Shimizu Hiroshi Boxsets

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esl
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#51 Post by esl » Mon May 12, 2008 10:48 pm

Steven H wrote:Here is Shimizu's JMDB page, which is in all Japanese, but I think it's a pretty healthy listing of his work (166 films directed!)
Thank you very much.
htdm wrote:According to the evening edition of Thursday's Asahi Shinbun (a leading national newspaper), Shochiku is planning to release 5 Shimizu sets - no details on the contents however.
Shimizu left Shochiku after WWII so that means it will be his pre-war films. That is unless Shochiku has obtained the rights to the films he put out under his own production company; films such as Children of the Beehive. Anyway, the release of more Shimizu is great news, especially if Shochiku continues to include english subtitles.

Shochiku list 19 films on their website here. As there have been 4 films on the each of the 2 boxes so far, 5 sets would be 20 films. I would assume that the remaining films listed at their site not already released are the likely candidates. But then they do not list Four Seasons of Children on their site which will be on set 2 so who knows.

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#52 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue May 13, 2008 11:14 pm

htdm wrote:According to the evening edition of Thursday's Asahi Shinbun (a leading national newspaper), Shochiku is planning to release 5 Shimizu sets - no details on the contents however.
Wonderful news! Hopefully this means films like Seven Seas, Eclipse, Memoirs of a Song Girl and the like will make it to DVD.

Fue no shiratama (1929) was shown as part of Shochiku's retrospective (and it is a gorgeous looking film -- in good shape). So hopefully, this will be released.

Some pictures (and comments)

If I count right, I've seen at least 15 of Shimizu's films -- and, so far, none have been clunkers.

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#53 Post by Jack Phillips » Wed May 14, 2008 4:51 am

About the name -- as best I can tell, "fue no" means "indestructible" and shiratama means "white jewel". While none of my Japanese dictionaries helped pinpoint which white jewel the title named, a Chinese dictionary (belonging to one of my children) translated the kanji as "pearl". So one assumes that the kanji used for "pearl" in the Japanese title was intended to evoke some antique poetical work. Once again, we find an important Japanese film burdened by what would seem to be an inaccurate (and, in this case, a bit nonsensical) English name.
I happen to be in Tokyo this month staying with Japanese friends and I mentioned this matter to them. They knew nothing about the subject but were willing to glean what they could from Japanese Wikipedia. Apparently, "shiratama" is an ancient usage for pearl (the modern word being shinju) which survives as the name for a kind of sweet (the white beads you see mixed in with azuki). It's possible that the title is alluding to a tanka by Wakayama Bokusui (1885-1928) who used the expression in one of his poems (but there is dispute about what he meant by the term). Your reading of the title, however, is confirmed: the best translation (according to my friends) is Unbreakable or Indestructible Pearl.

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Michael Kerpan
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#54 Post by Michael Kerpan » Wed May 14, 2008 8:35 am

Jack --

Thanks for checking into the meaning of Fue no shiratama. Nice to know my amateur researching turned out to be right. ;~}

In any event, I hope Shochiku includes this pearl of a film in one of its box sets.

I sent an e-mail to Shochiku about the Shimizu series, but I doubt I'll ever get an answer.

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#55 Post by htdm » Sun May 18, 2008 2:41 am

DVD Beaver on the first set.

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Steven H
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#56 Post by Steven H » Sun May 18, 2008 12:46 pm

Wow. It looks a *hell* of a lot better than I thought it would.

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#57 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun May 18, 2008 1:15 pm

Well, there is some spots of film wiggling and jiggling (among other problems). But I am still overjoyed to get this -- we're not likely to see any better version, I suspect.

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#58 Post by sidehacker » Sat May 24, 2008 6:29 pm

It's official: I love Shimizu. Had a double-bill featuring Kanzashi (my blabberings here) and Anma to onna last night. Both fantastic films and both presented gorgeously, at least compared to the old TV broadcasts I had laying around. God bless Shochiku.

