The Japanese Cinema Book by Hideaki Fujiki & Alastair Phillips

Author:Hideaki Fujiki & Alastair Phillips [Fujiki, Hideaki & Phillips, Alastair]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Performing Arts, Film, History & Criticism, History, Asia, Japan
ISBN: 9781844576814
Google: qkXZDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2020-04-02T20:30:06+00:00

Fig. 21.1 Japan’s first monster-movie star, Suzuki Sumiko, in bakeneko (‘ghost-cat’) form and fighting a host of human adversaries in The Cat of Arima/Arima neko (Mokudō Shigeru, 1937, Shinkō Kinema).

On a formal level, the manner in which the monster is filmed is often little different than the way a human hero might appear in a non-kaiki jidaigeki. Gone is the emphasis on trick cinematography, which characterised the silent era kaiki films. The Shinkō pictures make sparing use of double exposure and reverse filming, the main focus of spectacle being transferred to the body of Suzuki Sumiko. Audiences delighted in seeing the sexiness of the onetime silent cinema vamp transformed into the grotesque half-woman, half-cat bakeneko spirit, and the films downplay special effects in favour of a more physical (and physically present) monster. While Ushihara employs some creative tricks such as a kaleidoscope effect to portray his bakeneko as a more ethereal presence in the film’s diegesis, Mokudō’s monsters are most often shot engaging the villain and their henchmen in conventionally staged, choreographed fight scenes (tachimawari) that are largely interchangeable with any other jidaigeki swordplay picture of the day. Suzuki Sumiko’s wire-assisted acrobatic leaps and concrete, physical engagement against her human opponents often bear little difference from the feats of the samurai action heroes with whom she shared the matinee bill.

Early postwar kaiki films continued largely in this vein. Government censorship under the 1939 Film Law had effectively shut down production of all ‘frivolous’ kaiki pictures, a policy continued under the American Occupation ban on ‘feudalistic’ elements of jidaigeki, which included the revenge vendettas typical of kaiki narratives.16 With the end of the Occupation, beginning in 1953, Daiei studio head Nagata Masaichi immediately reinstated the annual production of kaiki pictures that had been a mainstay of Shinkō, Nagata’s prewar studio and one of three companies merged to create Daiei in 1941. Several of these were direct remakes of the prewar Shinkō bakeneko pictures, and apart from replacing Suzuki Sumiko with Irie Takako, the second great bakeneko actress, they replicate the old familiar formal and thematic patterns of their earlier counterparts. Arai Ryōhei’s 1953 version of The Cat of Arima features a tachimawari conclusion shot in nearly identical set-up to Mokudō’s 1937 film. Kato Bin’s The Ghost Cat of the Okazaki Rebellion/Kaibyō okazaki sōdō (1954) is at pains to open with a shot of Irie’s monster-cat, perhaps catering to the demands of an audience desirous to see the monster frontloaded in the style of Hollywood horror films, but Kato achieves this only by starting his picture with a brief flash-forward sequence, subsequently banishing his monster from the screen until the 60-minute mark of a less than 90-minute picture.

Articles and reviews of the time from Kinema junpō suggest that there was a growing dissatisfaction with the established kaiki formula. The critics who were once dismissive of the genre altogether now seemed more willing to engage kaiki films on their own terms, yet they invariably complained that the Daiei pictures with their third-act monsters lacked enough genuine scares.

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