10th September - 28th February 2006
It's not often that films that were first released nearly half a century ago get to premiere on a major UK tour. But the work of Yasuzo Masumura is worthy of just such an accolade - although it's puzzling why British audiences have been so long deprived of an opportunity to see the work of this maverick genius.
Launching at the National Film Theatre (10th-28th September), the Cruel Beauty Of Yasuzo Masumura programme will call in at the National Museum Of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford, the Duke Of York's in Brighton, the Watershed in Bristol, the Chapter in Cardiff, the Cambridge Arts Picture House, The Barn in Dartington, the Edinburgh Filmhouse, the Glasgow Film Theatre, Kendal's Brewery Arts Centre, the Phoenix Arts in Leicester, the Nottingham Broadway, the Sheffield Showroom and the Irish Film Centre in Dublin before 28th February 2006.
Trained at Centro Sperimentale Cinematografia in Rome, Yasuzo Masumura returned to Japan to direct the first of his 58 features in 1957. Echoing not just Michelangelo Antonioni's bleak studies of urban alienation, but also Ingmar Bergman's sombre love stories, Kisses (1957) is a neo-realist romance that has an offbeat energy that anticipates the Nouvelle Vague. Hiroshi Kawaguchi and Hitomi Nozoe excel as the lovers who meet while visiting their respective fathers in prison and find escape from their humdrum lives in visits to the cycle race track and the beach. However, a misplaced telephone number threatens to shatter their idyll even before it starts.
New Waver in waiting Nagisa Oshima declared Kisses to be one of the most powerful occurrences in Japanese screen history. But rather than embark upon another handheld slice of everyday life, Masumura turned instead to CinemaScope and colour. He pitched Kawaguchi and Nozoe into the big business world of Giants And Toys (1958), which feels at times like Douglas Sirk's version of Sweet Smell Of Success. Kawaguchi is steady enough as the PR apprentice at a sweet company going head to head with its competitors. But Nozoe is a sensation as the taxi switchboard operator who begins to believe her own publicity after she's chosen to be the campaign's poster girl.
The Sirkian touch is also evident in The Precipice (1958), in which a climber is killed on an expedition designed to help him forget his passion for married lover, Fujiko Yamamoto. However, Masumura also combines elements of the 20s German 'mountain film' and a Hitchcockian 'wrong man' melodrama, as the victim's best friend comes under suspicion for causing the fatal accident to clear his own way to Yamamoto's heart.
Masumura returned to the slopes for A Wife Confesses (1961), in which Ayako Wakao is forced to choose between her brutal husband and her secret lover when they're trapped together on a perilous climb. However, he shifted style again for A False Student (1960), as he adopted a noirish look for this tale of a mummy's boy whose furtive bid to prevent his parent from finding out that he failed his college entrance exam convinces members of the radical political group he's joined that he's a police informer.
Ayako Wakao became something of a muse in the mid-60s, as Masumura used her in both Red Angel (1966) and The Wife Of Seinshu Hanoaka (1967). In the former, she gives an extraordinary performance as a nurse sent to the front during the Sino-Japanese War in 1939, where her attempts to minister to the soldier who raped her bring her into contact with Shinsuke Ashida, a morphine-addicted surgeon, who becomes increasingly dependent on her after they're transferred to a cholera-infected outpost that's about to be subjected to an enemy assault. Masumura tempers the story's overt melodrama with chillingly authentic field hospital sequences that caused a scandal in their day. However, he opts for a more unconventional approach in the latter, his biopic of the first doctor to use general anaesthetic. Wakao is again outstanding as the wife who is willing to be a human guinea pig in order to sustain her strained marriage.
However, nothing can compare to the cruelty and fixation depicted in Blind Beast (1969), a sado-masochistic love story whose surreal sets recall the work of Dali, Cocteau and Franju, while its content anticipates the 'liberation through sexual excess' theme that would characterise Oshima's notorious Ai No Corrida (1976).
Eiji Funakoshi's blind artist initially comes across as a perverted maniac, whose stint as a masseur provided the sick inspiration for his giant sculptures of female body parts. But kidnapped model Mako Midori gradually comes to appreciate the pleasures of touch, as her own sight fails, and their final search for gratification is shocking (and sad) in the extreme.
"My goal", Masumura once wrote, "is to create an exaggerated depiction featuring only the ideas and passions of living human beings.... In Japanese society, which is essentially regimented, freedom and the individual do not exist. The theme of the Japanese film is the emotions of the Japanese people, who have no choice but to live according to the norms of that society. The cinema has had no alternative but to continue to depict the attitudes and inner struggles of the people who are faced with and oppressed by complex social relationships and the defeat of human freedom....(But) after experiencing Europe for two years, I wanted to portray the type of beautifully vital, strong people I came to know there, even if, in Japan, this would be nothing more than an idea."
These eight films not only suggest that Masumura succeeded in his ambition, but also that he inspired such 'nuberu bagu' auteurs as Oshima and Shohei Imamura, as well as such new generation turks as Shinya Tsukamoto and Takashi Miike. Let's hope it's not long before we get to see some his other 50 pictures, too.