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zedz
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#59 Post by zedz » Sun May 25, 2008 12:44 am

I haven't watched any of this yet, but this has got to be one of the most gorgeous DVD packaging jobs I've ever seen.

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#60 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun May 25, 2008 3:26 pm

I will be devastated (though not so much as Shochiku, I guess), if lots of people don't fall in love with Shimizu now that there are watchable DVDs.

(Just watched a dodgy old copy of Notes of an Itinerant Performer (Utajo oboegaki) -- and have my fingers crossed for a proper release of this.

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Keaton
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#61 Post by Keaton » Sun May 25, 2008 5:23 pm

so, the silent one has english subs?

regards,

Dennis :)

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#62 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon May 26, 2008 11:54 pm

Keaton wrote:so, the silent one has english subs?
Happily, yes. The Japanese intertitles for Japanese Girls at the Harbor have English subtitles.

(BTW -- I think this title is probably more like The Port's Japanese Girls).

Watched Shiinomi Gakuen (copy of unsubbed video). This was a Shintoho film -- about Dr. Saburo Shochi, who started the first school for disabled children in Japan (and then later helped China establish _its_ first school of this sort). Remarkably this this man is still active in the promotion of educating and caring for disabled children. (His own children both developed cerebral palsy -- which is why he devoted his life to his cause).

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esl
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#63 Post by esl » Tue May 27, 2008 9:54 am

Michael Kerpan wrote:Watched Shiinomi Gakuen (copy of unsubbed video). This was a Shintoho film -- about Dr. Saburo Shochi, who started the first school for disabled children in Japan (and then later helped China establish _its_ first school of this sort). Remarkably this this man is still active in the promotion of educating and caring for disabled children. (His own children both developed cerebral palsy -- which is why he devoted his life to his cause).
Michael, where do you get copies of this and Shimizu's Jiro Monogatari? Tell me you have not made a deal with the devil. :twisted:

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#64 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue May 27, 2008 10:02 am

esl wrote:Where do you get copies of this and Shimizu's Jiro Monogatari? Tell me you have not made a deal with the devil.
My fingertip is still bleeding.....

(Most of the obscure stuff I see was either released on video long ago or shown on TV somewhere, at some time of another)

BTW -- I note that Dr. Shochi visited Boston a couple of years ago. I feel like such a putz for not noticing -- and going to see him. Reading about his accomplishments makes me feel seriously inadequate... ;~}

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#65 Post by zedz » Sun Jun 08, 2008 9:12 pm

Just a beautiful set, and such wonderful films. The only Shimizu I’d been lucky enough to see before this was Mr Thank-You (I think I posted on it somewhere or other), which was terrific, but the other films so far are of similar standard.

Japanese Girls at the Harbour

The only silent film in the set, and it’s pretty wonderful. The story is somewhat melodramatic, a young girl going off the rails drama that could have featured Asta Nielsen two decades earlier, but the way Shimizu tells the story is consistently original and formally inventive.

Shimizu’s style seems to be characterised by its careful use of repetitions. For Mr Thank-You he created a very specific syntax for the bus trip, with looming bus-POV shots of the wayfarers they approach dissolving into the receding view of the same figures viewed through the back window of the bus. It’s a tactic that sort of elides the actual passing of those on the road, and we often don’t see them move aside, either, so it gives a kind of odd, almost dream-like effect. In Japanese Girls, the repetition applies to more constructed sequences, two early going-to-school scenes being made up of almost exactly the same sequence of shots, from the same positions, of the same durations, but diverging into difference. Towards the end of the film, some of those specific setups will be revisited, with even more drastic differences.

