#yoshi sugihara

[byneddiedingo]

Twenty-Four Eyes (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954)

Cast: Hideko Takamine, Chishu Ryu, Takahiro Tamura, Yumeji Tsukioka, Toshiko Kobayashi, Toshio Takahara, Shizue Natsukawa, Kumeko Urabe. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, based on a novel by Sakae Tsuboi. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita.

One of the most unabashedly sentimental movies you'll ever see, Twenty-Four Eyes may also be one of the most effective anti-war movies, without presenting bloody scenes of people being killed and maimed. Hideko Takamine plays Oishi, a young teacher who begins her career in 1928 on Shodo Island in the Inland Sea of Japan, teaching a first-grade class of 12 -- six boys and six girls -- the 24 eyes of the film's title. We follow her life, and through her point of view the lives (and some deaths) of her first pupils, for the next 18 years, as the world and the war encroach upon a peaceful, pastoral setting. Where Kinoshita's Morning for the Osone Family (1946) was claustrophobic in its presentation of life during wartime, Twenty-Four Eyes shows how the entrapment of people by war can occur in a place where there are no visible signs of the conflict. The natural setting remains undisturbed. No planes fly overhead, no bombs are dropped on the village, but the menace of war threatens the minds and hearts of the most vulnerable: the children Oishi teaches. The most chilling scenes are the ones in which young men are sent off to the war, as flag-waving crowds sing bloodthirsty tributes to the glory of dying in battle for their country. Kinoshita and cinematographer Hiroshi Kusuda reinforce the bitter irony by their restraint. They don't darken the atmosphere: It's the same lovely natural setting. Only the human beings in it have changed. I have to admit to feeling the movie is overlong, and that Kinoshita ladles on the pathos a bit too heavily. The cast weeps floods of tears, and the soundtrack features not only the Japanese folk songs that the children learn but also some old-fashioned Western parlor songs: "Annie Laurie," "The Last Rose of Summer," "Home, Sweet Home," "Auld Lang Syne," and, most curiously, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus."  But repress the cynic or the realist, and you may find it moving, too.

[sesiondemadrugada]

Blood Is Dry (Yoshishige Yoshida, 1960).

[palestarpowderworks]

Sleep tight, tiny lizard.

I really really need to level Noriko... Smol, sweet.

[leenaevilin]

[Announcement]  舞台 逆転検事 ~ 逆転のテレポーテーション (butai gyakuten kenji ~ gyakuten no teleportation)

the saien will start next month^^ (November 2nd, 2017 - November 7th, 2017)

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Cast:

Wada Takuma as Mitsurugi Reiji Arai Reira as Ichijou Mikumo Isogai Ryuuko as Itonokogiri Keisuke Hayashi Akihiro as Yahari Masahi Miyashita Yuuya as Chijou Yaichirou Kuge Megumi as Ooba Kaoru Shinagawa Shou as Takanashi Mamoru Tonoshiro Yuuma as Nakatori Motsuma Noguchi Mao as Houzuki Akane Kanade as Kurono Koyuki Shimomura Aya as Ukon Yoshie Ikeda Kenshin as Za Kanji??? Yonemaru Hinata as Shouji Shougo??? Koyama Shun as Baba Tomo??? Inoue Kaho as Ozaki Masshi??? Sugihara Isamu as Tenma Tsubaki Tomita Shou as Asukai Tomorou

[the-blank-kobe]

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[byneddiedingo]

The Face of Another (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1966)

Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Machiko Kyo, Mikijiro Hira, Kyoko Kishida, Miki Irie, Eiji Okada, Minoru Chiaki, Hideo Kanzi, Kunie Tanaka. Screenplay: Kobo Abe, based on his novel. Cinematography: Hiroshi Segawa. Production design: Masao Yamazaki. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Toro Takemitsu.

Kobo Abe based the screenplay for The Face of Another on his own novel, and I suspect that adherence to the source weakens the film, which dwells heavily on ideas about identity and morality that are more efficiently explored in literature than in cinema. The central narrative deals with Okuyama (Tatsuya Nakadai) who, having been disfigured in an industrial accident, sees a psychiatrist (Mikijiro Hira) who devises an experimental mask that gives Okuyama an entirely new identity. Wearing the mask, Okuyama seduces his own wife (Machiko Kyo), who tells him that she knew who he was all along and assumed that he was trying to revive their marriage, which had been troubled since his accident. She is enraged when she learns that he was in fact testing her fidelity. But there is a secondary narrative about a beautiful young woman (Miki Irie) who bears scars along one side of her face that, it is suggested, are the result of exposure to radiation from the Nagasaki atomic bomb. In the novel, this story comes from a film that was seen by Okuyama, but Hiroshi Teshigahara withholds this explanation for including it without apparent connection to Okuyama's story. I'm not troubled by the disjunction this creates in the film, because Teshigahara and production designer Masao Yamazaki have developed a coherent symbolic style that creates an appropriate air of mystery throughout The Face of Another. The weakness lies, I think, in the dialogue, especially in the too didactic exchanges between Okuyama and the psychiatrist about the limits and potential of a mutating identity. Nevertheless, it's a fascinating, flawed film, more disturbing than most outright "horror" movies.

