THE CINEMA OF GOSHO HEINOSUKE: LAUGHTER THROUGH TEARS PDF, EPUB, EBOOK

Arthur Nolletti | 352 pages | 15 Apr 2005 | Indiana University Press | 9780253217257 | English | Bloomington, IN, United States Cinema: An International History

Gosho and Shomin Comedy in the s, 2. Dancing Girl of Izu and the Junbungaku Movement, 3. Gosho in the s: Changing Times, Undiminished Mastery. As with other scholarly books-notes, a filmography, bibliography, and index. All in all, a great overview of Japanese film legend who has fallen into obscurity. Emil rated it liked it Feb 03, Matt Pike marked it as to-read Oct 10, Eadweard marked it as to-read Feb 24, Amar Baines marked it as to-read Jan 19, Exene Cervenka is currently reading it Mar 11, There are no discussion topics on this book yet. About Arthur Nolletti Jr. Arthur Nolletti Jr. Books by Arthur Nolletti Jr. Read more Trivia About The Cinema of Gos No trivia or quizzes yet. Welcome back. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. Publisher: Indiana University Press , This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. View all copies of this ISBN edition:. Synopsis About this title "The elegant, graceful, and deeply humanistic cinema of Gosho Heinosuke has found its perfect English-language explication in this equally elegant, graceful, and humanistic study by Arthur Nolletti. About the Author : Arthur Nolletti, Jr. Review : With this work Nolletti English, Framingham State College closes a gap in the anglophone literature on the history of Asian cinema. Create a Want. Other Popular Editions of the Same Title. Inhalt Gosho and Shomin Comedy in the s. Dancing Girl of Izu and the Junbungaku Movement. Blending the Shomingeki Shitamachi. Once More and Goshos Romanticism in. A New Kind of Shomingeki. Money Democracy. Adapting the Meijimono Reconfiguring. Observations on film art : Addio Bologna

It is apparent that the reader is in capable and comprehensive hands; Nolletti has seen nearly every extant Gosho film, and knows them intimately. It sometimes feels as though no one gets it right but he. Gosho directed possibly more than films, and seems to have been very hit-or-miss throughout. It would seem all of the films of the s are lost, with only a fraction of those of the prolific s still surviving. In the case of his two grown daughters, the release of that burden means marrying them off, which gets accomplished early on in the film. For his young son, Kan-chan, who is probably about eight years old, the sentence will be much longer. The father considers the boy a failure and longs to be rid of him, making no secret about his feelings. Yes, there is laughter through tears here, but it seems to be our laughter in light of their tears. There are moments in the film that are so horrible that they make us laugh, but it is a sort of stunned laugh, barely empathetic. One parent excoriates the young boy, the other feels pity for him. This is clearly no way to grow up. It actually oozes that blend, and at times goes overboard with that tone of contrast, but generally keeps an even keel. In the film a young man named Seiichi has begun secretly dating a woman named Teruko, neglecting his studies and causing his concerned parents to become highly suspicious. His mother decides to invite over her brother, a married and childless man named Bunkichi, to come and talk some sense into Seiichi. The young man reveals to his uncle that he has been seeing Teruko and that she is now pregnant. The uncle makes the decision to take the fall for him, claiming that he had an affair with the woman whom he had never met up to that point , sacrificing his personal and professional life for the promising young man. The laughter and the tears are genuine and well-deserved in this film. Nolletti concludes about it:. Thus, Woman of the Mist is more than a character study or a melodrama or a shomin-geki drama. Indeed, the textures and feelings of daily life found in the shomin-geki echo into later works that could more easily be defined in terms of melodrama, psychological study, or historical picture. In the body of the book Nolletti devotes less than four pages to discussing Dispersing Clouds and then, partly used as a comparison to Elegy of the North , clearly considering it a minor work. In it a young girl from Tokyo named Masako, falls ill while on a trip to the countryside with her friends. They take her to a local inn where she is gradually nursed back to health by a kindly maid named Osen, along with the help of a country doctor, a young man who teaches her about the difficulties of living in a place with few modern amenities. She gets visited by her busy stepmother, with whom she clearly has some underlying tensions, and then by her yet busier father, but she seems in no hurry to return to the city. Getting to know the maid and the doctor, she finds that both also come from Tokyo originally, but have come to the countryside to escape from their painful pasts and to become immersed in a different and less hectic way of life. She goes with the doctor to a rural village where he wants to open a clinic for local children. In spite of Masako learning a lesson about caring for others in the village it is always apparent that she will eventually have to return to Tokyo. Avowedly auteurist as the book is, Nolletti says relatively little about cinematography. The bulk of the technical discussion concerning how the images form the narratives is dominated by editing, which is given such thoughtful and in- depth treatment as to more than make up for separate deficiencies. At times he tries to portray Gosho as an auteur with a vision that radically breaks with accepted norms, but never entirely follows through with the thought, always leaving it at the wayside. If not altogether radical, films from this period at least have relevance to call their own. Nolletti explains:. They compel us to care. If one wanted a better idea of what Gosho was like as a person, they may turn to his autobiography. But when does anyone read an autobiography to get a truthful perspective on a personality? Through the fog comes Elegy of the North , a sort of twisted Brief Encounter , representing an atypical take on romance straight out of Gosho Land. Two others about which he writes at some length are The Fireflies an attempt at a straightforward war drama and Yellow Crow a film that experiments with color to create a portrait of a troubled young boy. The heroine of the film, infinitely more complex than that of Dispersing Clouds , is unusual for any sort of film, she being deformed both physically and emotionally. Like Masako, she gets compared to the Mona Lisa and, like Masako, she is without her mother. She registers emotions, but we can visibly see how they come to her through a filter of cognitive distortion, all blunted to become disquietingly single-pointed. To Reiko, torturing other people is sport. She goes on dates with Katsuragi, a married man who, unable to understand her, settles for being possessed by her. He sketches pictures of Angkor Wat, a place he visited a long time ago, and which Reiko looks at with fascination. Meine Mediathek Hilfe Erweiterte Buchsuche. Indiana University Press Amazon. Arthur Nolletti. Inhalt Gosho and Shomin Comedy in the s. Dancing Girl of Izu and the Junbungaku Movement. Blending the Shomingeki Shitamachi. Once More and Goshos Romanticism in. A New Kind of Shomingeki. Money Democracy. Adapting the Meijimono Reconfiguring. New Challenges and the Quest to Create. Verify your identity