He’s also highly ambitious in moving his camera, following actions through oblique (rather than frontal / lateral) tracking shots, and in trying out some great ‘tricks’. There’s a fabulous jump-cut ‘zoom’ in and back out on a character in the climactic church scene (he would reuse a variation of this in The Masseurs and the Woman, in another highly emotional sequence), and he twice uses a dissolve to make characters ‘vanish’ from a scene. This seems to indicate the passage of time (as when characters move out of their dwelling towards the end of the film), but the first instance is much more complex and reflexive. It happens after Henry has been thrown out of the apartment his former girl Sumako now shares with a cantankerous painter. Standing outside, he gently vanishes. Passage of time? Not really: after a beat, the painter opens the door to chase him off and is bemused by the mystical disappearance. It’s an audacious and funny flourish, but I have no idea how it would have been taken by audiences at the time.

Foremost in Shimizu’s stylistic arsenal is his exquisite framing: generally at a distance and with a wonderful, dramatic use of negative space: big skies, marginal placement of figures or details. I couldn’t really see an antecedent for the decentred framings of Yoshida or Jissoji in any other classical Japanese director, but I can just about see it in Shimizu, though in these films it seems to be far more aligned with traditional Japanese visual culture (Hokusai etc.).

The Masseurs and the Woman

Another gem, this time closer to the more relaxed, discursive format of Mr. Thank-You (the ‘dramatic’ elements of the plot end up not amounting to much – this is much more about character). A pair of blind masseurs travel to a mountain spa, where one of them becomes obsessed with a mysterious lone woman. Shimizu’s moving camera is hard at work, tracking backwards up bumpy mountain roads, or smoothly tracking laterally behind walls to follow interior action (in the latter shots there’s an Imamurian use of Japanese architecture to break the frame up into narrative panels). As with Mr Thank-You, there’s a rich sense of place. These films capture an open-air freedom rare in early sound cinema.

Many arresting shots: a particularly gorgeous shot of the woman walking away from the camera along a classical pathway is broken up by a series of dissolves as she moves from foreground, to middle distance, to far background; or the final shot, in which the camera curiously dollies around a corner to get one last glimpse of a departing carriage. There’s also a strikingly framed portrait of the woman, head and shoulders in the lower half of the frame, the rest a mass of dark foliage. This unusual composition is reiterated in the remake, for which a trailer is included. On the evidence of that trailer, this seems to be an act of ‘cover versioning’ as obsessive as Van Sant’s Psycho: the vast majority of the shots are, in terms of framing and blocking, identical to Shimizu’s. Has anybody seen this remake?

EDIT: saw this was addressed on the previous page!

Rounding up the first box:

Ornamental Hairpin

Something of a blend of the two earlier sound films in the set. There’s those blind masseurs again, and the spa setting, but the character dynamic is more like the temporary community of the bus in Mr Thank You. It’s all very charming, and it’s got the same beguiling misdirection in the storytelling, but I was less taken with this film than the others in the box. Chishu Ryu plays a significant role, and he’s something of a revelation, but not in a good way: broad and bland in a way he never was under Ozu’s direction. The way he ‘struggles’ with his injured foot is rather unbelievable (the effort he expends lazily represented by the same mechanical ‘wiping my brow’ arm movement over and over again), and he never really develops any particular character in his other scenes.

Technically, much of the film is more standard than the earlier films (but nevertheless impeccable), though the opening scenes demonstrate more extended backwards tracks, and there’s a tracking shot along the exposed side of the hotel, in counterpoint to the movements of characters through various rooms, that’s so striking and formidable it’s really a proto-Tout va bien moment.

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#66 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun Jun 15, 2008 7:08 pm

Well, I probably like Arigato-san and Japanese Girls at the Harbor a bit more, but I like this one an awful lot too (a bit more than the Masseur and the Woman). I agree that Ryu is not as interesting here as in Ozu -- but Tanaka is utterly wonderful -- and so is Tatsuo Saito (as the grumpy professor). There is something a bit uncanny about the surface tranquility of the story here, given what was going on politically at the time.

