Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
produced Kyuha (Old School) films; samurai films with historical backgrounds. As soon
as Nikkatsu was established, several anti-trust companies were also ' formed. Among
them, Tenkatsu, established in March 1914, became the most competitive rival to
Nikkatsu. Before being absorbed into Nikkatsu, Fukuhodo had bought the rights to
Charles Urban's Kinemacolor for the purpose of releasing Urban's Kinemacolor films and
producing Japanese films shot by the process. Taking over these rights, Tenkatsu was
established to make Kinemacolor films to compete with Nikkatsu films. Tenkatsu, who
imitated Nikkatsu by making both Old School and New School films, also produced
rensageki, or chain drama, a combination of stage play and cinema using films for the
scenes that were difficult to represent live on the stage. The live action and filmic images
alternated in a 'chain' fashion. After one scene was played by actors on the stage, the
screen descended and the next scene was projected on to it for several minutes, and then
the actors played on the stage again. Tenkatsu was unusual in employing actresses for
these films as early as 1914.
The distinction between the Old School and New School was borrowed from the concept
of genre chiefly established in stage plays of the Meiji period. The Old School, which was
later called jidaigeki (period drama), was constituted, in most cases, by sword-play films
in which people in historical costume appeared, set in the periods before the Meiji
restoration. The New School, which was later called gendaigeki (modern drama),
consisted of films set in contemporary circumstances. The Old School was always based
around a superstar: Matsunosuke Onoe was Nikkatsu's most famous star, while Tenkatsu
had the very popular Shirogoro Sawamura. The cinema of stars was thus established first
and foremost by the period drama in Japan. In such films, stereotyped stories were
repeated again and again, and played by the same actors. This tradition of repetition
became one of the most particular traits in the history of Japanese cinema. Such stories as
Chushingura ('The loyal forty-seven retainers') have been made many times and continue
to be made to this day.
By 1914 there were nine film-producing companies in Japan. The largest one was
Nikkatsu, which released fourteen films a month from their two studios. Tenkatsu had
studios in Tokyo and Osaka and made fifteen films a month. The oldest company,
Komatsu, established in 1903, had ceased film production for a while, but began to
produce films again in a studio in Tokyo in 1913. In 1914 this company made six films a
month. The ephemeral company Nippon Kinetophone made a few sound films in the
same year. Tokyo Cinema and Tsurubuchi Lantern & Cinematograph were making news
films. In Osaka, there were some small companies like Shikishima Film, Sugimoto Film,
and Yamato On-ei. By 1915, when M. Kashii Film, the company that took over Pathé,
joined these antitrust companies, Nikkatsu's aspirations to monopolize the market were
dashed.
Masao Inoue's Taii no musume ('The daughter of the lieutenant', 1917), made at the newly
established Kobayashi Co., was quite different from the traditional New School films in
using westernized techniques. Adapted from the German film Gendarm Möbius ( Stellan
Rye, 1913), Taii no musume was inspired by its stylistically static direction, but Masao
Inoue used a flashback that the German film had not, and utilized close-ups that were
unusual in Japanese cinema at the time. In the period when the filmic was for the most
part constituted as a kind of illustration for the benshi's vocal skills, Inoue showed the
rhetorical sense in the picture itself. The image of the bride's trousseau being carried for
the wedding ceremony is reflected on the surface of a river, while the camera pans slowly
to catch the faces of people in the frame. Such westernized direction was rare in Japanese
cinema even in 1917. Inoue again used close-ups in his next film Dokuso ("The
poisonous herb', 1917), but in most Japanese films of this period, where oyama still
played the female roles, the close-up of the 'woman' was not effective.
There had been partial and sporadic attempts to westernize Japanese cinema even before
1910. For example, in the Yoshizawa Company's comedy films, which were heavily
influenced by French cinema, the main actor was a Max Linder imitator. But it was in the
late 1910s that some companies attempted to change the highly codified organization of
primitive Japanese cinema into the constitution of westernized reality; incorporating
realist settings, rapid shot development, and a move away from stereotyped subjects. This
was also the period when the role of director attained a new importance. In 1918 directors
like Eizo Tanaka and Tadashi Oguchi made changes to the dominant form of Nikkatsu's
New School films.
Although stereotypes could not be avoided totally in modern drama, films of the New
School did show more artistic ambition, particularly those produced in Nikkaten's.
Mukojima studio in the late 1910s. In Japanese arts in the post-Meiji period, artistic
ambition was widely considered to be a western concept, so that the value of art in Japan
could be made highbrow by conforming to the norms of western art. The westernization
of style was easier in modern drama than in period drama, and so it was here that the
developments took place.
The process of westernization in Japanese cinema, which included the phasing out of
oyama in favour of actresses, began in earnest in the late 1910s, spearheaded by the ideas
of the young critic and film-maker Norimasa Kaeriyama. Kaeriyama asserted that
Japanese cinema, which was only the illustration of the benshi's voice impersonations,
had to find a way for the narrative to be automatically formed by the filmic image, as seen
in the dominant form of European and American cinema. In 1918, when Nikkatsu allowed
Eizo Tanaka and Tadashi Oguchi to make westernized films on this principle, Tenkatsu,
accepting Kaeriyama's idea of the 'pure film drama', gave him the opportunity to make
two films: Sei no kagayaki ('The glow of life') and Miyama no otome ('Maid of the
deepmountains', both 1918). These films were set in imaginary westernized
circumstances, avoiding the highly codified comportment of the actors employed in
traditional Japanese cinema, and manufacturing naturalism that was complete opposition
to the prevalent Japanese style. They were the first Japanese films actively, if very
naïvely, to adopt western concepts of art.
