Talking the walk… I Was Born, But... (1932) with Katsudo-Benshi Hideyuki Yamashiro and Mie Yanashita, Barbican

Many silent films have placed adult actors as children and the results have been occasionally juvenile yet here we have a film featuring children as children who teach the adults as much as they learn.

Tomio Aoki and Hideo Sugawara are two fine actors and are clearly well-directed in delivering relaxed and believable performances. Director Yasujirō Ozu was a master of the family dynamic and here, as in his later works, you see a fully-rounded unit built on love, disappointment and stretched by social obligations. In some ways, it’s a slight story but told with almost novelistic attention to detail – it feels so rich.

An Adult's Picture Book View — I Was Born, But... to give its full title and then in Japanese - 大人の見る絵本　生れてはみたけれど -  was Ozu’s 25th film and he had 30 more years of film-making to go.

Tomio Aoki

Sugawara and Aoki play Ryoichi (the eldest, 8 at the time and 93 now!) and Keiji (the youngest although he was actually slightly older), the two sons of a business man, Kennosuke Yoshi (Tatsuo Saitō) and his wife, Haha (Mitsuko Yoshikawa) who have moved to the Tokyo suburbs – an area with improved education and where they will be closer to his boss Iwasaki (Takeshi Sakamoto); such are the obligations of working life.

Almost immediately the boys encounter difficulties with the local children who take against them in the way children do. The biggest boy pushes Keiji down and he runs to get Ryoichi to stand up for him. Sheer weight of numbers plays against them but, as the Yoshi’s escape, the boys promise to get their full revenge in school.

Ozu manages to catch a poignancy even among the ealy morning washing...

The next day their courage fails them as they sight of the gang at school leads the boys to play truant and forge their school work. The plan almost works until their teacher tells their father who, on hearing their reasons for avoiding school tells them to ignore the bullies. But, as every child knows, this tactic rarely works and so it proves.

But the boys are made of stern stuff and after fighting back and being helped by an older delivery boy called Kozou (Shoichi Kofujita) the biggest boy is despatched. Kozou won’t do anything about Taro (Seiichi Kato) the son of their father’s boss and also a very good customer of Kozou’s company.

The playground hierarchies are, as we grow to learn, not that dissimilar to adult ones and the boys become alarmed to see their father – seemingly – playing the fool to win favour with his manager, Iwasaki when they go along with Taro to watch cine-film at his house.

Hideo Sugawara who is now 93

Disgusted they both confront their father and ask why he must be subservient – he’s my Director and he pays me… says the father and the boys say he should refuse to accept the pay and pay his director… Not one I’ve tried I’ll admit but, as the two come to terms with the sacrifices their dad must make they realise that compromise and ambition aren’t necessarily incompatible. By the same token Kennosuke accepts he must keep his eye on his own goals…

Not a lot happens but a lot happens…

The Gang

Today’s screening was special for a variety of reasons and featured a precious 35mm print flown in from the National Film Centre in Tokyo. But it wasn’t alone in making the trip as Katsudo-Benshi Hideyuki Yamashiro and acclaimed silent film pianist Mie Yanashita had also made the long haul. Yanashita I was fascinated to hear as accompaniment styles vary by film culture whilst all the while embracing the same humanity on show. She opened with some glorious themes and then got stuck into the humour with practiced ease: this is what I love about Ozu, his ability to cover emotional range with deceptive ease and Mie was more than up to the task.

Family debate

Of course, she also had to accompany Yamashiro’s verbal accompaniment and that’s a skill in its own right. I’d never seen Benshi before and for the uninitiated, it’s more than just the reading out of inter-titles. Yamashiro acted out the scenes in between the dialogue, adding words where he could lip read them and tonally-appropriate narration. It was all in Japanese of course but between the mime, the piano and the emotional accenting we got the joke even if the Japanese speakers in the audience were there just that bit quicker!

It’s a remarkable combination and all I can say is that life would be a lot more interesting if we all had a personal Benshi with us on a daily basis.

The screening was part of the Barbican’s series The Japanese House: Architecture and Life After 1945, showing life before in this case and was sponsored by the Japanese Film Foundation, NFC Tokyo and Shindofuji Ireland.

The film is available on Blu-ray/DVD along with Good Morning, Ozu’s 1959 re-make. You can buy it from the BFI shop here at a very reasonable price!

Personal post-script: It was Yasujirō Ozu who got me interested in watching film again. Many years after the joyful complications of fatherhood began, I was walking along the Southbank enjoying some "us time" with Mrs IThankYou when, on impulse, we watched Late Autumn at the BFI. I’d never seen or heard of Ozu before but this was an energising enlightenment; a true holiday for the mind and a work so powerful in its strange simplicity and familiarity.

And one thing leads to another because, you just have to explore and find out more…

Go where the river flows… A Story of Floating Weeds (1934), with John Sweeney, Kennington Bioscope

I remember a lazy afternoon wandering the South Bank and taking a punt on a screening at the BFI of Late Autumn, a film through which I discovered the singular work of Yasujirō Ozu about whom, dear reader, I have to confess I previously knew nothing (I know: civilian!). That film focused on enduring questions about family, loneliness and loyalty – never flinching from the inevitability of the distance that comes with age, other commitments… other loves.

