18 Twenty-Four Eyes

[shirobamba]

Distributors began receiving these last week. It's done and dusted and definitely going to be on shelves for the February 20th release date.

Congratulations, Nick & MoC team! This was the final release of the Japanese Summer series.
Besides the Naruse summer box will there be more Japanese late autumn
releases, or are you still Japaned out?

[peerpee]

We're gonna have another Japanese Summer (Autumn, and Winter).

[peerpee]

Nope. Tartan have the UK rights for all the Ozu sound films.

I was alluding to the fact that our 2005 Japanese Summer dragged on until this month.... (and probably will again next year)

[FilmFanSea]

Nope. Tartan have the UK rights for all the Ozu sound films.

OK, I'll bite. Which UK company has the rights to Ozu's silent films? And--if it's possibly Eureka!--when could we expect to see them released?

[What A Disgrace]

Mine just shipped from Amazon. I'm expecting it on Thursday or Friday.

The disc is also up for order at CDWow, but for the same price as Amazon (but no shipping charge, and no VAT discount for overseas buyers), and $27.99 on their U.S. site. For now, Amazon looks like the place to get it, since you can pair it with AE's Fantomas disc.

[peerpee]

Nope. Tartan have the UK rights for all the Ozu sound films.

OK, I'll bite. Which UK company has the rights to Ozu's silent films? And--if it's possibly Eureka!--when could we expect to see them released?

Unfortunately, Shochiku's master materials for their Ozu silent films aren't in the greatest shape. I'm personally looking forward to Criterion nailing these, with all the expertise and resources that they could bring to such a large project.

[Lino]

http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDReview/24eyes.htm

[Lemdog]

Damn, that review make me want to buy it.

[King of Kong]

Damn, that review make me want to buy it.

Me too. I want to see this now.

[Apu]

Bought it, saw it and I was very, very impressed.

[jguitar]

I recently got this with a batch of other MoC titles from cd-wow. I was very impressed. Takamine is one of my very favorite actresses, and she's great here. I watched this film while taking care of my 2 and a half month old daughter. She would only sleep if I held her and walked around, so I watched the entire film while holding her and walking back and forth in front of the tv. And I was spellbound! An odd review, perhaps, but there it is.

[Michael Kerpan]

An important film -- and the DVD is well worth having.

That said, I find that Kinoshita is a director I like less and less the more I see of his work. This is the total reverse of my response to not only my Japanese top favorites (Ozu, Naruse, Mizoguchi, Yamanaka and Shimizu) but even to my second tier favorites (e.g. Gosho and Kurosawa). I'd like to see more Imai -- to see how he stacks up to Kinoshita (but I suspect I might not find him much more satisfying in the long haul).

[funkcisco]

Could I find the MoC version (within the U.S.) anywhere besides eBay?

[domino harvey]

Yep

[Fan-of-Kurosawa]

I have to respectfully disagree with Michael about Kinoshita. I find in his films the same humanist touch that can be found in the films of Kurosawa and Ichikawa. I have Twenty-Four Eyes and Ballad of Narayama and I love them both.

The Tartan R2 release of the Ballad of Narayama is especially great and when AnimEigo releases the Imamura version it will be great to have them both.

[Michael Kerpan]

Since my comment a year ago, wondering whether I would like Imai more than Kinoshita, I've seen several more Imai films. My conclusion -- a far better director than Kinoshita (at his best, one of the best of his era).

Obviously many people have liked Kinoshita, but I still find his visual imagination relatively weak (compared to his better contemporaries) -- and his manipulativness typically bothers me more a lot than Kurosawa's does (not sure why).

I don't see much kinship between the work of Ichikawa and Kinoshita at all. I still think he is most like Gosho -- but that Gosho's (though imperfect) is a lot more rewarding.

That said, I would mind a MOC release of his Army as part of a box set of the most important Japanese war-time, war-related films.

