Tokyo March (1929)
DVDRip | Language: French (intertitles) | Subtitles: Spanish (.srt) | XviD 640x480 (4:3) | 28 min | 18.0 fps | silent | 392 Mb
Genre: Drama
DVDRip | Language: French (intertitles) | Subtitles: Spanish (.srt) | XviD 640x480 (4:3) | 28 min | 18.0 fps | silent | 392 Mb
Genre: Drama
Tokyo March is a 1929 black and white Japanese silent film with benshi accompaniment directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. It is a classic melodramatic love tragedy addressing social inequality in modern Japan, depicted in Mizoguchi's typical style. The nostalgic scenes of Tokyo in the 1920s offers a valuable visual experience.
Original title: Tokyo koshin-kyoku
"The comparisons are as inevitable as they are unfashionable," wrote James Quandt, introducing the centenary retrospective of the films of Kenji Mizoguchi. "Mizoguchi is cinema's Shakespeare, its Bach or Beethoven, its Rembrant, Titian or Picasso." If this remains a minority opinion, it's not because others have tried him and found him wanting. Mizoguchi is either admired or ignored. If he is, as I believe, the greatest of Japanese directors, then he has eluded general recognition as such only through unpropitious circumstances.
The first circumstance was historical. The bulk of Mizoguchi's work was produced years before Japanese films were widely shown in the West. When a handful of Japanese movies did play in France and Germany in the late '20s, Mizoguchi's Passion of a Woman Teacher (1926) received considerable praise. But whereas its contemporary, Crossways (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1928) became (and remains) a staple repertory item in Europe, all trace of Mizoguchi's film has long since disappeared. Only in the '50s, as Japanese films again began to make their way into European festivals, did Mizoguchi win a belated international recognition for his late, bleak, yet beautiful and serenely moving period films. When he died, relatively young, in 1956, attention passed to such younger filmmakers as Kurosawa and Ichikawa, very much less distinguished artists who both profited from a fashionable brand of sentimental humanism and an obtrusive emphatic visual style consisting predominantly of rhetorical close ups and generally at the service of simplistic emotions.
The other circumstance, then, was artistic. Although a much more profound humanist than Kurosawa, Mizoguchi rarely, if ever, advertised his social concerns with the sort of condescending didacticsm which appealed to the message-hungry middlebrows of Sight and Sound and its ilk. As for his style, with its extraordinary elaboration, delicacy, beauty and grace, it must have struck the puritans who then dictated taste as decadent aestheticism. Naturally this sort of thing went down rather better in France, where Godard and Rohmer, then the Young Turk critics of Cahiers of Cinéma, hailed Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) as one of the cinema's supreme achievements and evoked comparisons with Homeric and Arthurian legend. But Mizoguchi's art eludes easy auteurist categorisation in a way that, say, Ozu's films do not. He vacilated politically between feudalism and feminism, militarism and Marxism. The essential features of his style - long takes, the rejection of close ups - remained constant for the last 20 years of his career, but the gulf between the stasis and austerity of Sisters of Gion (1936) and the roving camera and elaborate choreography of actors in Sansho Dayu (1954) is wide indeed. In consequence, critical opinion has often been divided: the traditional liberal humanist line, as exemplified by the criticism of Donald Richie, exalts the postwar period films, while the Marxist formalist school of Noel Burch prefers the prewar work for its supposedly more radical formal qualities.
"El carácter inevitable de las comparaciones es directamente proporcional a la poca estima en que se las tiene", escribió James Quandt, al presentar la retrospectiva por el centenario de Kenji Mizoguchi. "Mizoguchi es el Shakespeare del cine, su Bach o Beethoven, su Rembrandt, Tiziano o Picasso." Si ésta sigue siendo una opinión minoritaria, no es porque otros lo hayan examinado y hallado en falta. Mizoguchi es admirado o ignorado. Si es, como yo creo, el mayor director japonés, no ha sido reconocido como tal sólo por una serie de desdichadas circunstancias.
La primera circunstancia fue histórica. La mayor parte del trabajo de Mizoguchi se produjo años antes de que los films japoneses fueran exhibidos masivamente en Occidente. Cuando un puñado de películas japonesas fue exhibido en Francia y Alemania a fines de los años 20, La pasión de una maestra (1926), de Mizoguchi, recibió elogios considerables. Pero mientras que su contemporánea Encrucijada (Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1928) se convirtió (y lo sigue siendo) en un ejemplo de repertorio clásico en Europa, del film de Mizoguchi se perdió todo rastro hace mucho. Sólo en los años 50, cuando los films japoneses volvían a introducirse en los festivales europeos, ganó Mizoguchi tardío reconocimiento internacional por sus tardíos, oscuros, y sin embargo bellos y serenamente emotivos films de época. Cuando murió, relativamente joven, en 1956, la atención pasó a directores más jóvenes: Kurosawa e Ichikawa, artistas ambos mucho menos sobresalientes, pero que aprovecharon la marca del humanismo sentimental entonces de moda y un enfático estilo visual que consistía predominantemente en retóricos primeros planos y se hallaba generalmente al servicio de las emociones más simples.
La otra circunstancia, entonces, fue artística. Aun siendo un humanista mucho más profundo que Kurosawa, Mizoguchi rara vez -o nunca- publicita sus preocupaciones sociales con el tipo de didactismo condescendiente que tanto satisfacía a la medianía ávida de mensajes de la revista Sight and Sound y otras de su calaña. En cuanto a su estilo, con la extraordinaria elaboración, delicadeza, belleza y gracia que le eran característicos, debe haber impresionado a los puritanos que daban por ese entonces cátedra de gusto como un esteticismo decadente. Naturalmente, este tipo de cosas era mejor recibido en Francia, donde Godard y Rohmer, entonces críticos de Cahiers du cinéma, saludaron a Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) como una de las obras supremas del cine y arriesgaron comparaciones con leyendas homéricas o artúricas. Pero el arte de Mizoguchi elude una fácil categorización autoral de un modo en que, digamos, no lo hacen los films de un Ozu. Vaciló políticamente entre el feudalismo y el feminismo, el militarismo y el marxismo. Los rasgos esenciales de su estilo -planos largos, el rechazo del primer plano- permanecieron constantes durante los últimos veinte años de su carrera, pero el abismo entre stasis y austeridad de Las hermanas de Gion (1936) y la ágil cámara de El alguacil Sansho (1954) no dejan de ser importantes. En consecuencia, la opinión crítica a menudo se vio dividida: la línea humanista-liberal tradicional, ejemplificada por la crítica de Donald Richie, exalta los films de época de la posguerra, mientras que la escuela formalista marxista de Noel Burch prefiere la obra de preguerra por sus cualidades formales supuestamente más radicales.Alexander JacobySenses of CinemaMizoguchi's films are well known for their championing of women. He has been called the first major feminist director, though modern audiences may find that his themes do not line up with the modern concept of feminism. Typically he revealed women's position in the Japanese society as downtrodden and oppressed, and showed that they may be capable of greater nobility between the sexes. He made many films on the plight of the geisha, but his protagonists could derive from anywhere: prostitutes, workers, street activists, housewives, and feudal princesses.(…)
Mizoguchi's obsession with rehearsals was infamous, and could become a nightmare for his actresses. His preference for a long take meant there was little room for errors: there are stories of him rehearsing one shot nearly a hundred times. Kinuyo Tanaka, Mizoguchi's regular actress, once recounted that Mizoguchi asked her to read a whole library in preparation of a role.
Mizoguchi himself cited Marcel L'Herbier, Josef von Sternberg, William Wyler and John Ford as his influences.