Pixienatthecat /// Al Pacino's new Spouse

All of my close childhood friends died… because of the bomb, so I wanted to write a fantasy with the atomic bomb as a theme.

Like Father, Like Son [soshite chichi ni naru] (2013, Japan) Directed by: Hirokazu Koreeda 

For serious devotees of international cinema of high artistic quality, Paris is the centre of the world. At the moment, both Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi are having big retrospectives that are still drawing crowds long after they began before the summer. There are regular showings of all other important Japanese cineastes and even of some younger and less well known talents. But there has been one absentee, Masaki Kobayashi.  

The reasons for this shameful neglect are not hard to find. Kobayashi in his greatest periods in the Forties and Fifties, now seen as the Golden Age of Japanese cinematic art, was a perfectionist who made no compromises. He chose difficult themes that the post-war public, eager to forget the horrors of invasion and occupation, found too disturbing. He was a man with a message of pacifist humanitarian convictions, and today’s Japanese, especially the young, avoid like the plague what has come to be known as “the three Ds” - Dirty, Dangerous and Difficult. Koba-yashi’s extremely personal idiom, his anti-violence ethos, his deliberately paced, often very long films, are at the opposite pole to the special effects catastrophes in deafening Dolbey Stereo that are today’s imbecile film fare.

Kobayashi was born in the charming old port city of Otaru in the northernmost island of the archipelago. He studied ancient Oriental arts and philosophy and after graduation in 1941 entered the Shochiku studios at Ofuna as an apprentice director. But almost at once he was enlisted in the army and sent to Manchuria with the forces of occupation in Harbin. He had already demonstrated insubordination and opposition to the war by refusing promotion to a higher rank. He was captured and spent the last part of the war in a PoW camp on Okinawa, then not part of Japan.

More than any other contemporary Japanese film- maker, Kobayashi’s art was underpinned by the trauma of his wartime experiences. With the 50th anniversary of surrender in 1995, there were a number of documentaries about it and the events leading up to it, chief among them an adaptation of Shohei Ooka’s Reite Senki (“Account of the War on Leyte”), written between 1967 and 1969. I was expecting Kobayashi to be represented. But, as so often happened, he was overlooked. There were some homages to him in Europe at the end of the Eighties, retrospectives at the La Rochelle Film Festival in 1989, and a more complete one in Paris in 1990. But in Britain, for purely commercial reasons, the last episode of Kwaidan was brutally cut. Humiliation and mutilation are the lifeblood of the artist. Masaki Kobayashi was one of the greatest, and suffered in silence. His death may have the effect of bringing some retrospectives. On the other hand, it may not, alas.

(from Masaki Kobayashi’s 1996 obituary [x])

Samurai Spy

Early Spring (1956, Japan) Dir: Yasujiro Ozu

Black River (1957, Japan) Directed by: Masaki Kobayashi 

“In any era, I am critical of authoritarian power.” – Masaki Kobayashi.

“Very few figures in cinema during WWII were as delicate and, at the same time, profoundly expressive as Masaki Kobayashi. As a director, the portrayal and apparent exposé of his country’s atrocities formed Kobayashi’s reputation as an undisguised manifestation of integrity and brutal honesty. His films exist not only serve as reminders but as unyielding indicators to the forces of human capability. Moving towards this grand idea of ultimate, unbiased perception, his work gradually matured and progressed; displaying a more aggressive focus on clarity amidst his fiction as time went on.”  -MUBI