon is beautifully filmed in the sun-dappled woodland, in a minimalist style reminiscent of the silent cinema that Kurosawa so admired. The film is remarkable for its unreliable narration, now so common in cinema but almost unheard of at the time, as each character gives their version of events. Those events are depicted in flashback, despite their erroneousness. It is one
rashômon
studio:
Daiei Motion Picture Company, Daiei Studios director: Akira Kurosawa producer: Minoru Jingo screenwriters: Akira Kurosawa Shinobu Hashimoto cinematographer: Kazuo Miyagawa art director: So Matsuyama composer: Fumio Hayasaka
thing for the characters to lie but it is quite another for the images to collude in that lie and, in deceiving his audience in this way, Kurosawa removes the barrier between art and life until, just like the priest, we learn to distrust everything we are told. The Rashômon Gate surrounds the men like a stage, and is steadily dismantled by the peasant, tearing off pieces of wood to burn, mimicking the way in which Kurosawa here dismantles the very structure of cinema.
Aside from the final burst of optimism, the film is unremit- tingly bleak. As if the core story of murder and rape was not dark enough, each character embellishes their account to cast the others in a worse light than themselves: the man presents his wife as a whore, she presents him as a tyrant, and the woodcutter presents all three as cowardly and base. ‘Is there anyone who’s really good?’ asks the peasant, ‘Maybe good- ness is just make-believe.’ It seems that, for Kurosawa, who spoke of ‘the essential evil in human nature’, man’s goodness can only be glimpsed fleetingly – as is the sun behind the trees in woodland. Weather is used for symbolic effect throughout Kurosawa’s films: the torrential rain that obscures the landscape (dyed with black ink so as to be visible on camera) suggests the priest’s confusion, while the sun that breaks through in the final scene suggests his newfound hope. The ending is more optimistic than intended by Kurosawa, however, who had pes- simistically hoped to film an ominous black rain cloud hovering over the sunlit scene – but none appeared.
alanna donaldson
Jidaigeki & Gendaigeki / Period & Contemporary Drama 161
editor: Akira Kurosawa duration: 88 minutes cast: Toshiro Mifune Machiko Kyo Masayuki Mori year: 1950
Synopsis
Four children spending an idyllic summer with their grandmother become interested in her stories about the atomic bombing of Nagaski, in which she lost her husband. They visit the Peace Park in Nagasaki and return to their grandmother angry at the Americans who dropped the bomb. She tells them that war itself, not the Americans, is to blame. The children have a chance to meet a real American when Clark, the son of the grandmother’s long-lost older brother, pays a visit. The brother, who went to Hawaii as a young man and made a fortune in pineapples, is now dying and wishes to see his sister one last time. Clark has come to escort her to Hawaii.
Critique
‘It was a very strange summer.’ So begins Akira Kurosawa’s thirtieth feature film, Rhapsody in August. The initial foreign reaction to this tale of an old woman’s search for her past during a summer holiday with her four grandchildren was strange or perhaps I should say, sharply-divided. The audience at the Cannes Film Festival applauded
Rhapsody and its director loud and long, but foreign reporters at a
pre-Cannes press conference in Tokyo bombarded him with questions about the film’s historical one-sidedness. Why did the Rhapsody in