Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/13/24

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

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Street Without End (Mikio Naruse, 1934)

Setsuko Shinobu in Street Without End

Cast: Setsuko Shinobu, Akio Isono, Hikaru Yamanouchi, Nobuko Wakaba, Ayako Katsuragi, Shin'ichi Himori, Chiyoko Katori, Ichiro Yuki. Screenplay: Jitsuzo Ikeda, Komatsu Kitamura. Cinematography: Suketaro Inokai. Set designer: Jokichi Shu.

The titular street of Street Without End is located in the bustling Ginza district of Tokyo, where Sugiko (Setsuko Shinobu) works as a waitress. One of the most fascinating elements of Mikio Naruse's film is its documentation of the Ginza, now famous as a teeming, neon-lighted network of streets, in the 1930s, images of which constitute both the beginning and the end of the film. In between these shots of the crowded streets, we follow Sugiko's story as she almost marries the man she loves, almost becomes a movie star, loses her first love and her chance at stardom when she's struck by a car, marries the wealthy driver of the car, and suffers from the class snobbery of her sister- and mother-in-law. By the end of the film, she's back working as a waitress. A classic "woman's picture" melodrama, it was made in service of Naruse's concern about the weight of tradition and history that burdens the lives of Japan's women. It was Naruse's last silent film, and you can see him striving toward sound, which was late coming to the Japanese film industry. It is, for example, almost too chopped up by intertitles, as if Naruse were longing for audible dialogue. But Naruse surrounds his heroine with a gallery of well-drawn characters, overcoming the limitations of silent melodrama by making the people in it believable.