[byneddiedingo]

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan (Masahiro Shinoda, 1970) Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Shima Iwashita, Tetsuro Tanba, Shoichi Ozawa, Fumio Watanabe, Suisen Ichikawa, Masakane Yonekura, Jun Hamamura. Screenplay: Shuji Terayama, based on a play by Mokuami Kawatake. Cinematography: Kozo Okazaki. Art direction: Shigemasa Toda. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Masaru Sato. I think I was culturally ill-equipped for The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan, a wittily stylized film that presupposes an acquaintance with Japanese history and culture that I don't possess. From my own culture, I bring a knowledge of 18th-century portrayals of London lowlife, such as the pictures of Hogarth and the satire in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Buraikan has echoes for me of those, as well as, in its portrayal of the puritanical reformer's zeal, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. But for much of the film I felt at sea. That said, I like Tatsuya Nakadai so much I'd watch him read the Tokyo telephone book. 

[byneddiedingo]

Mariko Kaga in With Beauty and Sorrow (Masahiro Shinoda, 1965) Cast: Kaoru Yachigusa, Mariko Kaga, So Yamamura, Kei Yamamoto, Misako Watanabe, Haruko Sugimura. Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada, based on a novel by Yasunari Kawabata. Cinematography: Masao Kosugi. Art direction: Junichi Osumi. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara, Music: Toru Takemitsu. Some mannered acting and stagy blocking mars Masahiro Shinoda's otherwise involving With Beauty and Sorrow, a revenge drama that doesn't quite transcend its genre. Toshio Oki (So Yamamura), a womanizing novelist whose wife just barely puts up with his extramarital exploits, once had an affair with the young artist Otoko Ueno (Kaoru Yachigusa). She became pregnant but lost the baby at birth, and suffered severe psychological trauma. Now she lives with a young woman, Keiko (Mariko Kaga), her student and her lover. Otoko has recovered her emotional stability, and even agrees to meet Oki when he telephones her on a visit to Kyoto, sending Keiko to his hotel to take him to the restaurant where they will reunite. But Keiko is, as even Otoko suggests, a little "crazy," and after the meeting begins to plot ways to bring about her lover's revenge on Oki. Eventually, this involves Keiko's seducing not only Oki but also his son, Taichiro (Kei Yamamoto), a graduate student of medieval Japanese history, with predictably disastrous consequences. Old pro So Yamamura is excellent as Oki, and it's good to see the great Haruko Sugimura, veteran of many films by Shinoda's mentor, Yasujiro Ozu, in the small part of Otoko's mother. But the younger actors, particularly Kaga and Yamamoto, turn what might have been an affecting portrayal of doomed characters into melodrama. The film benefits from Toru Takemitsu's score, though it sometimes feels a bit at odds with the soap-operatic events on screen.

[byneddiedingo]

Noriko Maki and Chieko Baisho in Our Marriage (Masahiro Shinoda, 1961)

Cast: Noriko Maki, Chieko Baisho, Shin'ichiro Mikami, Isao Kimura, Eijiro Tono, Sadako Sawamura. Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Masahiro Shinoda. Cinematography: Masao Kosugi. Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Naozumi Yamamoto.

