Close Up (Mar-Dec 1933)

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CLOSE UP 355 (wooden shoes) and placing towels over their shoulders, fold their hands in prayer. They look towards the camera, as if they were confronted with it for the first time. Another film introduces Japanese Geisha in Hawaii, dressing their hair in Japanese style and dancing in bathing suits of occidental fashion. (Their hair and suits make a very odd, ridiculous contrast). Another shows pearl-girldivers who, having on short shirts and pieces of cloth around their waist only, dive down and then come up time and again. A short shows a man and a woman praying to God under the waterfall. (One of the old, religious rituals in Japan.) And also scenes of a portable shrine carried about into the river by many lads ; one of them wearing a towel round his head, is, using a Japanese fan ; another is exposing buttocks by rolling up his skirts. A document introduces an Ainu girl as if she were typical of a Japanese girl. (Erroneous, of course). It is very clear that those shorts, though they only express Japan in fashion and usage, never fail to impress on outworn foreigners throughout the world with the visual precision and intensiveness that here is a country that stands even to-day beyond the pale of modern culture and civilization. Such being the case, we are always worried by the present situation in the exhibition of Japanese films in foreign countries. Recently, however, we had good news that was an unexpected joy indeed : the appearance of Nippon, commented on in the Close Up, September, 1932, by Miss W. Bryher, wherein she says (after referring to the Japanese landscape, Judo, etc.), it (Nippon) is not to be compared with the rather dull films of modern Japanese life that have occasionally been seen in London . . . and that readers of Close Up should do all in their power to see these four pictures, Kiihle Wampe, Harlekin, Nippon and L'Atlantide, since they certainly must rank among the great films of 1932. I, as well as other readers in Japan, was very glad to read her commentary upon Nippon, although it was at that time utterly unknown to us, since we had never had a film with such a title. However, in the spring of this year, quite suddenly, the Tokyo Asahi newspaper (one of the two big journalistic publications which has a considerable circulation among intellectuals on account of its liberal and pacifistic tendency) contained an article with the provocative title " Seeing Nippon, a film of national disgrace for Japan," by Fujio Homma, assistant professor of the Kyoto Imperial University who was studying in Europe and had sent it far from Vienna. I think I am going to summarize his article as short as possible, as it is too long to be reprinted in its entirety. It created so great a sensation that Kiyohiko Ushiwara, a famous Japanese director and one of the four principal participants in Nippon (Nippon was edited and montaged by Karl Koch into one piece from three Japanese films ; one is Samimaru, directed by Eiichi Koishi, others Torch, by Teinosuke Kinugasa and A Great City, by Kiyohiko Ushiwara) was obliged to write an excuse in the same newspaper. Fujio Homma writes : " The scoundrel Samurai, masters of martial arts, commits a terrible manslaughter in order in Samaimaru to get back his girl in the temple and in Torch D