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09 August 2024 Bonn (Germany)
Internationale Stummfilmtage: Im Schatten von Yoshiwara Crossways (In the shadow of Yoshiwara Crossways)
Sabrina Zimmermann (Violin) & Mark Pogolski (Piano) - Arkadenhof der Universität Bonn
Program Info: In the red light district of the Japanese capital, a young man who has fallen in love with a courtesan loses his sight in a fight with a rival. In order to pay for the expensive treatment, his devoted sister is forced into prostitution. The artistically demanding melodrama IN THE SHADOW OF YOSHIWARA is considered the first Japanese silent film to be shown in Europe at the time. As in Teinosuke Kinugasa's previous masterpiece A SIDE OF MADNESS (1926), the influence of German expressionist film can be seen in the sophisticated visual design.
Available to stream from August 11th to 13th, 2024 on https://stummfilmtage.culturebase.org
A modern film from Japan can be seen. It's called: IN THE SHADOW OF YOSHIWARA and uses the most advanced technical means to depict an event that is supposed to take place in the year 1850, but in reality seems like a timeless legend. A poor young man is in love with a prostitute who mocks him. The young man's sister tries to save him, but also succumbs to destruction. How purity and poverty combine to deliver both siblings to the demons is made clear with a naivety that contradicts the meaning of the virtuoso montage. In other ways too, the foreign appearance of the filmmaking that we are familiar with comes through. Figures go around that are hard to unravel. They have faces like those in Japanese watercolors, their expression is an inscrutable hieroglyph. The contrast between the mask cover and the general human content creates the special appeal of this film, which is moving through its accusation without necessarily having to trust its authenticity.
Siegfried Kracauer, in: Frankfurter Zeitung, May 28, 1929
Just as Kinugasa finds a metaphor for thecinematic apparatus in the woman dancing behind bars in the asylum, hediscovers an apt historical parallel for modem consumer society and itscinematic “dream factory” in the “floating world” ( ukiyo ) of courtesans and their patrons in Edo Japan. In theYoshiwara quarter and its contiguous cultural territory, Kinugasa glimpsed an“entertainment” world made possible by an advanced money economy, driven by thepurchasing power of the ascendant merchant class, and promoted by a minorindustry of popular art ( ukiyo-e ),literature ( gesaku ), and theater (kabuki).
The critical dimension of Kinugasa’s film liesin the gap between the desire stimulated by the illusions of the floating worldand the bitter economic situation of the film’s protagonists. This theme linksCROSSWAYS with contemporary works of so-called proletarian literature,left-leaning modernist literature, and “tendency” films, which frequentlythematize the gap between the fashionable “modern” consumption that prevailedin the rapidly expanding mass media of the 1920s and the realities of everydaylife for the majority of Japanese subjects during the stagnant economicconditions of that decade.
William O. Gardner: New Perceptions: Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Films AndJapanese Modernism, in: Cinema Journal, Vol. 43, No. 3, 2004
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