We can start by asking how such features might contribute to a causal explanation. We might say that Japanese aesthetic traditions and Zen precepts simply pervade the culture, and as a Japanese Ozu is naturally drawing on them. But this dispositional explanation is inadequate. Not all Japanese directors fit the 'Zen aesthetics' case, so Ozu's living in Japanese society is not enough to cause its presence in his work. A causal explanation must specify why Ozu's work embodies these qualities more than other directors' works do. The logical step would be to posit an urge in Ozu to present these qualities in his films. This urge might be spontaneous and unreflective, or calculating and strategic. To prove either case, we would have Zeman might try to show that Ozu's early life gave him an unusual interest in the traditional arts, Schrader and Richie that he was a devout Buddhist or that he had a keen interest in Zen. Unfortunately, these critics adduce no such evidence. Indeed, I can find virtually nothing that would support an explanation of this type. As we have seen, Ozu's youth was consumed by a passion for Western culture. Apart from one remark about Japanese verse, which needs to be interpreted carefully see p. The widescreen frame reminds him not of emaki-mono, or scroll painting, but of toilet paper. And he once remarked of foreign critics: 'They don't understandthat's why they say it is Zen or something like that. In certain ways, they do. But I can spell out those ways only by showing that the very concepts 'Zen Buddhism' and 'Japanese aesthetics' need to be understood within particular historical contexts. Japanese Buddhism is not a unitary phenomenon. The variety of sects, the shifting relations between Buddhism and Confucianism, and Buddhism's mixture of otherworldly and purely pragmatic concerns have made it subject to periodic revision, often for immediate social ends. During the late s, for example, some ideologues combatted Westernization by exalting Buddhism as an expression of pan-Asian culture. The Zen sect enjoyed particularly fluctuating fortunes. Founded in China around and taken up by the Japanese samurai class, it is less important as a religious doctrine than as an aesthetic attitude. With the rise of Confucianism, Zen became predominantly an artistic practice. Like Buddhism generally, Zen also took assumed concrete social functions. Whatever religious meaning the tea ceremony once had, by it had become a purely aesthetic experience, and by it was wholly commercialized. Before World War I, it was a hobby for rich women, and afterward it became popular with the masses, with firms offering low-cost courses to women employees. In , Kitaro Nishida's spectacularly successful book Zen no kenkyu Studies in Goodness proposed a revival of Zen practices and a search for individual enlightenment. This new doctrine owed a good deal to such Western sources as Hegel and T. Greene and influenced many Japanese intellectuals' retreat from political action. In sum, Zen is not the only source of Japanese aesthetics, nor does it exemplify a pure essence uncontaminated by historical reinterpretations. Indeed, to speak of 'Japanese aesthetics' itself is to suggest that the tradition is more homogeneous than it is. Japanese art has always subscribed The Zen idea of sabi - solitary serenity attained by immersion in nature - differs significantly from iki, an urbane flair and sensuousness. Shibui, the beauty of reduction and astringency, contrasts with hade, the beauty of brilliancy and exuberance. Moreover, such traditional concepts were constantly being revised and reinterpreted. In medieval aesthetics, yugen referred to an impersonal, elegant beauty; but the noh playwright Zeami recast it to include a feeling of sadness at the mutability of life. There is no single or monolithic Japanese aesthetic tradition. It is a highly variable construct to which artists and polemicists of different periods appeal even as they redefine it for contemporary purposes. What, then, of Ozu? There are obvious citations of Buddhism in his work. In Days of Youth, a rude college student jams chewing gum on a statuette of Saigyo, the wandering Buddhist poet. There Was a Father makes extensive use of Buddhist imagery. See pp. These references can be traced to the changing fortunes of Buddhism in Ozu's social milieu: skepticism among s youth, mobilization of Buddhism for the war effort. At the thematic level, Ozu's world seems quite un- Buddhist: no attribution of life's sorrows to sins during previous existence, no trust that after numerous rebirths the spirit will attain Nirvana. Stylistic features present a more difficult case. Schrader has argued that certain features of Ozu's compositions, cutting and acting exemplify Zen religious principles, such as ritual, unity, and mu emptiness as presence. For now, I simply propose that any such use of Zen in Ozu is not direct, let alone directly religious, but will be mediated by proximate historical practices. The concept of mono no aware, so central to Western discussions of Ozu, perfectly illustrates this process. Aware suggests an emotional quality present in all things; mono no aware, perhaps best translated as 'the pathos of things', connects beauty and sadness. Aware emerges as an aesthetic concept during the Heian period eighth to eleventh centuries. Issuing from an aristocratic 'lite that cultivated an exquisite sensitivity to beauty, aware had a firm class basis: no commoner could have it. It quickly became a literary convention. In the eighteenth century, the literary theorist Norinaga Motoori used the term mono no aware as part of a reinterpretation of Heian aesthetics. Motoori claimed that modern man had lost natural human feelings by virtue of conflicting moral codes - bushido, Confucianism, Buddhism. Mono no aware, a phrase which seldom occurs in Heian literature, was thereby made into what Raymond Williams calls a 'selective tradition'. Note that mono no aware is here opposed to Buddhism. By virtue of Motoori's longing for Heian purity, mono no aware becomes a nostalgic concept, shot through with a sense of loss. But then this was turned into an aesthetic device. During the nationalistic s, however, a new selective tradition emerged. Writers were summoned to 'return to' mono no aware, now characterized as a distinctive quality of Japanese literature and the 'core' of Heian writing. Particularly important in this process is the post encounter with the West. In different ways, both Tsubouchi's Essence of the Novel and the s urgings to return to tradition exemplify the recasting of literary ideology in order to define Japan in relation to Europe, Russia, Britain, and the United States. This is not simply to say that Japanese artists were forced to choose between Japanese and alien traditions. Rather, the very definition of Japanese traditions became subject to dispute. For example, by Japanese fiction writers had grown used to many foreign genres and styles, and this acquaintance 'defamiliarized' Japanese traditions as such. Rimer puts it well in discussing the great novelist Yasunari Kawabata: 'Kawabata's very distance from his tradition gave him a self-conscious awareness of the workings of the tradition necessary to permit him to adapt them for his own particular purposes. In the Taisho period especially, as Miriam Silverberg has shown, a 'Japanese tradition' was being produced and packaged for domestic as well as foreign consumption. A similar