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| Festival Year |
Festival Section |
| 2001 |
|
| Film Title |
JUJIRO |
| Alternative Title 1 |
[CROSSWAYS] / [CROSSROADS] |
| Alternative Title 2 |
[SHADOWS OF THE YOSHIWARA] |
| Alternative Title 3 |
[INCROCI] |
| Country |
Japan |
| Release Date |
1928 |
| Production Co. |
Kinugasa Eiga Renmei [Shimogamo Studio Kyoto] |
| Director |
Kinugasa, Teinosuke |
| Format |
|
Speed (fps) |
| 35mm |
|
18 |
| |
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| Footage |
|
Time |
| 5857 ft. |
|
65' |
| Archive Source |
National Film Center |
| |
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| Print Notes |
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles. |
| Cast |
Junosuke Bando
Akiko Chihaya
Ippei Soma
Misao Seki
Yoshie Nakagawa
Yukiko Ogawa |
| |
| Other Information |
Antonio Coppola, pianoforte.
prima proiezione / released 11.5.1928 |
| |
| Program Notes |
This film's minimal plot displays deeply Japanese motifs: an older sister looks after her younger brother, and these two pure, naïve creatures are lied to, betrayed, and destroyed by the impure world of cynical adults. Highly experimental, in the spirit of the international avant-garde of the 1920s, the film features intense close-ups, a moving camera, graphic leitmotifs, subjective and point-of-view shots, and non-naturalistic costumes and sets. It belies its genre, for the action is set in ancient Japan - jidai geki country - but lacks the obligatory series of swordfights, each more dramatic than the previous. Individual images produce the strongest impressions: Ippei Soma's dirty toes, a falling knife, pearls of water in the hair of the sleeping Akiko Chihaya. While Kinugasa's first independent experiment, Kurutta Ippeiji (A Page of Madness, 1926), features discontinuity, openness, and heterogeneity, his second, Jujiro, is characterized by unity and polish - the unity of both the film's fictional and production space (e.g., the studio at night), and the polish of the impeccable frame compositions in black and white.
After Kurutta Ippeiji (and with the cast and crew assembled for that film) Kinugasa began to produce jidai geki for Shochiku. After Jujiro he went to Europe for two years, and his company, Kinugasa Eiga Renmei, until then nominally independent, was taken over definitively by Shochiku. In May 1929 Jujiro, with the German title Im Schatten des Yoshiwara (Shadows of the Yoshiwara), premiered at the Ufa-Pavillon cinema in Berlin's Nollendorfplatz and was then distributed in many European countries. At least two versions have survived, one English and one German. For decades Jujiro remained virtually the only Japanese silent film known in the West, the only one to enter into cinema history as conceived in Europe and into the canon of works based on the criteria of the avant-garde. It was not until the 1970s that more normal Japanese silent film production - where any material at all was preserved - was first taken up in retrospectives in the West. Yet even this late acceptance in the West was in an avant-garde context. From Burch to Bordwell, Japanese cinema was always positioned as an alternative to or a deviation from the Western norm, as though different fully-formed identities of cinema could not co-exist.
In 1975 Kinugasa re-edited Jujiro, shortening it by 450 metres, adding sound, and increasing the projection speed correspondingly. Today the mere thought of such mutilation and distortion might irritate silent film specialists with a historical bent, but one should understand that at the time it was a practical attempt to release a 1928 film. - MLF
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