Silent Women in Ozu, Naruse and Mizoguchi (21 March, 7.30 pm at University Cultural Centre)

Asian Film Archive invites you to the screening of three silent Japanese films on 21st March ’07 by Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi, some of the greatest filmmakers in Japanese Cinema. Three rare surviving silent films are specially flown in for this programme, which will be played with live accompaniment of Indonesian Gamelan and other Southeast Asian instruments. All three films were made within the span of two years from 1933 to 1935, and share a similar strand in their stories about the sacrifice the female protagonists made to support the education of their son, brother and lover.



Films screened are:

Woman of Tokyo (1933) by Yasujiro Ozu,
Nightly Dreams (1933) by Mikio Naruse and
Osen of the Paper Cranes (1935) by Kenji Mizoguchi.
For more details on the films, please visit http://www.asianfilmarchive.org/Silent_Women.htm.



Date: 21 March 2007
Time: 7.30 pm
Venue: University Cultural Centre Hall, NUS
Ticket: $25
(To get your tickets, please visit http://www.sistic.com.sg/cms/events/index.html?content=691.)



Some highlights:

* In Woman of Tokyo by Ozu, a famous sequence in the film: Ryoichi and Harue going to the movies when Harue receives the horrible telephone call. This received a treatment in Noel Burch's To the Distant Observer, and a strong rebuttal in David Bordwell's Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. The film also draws parallel with Ernst Lubitsch’s If I Had a Million (1932). In a film-within-film set up, Ozu quoted fragments of the Lubitsch film in Woman of Tokyo.
* Don’t miss Mikio Naruse’s Nightly Dreams too. Naruse is the favourite director of Akira Kurosawa, and has been championed by film critics such as Susan Sontag.
* Kenji Mizoguchi is regarded by many as the unsurpassed Japanese filmmaker of all time. Yet his films are not readily accessible through festivals, much less on DVD. Do not miss this screening of one of his rare masterpieces.

“In the Japanese woman, Japanese directors have discovered the perfect protagonist.” – Donald Richie, noted author and film critic.



Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi are known as some of the greatest filmmakers in Japanese Cinema; some regard them as the greatest filmmakers ever lived. Yet, most of their early films are now irretrievably lost. Around 7000 films were produced in Japan in the 1920s alone. Today, the National Film Center (Tokyo) lists only around 70 titles before 1930 in their collection.

Three surviving silent films are curated for this programme. All were made within the span of two years from 1933 to 1935, and share a similar strand in their stories about the sacrifice the female protagonists made to support the education of their son, brother and lover. In Woman of Tokyo (1933) by Yasujiro Ozu, Chikako works in a bar to pay for her brother, Ryoichi's tuition fees. In Nightly Dreams (1933) by Mikio Naruse, Omitsu supports herself and her son by working as a bar hostess. In Kenji Mizoguchi’s Osen of the Paper Cranes (1935), Osen turns to prostitution to raise money to pay for the tuition fees of Sokichi, her younger lover, a medical student.

Lending voice to the silent women is live accompaniment of Gamelan music, played traditionally in Wayang Kulit or shadow puppet theatre prevalent in Southeast Asia in the past and designated by UNESCO as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. For the first time, these silent films will be given a new lease of life with an original score inspired by traditional Southeast Asian cultures and improvisation on Asian bronze, bamboo and string instruments.