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This, in turn, helped to raise the intellectual and artistic level of Japanese film art, and again, to please and attract intellectual cinema-fans. By this reciprocal action, the Japa¬ nese film has been able to go a long way during the past two or three years.
A very important factor in this connecting is the great help rendered to the screen by Japanese literature. The majority of superior films of recent years have been inspired by literary masterpieces. Of course even in previous years there had been many films called “literary”, but they were merely works of cinematization of cheap popular fictions in nearly all cases, and the products themselves were extremely vulgar. But now, not only intellectual and artistic works of leading authors were used as originals, but in the process of their cinematization a most conscientious consideration was given, and some films were so excellently finished that their artistic value was just as high as that of the original literay works. “Ikitoshi lkerumono” (All Living Things, Shochiku, 1934) direct¬ ed by Heinosuke Gosho, “Okoto to Sasuke” (Okoto and Sasuke, Shochiku, 1935) and “Kazoku Kaigi” (The Family Conference, Shochiku, 1936) by Yasujiro Shimazu, “Jinsei Gekijo” (Theatre of Life, Nikkatsu, 1936), “Akanishi Kakita” (Nikkatsu, 1936) by Mansaku Itami, “Ani Imoto” (Brother and Sister, P.C.L., 1936) by Sotoji Kimura, — all these are screen versions respectively of the representative pieces of contemporary Japanese literature by Yuzo Yamamoto, Jun-ichiro Tanizaki, Riichi Yokomitsu, Shiro Ozaki, Naoya Shiga, Saisei Muro, and they each have attained a very high artistic finish. Side by side with these, original screen plays — not adapted from literary works — made considerable progress. The year 1936 produced some truly worthwhile works in this group, which describe the gloomy, depressing, real life of the humdrum middle-class and proletariat, and their sturdy realism sufficiently warrants a future possibility for Japanese screen art. They are: “ Hitori-Musuko ” (The Only Son, Shochiku, 1936), screen play by Yasujiro Ozu and directed by himself, and particularly, “Naniwa Erejii” (Naniwa Elegy, Daiichi Eiga, 1936) and “Gion no Kyodai” (Sisters of Gion, Daiichi Eiga, 1936) screen plays by Kenji Mizoguchi and also directed by himself.
In the history of Japanese screen art, 1936 may be regarded as having been the richest in its artistic harvest and the highest in importance. As we have observed, the degree of artistic advancement and the tempo of progress have been steadily increasing through the few dozen years of the short history of the Japanese film, and we may not be guilty of too great an optimism if we predict its attaining to the level of highest inter¬ national standards in the very near future.
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