[the dancing kid]

I’m skeptical toward the idea of Japanese directors being “postwar humanists” (a popular notion, and one that I feel dominates the way Japanese films are represented on DVD in America). Kinoshita’s film in particular is a textbook example of “victim consciousness” in how it conceals the experience of the war for Japan by a) casting everyone as a victim and b) rewriting history so that liberal protest against the war was a conceivable notion. It’s easy to see why the film has been so popular in Japan and in America/Western Europe; it offers a chance to overcome the trauma of the war and plays into the notion of Japan being “rehabilitated” by the occupation forces and liberal values.

Kurosawa’s “No Regrets for Our Youth” is equally bewildering in its cognitive dissonance toward the realities of the war and postwar period in Japan. I think one of the most interesting things about Kurosawa as a filmmaker is how he made the transition between wartime film and postwar film. That Hara Setsuko, the “face of Japanese fascism” was the star is all the more incredible.

That’s not to say that these films are bad. I actually like ‘No Regrets’ quite a bit, and both are fascinating from a historical standpoint. However, I also think that the idea of interpreting them from the perspective of looking for “humanism” has a troubled “anthropological subject vs anthropological object” type relationship. The popularity of these films in the postwar festival circuit is, in my opinion, deeply entwined with the desire to use Japan as a way of renewing the cultural identities and values of American and Western Europe after the war. The debate over Ozu being “liberal” or “conservative” is similar in how it is an idea brought to the films are and the reality they are representing by critics (rather than the other way around); that’s not a vocabulary that addresses what the films are dealing with in my opinion.

[HerrSchreck]

I also think that despite its interest from a straight historical perspective (and some obviously blooming mise en scene & pictorialism from AK), No Regrets is an extremely scrambled, confused narrative, dripping to Overload with a sense of deep seriousness about "something" that the filmmaker & screenwriter seem frightened to come out and articulate. It has one foot in the Occupation Program and another one with his countrymen, wary of offending anyone but the most hardcore of fascists during the war years, and avoiding the overall issue of Bonzai War Hysteria. Which is fine, thats a hard charge to put on the bull horns for, especially for an up and comer dealing with a hurt, humiliated, and furious population of Defeated. But if you're specifically going to hold up a mirror to Japan 1933-45....

Whereas a film like Burmese Harp can successfully avoid the need to indict War Lunacy-- because every nation at war has a right to weep for their heaps of wasted youth in corpses, whether provacateur or respondant-- No Regrets wants to specifically take on the issue of "responsibility", but never really does, beyond a few fascistic students & professors at university.

Not to mention the fucking thing should be retitled "Setsuko Cries... again and again..".

I never thought it would be possible to see a picture where the female breaks down and cries as a repeating setpiece more than Emiko Yamane in Honda's original Gojira... but No Regrets walked away with that one without a hitch, man. By the latter half I was cracking myself up majorly by trying to time when the tears would come in each scene, and was doing quite well.

[Michael Kerpan]

The notion of post-war humanists as described by Richie and (more sententiously) by Audie Bock is probably somewhat dicey. There were such film makers -- but they were largely ones whose left-wing sensibilities made them unacceptable to Bock (and problematic to Richie and Anderson).

I think Dancing Kid libels Hara by calling her "the face of Japanese fascism". I'd be interested in his "proof".

So far as I recall, she apeared in propaganda movies during the war (just like many Japanese performers) -- and was a pin up girl (more or less) for Japanese soldiers. How did this make her particularly "the face of fascism" (a careless phrase in its own right -- as the Japanese government wasn't "fascist" -- though they were militaristic, ultranationalist, even totalitatian).

As to No Regrets, it has great cinematography -- and Hara does a fine job -- though she does cry lots. It certainly isn't nearly as brave a film as Ozu's Hen in the Wind, which dared to hint that ordinary, middle-class men bore some responsibility for the consequences of military adventurism.

[the dancing kid]

Now I wish that I could take credit for coining that phrase! I’ll still take credit for the carelessness of it though, because I often invoke it when the subject of her transition from war-star to post-war liberal comes up (although I’m usually the one who brings it up, since it’s an interest of mine and few others). I think I’ve actually used it on this forum before.