process took place in the postwar period, when artists could treat the war era as a 'dark valley' and find true Japaneseness in some new selective tradition haiku but not bushido; liberal democracy of the s interrupted by 'militarists'. In the chapters that follow, we shall see how Ozu's career traces its own fluctuations in relation to shifting notions of Japanese art, as well as of Japaneseness itself Granting these qualifications, we can see that Japanese filmmaking of Ozu's formative period did assimilate certain features of aesthetic traditions. In the s, some directors self-consciously set out to study such literary techniques as the kodan, the device of abbreviated statement, curt dialogue exchanges, and rapid shifts of scenes. Some filmmakers turned to haiku's atmospheric brevity as a model for cutaway shots of nature or objects although such images can also be found in American films of the s and 20s as well. More generally, as literature, calligraphy, music and the graphic arts prized the ornamental flourish, so virtuoso stagings in depth or perfectly-timed camera movements testify to the director's decorative control. Because of foreign influences, Japanese films had a more 'Western' dramaturgy and style than prior traditions would have allowed, but filmmakers also borrowed eclectically from native sources in order to display an 'indigenously Japanese' quality. Cinema disrupted native traditions by reinforcing a pull toward Western models of narrative and representation that was already being felt in Meiji literature and theatre. But filmmakers could embellish American-based plot structure and style with asides, elaborations, and fine points that harked back to 'traditional' arts. In this context, Ozu's mixture of classical Hollywood principles and studied citations of Japanese elements makes sense. His films draw not on some amorphous entity called 'Japanese tradition' but upon mass culture of his moment. His s films in particular are closely indebted to trends in popular novels and to urban fads. During the postwar period, Ozu's plot construction recalls the work of such twentieth-century writers as Toson, Tanizaki, and Ton Satomi the author of novels that would become Equinox Flower and Late Autumn. In his early days, Ozu's 'modernity' was modern, and in later years so was his 'traditionalism'. The next chapter will show how he recast not a pure 'Japaneseness' or traditional art but specific post-Meiji materials, themselves shaped by the encounter with the West. That recasting was centrally mediated by such cinematic factors as Hollywood norms, Japanese cinema's 'decorative classicism', and the practices of a commercial film industry. Today the plebeian flatlands [shitamachi] of Tokyo have lost the last vestiges of their former appearance, but sometimes, in an old part of Kyoto or Osaka, you come upon rows of the same heavy-roofed houses, the same latticed fronts You say to yourself, as if remembering your long-forgotten home, 'Ah, Tokyo was once like this'. Junichiro Tanizaki, The historical poetics that I am proposing here is not one that 'elevates form over content'. The Formalists have bequeathed us two analytical schemas devoted to this problem: Shklovsky's distinction between form and material, and Tynianov's between material and the 'constructive principle' the two constituting 'form'. The crucial point is that the art work's form is not an external shape, an ornamental appendage, or a mere vehicle for something ineffable. The work's material is what it is made out of; the form is the process and system of the making. But what can an art work be made out of? Shklovsky distinguishes three sorts of material. There is physical stuff, such as paint and canvas in painting, sounds in music, or language in literature. The physical material need not itself be raw or unshaped, as musical tonality or verbal syntax shows. Secondly, there is referential material, what we usually call subject matter. For the painter, the external world functions as material in the sense that the painting may portray recognizable objects or states of affairs. Finally, the art work is made of what we might call 'conceptual' or thematic material. In excessive moments Shklovsky denigrated referential and conceptual material as 'non-artistic'. But as his essay and other writings of Formalist theorists make clear, all these sorts of material must be considered important to the making of the art work. It will not do to privilege only one type, such as thematic material. We can best see the work's materials as diverse and heterogeneous, neither pristine nor necessarily compatible, with the art work's form relying upon their interaction. Instead of content, we find context and contest. We can here address the referential and thematic dimensions of his work. Ozu's material is, at one level, a body of well-worn referents; his subject matter is concrete and often directly citational. At a more abstract level, Ozu's thematic material can be thought of as consisting of cliches or commonplaces - in the sense that all artists build works out of inherited meanings and idees revues. The two most usual notions of the 'content' of Ozu's work - his quotidian realism and his transcendental values - can be seen as issuing from the films' use of particular referents and thematic commonplaces. Detailed analysis of these materials is reserved for the film-by-film discussion of Part Two; some general tendencies will be traced out here. Ozu's referents and commonplaces come to him already 'processed'. In the broadest sense, these materials are circumscribed by the ideological horizon of post-Meiji Japan: the landscape of emergent industrial capitalism, urbanization, growing state bureaucracy and struggle for political power that constitutes Taisho and early Showa history. As we shall see, Ozu's films are firmly fixed in the social field. More specifically, between the overall social formation and Ozu's films lie crucial mediations, some of which I have already mentioned. For instance, Ozu's materials bear the traces of the continuous revision of 'innately Japanese' aesthetic traditions in the light of changing social demands. We shall have occasion to pause on ways in which Ozu's subject matter and themes are self-consciously linked to contemporary reinterpretations of aesthetic precepts. Another crucial mediation is Ozu's working milieu at Shochiku, where Kido's genre policies dictated domestic subjects and humanistic themes. Still another mediating factor, seldom discussed but absolutely central to Ozu's work, is that of the burgeoning urban culture of Taisho and early Showa. As Tokyo was rebuilt after the earthquake, there arose a teeming, flamboyant mass culture. Movie theatres, revues, dance halls, cafes, bars, and mah-jongg parlors sprang up, replacing the variety theatres and Japanesestyle restaurants of a decade earlier. The rebuilding of Tokyo accelerated popular culture trends of the s. By , consumer goods had begun to enjoy nationwide distribution; after the Kanto quake, advertising in the European mode expanded hugely. Newspaper circulation soared into the millions, and popular magazines began to cater to a huge readership. The expansion of publishing required a new popular literature, known broadly as taishu bungaku, which, like the cinema, owed much to Western models. Critics and highbrow novelists tended to disdain mass literature, but whereas an 'art' novelist's work might sell only a thousand copies, a novel serialized