It goes without saying (though I've said it often enough) that cultural differences are a hindrance to our understanding or enjoyment of films made in other countries, but Masahiro Shinoda's Our Marriage brought the point home for me in an unusual way. It's a simple, elegantly made film, scarcely over an hour long, about two sisters and the pressures on women to get married. That's nothing we haven't seen in films by Naruse and Ozu and others, but Shinoda is particularly focused on social and economic change -- not just in the role of women in Japan but also on a society in which upward mobility is becoming possible and desirable. Keiko (Noriko Maki) and Saeko (Chieko Baisho) are office workers in a factory, the daughters of a man struggling to make ends meet by harvesting seaweed. His job has become more difficult because of industrial pollution, and his wife sometimes has to borrow money from the daughters to pay bills. So the parents begin looking for a husband for 22-year-old Keiko. The father wants her to marry the son of the union chief at the factory, a widower nearing 30, but another man, Matsumoto (Isao Kimura), who works for a dry goods company, also shows interest in her. The parents disapprove of Matsumoto because he traded in the black market in the postwar years, but he has since cleaned up his act. The complication is that Keiko has met a handsome young factory worker, Komakura (Shin'ichiro Mikami). Saeko, who has a secret crush on Komakura, wants Keiko to marry him, and Keiko is certainly not averse to the idea except that Komakura doesn't make much money. Things work themselves out after some family drama, of course. But the cultural difference that mars the film for me is not the tension between arranged marriages and marrying for love -- that's familiar enough even in the Western tradition. The problem is that the music arranger has chosen the tune of the old spiritual "Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore" as the film's main theme. Anyone who grew up singing it around a campfire, or knows the recorded versions by Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte, is going to have a hard time reconciling the music with the story.

[byneddiedingo]

The River Fuefuki (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1960)

Cast: Hideko Takamine, Takahiro Tamura, Koshiro Matsumoto, Shima Iwashita, Shinji Tanaka, Kichiemon Nakamura. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, based on a novel by Shichiro Fukazawa. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Production design: Kisaku Ito. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita.

In The River Fuefuki Hideko Takamine gives a remarkable performance as Okei, a woman who marries into a peasant family on the banks of the titular river. As generations pass in the small house that lies at one end of the bridge across the river, the family's sons are drawn, despite warnings from their elders, into service of the feudal lord in battle after battle. Keisuke Kinoshita has apparently designed the film as an antiwar fable, sometimes giving the monochrome images a storybook quality with overlaid washes and streaks of color, often highlighting just a candle or the fire in a small hearth with a spot of red. He takes the heroism of the samurai film and debunks it, reducing the combat to mere slashing and hacking. Okei endures and ages through the film, becoming the true hero of the story.

[byneddiedingo]

Haruko Sugimura, Mitsuko Miura, and Eitaro Ozawa in Morning for the Osone Family (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1946)

Cast: Haruko Sugimura, Toshinosuke Nagao, Shin Tokudaiji, Mitsuko Miura, Shiro Osaka, Eitaro Ozawa, Natsuko Kahara, Junji Masuda, Kinji Fujiwa, Eijiro Tono. Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Art direction: Mikio Mori. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Takaaki Asai.

One of the myths of war is that the enemy moves in lockstep, from the commander-in-chief down to the lowliest citizen. So the image of World War II Japan as a monolithic force lingers, even though years of peace with the Japanese and a wholesale assimilation by the West of their culture, from sushi to anime, have effaced old hostilities. Keisuke Kinoshita's first postwar film, Morning for the Osone Family, gives us a valuable sense of the way things were -- or at least may have been -- for a Japanese family during wartime. Working in the year after the surrender of Japan, after ideological censorship had ceased (though the American occupation imposed its own censorship, which is why you'll find no mention of the atomic bomb in Japanese movies made just after the war), Kinoshita and screenwriter Eijiro Hisaita tell the story of a widow, Fusako (Haruko Sugimura), and her three sons, her daughter, and her brother-in-law in the waning years of the war. One son is imprisoned for writing against the war; the daughter is forced to break off her engagement to a young man because of the political implications of what her brother did; another son, a pacifist who wants to be an artist, is drafted and dies of pneumonia in a hospital; the youngest son, embracing the militarist propaganda, enlists and is killed. And then there is the domineering presence of the brother-in-law (Eitaro Ozawa), a colonel who despises the way Fusako has raised her children to doubt the glory of the Japanese military. When his house is destroyed by bombing, he moves in with the Osone family and takes over the household. Devastated by the surrender, he begins to stockpile food in their house, even as starvation spreads across the land. The film takes place on a single set, which only emphasizes the sense of a world closing in on the family. We might question how representative the Osone family is of the Japanese citizenry, but we could also question the accuracy of the "home front" movies made in the United States during and after the war.

