The Forgotten Master
One of the particular pleasures of film geekdom is discovering the work of a director whose oeuvre, though unified by filmmaking acumen, quality, and vision, has no name recognition attached to it and has eluded academic appraisal by critics and cult status among buffs. For every John Ford, it seems, there is a Roy Del Ruth. For every Francis Ford Coppola there is a John Flynn.
Japan's native top-line directors, such as Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi, produced enough masterpieces to keep an Asian-inclined cinephile happily seated and facing front in the dark for weeks. Recent revivals in repertory and home video of lesser-known Japanese studio directors such as Mikio Naruse, Kenji Fukasaku, and Kihachi Okamoto have helped to rescue the work of these fluent cinema stylists from Western obscurity.
For the next three weeks, the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Cinématek will unveil 10 films by another brilliant Japanese genre expert who, until a survey of his work was presented at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2005, was nearly unknown in America. The series, Tomu Uchida: Discovering a Japanese Master, offers a rare opportunity to explore the exceptionally dramatic and visually fluent work of this imaginative craftsman's 50-year career.
Though he was born in 1898 to an affluent merchant-class family, by the time Uchida was in high school, bad business deals had shuttered his household and forced him to seek his own fortune. Inclined to wander, Uchida worked as a factory laborer, piano tuner, and actor in a traveling theater troupe. His friendship with the screenwriter and director Kintaro Inoue led him to Tokyo's nascent film business, and stints as an assistant to the American-trained Japanese director Thomas Kurihara and gigs as a prop master, camera operator, and film actor eventually led him to the director's chair. By the start of World War II, Uchida had helmed some two dozen features and short subjects.
Though he became one the most prominent Japanese filmmakers of the 1930s, almost all of Uchida's pre-war output has been lost. His sole extant silent film, 1933's "Policeman," is a lean, straightforward gangster drama that exhibits the left-leaning social conscience of Hollywood, as well as the reflections and echoes of narrative expedience that would continue to color Uchida's later work.
By the 1940s, the Japanese war effort had forced the country's film studios to consolidate and reduce production. But across the sea, in occupied Manchuria, business was booming at the Manchurian Film Corporation, a Japanese company producing pro-Japanese films in China. Throughout the war years, Uchida negotiated various production deals abroad, but none of the Chinese film projects he pitched (notably a film dramatizing the exploits of a tank battalion in the Imperial Army during the Manchurian invasion) were made.
In his fascinating essay on Uchida's life and work in the Bright Lights Film Journal, the historian and critic Craig Watts describes the director as a romantic who embraced nationalist Japan's fascist ideals only as much as it was artistically self-serving. In any case, when Japan surrendered in 1945, Uchida's studio boss at the Manchurian Film Corporation swallowed a lethal dose of poison (a plan to blow up the studio's facilities by igniting the stores of highly flammable nitrate film stock never came to fruition), and Uchida chose to remain in China. Attempts at further film work were stymied by the chaos of the Chinese Civil War, and in 1953, Uchida returned to Allied-occupied Japan to begin his career all over again.
Asked by the production head at Daiei Studios what he had in mind for what would become his first feature film in 15 years, Uchida is said to have replied: "A peaceful movie." "Bloody Spear at Mt. Fuji" (1955) begins serenely enough, as a seemingly unrelated group of travelers encounter one another in various combinations on the road to feudal Tokyo during Japan's Edo period.
Working with his frequent collaborator, the cinematographer Sadaji Yoshida, Uchida tracked this mobile "Grand Hotel" of individual and intersecting dramas among different social classes with gentle visual authority. But what begins as a relatively innocent meshing of a samurai's retinue, an orphan, two grieving fathers, a thief, a pair of street performers, and others, builds to a violent sake- and blood-soaked confrontation on a muddy terrace. The denouement nods to the rainy finale of Kurosawa's "The Seven Samurai" (which was made the previous year), and yet is spectacular in its absence of glorifying heroics.
Like those of his contemporary and colleague, Ozu, Uchida's postwar films bear less of the obvious weight of social consciousness than the pictures he made before his lost decade in China. Nevertheless, "Bloody Spear at Mt. Fuji" smuggles a surprisingly nihilistic and unsentimental indictment of hypocritical military loyalty and parental selfishness into a period samurai drama.
Similarly, 1960's "Yoshiwara: The Pleasure Quarter," a turgid but endlessly watchable melodrama, bears a grim fatalism about power politics between the sexes that is worthy of American pulp writers James M. Cain and Jim Thompson, and Germany's master of the self-immolating unrequited love story, Fritz Lang. Shot in gorgeous color and wide-screen (again by Sadaji Yoshida), "Yoshiwara: The Pleasure Quarter" turns a businessman's social and personal destruction at the conniving hands of an ex-con prostitute into a marvelously decorous and perversely polite excursion into some of the worst aspects of human relationships.
As in "Bloody Spear at Mt. Fuji," Uchida makes use, in "Yoshiwara," of his own experience as a player in Japan's (to Western eyes) extravagantly presentational dramatic tradition. His two leads deliver performances that build to an intense level of theatricality. Playing Jiro, a fatally love-struck, disfigured middle-age cuckold, Chiezo Kataoka does perhaps the greatest homicidal slow burn this side of Edward G. Robinson in Lang's "Scarlet Street."
The film's brutal conclusion, staged, like "Bloody Spear," primarily in long takes from a polite, nonjudgmental distance, is absolutely stunning. "Don't touch my wife!" Jiro howls, literally a marked man, as those who would defend the woman who scorned him and cost him his mind close in. We, however, turn away. Cherry blossoms fall, the camera booms up, and, as off-screen chaos continues on the soundtrack, visual order is restored. It's an inspired and inspiring moment, in which the pure corn of kimono-ripping histrionics meets the pure cinema of an unheralded master of Japanese film.
Through April 30 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).