in Shufu no tomo Ladies' Companion would reach a hundred thousand avid readers. After the quake, radio and phonograph records began to disseminate both Western popular music and Japanese hit songs. One historian credits Taisho music with giving the Japanese a consciousness of their own mass culture. We shall even discover that he uses iconography also developed by contemporary cartoonists, novelists, journalists, The director so often identified with ascetic otherworldliness turns out to be constantly referring to contemporary concerns, alluding to passing fashions, and developing political ideas. Everyday Modernity Early and late, Ozu's films are highly referential. His master referent is thus a cliche: the modernized, urbanized life of the contemporary Japanese. Like most of his peers, Ozu situates each film in a definable economic setting. Several of the pre films present a strongly working-class milieu consisting of cramped alleys, shabby apartments, and laundry billowing on washlines. These surroundings form a tangible reminder that the s was the major period in the development of an urban proletariat. These films refer to the plight of the seasonal or short-term worker - uneducated, poorly paid, toiling in unregulated industries. In the postwar period, Ozu's proletarian has become a small tradesman: Record of a Tenement Gentleman presents Kihachi as a dyer, while the estranged mother in Tokyo Twilight runs a seedy mahjongg parlor, and Hirayama's war buddy in An Autumn Afternoon has his own garage. Another milieu of interest to Ozu is that of the college student. Between and , he made college films on the American model, and these too were filled with references that would have appealed to contemporary viewers. During the s, Japanese colleges and universities were being established at a rapid rate, and by they held over 60, students. Although competition for university places was severe, once a student was accepted he was virtually guaranteed a diploma. University life was highly Westernized, boasting European-style curricula and sports such as tennis and skiing. Given two principal stereotypes of the student - the passionate radical and the apolitical, unruly nonconformist - Ozu's college comedies draw upon the second. He updates the popular s literary tradition of the gakusei-mono, the story of such ups and downs of campus life as love affairs and 'exam hell'. Even the film's title may be a cliche; his Days of Youth recalls a Nikkatsu student film of , Days of Our Youth Warera no wakaki hi. He centers his tales at Waseda University, less prestigious than its imperial competitors and more hospitable to students from impoverished families. In Ozu's earliest films, college is a place of irresponsibility, of drinking, sports, and romance. The only problem is exams; then one must cram and cheat. By , in College Is a Nice Place, the university has become an utter dead end, and the students idle their days away, too dispirited even to make mischief. A year later, all is nostalgia: in What Did the Lady Forget? Setsuko promises to return to Tokyo to see a Waseda baseball game. In the popular imagination of the s, the student was something of a vagabond. So too were other marginal figures of Ozu's work of that period. Owing something to popular fiction that romanticized hoodlums, Salarymen ride a train to work in this cartoon from instantly recognizable as rewritings of American gangster films, they are nonetheless grounded in the contemporary life of the yotamono, petty thieves and swindlers. Their bars and hideouts are at once reminiscent of Hollywood and specific to Tokyo: Dragnet Girl is partly set in the Florida Cabaret, an actual Tokyo nightspot. At the same period Ozu turned his hand to another declasse milieu, that of the traveling entertainer. Story of Floating Weeds uses this very old topos to take Kihachi on the road as manager and star of a tattered Kabuki troupe. Ozu remade Story of Floating Weeds in for Toho, and both versions seem curiously anachronistic. Once Ozu leaves the city, he loses many of his reference points. If the urban proletarian, the college student, and the drifter fade out of Ozu's work, the salaryman is a constant from start to finish. During the first two decades of the century, Japan's modernization led to the creation of a 'new middle class' of white-collar workers and bureaucrats. During the s the ranks of salarymen swelled: by , one out of five non-agricultural male workers was a clerical employee in a firm or government bureau. After the Kanto quake, much of Tokyo's urban culture was addressed to the salaryman and his family. Magazines, cafes, bars, and cinema were bent on amusing these white-collar aristocrats, creating a milieu somewhat akin to the Angestelltenkultur analyzed by Kracauer at the same period. The correlation becomes evident if we compare a cartoon satirizing the conformity of the salaryman's lifestyle fig. The humor is complex, since the magazine, like Ozu's films, addresses itself to the very workers and wives who were being satirized. There is a female equivalent of the salaryman, the stenographer-typist who works for the firm. Walk Cheerfully, Dragnet Girl, and many postwar films also present this figure's milieu - one that referred to a genuine reality, since women have long formed the 'invisible proletariat' of Japan. Again, popular culture aimed its wares at such relatively independent women, so that Ozu's films, especially of the pre-war period, would have contributed to the perpetuation of the ideological construct of the moga, or 'modern girl'. In the pre Ozu film, most characters are haunted by the fear of unemployment, a very tangible referent for contemporary audiences. The depression which began in and continued into the s made the ranks of the jobless increase steadily. Bank failures triggered massive dismissals of white-collar employees. By , one out of five unemployed workers was a salaryman. Ozu's Life of an Office Worker, about a salaryman who is fired on the day he gets his seasonal bonus, must have struck a chord in For students the jobless rate was even higher: by , only a third of university graduates were finding work. Ozu borrowed a rueful catchphrase of the period for the title of I Graduated, But A shot from the home movie in I Was Born, But I Flunked, But In Tokyo Chorus, Ozu portrays Tokyo as 'the city of unemployment', in which a graduate, fired for defending an older colleague, must take a menial job - again, a refraction of the class anxieties of a white-collar audience. Most of these films solve the unemployment problem by fiat: a job appears miraculously. Even in Inn in Tokyo, a sombre portrayal of the unemployed proletarian, Kihachi does find work. In the more grim That Night's Wife, the penniless sign painter must rob an office to get medicine for his child, and his fate is capture and imprisonment. The employee can forget launching a career; he is lucky to have a job. And his aged mother must return to the country, where she can look forward only to a life in the silk millstill the most common form of female work in the s. Things have changed in the postwar films. Now unemployment is no threat. The office girl is a short-term employee, working to help out the family until she marries. With the expansion of Japanese industry, the salaryman became the new role model for contemporary Japanese workers. Enjoying regular hours, lifetime employment, and guaranteed advancement, the salaryman represented the 'bright