[byneddiedingo]

Yukiyo Toake and Go Kato in Children of Nagasaki (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1983) Cast: Go Kato, Yukiyo Toake, Chikage Iwashima, Masatomo Nakabayashi. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, Taichi Yamada, Kazuo Yoshida, based on writings by Takashi Nadai. Cinematography: Kozo Okazaki. Art direction: Masataka Yoshino. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita Keisuke Kinoshita was haunted throughout his life by the disaster that militarism inflicted on his country. His early film Morning for the Osone Family (1946) is a depiction of what one family, divided by its attitudes toward the war, went through during its waning years. Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), perhaps his best-known, is a sentimental yet oddly powerful anti-war film that takes place in a pastoral setting virtually untouched by bombing raids, yet deeply wounded by the conflict just over the horizon. Children of Nagasaki was one of his last films, and one of the few he made that directly confront the physical horror of the war. It's essentially a biopic of Takashi Nagai, a physician who survived the nuclear explosion in Nagasaki and devoted himself to writing about the event and its aftermath, using his training as a radiologist to document the effects of radiation. Most of Nagai's writing was censored by the occupation authorities and not published until after his death in 1951 from leukemia, with which he had been diagnosed before the bomb fell on Nagasaki.  In the film, Nagai (Go Kato) is at work when the bomb is dropped, killing his wife. His two children are in the country with their grandmother, and with her help he goes about the task of rebuilding their home and their lives. The film, which begins with scenes from the visit to Nagasaki by Pope John Paul II in 1981, is suffused with Nagai's Roman Catholic faith, and while it's not clear if Kinoshita shared Nagai's faith -- the director is buried in a Buddhist cemetery -- he treats it with deep respect, even reverence. Children of Nagasaki is an uneven film, a little too heavily didactic, as the literally preachy use of the pope to open the film suggests. Three-quarters of the way in, Kinoshita suddenly and clumsily switches to a narrator, Nagai's grown son, reflecting on the life of his father. But he makes one striking choice: not to depict the horrors inflicted on the people of Nagasaki by the bomb at the point in the narrative when they occur, but instead to show them at the end of the film in a flashback, reinforcing the point that such a story can't really have a happy ending.

[byneddiedingo]

Kinuyo Tanaka and Shima Iwashita in A Legend or Was It? (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1963)

Cast: Shima Iwashita, Mariko Kaga, Go Kato, Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshi Kato, Bunta Sugawara, Tsutomu Matsukawa, Osamu Takizawa. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita.

Keisuke Kinoshita's A Legend or Was It? begins in an idyllic setting: a mountain valley in Hokkaido, gorgeously filmed in color, almost like a travelogue. But the narrator (Osamu Takizawa) -- a rather obtrusive and unnecessary presence in the film -- tells us that it wasn't always inhabited by the kindly villagers we see going about their chores today. The setting remains the same as the film switches to black and white and we're told that it's now the summer of 1945. War is nowhere visible, but it's an inescapable presence. The villagers know that Japan is about to lose, and they're looking for ways to vent their frustration at having supported a losing cause. They find one in a family, the Sonobes, who have moved there after their home in Tokyo was bombed out. Suspicious and resentful of "city folk" on their turf, the villagers make the Sonobes a target after the daughter, Kieko (Shima Iwashita), breaks off an engagement to Goichi Takamori (Bunta Sugawara), the son of the powerful mayor of the village, a wealthy landlord. Kieko's brother, on leave from fighting, has recognized Goichi, with whom he once served, as having killed and raped civilians, and urged Kieko not to marry him. In revenge, Goichi destroys the Sonobes' crops and begins spreading malicious rumors about them. A mob forms and a small-scale civil war breaks out. A Legend or Was It? is a highly kinetic film in its later parts, and the score by the director's brother, Chuji Kinoshita, helps create the kind of tension that needs to be released in action. Like Ennio Morricone, who punctuated Sergio Leone's "Man With No Name" trilogy (1964, 1965, 1966), with pennywhistle tweets and percussion, Chuji Kinoshita's score relies heavily on simple, perhaps even primitive instruments, setting up a pounding repetitive sound to propel the action. It  has something of the hypnotic quality of Philip Glass's music, though without the variations that keep Glass's themes from complete monotony.  Critics commenting on A Legend or Was It? sometimes compare it to Fritz Lang's Fury (1936) for its portrait of vigilante mob justice. It's an unforgiving film, without Kinoshita's typical lapses into sentimentality, and an effective one.

[byneddiedingo]

Koji Nanbara and Takashi Fujiki in A Flame at the Pier (Masahiro Shinoda, 1962)

Cast: Takashi Fujiki, Mariko Kaga, Koji Nanbara, Tamotsu Hayakawa, Kyoko Kishida, Shinji Tanaka, So Yamamura. Screenplay: Ichiro Mizunuma, Masahiro Shinoda, Shuji Terayama. Cinematography: Masao Kosugi. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Toru Takemitsu.