As Dr Alex Jacoby from Oxford Brookes University explained in his excellent introduction, Ozu was also concerned with the additional stresses of modernisation on these increasingly fragile family units: the message in this film as others is perhaps to grab what you can. There was a point when I was willing the various characters to just turn around, swallow their pride and reach out but, parental sacrifice makes it impossible: the next generation must have the chance to move on.

Rieko Yagumo

These were lifelong concerns for the director of Tokyo Story and I was interested in watching one of his earliest films to see how the younger man was already being affected. All this, of course, in the week after it was revealed that perhaps Ozu’s greatest leading lady, Setsuko Hara passed away aged 95: the kindest eyes in cinema finally closed.

Setsuko would have been 14 when A Story of Floating Weeds (浮草物語) whilst Ozu was already an experienced film maker having started in 1927. He was still making silent film until 1936 and, a combination of Benshi-led resistance and technological limits meant that Japan had a uniquely halting route to sound with some directors going back and forth from silent to sound.

Yoshiko Tsubouchi and Rieko Yagumo back stage

Alex  pointed out that only in Japan were directors making silent films influenced by sound films with the positioning of Ozu’s title cards before a character is seen, indicating noises off in a way conventional silent narrative never would.

Elements of Ozu’s stand-out composition, low-angled interior shots and tableau style are much in evidence in this film but his camera also moves in a couple of precious, well-chosen moments (so much for that received wisdom...). There cutting also seems faster than his later film with shots picked more for narrative value than otherwise necessary in a sound film. Needless to say, there are some gorgeous images.

Meeting at the tree

A boy rides his bike, there’s a girl standing beside a tree, small banners blow in the breeze dotted around the base of the tree, it’s a special tree and magic is about to happen… we’re pulled into the screen, aching to find out what. She’s there to make a fool out of him, to unknowingly wound the boy’s father but something far more interesting is taking place. You know it from the tree, the fact the girl is sometimes obscured, motive uncertain and the camera’s focus on the boy’s bike – a signifier of his momentum.

Kôji Mitsui

The cinematography of Hideo Shigehara is exemplary and his steadfast collaborator held off making a sound film until his cameraman had developed his own system.

As for the story… Donald Richie notes in his criterion essay that Ozu was more interested in creating character than story and he certainly fills this film with textured players giving his performers so much to work with and there are some astonishingly naturalistic physical performances from actors who fill the frame in such a relaxed way, scratching, stretching and smoking their way.

I'll have what they're having...

There’s also a lot of Saki drinking, which is always good, and lead character, kabuki troop leader and seeming nae-do-well Kihachi (Takeshi Sakamoto), is one of the chief consumers. He has led his band back to a seaside town as part of their subsistence cabaret circuit.

Only one performance is shown and the theatre is very bizarre… Kihachi performing as a partially-coherent drunk and his efforts undermined by a misbehaving boy-dog (Reikô Tani) and the arrival of the rain, which pierces their thin tarpaulin and ensures their stay will be longer and far less profitable than expected.

Yoshiko Tsubouchi

Kihachi has other things on his mind though, spending his days visiting an old flame, Otsune (Chouko Iida) and her post-graduate son Shinkichi (Kôji Mitsui) who, it transpires is his son (although the boy believes his father dead). It’s an odd triangle, as secret father bonds easily with oblivious son whilst the woman who knows them both, provides. It is a heart-felt performance from Iida, in fact all the women prosper in their roles.

The train calls the traveler further onward

Kihachi's secret isn’t kept for long and his current mistress Otaka (Rieko Yagumo) comes to investigate his strange set up with another actress Otoki (Yoshiko Tsubouchi). There’s a scene and Kihachi pushes her away… but Otaka hasn’t survived being his partner without a fair share of strength and cunning and she sets out a plan to humiliate him sending Otoki to the aforementioned tree…

Of course, the plan goes awry as the two youngsters fall in love and the cycle threatens to begin again: Otoki tells Shinkichi that she is not worthy and, once Kihachi finds out, he is certain of that too… but the young man is unshakeable and then incredulous when his “uncle’s” secret is revealed.

Chouko Iida

Can this group hold together as a family and will the young man’s potential for greatness really be undermined by love? Can the best contribution from father simply be his absence… there are no easy answers. One of the key sequences had father and son fishing together standing knee deep in a river re-casting in synchrony and having the kind of conversation men only seem to have when they're busy doing something else… for this time they are together standing against the water flow but you know that can’t last forever.

Standing against the current, together

A Story of Floating Weeds retains a sophistication that guarantees modern engagement - is this what would have happened elsewhere had sound not so rudely interrupted the silent party?

Takeshi Sakamoto

John Sweeney played along with a syncopated sophistication all of his own weaving his lines carefully around the delicate visuals with practiced ease and with music that touched on the universality of the characters’ experience.

Ainu tribes people

As is usual down in Kennington we were also treated to some extras in the form of an entertaining travelogue From Beautiful Japan (1918) which showed everything from geisha’s dancing to bears being strangled by native Japanese tribesmen… ritual and custom from the island’s original inhabitants the Ainu.

Edna Marion and Neal Burns cut a rug...

 Then there was an American comedy from 1927 called Cash and Carry, set in a department store and starring Neal Burns as a shop salesman trying to work his way around his enemy the floor manager in order to win the hand of the bonny Edna Marion. All good clean fun with the work’s dance competition providing a new context for strictly come slapstick!

A Story of Floating Weeds is available along with Ozu’s sound and colour remake, Floating Weeds, from 1959 on an excellent Criterion set. It’s on Amazon of course.