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#67 Post by zedz » Sun Jun 15, 2008 8:40 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:Well, I probably like Arigato-san and Japanese Girls at the Harbor a bit more, but I like this one an awful lot too (a bit more than the Masseur and the Woman). I agree that Ryu is not as interesting here as in Ozu -- but Tanaka is utterly wonderful -- and so is Tatsuo Saito (as the grumpy professor). There is something a bit uncanny about the surface tranquility of the story here, given what was going on politically at the time.
I probably focussed too much on Ryu - the other performances, as you say, are much more engaging, and it's a lovely film. Considering this performance alongside Ryu's superb work in There Was a Father the following year was quite a shock.

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#68 Post by PimpPanda » Sun Jun 15, 2008 9:44 pm

Does anyone know what his films from the 50s are like? I watched Arigato-san yesterday and liked it very much.

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#69 Post by ltfontaine » Mon Jun 23, 2008 11:39 am

Were/are blind masseurs a reality in Japan, in the way that blind musicians have constituted an authentic cultural tradition in the U.S., or is this a singular cinematic conceit, perhaps Shimizu's own? An odd question, perhaps, but when blind massuers appear in two films of the Shimizu set, behaving according to what seems a familiar protocol, I have to wonder.

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#70 Post by Michael Kerpan » Mon Jun 23, 2008 1:13 pm

PimpPanda wrote:Does anyone know what his films from the 50s are like? I watched Arigato-san yesterday and liked it very much.
The latest films I've seen are Ohara Shosuke-san / Mr. Shosuke Ohara (1949), and Shinomi Gakuen (1955), discussed a bit earlier in this thread.

So -- not enough late Shimizu seen to know what the overall level is like.
ltfontaine wrote:Were/are blind masseurs a reality in Japan, in the way that blind musicians have constituted an authentic cultural tradition in the U.S., or is this a singular cinematic conceit, perhaps Shimizu's own? An odd question, perhaps, but when blind massuers appear in two films of the Shimizu set, behaving according to what seems a familiar protocol, I have to wonder.
Think of Zatoichi -- and (from China) the blind girl in ZHANG Yimou's Happy Times. Apparently, this practice is many centuries old -- though I don't know how many.

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#71 Post by ltfontaine » Mon Jun 23, 2008 2:56 pm

Right about Zatoichi, of course, I completely forgot about him.

It's interesting how Shimizu manages to treat these fellows with such dignity while simultaneously having such fun at the expense of their disability. I don't think the same thing would have been very well accepted in American films of the same period.

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#72 Post by Sanjuro » Mon Jun 23, 2008 7:36 pm

Talking of blind musicians, Shindo Kaneto's Chikuzan Hitori Tabi features the blind shamisen player Takahashi Chikuzan who spent most of his life wandering around Japan playing door to door before he became a big hit in the 70s. There's a scene towards the end in a school for blind kids learning to be masseurs.

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#73 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Jun 24, 2008 12:24 am

Apparently, the shogun set up a guild for blind workers -- which included both musicians and para-medical people (masseurs and acupuncturists, etc.).

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#74 Post by PimpPanda » Tue Jun 24, 2008 1:03 am

I just watched Kanzashi and thought it was very good. I really loved the subversiveness! My main problem with The Masseurs and a Woman was how the blind characters were treated. Even though I probably like the second half of that one more than any of the other Shimizu's I've seen, the comedic parts didn't resonate as much as the others. Arigato-san is my favourite so far.

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#75 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Jun 24, 2008 9:28 am

PimpPanda wrote:I just watched Kanzashi and thought it was very good. I really loved the subversiveness! My main problem with The Masseurs and a Woman was how the blind characters were treated. Even though I probably like the second half of that one more than any of the other Shimizu's I've seen, the comedic parts didn't resonate as much as the others. Arigato-san is my favourite so far.
One really wonders just WHAT is going on under the surface of Kanzashi. (same for Naruse's Hideko the Bus Conductress -- which ends up being even more disconcerting at the end).

I guess I don't much mind the humor of The Masseur and the Lady (I think the plural is wrong, by the way, despite its "standardization"). But while I rate this highly, it is not at the top of my Shimizu list.

I love Arigato-San and Japanese Girls and Seven Seas most, I think. But many more of his films are almost as good.

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