new life' of booming Japan. As Ezra Vogel puts it: 'For the rest of society the salary man mediates the direct impact of Westernization and industrialization by offering a model of life which is modest enough to be within the range of realistic hopes and modern enough to be worthy of their highest aspirations. Workers took up golf, flower arranging, and pachinko. A Sumitomo salaryman assumed the name Genji Kita and chronicled his class's aspirations and foibles in such successful stories as 'The Guardian God of Golf. The former is an astringent critique of the way that young clerks become trapped in the toils of the impersonal company. Ozu's image of crowds of white-shirted workers pouring out of the train station echoes a cliche of popular culture seen in a contemporary cartoon fig. Throughout his postwar work recur the sights of the new Japan: office buildings, construction sites, and the company-owned apartment block. Despite the ideological salience of the salaryman, Ozu's films refer to other middle-class prototypes. There is the independent entrepreneur who keeps a small bar, restaurant, or sake shop, or who runs a family-centered business such as the Kohayagawas' brewery in End of Summer. There is the super- salaryman, the highly-placed manager who comes to prominence in The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice and subsequent films. Above this rank there is the bourgeois as such, the successful owner of a large-scale business - sometimes as a secondary character, as in The Lady and the Beard or I Was Born, But It is significant that, contrary to common critical opinion, Ozu's 3. All these class milieux were commonly seen in Japanese popular culture throughout Ozu's life. Shochiku is an important influence here; during the late s Kido seems to have encouraged films to be set among richer circles. This survey of economic strata ought not to imply that Ozu's films afford a comprehensive view of Japanese life They ignore certain topoi of popular culture, such as the impoverished widow who raises children while slaving at subcontracted piecework, or the geisha who suffers for love of an unattainable youth. This selectivity doubtless owes something to Shochiku's artistic division of labor, which encouraged directors to specialize in certain material. Such partiality ought also to be kept in mind when we turn to the subject that critics have taken as Ozu's most typical: the family. Not all of Ozu's films center on families. In the college comedies and gangster films, families play no significant role. It would be fairer to say that Ozu's pre films use family relationships as one, usually privileged, arena of social conflict; and that after , more often than not, character relationships at work, in the neighborhood are usually plotted with reference to family relationships. In any event, his handling of the subject makes reference to many cultural constants. The family is an absolutely central ideological construct for Japanese society. The ie, or stem-family system, stretched back to Japan's feudal era, and it was strengthened by the Meiji Civil Code. The ie was the family line, transmitted through the eldest son and dominating all branch families that might be set up by his brothers. This patriarchal concept of the family had been much stronger among the samurai class than among the rural and urban masses, but the emerging industrialists of the early s promoted it as a pervasive and inherently Japanese cultural value. The patriarchal family became the model for several social institutions: the industrial workplace, overseen by a paternalistic manager or employer; the government office; the economic marketplace, run under the watchful eye of the ruling class; and finally the nation-state, with the citizens owing filial loyalty to the emperor. This master analogy played a strategic role in building a stable, modern work force. Family worship was promulgated by education, by state Shinto, and by appeal to Confucian precept. Explicit appeal to this ideology intensified during the s, when the most popular word for 'citizen' had become harakara, literally 'same placenta', and immense emphasis was placed on the Japanese kokka, the 'country-family'. Yet there were also contradictions between ideology and lived experience. Even in late Meiji, while the family was being canonized, the ie was itself breaking down, especially in the impoverished countryside and in urban areas influenced by Western individualism. During the s other tendencies became evident. Central among Occupation reforms was an attack on the patriarchal family, principally through granting women the vote and ending the legal authority of the main Economic changes also created smaller households on the Anglo-American model: generations split off, family occupations waned, married women began working outside the home. The company began to take over the role of the family in providing security, welfare, and a sense of tradition. As a result of these and other factors, there grew up the ideology of maihomushugi, or 'my-home-ism' - a redefinition of the family as parents plus children plus their domestic possessions. The modern family was united by a new degree of affection, individual privacy, and consumer obligations. The new situation was most evident in the change in marriage customs. Before the war, a central means of keeping ie spirit alive was the arranged marriage, or miai-kekkon. The Occupation discouraged such practices, and there appeared a rise in the 'love marriage', often growing out of acquaintances made in school, clubs or the workplace. The sense of a transcendent unity of families across generations was increasingly replaced by the integrity of the married couple, often under the benevolent auspices of the company. Again, however, social change was not a simple replacement of one norm by another. The ie lingered as an abstract ideal, and the miai was still favored among many families. Parents seemed especially reluctant to let daughters marry for love. These changes in the family leave their traces on Ozu's work, but not in any simple one-for-one way. The popular culture of the pre-war era bears marks of the tensions which capitalist and imperialist expansion put on the ie system. While the government used the press to reiterate that the family was the bulwark of tradition and that katei bunka family culture crossed all class lines, films and popular culture presented broken families. Instead of fearsome patriarchs and dutiful wives, urban culture was filled with images of absent or debilitated fathers, weak husbands, rebellious sons, and strong women and children. Ozu's films are no exception. The feeble husband of Body Beautiful, tyrannized by a successful wife; the ineffectual husband who says he lets his wife think she's boss What Did the Lady Forget? Even ostensibly strong males, like the hirsute protagonist of The Lady and the Beard or the gang leaders of Walk Cheerfully and Dragnet Girl, get tamed: the Beard becomes a shaven salaryman, the tough hoodlums end up weeping, chastened, and in prison. Usually the real vigor comes from the marginal family members. Sisters sacrifice for brothers and upbraid them for stupidity Woman of Tokyo, Dragnet Girl. Mothers spur their sons to achievement I Was Born, But Sons criticize their fathers I Was Born, But One could argue that as a narrative form, cinema needs transgression of social norms in Like other Shochiku directors, Ozu - addressing a predominantly female