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cannot safely enunciate in a direct and pointblank fashion. When Proletarian arts rose to prominence, the screen plays which disclosed their ideology were in most cases “period films”. Again, practically all the techniques of adaptation peculiar to the Japanese Cin¬ ema came into being by way, and through the exploitation, of the “period film” in order to pass over the weaknesses of social reality.
The “Qendai Eiga”, as the name implies, is undoubtedly a means of exhibiting the present-day phases of life, but its themes are frequently of a feudalistic character, to the same extent that the “ period film ” possesses a contemporary significance. This is analo¬ gous to the situation which prevails within the dramatic group known as the Shimpa, or “ New School ” which presents modern plays on the stage in opposition to the Kabuki, but which is never able to portray contemporary life, and merely succeeds through the employment of a sort of trivialism in brewing a peculiar atmosphere when attempting to express the trifling feudalistic sentiments which still exist in the life of our times. Nevertheless, it is quite true that its stories contain some aspects representative of the present day and age.
In considering the relationship between the “ Shingeki ”, or the “New Theatre” school, and the Cinema, we must first leave out the period film — the “ Jidai Eiga ” — from our discussion. Since the Shingeki constitutes a modern phase of the drama which rose as a revolt against both the Kabuki and the Shimpa, it is concerned exclusively with the contemporary film.
The type of play which is known in Japan as Shingeki is by no means an avantgarde, nor yet the sort that is presented on a non-commercial basis. It is a new form of drama preoccupied with the pursuit of contemporary, of human, and of literary qualities and characteristics which neither the Kabuki nor the Shimpa possesses, and is modelled after the “modern play” of the West. This movement today has a history of thirty years, but has not yet filled the gap, as it were, between the drama and the stage. In short, this dramatic movement came into existence under the stimulus of literary enthusiasm and attempted the development of something entirely new through the medium of Western dramas which had been rendered into the native tongue; but since it undertook to pre¬ sent, through actors who had had but a brief period of training, the literal versions of these translations as well as the immature efforts of young authors that had been pat¬ terned after them, it merely succeeded in introducing the works of the Western play¬ wrights as “literature”, unable as it was to comprehend, or to express, their essential qualities as drama.
But aside from these deficiencies, the Shingeki movement has demonstrated, in contrast with the bad taste and crudeness of the general run of commercial thea¬ tres, the existence of a dramatic art that is really in touch with the truths of human life. It has created an era in which young artists must pass, at least once, through the
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