#65
Post
by zedz » Sun Jun 08, 2008 9:12 pm
Just a beautiful set, and such wonderful films. The only Shimizu I’d been lucky enough to see before this was Mr Thank-You (I think I posted on it somewhere or other), which was terrific, but the other films so far are of similar standard.
Japanese Girls at the Harbour
The only silent film in the set, and it’s pretty wonderful. The story is somewhat melodramatic, a young girl going off the rails drama that could have featured Asta Nielsen two decades earlier, but the way Shimizu tells the story is consistently original and formally inventive.
Shimizu’s style seems to be characterised by its careful use of repetitions. For Mr Thank-You he created a very specific syntax for the bus trip, with looming bus-POV shots of the wayfarers they approach dissolving into the receding view of the same figures viewed through the back window of the bus. It’s a tactic that sort of elides the actual passing of those on the road, and we often don’t see them move aside, either, so it gives a kind of odd, almost dream-like effect. In Japanese Girls, the repetition applies to more constructed sequences, two early going-to-school scenes being made up of almost exactly the same sequence of shots, from the same positions, of the same durations, but diverging into difference. Towards the end of the film, some of those specific setups will be revisited, with even more drastic differences.
He’s also highly ambitious in moving his camera, following actions through oblique (rather than frontal / lateral) tracking shots, and in trying out some great ‘tricks’. There’s a fabulous jump-cut ‘zoom’ in and back out on a character in the climactic church scene (he would reuse a variation of this in The Masseurs and the Woman, in another highly emotional sequence), and he twice uses a dissolve to make characters ‘vanish’ from a scene. This seems to indicate the passage of time (as when characters move out of their dwelling towards the end of the film), but the first instance is much more complex and reflexive. It happens after Henry has been thrown out of the apartment his former girl Sumako now shares with a cantankerous painter. Standing outside, he gently vanishes. Passage of time? Not really: after a beat, the painter opens the door to chase him off and is bemused by the mystical disappearance. It’s an audacious and funny flourish, but I have no idea how it would have been taken by audiences at the time.
Foremost in Shimizu’s stylistic arsenal is his exquisite framing: generally at a distance and with a wonderful, dramatic use of negative space: big skies, marginal placement of figures or details. I couldn’t really see an antecedent for the decentred framings of Yoshida or Jissoji in any other classical Japanese director, but I can just about see it in Shimizu, though in these films it seems to be far more aligned with traditional Japanese visual culture (Hokusai etc.).
The Masseurs and the Woman
Another gem, this time closer to the more relaxed, discursive format of Mr. Thank-You (the ‘dramatic’ elements of the plot end up not amounting to much – this is much more about character). A pair of blind masseurs travel to a mountain spa, where one of them becomes obsessed with a mysterious lone woman. Shimizu’s moving camera is hard at work, tracking backwards up bumpy mountain roads, or smoothly tracking laterally behind walls to follow interior action (in the latter shots there’s an Imamurian use of Japanese architecture to break the frame up into narrative panels). As with Mr Thank-You, there’s a rich sense of place. These films capture an open-air freedom rare in early sound cinema.
Many arresting shots: a particularly gorgeous shot of the woman walking away from the camera along a classical pathway is broken up by a series of dissolves as she moves from foreground, to middle distance, to far background; or the final shot, in which the camera curiously dollies around a corner to get one last glimpse of a departing carriage. There’s also a strikingly framed portrait of the woman, head and shoulders in the lower half of the frame, the rest a mass of dark foliage. This unusual composition is reiterated in the remake, for which a trailer is included. On the evidence of that trailer, this seems to be an act of ‘cover versioning’ as obsessive as Van Sant’s Psycho: the vast majority of the shots are, in terms of framing and blocking, identical to Shimizu’s. Has anybody seen this remake?
EDIT: saw this was addressed on the previous page!
Rounding up the first box:
Ornamental Hairpin
Something of a blend of the two earlier sound films in the set. There’s those blind masseurs again, and the spa setting, but the character dynamic is more like the temporary community of the bus in Mr Thank You. It’s all very charming, and it’s got the same beguiling misdirection in the storytelling, but I was less taken with this film than the others in the box. Chishu Ryu plays a significant role, and he’s something of a revelation, but not in a good way: broad and bland in a way he never was under Ozu’s direction. The way he ‘struggles’ with his injured foot is rather unbelievable (the effort he expends lazily represented by the same mechanical ‘wiping my brow’ arm movement over and over again), and he never really develops any particular character in his other scenes.
Technically, much of the film is more standard than the earlier films (but nevertheless impeccable), though the opening scenes demonstrate more extended backwards tracks, and there’s a tracking shot along the exposed side of the hotel, in counterpoint to the movements of characters through various rooms, that’s so striking and formidable it’s really a proto-Tout va bien moment.