Slowly other film companies took up this trend, and by the early 1920s the traditional
form of Japanese cinema had become completely old-fashioned. The period between 1920
and the first half of 1923 (just before the Great Kanto Earthquake) witnessed a change of
form in Japanese cinema. The New School became established as modern drama, and the
Old School as the period drama. There was a transition from the traditional theatrical
form to the studio system, and film style, as well as the production process, began to
follow the western model. The earliest form of Japanese cinema, which avoided rapid
changes of images, used intertitles only for the chapters of a story, or used filmic images
for discrete segments of a stage play as seen in the chain drama, was obliged to change in
this period, even within the most conservative companies, like Nikkatsu. The company
resisted assimilating to the western form for a long time and attempted to preserve
tradition, but finally the audience's changing demands prompted change in company
policy.
In this short period, two ephemeral companies made some interesting films. One of the
two was Kokkatsu, which absorbed Tenkatsu in 1920, and gave Norimasa Kaeriyama the
opportunity to make films. This company not only produced period dramas directed by
Jiro Yoshino, but also began actively employing actresses in the place of oyama. It
allowed some directors to experiment with making realist films, such as Kantsubaki
('Winter camellia', Ryoha Hatanaka, 1921), or films which partially employed
expressionist settings, for example Reiko no wakare ('On the verge of spiritual light',
Kiyomatsu Hosoyama, 1922).
Eizo Tanaka's Kyoyo erimise ('Kyoka, the collar shop', 1922), one of the last Japanese
films to feature oyama (male actors in female roles)
The Taikatsu Company was established to produce intellectual films. This company did
not, unlike Nikkatsu and Kokkatsu, draw the audience in by making Old School sword-
play films with popular stars, and neither was the company interested in the already
codified form of New School films. Taikatsu's intention was to produce cinematic
Japanese films inspired by, but not directly imitating, European and American cinema.
For this purpose, the company invited Junichiro Tanizaki to be their adviser. Their first
production was The Amateur Club ( Kisaburo Kuri hara , 1920), in which elements of
American cinema -bathing beauties, chase scenes, slapstick-were adapted to Japanese
circumstances, attaining a visual dynamism absent from other traditional Japanese films
of the time. This was one of the first Americanized films produced in Japan, and its
director, Kurihara, went on to make Katsushika sunago ( 1921), Hinamatsuri no yoru
('The night of the dolls' festival', 1921), and Jyasei no in ('The lasciviousness of the viper',
1921) at Taikatsu, and expand this aesthetic.
The early 1920s also saw the establishment of Shochiku Kinema, a company which
relinquished archaic filmmaking from the outset, and introduced American formulas in
film direction. Shochiku used actresses who adopted facial expressions found in
American films in order to represent psychological complexity, and tried to render the
more natural movement of the everyday world. Shochiku built a studio in Kamata, Tokyo,
and immediately began to produce Americanized films under the advice of George
Chapman and Henry Kotani from Hollywood studios. The tendency to represent the naïve
imaginary world, as seen in the works of Kaeriyama, and a blatant desire to rebuff the
traditional Japanese style, were the hallmarks of the Shochiku films. The forthright
Americanism of the studio was decried by critics at first, but such criticism ceased in the
mid-1920s, when Japanese cinema as a whole assimilated a studio system based on the
model of the United States.
In 1920 such American methods in Japanese filmmaking would still have seemed strange
to the audiences, but the situation changed rapidly, and the system was transformed
virtually within a year. At Shochiku, Kaoru Osanai, the innovator of the theatre world,
turned to filmmaking, supervising the revolutionary Rojo no reikon ('Soul on the road',
Minoru Murata, 1921), the very apotheosis of the studio's desire to produce a new
Japanese aesthetic. In this film, plural stories were narrated in parallel, a new practice,
inspired by D. W. Griffith's Intolerance ( 1916). By this time even Nikkatsu, which had
been making the most traditional films, could not resist the current. In January 1921 the
company founded a special section for 'intellectual' film-making, dominated by the
director Eizo Tanaka, who made three films that year: Asahi sasu mae ('Before the
morning sun shines'), Shirayuri no kaori ('Scent of the white lily'), and Nagareyuku onna
('Woman in the stream'). These were, for Nikkatsu, attempts at innovation. They were
released in theatres that specialized in screening foreign films to an intellectual audience.
Their intertitles were written in both Japanese and English. The New School films
employed several benshi and the intertitles were traditionally felt to disturb the flow of
the filmic image. However, foreign films were narrated by a solitary benshi, so Nikkatsu
inserted bilingual intertitles into these 'intellectual' films to avoid the resistance of the
traditional film fans and to establish an affinity with the similarly titled foreign films.
Nevertheless, as the acting style in these films remained traditional, the attempts at
innovation were not wholly successful, especially in the face of competition from
Shochiku. Although Tanaka's films did feature actresses, in the main Nikkatsu, the last
film company to give up the oyama, continued to make films with them up until 1923.