Imagine that instead of Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley had been cast as Terry Malloy in Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) and that Budd Schulberg's screenplay had been rewritten to give him a couple of songs to sing. Then you'd have a pretty good sense of what Masahiro Shinoda's A Flame at the Pier* is like. That's not meant to belittle Takashi Fujiki's performance in the film, which is closer to Brando (or really James Dean) than to Presley. Clearly, Fujiki's singing ability -- he had a side career as a pop singer -- inspired the filmmakers to arrange for these fairly well-integrated musical moments. The standout is a command performance put on by Fujiki's character, Sabu, who has been roped into doing an a capella rock number at a party for some rich people, friends of the owner of the shipping company for which Sabu works. The song is about a tour of hell, which is pretty much where Sabu finds himself. He works as an enforcer on the Yokohama docks, where the workers are trying to unionize. His loyalties are to his boss, Kitani (Koji Nanbara), who is the company man in charge of keeping the dockworkers from organizing. Sabu believes that when he was a toddler during the war, Kitani rescued him from a fire and was crippled during the rescue. When he's not pushing the dockworkers around, trying to get them to go back to work after a sitdown strike, Sabu is wooing a pretty waitress, Yuki (Mariko Kaga). But after his performance at the party, he's seduced by Reiko (Kyoko Kishida), who is married to the owner of the shipping company and is also having an affair with Kitani. Eventually, all of these plot threads tangle when Sabu is asked to rough up one of the men trying to organize the union but accidentally kills him. The murdered man turns out to be Yuki's father. Sabu also learns from Reiko the truth about what crippled Kitani. A Flame at the Pier rises above this overplotted narrative because of the performances, especially by Fujiki and Mariko Kaga as the young lovers, as well as Masao Kosugi's eloquent black-and-white cinematography, and a score by Toru Takemitsu.

*The retitling and/or translation of Japanese film titles for English-speaking countries is always mysterious. A Flame at the Pier has also been titled Tears on the Lion's Mane, which seems to be, if Google Translate is to be trusted, a little closer to the Japanese title, Namida o shishi no tategami ni. There are certainly a pier, a lion, and considerable tears in the film, but the attempt at poetry in both titles rings false as a label for what is essentially a gritty dockside melodrama.

[byneddiedingo]

Hideko Takamine, Tatsuya Nakadai, and Yoshi Kato in Immortal Love (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1961)

Cast: Hideko Takamine, Tatsuya Nakadai, Keiji Sada, Nobuko Otowa, Akira Ishihama, Yukiko Fuji, Yoshi Kato, Kiyoshi Nonomura, Masakazu Tamura, Masaya Totsuka, Yasushi Nagata. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita.

I'm a little surprised to find that Keisuke Kinoshita's screenplay for Immortal Love is "original." The film has the feeling of an adaptation from one of those doorstop "sins of the father" family sagas like East of Eden. It's full of melodramatic moments, including at least one rape and several suicide attempts, including a successful one in which the character jumps into a volcano. It spans three decades and is loaded with enough plot and characters to fill a much longer film, which is why it sometimes seems a little skimpy. The plot is set in motion when Heibei (Tatsuya Nakadai), the son of a wealthy landowner, returns from the invasion of Manchuria in 1932 with a crippling war injury. He spies the pretty Sadako (Hideko Takamine), the daughter of one of his father's tenants, but she loves Takashi (Keiji Sada), another tenant farmer's son who has also served in China. When Takashi returns he finds that Sadako has been raped by Heibei and is set to marry him. As the years pass, Sadako stays with Heibei, tending to him and his aging father, and bearing three children -- one of whom was conceived during the rape, a fact that will develop into a plot point. Takashi marries and moves away, but his wife, Tomoko (Nobuko Otowa), bears a kind of grudge against Sadako, her husband's first love. And things get complicated as the children grow up. The film works largely because of the actors, even though both Hideko Takamine and Tatsuya Nakadai, considerable performers, seem a little stretched to put across their characters. Heibei, for example, comes across as a deep-dyed villain until the very end, despite some closeups in which Nakadai seems to be trying to suggest the character's remorse for his villainy. And Takamine is faced with playing the dutiful wife to a man she despises, undermining him secretly and passive-aggressively. It's a tribute to both actors that they make the film as watchable as it is. Kinoshita tries some things that don't really work, like a ballad that bridges the time gaps between "chapters" (of which there are five), and the guitar-based score by his brother, Chuji Kinoshita, sounds like flamenco -- an odd choice for the very Japanese story and setting. Even the title given it for American distribution is askew -- none of the loves depicted in it seem particularly deathless. It was released in the United Kingdom as Bitter Spirit, which seems more appropriate. The film was Japan's entry for the foreign language film Oscar; it made the shortlist but lost to Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly.