Laughter and tears
Japan's Golden Age Star Actress Award
| Alexander Jacoby (See and Hear)
Translation | Luly
Editor| 23
In the first decades of World War II, a large number of outstanding Japanese films focused on women who fought conservative cultures in an era of rapid technological change. Much of the power and profundity of these films is due to the excellent actresses in the films, such as Tanaka Atsuyo, Hara Setsuko, Hideko Takayama, and Kyo Machiko. They shape the film as the director shapes their performance in the movie.
The famous Japanese actress Sachiko Zuo once said in the 1970s that if you want to evaluate Japan, you must first focus on Japanese women. Many of Japan's exemplary films can be seen as a study of the female experience, especially in the early postwar period. The subtlety and power of Japanese cinema is mostly realized by excellent actresses. Their sumptuous, nuanced performances dramatically transform the meaning of being women in a country that has undergone great changes in the twentieth century.
Setsuko Hara · Hisako Yamane· Hideko Takamine
Women who lived through the long Showa era (1926-1989) witnessed participation in unprecedented social change. Born in a rapidly developing country in the early 20th century, they faced feudalism and modernity, and local ideas clashed with Western value systems. On the one hand, the Meiji Emperor's regime (1868-1912) promoted the conservative concept of "good wife and mother" as an ideal image of women, while on the other hand, women were also the center of the booming Japanese economy, especially the textile industry. In the early Showa period, although kimonos were still chosen by many women as traditional clothing, some people began to accept the characteristics of so-called "modern women" and learned Western clothing, hairstyles, and manners. Most people still look for a partner through blind dates. In the 1930s and 1940s, with the encouragement of the militarist government to have children, most women had four to five children.
Stills of Daughter, Wife, Mother (1960).
The end of World War II had a transformative impact on the situation of Japanese women. Women were given the right to vote, and in 1946, Parliament elected 39 women members. The 1947 Constitution under the influence of the U.S. occupation also contributed to women's rights, including provisions for gender equality, and guarantees of freedom to choose a partner. In the same year, labor standards of conduct established protections for female workers. The gradual clarity of Western model shaping influences women's appearance and mannerisms. At the same time, in the late Showa period, social customs remained relatively conservative. The breakthrough made by Parliament in 1946 did not bring much change. In the political world of the late twentieth century, men remained the dominant force. Women are paid less than men, and a large number of women work part-time. Women tend to give up their jobs for marriage, small Western family units (i.e., men earning money to support their families) have become the standard of convention, and divorce rates are unusually low. In some ways, "good wives and mothers" is still a reality today.
In the early days of Japanese cinema, the film industry was once a male arena. Until the early 1920s, female characters were still cross-stringed by male actors, as in Kabuki performances. But after the war, the film world became a "refuge" for women who didn't want to live a conformist life: actresses often made choices that the average woman didn't have. At a time when lifelong marriage was still the mainstream, Setsuko Hara was never married, Isuzu Yamada had four husbands, and she had a non-marital partnership with director Eigenosuke Ikasa. Nevertheless, the crisis of women in Japanese society is artistically reflected in Japanese cinema, which dramatically expresses the complexity, precision, and power of women's experiences across the ages.
Shochiku
Toho
Toei
Japanese cinema in the mid-twentieth century, like Its Contemporary Hollywood, was a studio system. Production and distribution are dominated by several major companies (Shochiku, Daiei, Toho, and Toei, who joined the queue in the 1950s and Nihon, who reinvigorated), under which actor-star collaboration is contracted. Like Hollywood, actors build their own clear but also flexible fixed image. Just as Babara Stanwyck can play as a comedian or a scorpion beauty, either as a self-sacrificing mother or a career woman; Hideko Takayama can play both a wife and mother, a female gunner, an artist's model, but also a prostitute, actor, peasant and aristocrat. But the different characters are integrated by the 'key temperament' defined by the film scholar Chika Kinoshita. For example, her smooth, rapid, brisk pace of walking, smooth and coherent gestures, avoidance of eye contact and ambiguous facial expressions. ”
In all the studios, Shochiku has been looking at female audiences since the silent film era. At that time, Shochiku's boss, Shiro Johto, observed that "the old moral concept of oppression for women" created theatrical material, and he also had a business vision, believing that women were more inclined to bring friends, family and boyfriends to the cinema. Indeed, the sitcom film produced by Shochiku about a pair of lovers who met during the war air raids, Your Name (1953), became the biggest box office winner of the time. In the 1950s, other studios also tried to cater to the female audience: while Naruse was directing women's films at Toho, Daiei also produced a series of films focused on mothers or female workers.
Naruse Mikio
Film historians Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie have pointed out that Japanese cinema is "director's film," and that even the work of famous directors tends to be defined by actresses. When you think of Yasujiro Ozu, you can't help but think of the innocence of Hara Setsuko's smile; you can't think of Naruse's gentle firmness and determination. Both of the brilliant actresses were praised for their intuitive understanding of the director's performance, and a few years after Naruse's death, Hideko Takayama said that if she starred in Naruse's film at this time, she would still remember how to perform. They shape the film as the director shapes their performance in the movie. They are both translators and creators. Speaking of the two actors he most often collaborates with, Isuzu Yamada and Atsuyo Tanaka, even control freaks such as Kenji Mizoguchi have to admit that "I can't guide them step by step, the only thing I can do is to succumb to their personal style and find the right rhythm in them."
The older generation of Japanese stars who were active after the war included some actors who had been performing before the war. Tanaka Atsuyo (born 1909) began appearing in films in the late 1920s. Tanaka Atsuyo (b. 1917) also emerged in the mid-1930s, with Setko Hara (b. 1920) playing the lead role in 1937.
Yamada Isuzu Yamada
Date of birth and death: 1917/02/05 ~ 2012/07/09
Place of Birth: Japan, Osaka, Osaka, Chuo
Masterpieces: Heart Stick / Spider's Nest City / Tokyo Twilight
In her two groundbreaking collaborations with Kenji Mizoguchi, released in 1936, "The Lamentations of Langhua" and "The Sisters of The Garden", Yamada represented the "modern girl" before the war: career first, business acumen, and open sexual concepts. In a previous film, she played a telephone operator who became a criminal by participating in an illegal incident. Her work on technology and communication can also be seen as one of the hallmarks of modernity. In "Sister Garden", although Yamada plays a geisha, she is a female Haojie who rejects tradition, loves to wear Western clothes in her spare time, and refuses to be loyal to her patrons.
Yamada later played a role in Ozu Yasujiro's most sitcom film, Tokyo Twilight (1957), a mother who abandoned her child and maintained such a blackened character; in Kurosawa's 1957 film The Abyss, she played a mean, exploitative landlord; in Akira Kurosawa's other film of the same year, Spider City, she played the role of Lady Macbeth, which also allowed her to show the diversity of her performances; when Yamada recreated the character's mental breakdown, The strange dullness of the controlled swastika erupted in an instant.
In 1947, Yamada starred in "Actress" by Einosuke Ikasa. "Actress" is one of the greatest stage actors of the early 20th century, the autobiographical film of Matsui Sumako. She became famous for starring in Nala in Ibsen's feminist-style play The Doll's House, and committed suicide in 1919 after the death of her beloved, director Shimamura Tsukizuki.
Tanaka Atsushiro Kinuyo Tanaka
Date of birth and death: 1909/12/29 ~ 1977/03/21
Place of Birth: Yamaguchi, Japan
Representative works: Nishizuru Generation Girl / Rain Moon Story / Tsukiyama Festival Examination
In order to compete with Einosuke Iguro's "Actress", Kenji Mizoguchi directed his version, "Actress Sumako" (1947), played by Kenji Mizoguchi's favorite actress at the time, Tanaka Yushiro, and the two also collaborated many times in Mizoguchi's final career. In the late 1940s, they collaborated on a feminist popular drama Triumph of women (1946), in which Tanaka played a lawyer defending a woman suspected of murder, and in Daughter of the Night (1948), she played a prostitute who survived in a desolate, war-torn Osaka. In another feminist masterpiece, My Love Is Burning (1949), she played a wife who was a politician of the liberal parties of the nineteenth century, open-minded but unable to spread her values to her home. Kenji Mizoguchi and Tanaka Shiro co-produced one of the most avant-garde feminist films of the time, far more than the American occupiers had expected. However, Tanaka's fragility and resilience at the same time also make her remember the image of the wise, tolerant, and tolerant heroine in "The Tale of the Rainy Moon" (1953) and "Yamanake Doctor" (1954).
In fact, Tanaka, who has excellent acting skills, has almost all the best Japanese directors have cooperated. In the early 1950s, in Kinoshita's Ring of Marriage (1950), Tanaka still had the ability to play the sexy romantic heroine who fell in love with her husband's attending doctor (Toshiro Mifune), and in 1958, she convincingly played the old woman who was ready to die in Keisuke Kinoshita's "Kaeyama Festival Examination". In order to more realistically complete this tragic scene of knocking out a few teeth with a brick, Tanaka pulled out several of his own teeth. Tanaka also went on to become one of Japan's finest female directors, producing a series of outstanding feminist films in the 1950s and 1960s.
Hara Setsuko
Date of birth and death: 1920/06/17 ~ 2015/09/05
Place of Birth: Yokono, Kanagawa, Japan
Masterpieces: Tokyo Monogatari / Late Spring / Mai Qiu / Green Mountains
Compared to these more "powerful" stars, Hara seems to be a softer, gentler presence. She is accepted for her roles that always seem to float on the surface, peacefully, and acceptingly. In particular, in Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), he says, "Isn't life disappointing?" This question, while answering "yes", while smiling brightly character. Japanese audiences see her as the eternal saint, but it's a sentimental look at the actress, which film critic Robin Wood seems more accurate in describing. She "refuses to be qualitative". In Ozu Yasujiro's famous "Noriko Trilogy" (Late Spring 1949, Mai Qiu 1951, and Tokyo Story 1953), she played two young women who refused to marry and refused to cater to social expectations, and a widow who had no desire to remarry. In other films, her role is also very subversive. For example, in Naruse's "Sound of the Mountain" (1954), she would rather have an abortion than be trapped in a loveless marriage, and Ozu's "Tokyo Twilight" (1957), she is also trapped in a loveless marriage, much darker than Noriko.
Hideko Takamine
Date of birth and death: 1924/03/27 ~ 2010/12/28
Place of Birth: Japan, Hokkaido, Hakono
Masterpiece: 24 Eyes / Woman Walking Up the Stairs / Confused / Floating Clouds
Although much younger than the actresses mentioned above, Hideko Takayama is not a new face. Although she became a child star in the 1930s and was a wartime teen idol as a teenager, it was not until the fifties and sixties that she began to truly establish her own gentle, powerful, active, determined, and ambitious acting image. It is also an expression of post-war sentiment. Hideko Takayama's talent was brought to fruition in collaborations with Naruse, most famous and popular among critics, in The Floating Clouds (1955), directed by Naruse and adapted from a women's novel by Fumiko Hayashi. This story about addicted love is one of Naruse's strongest storytelling films at the moment, and it is different in many ways. But the sheer tenacity and enthusiasm of Shuko Takayama's character brings brilliance to the determined bar owner in When a Woman Walks Up the Stairs (1960) and the widow shopkeeper in Confused (1964) who is victimized by her cousin.
Hideko Takayama has also performed well in the works of other directors, such as Shiro Toyoda's Wild Goose (1953), in which she plays the lover of a lender, who spends her days in love with a kind student. Her delicate performance brings a glimmer of redemption to the story, and at the climax of the story, Donald Richie writes that "Toyota's camera finds hope as it turns into Hideko Takayama's face." Similarly, Hideko Takayama's diversity is reflected in two notable roles she collaborated with Keisuke Kinoshita: one was Japan's first feature-length feature film, Carmen Returns Home (1951), where she performed impeccable acting skills as a stripper who returned from Tokyo to "mock" her hometown of Nagano Prefecture; and in the sitcom Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), she played the island teacher, showing the fragile sentimentality of students facing world war II trauma as they entered adulthood.
Kyo Machiko
Machiko Kyô
Date of birth and death: 1924/03/25 ~
Place of Birth: Osaka, Japan
Masterpieces: Rashomon / Floating Grass / Rain Moon Story
Also personalizing the tough, active image of post-war women is Kyo Machiko. Ironically, her famous role as the West is known, but relatively limited, is Kurosawa's illegible prophecy of truth, the ambiguous woman in Rashomon (1950). But whether it is the victim or the lying snake and scorpion woman, Kyo Machiko has made a unique interpretation. The following year, she gave a richer performance in Yoshimura's Costume of Illusion (1950). In it, she plays a geisha in Kyoto's Gyoen Garden, trapped by the ancient Japanese capital and her geisha approach, but she still musters up her commercial prowess and street appearance to protect her sister, who works in a visitor center and marries against her mother's wishes, typical of a modern woman.
She also played the feared, ghostly princess in Rain Moon Story and the sister who committed crimes in Naruse's Brothers and Sisters (1953). Many of Kyomachiko's characters are desperate, but they all settle together in her trademark confidence and sensuality. She's 93 years old now, and Kyoko is one of our last connections to Japan's early postwar Golden Age films.
Fumiko Wakao Ayako Wakao
Date of birth and death: 1933/11/08 ~
Place of Birth: Tokyo, Japan
Representative works: Red Line Zone / Floating Grass / Gion Singer
Okada Jasmine Mariko Okada
Date of birth and death: 1933/01/01 ~
Masterpieces: Saury Flavor / Floating Clouds / Autumn Day and
The generation of actresses represented by Kyomachiko and Hideko Takayama reached maturity at the end of World War II, and their screen images were both strong and fragile, both crushed by war and deprivation and gaining strength in it. In the late 1950s, a new generation of women was formed in Japan. They were children in wartime, and they slowly matured in the hopeful distribution after the war. Stars such as Fumiko Wakao and Jasmine Okada (born in 1933, almost ten years after Hideko Takashi) are probably the first generation in Japanese history to be confident in prosperity and more inclined to embrace new ideas and lifestyles.
Both began to establish their own screen presence in classic directors' films: Fumiko Wakao played the young rebellious geisha Eiko in Kenji Mizoguchi's The Festival of the Garden (1953) and played the lead role in Kenji Mizoguchi's last film, The Red Line Zone (1956). Jasmine Okada appeared in Yasujiro Ozu's Late Autumn (1960) and Autumn Harmony (1962). But both were better suited to the new generation of filmmaking models of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Fumiko Wakao and Hozo Masomura have worked particularly closely together, bringing a touch of European flair and freshness to Japanese cinema. Fumiko Wakao is in line with his insistence on a modern sense and crude social commentary. In Aoki (1957), she played the illegitimate daughter of a businessman whose arrival exposed her father's family in Tokyo to the tensions and crises that lurked on the surface of Japanese society. Wakao's disturbing sense of freedom, as Jonathan Rosenbaum put it, "The scene in which she finally denounced her bedridden father and made him admit his mistake must have shocked the Japanese audience at the time." Later, she played the nurse in Masamura's harsh war film Red Angel (1966), enduring sexual violence on the front lines.
Okada's free and active image is most typical in Yoshimura's Ono no Sasaka (1960). She played a young and powerful businesswoman who runs a traditional dim sum company and is disappointed in love, and she finds satisfaction in her work. Her collaboration with her later husband, New Wave director Kishige Yoshida, is the most enormous. Their first collaboration, Akitsu Onsen (1962), was like a summary of shochiku sitcoms and a re-departure, heralding the beginning of their departure from the studio to produce the so-called "anti-sitcom" series independently.
Haruko Sugimura Haruko Sugimura
Date of birth and death: 1909/01/06 ~ 1997/04/04
Place of Birth: Hiroshima, Japan
Masterpieces: Tokyo Monogatari / Mai Qiu / Late Spring / Taste of Saury
Chikage Awashima
Date of birth and death: 1924/02/24 ~ 2012/02/16
Masterpieces: Fireworks / Early Spring / Mai Qiu
Miko Kuga
Yoshiko Kuga
Date of birth and death: 1931/01/21~
Masterpieces: Four Love Stories / Tokyo Day and / Good Morning
In addition to these representative characters, post-war Japanese cinema is also enriched by the outstanding performances of other actors, each of whom has made his own performance and interpretation in some unique aspect.
A frequent guest in Ozu Yasujiro's films, Haruko Sugimura's cynical, daunting personality traits seem to retain the dark side of postwar capitalism: her role as Kaneko in Tokyo Story, the selfish beauty shop owner impressive, just as she played the material geisha and the creditor in Naruse's film Late Chrysanthemum (1954).
The characters of Chikei Awashima are usually balanced between cold irony and tenacious perseverance. The former is reflected in her funny and sad performance in Shiro Toyoda's Couple Zenya (1955), a geisha who engages in complex negotiations with the shangjia family, while the latter's image is based on her performance in Naruse's film Herring Cloud (1958), in which she reclaimed the portrayal of women's self-reliance in Japanese films.
All three actors have starred in the geisha story directed by Masaru Imai and transformed by the 19th-century female novelist Higuchi Kazuya, Turbid Stream (1953), a blended film that even beat out Tokyo Story and Rain Moon Story in the voting of the annual film critics in the authoritative film magazine "Movie Shunbun" to win the first place. Regardless of how this decision should be evaluated, the excellence of the film lies in the actresses' realistic representation of the geisha world full of details.
In the post-war era, Japanese actresses revived traditions while trying to establish new images of women. When director Shiro Toyoda was asked by Donald Richie why Japanese actresses are better than male actors, he replied that because Japanese women "perform all their lives." Yet in an era when women's power and female roles faced unprecedented challenges, Japanese films and these great actresses not only took on their roles, but also shaped the times.
Deep Focus DeepFocus is the author of today's headlines