Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 09/24/18

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, September 24, 2018

Apostasy (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1948)

Ryo Ikebe in Apostasy

Segawa: Ryo Ikebe
Oshiho: Yoko Katsuragi
Tatsutaro Inoko: Osamu Takizawa
Ginnosuke Tuchiya: Jukichi Uno
Takayanagi: Eitaro Ozawa
Inoko's Wife: Sachiko Murase
Segawa's Father: Kenji Susukida
Keinosuke Kazama: Ichiro Sugai
Bunpei Katsuno: Akira Yamauchi

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita
Based on a novel by Toson Shimazaki
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Isamu Motoki
Film editing: Hisashi Sagara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

The title of Keisuke Kinoshita's film Apostasy is generally acknowledged to be a bad mistranslation of the original, Hakai, which has a variety of meanings, including "destruction." The film is not about someone abandoning his religion, which is what the English "apostasy" means, but instead it's about the discrimination against Japan's feudal pariah class, the burakumin, literally, "people who live in villages." Which is again misleading if we think of villages as small communities of farmers, artisans, and merchants, all of whom had acceptable roles in feudal society. The burakumin were considered untouchable because their work associated them with death: butchers, tanners, undertakers, executioners, and so on, who, unable to associate with the "respectable" classes, formed communities and villages of their own. The taint of their work extended to their children's children -- even to those who managed to improve themselves with education and work in other fields, like the protagonist of Kinoshita's film, Segawa, who loses his job as a schoolteacher because he has hidden the fact that he's a "villager," as the English subtitles somewhat misleadingly call him. His secret is exposed when he goes home to his village, remote in the mountains near Nagano, for his father's death. The action of the film takes place in 1901, well after American influence had caused the Japanese government to lift the legal restrictions placed on the burakumin, though without erasing the deep-seated prejudice against them. But Kinoshita has a more contemporary purpose for his film: After World War II, Japan was adopting a new, and of course again heavily American-influenced, constitution, guaranteeing civil rights to all Japanese citizens. So Apostasy is a heavily didactic film about tolerance -- not unlike some of the preachier American films that promoted better race relations in the aftermath of the war. Its bigots are despicable and its heroes -- including a descendant of the burakumin who has become a lawyer and a crusader for equality -- are noble. There's a love threatened by prejudice that triumphs, and a tear-filled ending in which the children Segawa has taught come out to wave goodbye as he departs the town that scorned him. In short, it's Kinoshita at his most sentimental.