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| Festival Year |
Festival Section |
| 2001 |
|
| Film Title |
AI NO MACHI |
| Alternative Title 1 |
[TOWN OF LOVE] |
| Alternative Title 2 |
[CITTÀ DELL'AMORE, LA] |
| Alternative Title 3 |
|
| Country |
Japan |
| Release Date |
1928 |
| Production Co. |
Nikkatsu |
| Director |
Tasaka, Tomotaka |
| Format |
|
Speed (fps) |
| 35mm |
|
24 |
| |
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|
| Footage |
|
Time |
| 7081 ft. |
|
79' |
| Archive Source |
National Film Center |
| |
|
| Print Notes |
Didascalie in giapponese, sottotitoli in inglese / Japanese intertitles, English subtitles. |
| Cast |
Shizue Natsukawa
Bontaro Miake
Shozo Nanbu
Yutaka Mimasu
Yoshii Yasushi |
| |
| Other Information |
John Sweeney, pianoforte.
prima proiezione / released 31.8.1928 |
| |
| Program Notes |
An orphan … Parents rejected by her grandfather … a factory owner … She works incognito in her grandfather's factory … becomes his private secretary … His search for the son he has rejected… Granddaughter and grandfather reunited … Better conditions for the factory workers.
You may have recognised the synopsis right away, if you've known the book since childhood - as generations of children have. It is En famille, by Hector Malot, a late-19th-century bestseller and an evergreen children's classic up to the present day.
But you would be wrong. This synopsis is from the catalogue of the 1984 Japanese Cinema retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, and it refers to a Tomotaka Tasaka film of 1928 (whose opening titles then confirm that the script is indeed based on Malot's novel).
Films the world over have commonly adapted material of every kind of provenance, transposed it, and made it their own. Which elements of Malot's 1893 French novel were usable in 1928 Japan? Which were rejected or re-shaped, and why? Obviously, the novel's social criticism of working conditions during a period of industrialisation was usable - the socially critical "tendency film" (keiko-eiga) was in vogue in Japan at the time. For the purposes of the film, however, the main character - in the novel, a brave, clever, uncompromising 12-year-old girl, who all alone overcomes enormous dangers and problems and finally tames the evil grandfather - was rejected. In the film this heroic child was replaced by a sentimental and submissive young woman who wilts after the slightest physical labor, is happier doing a bit of dusting and flower-arranging in her grandfather's villa, and reacts to problems by wringing her hands. Why does a Japanese film of 1928 need such a creature? As half of a romantic pairing, of course. The film's problems are taken over by the other half of the couple, a competent young man. The love story, plus a few lyrical musical numbers (performed live at the time by the benshi or other singers, evidenced today by long intertitles at these points), now qualifies this elegant Nikkatsu production as a modern film romance. As with Shochiku's better-preserved and therefore better-known contemporary dramas (gendai geki), the formal richness is striking here. Ai No Machi belongs to the substantial group of Japanese silent films which have survived outside Japan (in this case, in Belgium). - MLF
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