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JAPANESE FILM PROBLEMS, 1932
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Sadao Yamanaka as a new figure. Some notes on Japanese talking films. Chushin-gura or The Forty-Seven Faithful.
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Sadao Yamanaka, a young director, was the greatest and most brilliant discovery of Japanese cinema in 1932. He made six feature films during the year — which perhaps you may think is a praiseworthy production output — not one of them having failed to draw discussion and acclaim from the critics.
As a matter of fact, no other Japanese director — with the possible exception of Daisuke Ite — has been studied and analysed with more enthusiasm. It is said that he is twenty four )-ears of age, one or two years younger than Ilya Trauberg, the renowned Soviet director.
Sadao Yamanaka, formerly a scenario-writer, made his directorial debut in February, 1932, with Genta Isono (a vagabond gambler) wherein he revealed promise of becoming a director of talent. After that he made, in quick succession, five pictures — Rain of Coins, lkono-Kami Ogasawara, A Whistling Samurai, A Fraudulent Buddhist, and Kurama Tengu. You must know that S. Yamanaka was obliged to work with such speed because he was the only chief directorial figure in a minor film company, named Kanjuro Production Company.
All his pictures are characterised by eminently superior film technique, by which is meant that our interest in his films is more related to his film forms than to his material content. Detailed comment on his technological merits (i.e., his rhythmic construction with straight cuts, emotional expression of picturesque frames cut in with titles — sometimes spoken titles, sometimes even verse — adoption of unusual camera angles to give pictures sterescopic effect, his peculiar manner of connecting one scene with the following, etc., all that contributes tO' distinguish him as a great technician) would fill a book !
One of his directorial resources which I like best is that he never permits his actors to indulge in striking facial expression (a prevailing narrative means in most Japanese films, especiallv in Jidai-Gcki films, which deal with old Japanese material, not modern stories; and a bad influence and tradition of Japanese Kabuki Theatre.)
In spite of this superior technicality, his films are not highly esteemed, because they are, so to speak, unreal, they are wanting in what relates to actuality. It is true that in the depiction of love scenes he shows great adroitness, and is equally skillful in constructing a scenario, but there it ends. His success in Rain of Coins (which is a love story, a pathetic romance of a restaurant girl and a fireman — considered to be his best) and
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