Man With A Movie List

Director: Hiroshi Shimizu Year: 1941 Run-time: 1 hr 15 min - Like The Masseurs And A Woman , this takes place in a mountain spa, and is centered on the characters' drive for escapism. From hindsight, this would seem to be the director's desire to escape the war - one of the characters is apparently a soldier (who is injured by the titular object and kept from returning), although it's barely mentioned. It probably isn't far to read too much historicity into this film. Like its predecessor, it's a short and light glimpse into a few lives meeting in this setting defined by transience. It's less than 80 minutes, but takes a glacial pace in which our thoughts will naturally wander. That's not a criticism - in a way, it helps us relate to the characters, whose thoughts are also returning to the "real world", no matter how much they may wish otherwise.

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi Year: 1939 Run-time: 2 hr 22 min - This is a stellar romance from Mizoguchi, often called his best pre-war piece, but it's most fascinating for being a frank description of Kabuki actors in the 19th century. It's very hard to understand as a Westerner, but the strange culture and art form is crucial to understanding the story, which centers on an actor and adopted son of a famous Kabuki idol (who will pass on his famous name) struggling to live up to his inheritance, and getting honest criticism from the wet nurse to a biological son of the same actor.  It's a credit to Mizoguchi that the strength of the story passes unscathed through the culture shock. - Although the patient and ever-enduring female lead that is a staple of Mizoguchi films is here, the male lead has a little more backbone than usual, and develops in a fascinating way over the course of the story, which takes place over multiple years and goes through highs and lows of the ac...

Director: Hiroshi Shimizu Year: 1938 Run-time: 1 hr 6 min - This is the kind of simple, elegant, beautiful, short film that I'm happy that the list sheds some light on. It's a short story told in just over an hour, but fitting in a surprising range of characters, all meeting in a resort town and never quite getting to know each other, but making a lasting impression nonetheless.  We get little glimpses into their lives outside the town, only the details we need.  No one is quite to help anyone else, and feels worse for it.  I found it less overtly melodramatic than the last Shimizu film I watched, Japanese Girls At The Harbor , a sign that Shimizu's style was developing.  Shimizu was an enormously prolific director , with so many of his films lost to the war. - This film fits into an interesting canon of Japanese films set at resorts, a canon that includes all-time greats like Tokyo Story  and Spirited Away .  There's something about the setting that ...

Director: Sadao Yamanaka Year: 1937 Run-time: 1 hr 25 min - This is actually the third of Yamanaka's films to appear on the list, but the only one that seems to have gotten any physical release outside of Japan.  That's really unfortunate - this film has an incredibly forward-thinking style, and I would really love to see the others.  Despite being set in feudal Japan, with samurais, this has almost nothing in common with Kurosawa.  Instead it's a story of class-based oppression, that left me drawing comparisons to Altman in the way that it weaves between characters.  The tragedy really hits hard by the end.  So glad the list is here to introduce me to films like this that I would otherwise never encounter.

Director: Yasujiro Ozu Year: 1936 Run-time: 1 hr 22 min - And now Ozu enters the scene, with a style already fully developed.  Clare and I recently watched his 1950's color film Good Morning  since it appeared in Criterion Channel's Saturday Matinee series, and we got to see his (very) funny side which doesn't often show up in his most recognized films.  The Only Son  is definitely on the other side of that spectrum, but it's still an excellent film, and it's one that really hit home for me, coming coincidentally near Mother's Day. - Here we have the first time that math education features on the list, with a classroom full of students copying down one of Euclid's proofs, presumably.  Being a "night-school teacher" is here the symbol for the protagonist's thwarted dreams in the big city, and man, can I relate (although I have it much better than he does, I think).

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi Year: 1936 Run-time: 1 hr 11 min - Here we see many of the same themes from Mizoguchi's earlier film The Water Magician , but this one feels much better paced, and shows how Mizoguchi (and Ozu, who's up next) quickly adapted to the standards of the talkie.  We have a brave, self-sacrificing woman being let down by the fecklessness of the men they rely on.  The ending, with the woman out on the street fending for herself, could be seen as tragic or freeing, depending on your mood.  It's a great film, full of the tension that comes with rapid modernization in the cities (also the theme of the next film).  This isn't yet peak Mizoguchi, but it's getting close.

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi Year: 1933 Run-time: 1 hr 40 min Source: Youtube Notable For : I've chosen this list for the extraordinary breadth of films on it, with films chosen of nearly every nationality with no regard for their current availability (although this has caused quite a bit of frustration in tracking down these films).  But every cineaste has their particular tastes, and this one has made no secret of the fact that his favorite director is Kenji Mizoguchi.  And while that name isn't quite as well known as that of Mizoguchi's compatriots Kurosawa or Ozu, he was nevertheless a phenomenal director who perfected the art of the long take.  Water Magician  is the rare Japanese silent film that survived to the present day, and wonderfully, it's on Youtube with the Bensho narration that it would have screened with at the time (also woefully lacking in films like Page of Madness ). Verdict: Water Magician  doesn't have the cinematographic style that hi...

Director: Hiroshi Shimizu Year: 1933 Run-time: 1 hr 8 min Source: The Criterion Channel Notable For : This list would be entirely different had not the great bulk of Japanese films in the 20's and 30's been lost in the destruction of war.  Hiroshi Shimizu was an incredibly prolific director who made over 160 films, and was a great influence on Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, but he's relatively unknown today. Verdict :  Japanese Girls at the Harbor  reveals the maturity of his style, with a simple, effective silent melodrama (very Borzage-esque) with few close-ups, but rather some of the most emotional long shots so far yet.  The director conveys a lot with the way that his wonderful actors position themselves in relation to each other, and how they hold their bodies.  As with Mizoguchi's work, the focus is on the women - the male characters are weak-willed, and helpless without the support of these women.  Also, I don't often say this, but the war...

Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa Year: 1926 Run-time: 60 min Source: Amazon Video In studying the history of film, we have to always keep in mind that it's the films that survived that get to tell the story.  In this sense, Japanese silent films have the worst of it.  Due to earthquakes and World War II (Americans destroyed an entire archive), less than 1% of Japan's films from the 1920s have survived.  We've lost the first films of Ozu and Mizoguchi (we'll see plenty of both later in the list), and countless other directors or gone entirely.  This makes it all the more remarkable that we can watch A Page of Madness , which the director Kinugasa reportedly found in his own storehouse in 1971. Without the necessary context, it's difficult to know just how revolutionary this film was, but certainly it's hard to imagine it fitting well in any 1920's society.  The plot centers around a man who gets a job at a mental asylum where his wife was committed, presum...