You can say a thing a lot of ways. That’s why we watch silent films, isn’t it? To see how, when the sound’s taken away, some great artist got his or her point across. To be reminded of all the options.
Imagine, for example, that you’re watching the story of a man and his wife, both young. They were married under pretences the male party now considers false. They’ve grown estranged. Now he is out on a job and she is home. An intruder muscles his way into the house and attempts to take her away. Realizing, finally, that she would rather stay with her husband than move on, she dispatches the intruder. As his heavy body hits the floor, two dinner plates, set askew on the table behind her, slide into an even stack.
There is no intertitle to tell us their marriage is saved. But it is. The plates said so.
Some say Otsuta needs a man. What they really mean is that Otsuta needs
money.
Money, and how to get it, is the ongoing concern in Flowing, Mikio Naruse’s tale of down-and-out geishas in mid-century Tokyo. Otsuta’s geisha
dwelling, Tsuta House, is deep in debt, and it’s her fault: the result of her
love-affair with a man who took more than he gave. But Tsuta House still
survives, and that, too, is thanks to Otsuta (Isuzu Yamada), whose fame,
beauty, and mastery of traditional geisha arts continue to draw customers to
her business.
You think you know Setsuko Hara.
I discovered the Japanese actress the same way, I bet, that a lot of you did: through the works of her friend, and favourite director, Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu’s ‘Noriko Trilogy’—so-called because all three films starred Hara as a woman named Noriko—are considered among his best work. Given Ozu’s stature, that makes them three of the best films ever made.
Hara worked for other directors, of course, but I’d never seen an example. And until I did, I didn’t realize how wholly the actress and the Noriko character were merged in my mind. It wasn’t simply Noriko who possessed that infinite patience, that commitment to self-sacrifice, that smile of steel—those were, for me, Hara’s traits too. And that made Repast, a major work by director Mikio Naruse, starring Hara, revelatory for me in a way that it might not be for everybody. Here, for the first time, I saw Hara look… grumpy. That was big.
‘Mama’ is only 30-years old. But in Mama’s line of work, that’s old indeed. She’s a hostess in a nightclub in the Ginza, a wealthy section of Tokyo, and over the five years she’s worked there she’s built a reputation as one of the loveliest, most engaging members of her profession around. The trouble is, no one wants to be a hostess for five years.
To those of us who have seen Yasujiro Ozu’s masterpieces (Tokyo Story being the most famous of them), the silent films he made early in his career can seem strange. Ironically, it’s their familiarity that makes them so. Ozu’s mature works are famously minimalist: conservative in style, slow and contemplative in pace, alike in subject matter. But much of his early work, influenced by Hollywood and his own studio masters, has a more populist feel. This was an artist in search of himself.
He did not find what he was looking for with Dragnet Girl, a gangster (!) film with characters more reminiscent of Mikio Naruse’s later work than Ozu’s. But though Dragnet Girl is an anomaly even among Ozu’s silent films—and far from the best of them—it is still interesting to watch. Especially when considering the roles Ozu assigned to both women and children later on.