As for proof, I would suggest looking at the films she appeared in and the way her star text was mobilized by filmmakers. The two films I would cite most directly are “The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malay” and “Suicide Troops of the Watchtower.” She had supporting roles in both films, but in both cases she is used as the surrogate for wartime ideology: in “War at Sea” she appears as a token of the family system (including a strange dream sequence from the perspective of her brother, who is serving in the military). Her role is to communicate the need for soldiers and families to sacrifice the emotional attachment of their relationships for the good of the war. “War at Sea” is also a major film from the period, as it was the first film to be exhibited under the two-branch distribution system (not to mention the tremendous advances in special effects). In “Troops,” she appears as a spiritist fanatic who prepares to kill the children of the families stationed at her outpost in order to save them from communists and a “fate worse than death.” If you’ve seen Ford’s ‘Stagecoach’ it’s basically the same scenario as the big action sequence near the end of that film, with Hara’s character assuming the same part as John Carradine’s.

If you want scholarly support, Peter High’s book is probably the only published work in English that argues for her significance to wartime cinema. It’s also available in Japanese, but the English language version benefits from revisions. I don’t remember if he invokes the phrase “face of Japanese fascism” or not, so if your objection is to that specific rhetoric and not the idea of her involvement in the war you might not be satisfied.

[Michael Kerpan]

I deplore the sloppy use of "fascism" to describe all sorts of "bad" governments. I think it is especially careless when used to describe the nature of Japan's war-time government.

It is unquestionable that Hara appeared in propaganda films. I am unconvinced that she (limited to mainly supporting roles during WW2) was peculiarly the "face" of Japanese militarism/nationalism/etc-ism.

[Jack Phillips]

I think Dancing Kid libels Hara by calling her "the face of Japanese fascism". I'd be interested in his "proof".

Maybe he's referring to her Aryan good looks.

So far as I recall, she appeared in propaganda movies during the war (just like many Japanese performers) -- and was a pin up girl (more or less) for Japanese soldiers. How did this make her particularly "the face of fascism" (a careless phrase in its own right -- as the Japanese government wasn't "fascist" -- though they were militaristic, ultranationalist, even totalitatian).

In fact, if you google "Japanese fascism" you get lots of hits. Here's something from one wikipedia page:

The use of the term fascism in relation to Japan is contentious and disputed. Japanese fascism was not an insurgent political movement, but an admixture of conservative and quasi-fascist ideas used by the Japanese political elite.

Fascism is one of those terms like film-noir that you can argue about ad infinitum. I sure hope you guys aren't going to turn this thread into a pissing match over semantics.

[the dancing kid]

I sure hope you guys aren't going to turn this thread into a pissing match over semantics.

I have no intention of doing so. I think my posts in this thread have been of good quality, and this is one of my favorite subjects, but I'm happy to drop the subject in the interest of the tone of the forum if that's where it looks like we're heading.

[Jack Phillips]

As for proof, I would suggest looking at the films she appeared in and the way her star text was mobilized by filmmakers. The two films I would cite most directly are “The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malay” and “Suicide Troops of the Watchtower.” She had supporting roles in both films, but in both cases she is used as the surrogate for wartime ideology: in “War at Sea” she appears as a token of the family system (including a strange dream sequence from the perspective of her brother, who is serving in the military). Her role is to communicate the need for soldiers and families to sacrifice the emotional attachment of their relationships for the good of the war. “War at Sea” is also a major film from the period, as it was the first film to be exhibited under the two-branch distribution system (not to mention the tremendous advances in special effects). In “Troops,” she appears as a spiritist fanatic who prepares to kill the children of the families stationed at her outpost in order to save them from communists and a “fate worse than death.” If you’ve seen Ford’s ‘Stagecoach’ it’s basically the same scenario as the big action sequence near the end of that film, with Hara’s character assuming the same part as John Carradine’s.

If you want scholarly support, Peter High’s book is probably the only published work in English that argues for her significance to wartime cinema. It’s also available in Japanese, but the English language version benefits from revisions. I don’t remember if he invokes the phrase “face of Japanese fascism” or not, so if your objection is to that specific rhetoric and not the idea of her involvement in the war you might not be satisfied.

You've piqued my interest. Do you have the title of Mr. High's book?

[fiddlesticks]

That Hara Setsuko, the “face of Japanese fascism” was the star is all the more incredible.

Now you've gone and made my avatar cry.