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| Festival Year |
Festival Section |
| 2013 |
Special Events - Ichiro Kataoka, Benshi |
| Film Title |
CHOKON |
| Alternative Title 1 |
[Un rancore indelebile] |
| Alternative Title 2 |
[An Unforgettable Grudge] |
| Alternative Title 3 |
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| Country |
Japan |
| Release Date |
1926 |
| Production Co. |
Nikkatsu Taishogun |
| Director |
Daisuke Ito |
| Format |
|
Speed (fps) |
| 35mm |
|
16 |
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| Footage |
|
Time |
| 875 ft. |
|
15' |
| Archive Source |
National Film Center, Tokyo |
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| Print Notes |
orig. l: 6 rl. 35mm
Restauro digitale / digitally restored 2010.
col. (imbibito/tinted)
Didascalie in giapponese, con sottotitoli in inglese / Japanese intertitles, with English subtitles
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| Cast |
| Denjiro Okochi (Kazuma Iki), Yuzuru Kume (Tsugio Iki), Utagoro Onoue (Sozaemon Numata), Yayoi Kawakami (Yukie), Momonosuke Ichikawa (Tomigoro);, |
| |
| Other Credits |
| scen., sogg./story: Daisuke Ito; f./ph: Rokuzo Watarai |
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| Other Information |
| Commento benshi / Benshi commentary: Ichiro Kataoka; mus: John Sweeney. |
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| Program Notes |
This was the first film made by Daisuke Ito after moving to the production company Nikkatsu, and is also noteworthy as his first collaboration with actor Denjiro Okochi. Set in the late Edo period, Chokon depicts the tragic lives of two brothers, Kazuma and Tsugio Iki, who both fall in love with the same girl, Yukie; the title is a word borrowed from the Chinese, meaning “the grudge that one cannot forget”. When Kazuma’s younger brother Tsugio loses his sight as a result of a sword fight, Yukie nurses Tsugio back to health and eventually falls in love with him. Having lost all that is dear to him, Kazuma gets into a desperate fight, and after dispatching countless opponents is finally slain.
The film originally consisted of 6 reels; the surviving one-reel fragment centres on the climatic fight from the end of the film, which originally stretched over 3 reels (more than 30 minutes). In this scene, as Hiroshi Komatsu has noted, director Daisuke Ito “displays virtually every element of the impressionist cinema: fast-moving camera, unusual camera angles, rapid cutting, double exposure, etc.”.
Daisuke Ito (1898-1981) was one of the most celebrated and influential directors of jidai-geki (period films). He directed nearly a hundred films, and has often been called by critics and movie fans in Japan “the father of jidai-geki”. Although most of his silent films are lost, the examples that have survived (only one in its entirety, as well as certain longer fragments) reveal his energetic and flamboyant style, described by David Bordwell as “calligraphic”, filled with fast action, rapid montage, and flamboyant camera movement. He often portrayed his heroes as nihilistic drifters and lonely social outcasts, and imbued much of his work with a social consciousness often present in the jidai-geki of the 1920s and early 1930s.
Shown in the Giornate’s 2001 retrospective “Light from the East: Japanese Silent Cinema, 1898-1935”, the film now appears in a new print, digitally restored and tinted by the National Film Center in 2010
Johan Nordström
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