audience - had no compunction about leaving his family melodramas suspended on a point of uncertainty or equivocal resolution. It is only with the more explicitly optimistic wartime products, Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family and There Was a Father, that the ie ideal is redefined in terms of duty, hierarchy, and proper place - just as it was treated in other Shochiku films of the period. The postwar era likewise leaves its marks on Ozu's representation of the family. According to Sato, Ozu was thereafter told by friends that he had reached the limits of his formal powers. He set out to find a stable subject through which he could refine his technique, and the life of the middle-class family was his choice. Dramatic crises would no longer revolve around unemployment or failures in job advancement, but rather the death of a parent, the conflict of generations, or the marriage of a daughter. Ozu's films still addressed a female viewer, with maihomushugi furnishing the occasion to dramatize and satirize the new urban Japan. The salaryman coming home late to a dutiful wife, the child studying, the daughter cooking or commuting to work, the separate worlds of the husband's cronies and the wife's school friends - these stereotyped social images, instantly recognizable to Ozu's audience, became the basis of his patient exploration of domestic conflict and social change. Economic strata and representations of the family are geographically localized in these films. Despite an occasional use of rural settings, Ozu's films are overwhelmingly urban. Our survey of Ozu's referential materials would not be complete without a consideration of how he taps his audience's assumptions about the nature of city life. Japan entered the twentieth century as a rural society, but the city exercised an influence on national culture out of all proportion to its population. After World War I there began a massive movement of penniless farmers and ambitious younger men to the city, where they formed an urban proletariat. It was in the city that Western elements first took firm hold, that new industrial techniques transformed the work day, that the press and mass-market book publishing built a base of support. By the s, thanks to the mass media, Japanese culture was becoming redefined as urban culture. This process was not without its tensions, as when a sentimental song or novel contrasted the gay life of the city with the truer morality of the countryside. Between and , the rural population plummeted from about forty per cent of the total to twenty-five per cent; by , over ninety per cent of people lived in cities or towns. Despite Ozu's occasional Central to the urban life of Ozu's period was Tokyo, which by the s began to dominate Japanese society. The city was to be the showcase for innovation, the symbol of how Meiji Japan could succeed with Westernized learning. Tokyo became the mecca for ambitious youth and the center of cosmopolitan culture. Once the quake had leveled much of the city, Junichiro Tanizaki could look forward to living in the capital of the modern world: I imagined the grandeur of the new metropolis, and all the changes that would come in customs and manners as well. An orderly pattern of streets, their bright new pavements gleaming. A flood of automobiles. The geometric beauty of block towering upon block, and elevated lines and subways and trolleys weaving among them, and the stir of a nightless city, and pleasure facilities to rival those of Paris and New York Fragments of the new Tokyo passed before my eyes, numberless, like flashes in a movie. Soirees, evening dresses and swallowtails and dinner jackets moving in and out, and champagne glasses floating up like the moon upon the ocean. The confusion of late night outside a theatre, headlights crossing one another on darkly shining streets. The flood of gauze and satin and legs and illumination that is vaudeville. The seductive laughter of streetwalkers beneath the lights of Ginza and Asakusa and Marunouchi and Hibiya Park. The secret pleasures of Turkish baths, massage parlors, beauty parlors. Weird crimes Taxis, subways, private cars, and express trains were all in use by the end of the s. Houses had one room decorated in Western fashion, while mogas and mobos adopted flapper and sheik hairstyles. Foreign words poured in, and urban sophisticates prided themselves on knowing some English. A perceptive foreign traveler noted in that movies, radio, and dancing catered to the two hundred thousand white-collar workers with ready spending money. She also noted how post-quake culture had created new roles for Japanese women - the cafe hostess, the flirtatious waitress, the permed typist, even girl billiard markers. His work is saturated with references to the teeming mass culture of the metropolis. The films celebrate the city's streets, alleys, cafes, bars and wharves. His characters indulge in gimbura - strolling through Ginza - and use local landmarks, such as the Hattori clock tower, as compass points. He pays homage to the city of lanterns when Otsune in The Only Son visits the giant lantern at Kaminari Gate, or when in Tokyo Story three carousing old men are filmed over the top of a huge lantern. Routledge Routledge studies in the modern history of Asia, Pimlico Here at last, are the poems of the Holocaust, the Blitz, Hiroshima; of soldiers, refugees and disrupted Macmillan Press Introduction - prelude to a revolution, A. Cooper; socio-economic interaction and establishment of colonial-capitalist Global Oriental Indiana University Press c University Press of America c They follow the territory after it became a British colony after the first Opium War , Japan's World War II attack and occupation , economic development, democracy movements, the psychology of the Chinese, and more. This book reviews and analyzes British rule Oxford University Press Ashgate c Lexington Books c New studies of modern Japan. America as we rethink the historical and contemporary significance of such ongoing questions as the meaning of the American occupation both inside and outside of Japan , the shifting semiotics of "literature" and "politics," and the origins of what would become crucial ideological weapons of the cultural Part II explains the basic framework of budgets, the budgetary process in Japan , and fundamental strategies Beate Sirota Gordon ; [with a new foreword by John W. University of Chicago Press Francisco that would eventually become part of the FCC. When the war ended, she became the only woman in the team of experts sent to Japan to help the army with the American occupation. General MacArthur gave the team four days to draft the constitution. Oxford University Press , c Pearson c Lexington Books c Indiana University Press c Twentieth-century battles. Routledge Empires in perspective. Thus, Britain stressed that occupation was temporary and attempted to gain legitimate control anyway, through issuing leases. In the event, after much political posturing from East Asian Cornell University Press On August 30, , in a United Nations-sponsored ballot, East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia and for an end to a brutal military occupation. Upon the announcement of the result, Indonesian troops and their paramilitary proxies launched a wave of terror that, over three weeks, resulted Focusing on the intersection of world politics, U. As he looks at the political and strategic legacies Sata Ineko ; translated with an introduction