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| Festival Year |
Festival Section |
| 2010 |
Three Shochiku Masters: Yasujiro Shimazu, Hiroshi Shimizu, Kiyohiko Ushihara |
| Film Title |
GINGA |
| Alternative Title 1 |
[La via lattea] |
| Alternative Title 2 |
[The Milky Way] |
| Alternative Title 3 |
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| Country |
Japan |
| Release Date |
1931 |
| Production Co. |
Shochiku |
| Director |
Hiroshi Shimizu |
| Format |
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Speed (fps) |
| 35mm |
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18 |
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| Footage |
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Time |
| 3868 m. |
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188' |
| Archive Source |
National Film Center, Tokyo |
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| Print Notes |
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles |
| Cast |
| Minoru Takada (Soichi Minegishi), Emiko Yagumo (Michiko, Terao’s daughter), Teruo Mori (Takuya, Michiko’s brother), Hideo Fujino (Kennosuke Terao, Michiko’s father, a businessman), Mitsuko Yoshikawa (Yoriko, Terao’s second wife), Hiroko Kawasaki (Terue, Soichi’s sister), Shinyo Nara (Eisaku Nagashima, secretary), Shinichi Himori (Kensuke Seki, painter), Tatsuo Saito (Shigeru Sakai, man of letters), Naoyo Yamagata (Kimiko, a hostess), Ryokichi Ishida (Shinji Kuroda, Soichi’s comrade) |
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| Other Credits |
| scen: Tokusaburo Murakami; f./ph: Taro Sasaki |
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| Program Notes |
Never to our knowledge previously screened in the West, Ginga is an adaptation of a novel, originally published as a newspaper serial, by the fashionable author Takeo Kato. It tells the story of Michiko, the daughter of a businessman, Terao, who is loved by Eisaku Nagashima. After Soichi, the son of her former wet nurse, forces himself upon her, she becomes pregnant, and marries Nagashima, whom she does not love, to avoid social disapproval. Nagashima takes over the Asahi steelworks, while Soichi, who has become a labour union organizer, leads the workers in their dispute with the Asahi management. Then, he meets Michiko again…
This 15-reel, two-part film was shot in a mere 20 days, with the cast and crew apparently sometimes staying up all night to complete it. Critic Matsuo Kishi wrote of Shimizu that “when he rushes his work, something good is made”. Fellow Shochiku directors Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse apparently helped out with the skiing sequence. The film’s basis in a mass-market novel accounts for its blend of melodrama and proletarian consciousness, which can be related to the left-leaning keiko-eiga (“tendency film”) genre fashionable in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Shimizu himself, however, was most concerned with the film’s emotional content. “Putting class struggle aside for a while,” he commented, “I keenly felt that people who love each other could also harm each other. So-called ‘love’ can easily turn into hatred, because hatred is a form of love. […] Having deep hatred may be an excusable emotion if the situation doesn’t permit our love to flow out naturally and straightforwardly. Yet even so, how tragic is the human fate.”
ALEXANDER JACOBY & JOHAN NORDSTRÖM
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