by Samuel Perry. University of Hawai'i Press , c Sata's first novella, Crimson , joins a long tradition of women's writing in Japan that sought to assert women's "liberation" from what was seen as the oppressively patriarchal Left for Dead? NUS Press c 2nd ed. It shows the impact of war and occupation on a non-belligerent population, and creates a new understanding of the changes and the continuities that underlay the post-war economy and society Crawford F. Sams ; edited with an introduction and notes, by Zabelle Zakarian. Routledge An East gate book. Macmillan , c China in particular was the target of increasing Japanese invasion and occupation until it no longer had any active seaports under its control. To give themselves an artery to trade with the outside world, more than , Chinese Longman Seminar studies in history. China in Within a chronological framework the author explores the forces of nationalism, modernisation and change in a period of revolution, occupation and civil war. Two thematic chapters look at social change through the period in particular, the status of women and education and the student British Museum Press Sharpe c An East gate book. Derev'anko ; Demitri B. Shimkin and W. Roger Powers, American editors ; translated by Inna P. Written by leading Russian experts and edited by scholars including the late Demitri Shimkin, the book presents the results Greenwood Press c Contributions in military studies, no. Palgrave Macmillan c World histories of crime, culture and violence. The question of Complicity: Japan's early postures Springer Advances in natural and technological hazards research, v. This trend is often accompanied by proliferation of poorly built housing, uncontrolled use of land, occupation of unsafe environments and overstretched services. When a natural hazard strikes such a city many people are vulnerable to loss of life and property Routledge Routledge handbooks. Cambridge University Press Introduction: Indonesia's three watersheds; 2. The colonial legacy; 3. Occupation , liberation and the challenges facing the new republic, ; 4. Suharto's economic record: successes and failures; 5. Hodder Education 2nd ed Access to history. Zed Books US dominance is as significant as US economic preponderance in determining the future of capitalist development - with the recent US invasion and occupation of Iraq being a confirmation of Amin's prescient thesis. Cornell University Press Cornell studies in money. They were highly influential in Japan , and Metzler traces their impact in the period from the Allied Occupation , starting in , through the Income Doubling Plan of Japan after defeat, Metzler argues, illustrates the critical importance of inflationary Oxford University Press c 3rd ed. Author Andrew Gordon offers the finest synthesis to date of Japan's passage through militarism, World War II, the American occupation , and the subsequent economic rollercoaster. Routledge Political theories in East Asian context, 1. Years of Japanese imperial occupation followed by the Cold War have entrenched competing historical understandings of responsibility for past crimes in Korea, China, Japan and elsewhere in the region. In this context, even the impressive economic and Stanford University Press c Asian America. In addition to the mission to tame the former enemy, it became strategically important for the United States to establish a docile, "democratic" ally in Asia as the nation entered the Cold War Kurt Piehler, series editor. In "Facing Japan ", Parks M. Coble focuses on how events that took place during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria - from until war erupted in - affected the Chinese goverment and public opinion. Both in the places where incidents occurred and in other centres of power, Japanese threats Routledge , c Routledge library editions,. Japan ; v. Shingu, on the northern shores of Kyushu is today a suburb of Fukuoka City. Fishing is a slowly-dying occupation and this volume analyses how the fishermen adjust to changing circumstances. Although Japan is the largest fishing nation in the world, when originally published this book was the first to be Lexington Books , c Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 1. Beginnings Chapter 3 2. Washington, Chapter 4 3. Countdown to War Chapter 5 4. Last Hope for This book examines the Communists' revenue and supply system during the Japanese occupation in Shandong, a coastal province in northern China. It explores how the Communists manipulated currency exchange rates to turn trade within the occupied Ashgate Pub. Houghton Mifflin c 2nd ed. Stanford University Press c Studies in Asian security. In the early s, Hokkaido Routledge RoutledgeCurzon contemporary Japan series, Duke University Press Asia-Pacific : culture, politics, and society. Once the object of discrimination at home, Yamazaki paradoxically found himself in Japan for the first time as an American, part of the Allied occupation forces, and again an outsider. This experience resonates through his work with the children of Nagasaki and Hiroshima Duke University Press University of Nebraska Press c Columbia University Press c Brill c History of warfare, v. Palgrave Macmillan 1st ed. Thomas Chih-hsiung Chen 6. Qafisheh 8. Koman and Helena Whalen-Bridge 9. Clinical Legal Education in Thailand: A University of California Press , c Japanese history, Gregory Pflugfelder explores the languages of medicine, law, and popular culture from the seventeenth century through the American Occupation. Pflugfelder opens with fascinating speculations about how an Edo translator might grapple with a twentieth-century text on homosexuality, then Thomas Rimer and Van C. Columbia University Press c Modern Asian literature series,. Gessel ; v. Beginning with the Allied Occupation in and concluding with the early twenty-first century, these stories, poems, plays, and essays reflect Japan's heady transition from poverty to prosperity, its struggle with conflicting ideologies and New Press University of California Press c Pflugfelder opens with fascinating speculations about how an Edo translator might grapple with a twentieth-century text on homosexuality, then turns Routledge War, politics and experience. Yuasa Katsuei ; translated and with an introduction and critical afterword by Mark Driscoll. Born in Japan in and raised in Korea, Yuasa was an eyewitness to the ravages of the Japanese occupation. In both of the novels presented here, he is clearly critical of Japanese imperialism. Kannani Doctors and family planners used a small window of opportunity during the Occupation to legalize abortion, and afterwards, doctors and women battled religious groups to uphold the law. The pill, on the other hand, first appeared Lee ; foreword by Carol N. But he had a voice and style of his own, and Nolletti is careful to define and describe this sensibility in telling detail. The careful attention Gosho gave to even the smallest gestures and nuances of character and emotion is matched by the breadth of Nolletti's research and the depth of his understanding. His analysis illustrates the important influence of Gosho's unique style and sensibility on cinematic form in Japan and beyond. Get A Copy. More Details Original Title. Other Editions 1. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Cinema of Gosho Heinosuke , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about The Cinema of Gosho Heinosuke. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order.

​Dispersed Clouds () directed by Heinosuke Gosho • Reviews, film + cast • Letterboxd

Indeed, the textures and feelings of daily life found in the shomin-geki echo into later works that could more easily be defined in terms of melodrama, psychological study, or historical picture. In the body of the book Nolletti devotes less than four pages to discussing Dispersing Clouds and then, partly used as a comparison to Elegy of the North , clearly considering it a minor work. In it a young girl from Tokyo named Masako, falls ill while on a trip to the countryside with her friends. They take her to a local inn where she is gradually nursed back to health by a kindly maid named Osen, along with the help of a country doctor, a young man who teaches her about the difficulties of living in a place with few modern amenities. She gets visited by her busy stepmother, with whom she clearly has some underlying tensions, and then by her yet busier father, but she seems in no hurry to return to the city. Getting to know the maid and the doctor, she finds that both also come from Tokyo originally, but have come to the countryside to escape from their painful pasts and to become immersed in a different and less hectic way of life. She goes with the doctor to a rural village where he wants to open a clinic for local children. In spite of Masako learning a lesson about caring for others in the village it is always apparent that she will eventually have to return to Tokyo. Avowedly auteurist as the book is, Nolletti says relatively little about cinematography. The bulk of the technical discussion concerning how the images form the narratives is dominated by editing, which is given such thoughtful and in-depth treatment as to more than make up for separate deficiencies. At times he tries to portray Gosho as an auteur with a vision that radically breaks with accepted norms, but never entirely follows through with the thought, always leaving it at the wayside. If not altogether radical, films from this period at least have relevance to call their own. Nolletti explains:. They compel us to care. If one wanted a better idea of what Gosho was like as a person, they may turn to his autobiography. But when does anyone read an autobiography to get a truthful perspective on a personality? Through the fog comes Elegy of the North , a sort of twisted Brief Encounter , representing an atypical take on romance straight out of Gosho Land. Two others about which he writes at some length are The Fireflies an attempt at a straightforward war drama and Yellow Crow a film that experiments with color to create a portrait of a troubled young boy. The heroine of the film, infinitely more complex than that of Dispersing Clouds , is unusual for any sort of film, she being deformed both physically and emotionally. Like Masako, she gets compared to the Mona Lisa and, like Masako, she is without her mother. She registers emotions, but we can visibly see how they come to her through a filter of cognitive distortion, all blunted to become disquietingly single-pointed. To Reiko, torturing other people is sport. She goes on dates with Katsuragi, a married man who, unable to understand her, settles for being possessed by her. He sketches pictures of Angkor Wat, a place he visited a long time ago, and which Reiko looks at with fascination. The cavernously overgrown temples form a symbol of what she sees as something nestled within his life and out of her reach, something serene, mysterious, and far-away that she wants to hold some personal meaning. Reiko decides to stalk them, watching their drama play out from a close distance, eventually befriending them without revealing who she really is. The secrets she knows about the prim and glamorous Akiko, along with the dual life she has fashioned for herself, seem to bring enjoyment to her strange, adolescent mind. At one point, likening Akiko to a swan, she then mimes being a swan-hunter, turning a compliment into an obscure threat. Katsuragi immediately detects her schadenfreude but continually forgives her for it. This is a wonderful and very dark view on a sort of human desire, wherein we are detached emotionally, physically bound by suffering more than by happiness, wanting to stifle rather than to uplift. Involvement is sustained through torment, but that too must be mutual to continue, lest one of the lovers get killed off by it. The further she insinuates herself, the more chaos she introduces, until all the walls have been knocked down and she is left with only the aftershocks of her obsessions. In two lengthy chapters, Nolletti favors Where Chimneys Are Seen and An Inn at Osaka as significant examples of the way Gosho uses the essences of everyday life as a peculiar type of dramatic fodder, which highlights the humor and the pain latent all the time, making of those situations a double-sided mirror whose two facets are of equal importance. Her imbalances reveal, by proximity, those of the supposedly more stable people she sets out to destroy. Nonetheless her lover defiantly clutches onto his own equanimity, frustrating her. In spite of the masochism and bizarre attractions the film grows, it also manages nostalgia, acute expression, and powerful atmospheres like those that make Woman of the Mist such a treat. Laughter Through Tears is, ultimately, thought-provoking, enjoyable, and successful in fulfilling its aims. Tear streaks and giggling fits notwithstanding, the book retains a worldly lucidity, shedding most consistent light on an artist of multifaceted ambitions and persistently flowering trajectories. This is one of the best film book reviews I have ever read. I would like to credit you directly in the list of references appended to my essay, but I think that the only reference here is to the webpage itself. If you would like an author by-line, please contact me by email. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. Score: 7. Add Cast. Sano Shuji Mita Kyoichi. Mito Mitsuko Orika. Hidari Sachiko Oyone. Miyoshi Eiko Inn Owner. Tanaka Haruo Mita's Boss. View all 5. Write Review. There have been no reviews submitted. Be the first and write one. Add Recommendations. There have been no recommendations submitted. Be the first and add one. New Topic. Be the first to create a discussion for An Inn at Osaka. Content Rating: Not Yet Rated. 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