THE WIFE OF SEISAKU (YASUZŌ MASUMURA, 1965)
SEISAKU NO TSUMA
Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
7:00 PM
Wednesday 06 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
4:30 PM
Saturday 16 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 93 minutes
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Cast: Ayako Wakao, Takahiro Tamura, Nobuo Chiba, Yūzō Hayakawa, Mikio Narita, Yuka Konno, Taiji Tonoyama
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
7:00 PM
Wednesday 06 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
4:30 PM
Saturday 16 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 93 minutes
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese with English subtitles
Cast: Ayako Wakao, Takahiro Tamura, Nobuo Chiba, Yūzō Hayakawa, Mikio Narita, Yuka Konno, Taiji Tonoyama
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
‘[The works of Yasuzō Masumura are] undoubtedly among the most-envelope-pushing studio films of the late 1950s and 60s – no less personal or ingenious than those of Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Fuller or Nicholas Ray.’ – Joseph Fahim, British Film Institute
After the death of her wealthy older husband, Okane (Ayako Wakao) returns to the village where she grew up. Cruelly ostracised by the intolerant community there, Okane nevertheless catches the eye of model citizen and soldier Seisaku (Takahiro Tamura), and they marry – but when a newly declared war threatens to take the man she loves away from her forever, she is driven to extremes to save his life.
Set against the backdrop of the Russo-Japanese War and expressing a strong critique of militarism, Yasuzō Masumura’s piercing melodrama is a major work from a long-overlooked director. Wakao, who collaborated with Masumura on twenty films, is a particularly commanding presence, bringing a fierce intensity to the tightly controlled narrative.
Introduced by Jane Mills at Ritz Cinemas and Grant Watson at Lido Cinemas.
Co-presented by The Japan Foundation, Sydney.
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‘[The works of Yasuzō Masumura are] undoubtedly among the most-envelope-pushing studio films of the late 1950s and 60s – no less personal or ingenious than those of Alfred Hitchcock, Sam Fuller or Nicholas Ray.’ – Joseph Fahim, British Film Institute
After the death of her wealthy older husband, Okane (Ayako Wakao) returns to the village where she grew up. Cruelly ostracised by the intolerant community there, Okane nevertheless catches the eye of model citizen and soldier Seisaku (Takahiro Tamura), and they marry – but when a newly declared war threatens to take the man she loves away from her forever, she is driven to extremes to save his life.
Set against the backdrop of the Russo-Japanese War and expressing a strong critique of militarism, Yasuzō Masumura’s piercing melodrama is a major work from a long-overlooked director. Wakao, who collaborated with Masumura on twenty films, is a particularly commanding presence, bringing a fierce intensity to the tightly controlled narrative.
Introduced by Jane Mills at Ritz Cinemas and Grant Watson at Lido Cinemas.
Co-presented by The Japan Foundation, Sydney.
FILM NOTES
By Tony Rayns
By Tony Rayns
Tony Rayns is a London-based critic, curator and occasional filmmaker with a particular interest in the current cultures of East Asia.
Director Masumura Yasuzō (1924-1986; ‘Masumura’ is the surname) was barely known outside Japan until DVD publishing happened along. Look back at the older books on Japanese film history in western languages and you’ll find few to no mentions of his name. We don’t need to go into the reasons for this neglect, but a course-correction has taken place in the first quarter of this century. Kadokawa, the book-publishing/production giant which bought the entire back catalogue of the Daiei Film Company when it closed down in 1971, began restoring/remastering films by Masumura in 2002 and growing interest (both inside and beyond Japan) has escalated this “rediscovery.” Thanks to this, The Wife of Seisaku (Seisaku no Tsuma) will soon be known as a 1960s’ classic: a film that in some ways prefigures Ōshima Nagisa’s Ai no Corrida (In the Realm of the Senses, 1976).
The film is based on a novel by the little-translated Yoshida Genjirō (1886-1956), first filmed by Murata Minoru in 1924; that silent film is now remembered as one of the earliest in Japan to cast a woman rather than a kabuki-style female impersonator. This 1965 remake was scripted by Masumura’s frequent collaborator Shindō Kaneto (elsewhere the director of Onibaba (1964) and many other films); it keeps the storyline and many of the novel’s details but changes the original tragic ending into something much more nuanced and resonant. Shindō’s dialogue sometimes seems overly expository, especially in the early scenes, but it’s always in the service of Masumura’s preference for fast pacing.
The story is set in a ramshackle rural village in the early 1900s, although this version opens in a nearby port. Okane (Daiei contract star Wakao Ayako, who made some 20 films with Masumura) was sold by her impoverished parents at the age of 17 as mistress to a wealthy, elderly widower in the port town; the village they came from has reviled them (and despised Okane as a “whore”) since they left. But when both the patron and Okane’s father die, she and her mother return to the village, where they are treated with contempt and ostracised. The eligible young Kamikaji Seisaku (Tamura Takahiro, fresh from his role as a reluctant army conscript in Masumura’s preceding film Heitai Yakuza/Hoodlum Soldier) returns around the same time from military service, decorated for his valour as a “model soldier” and welcomed home as a local hero. Seisaku is drawn to Okane and sympathises with her situation; the couple meet furtively, admit their passion for each other and begin living together. Japan declares war on Russia over territories in Manchuria and Port Arthur at the start of 1904 and Seisaku is called up to fight. He returns, lightly wounded in one arm and leg, and Okane begs him to stay. But when he elects to return to the front, Okane takes drastic action to prevent it.
Masumura is often described as a progenitor of the Japanese “new wave”, largely because Ōshima (writing as a critic) was very impressed by the free-spirited attitudes and visual style in his debut film Kuchizuke (Kisses, 1957), but the director himself always declined to be pigeonholed. After dropping out of a law degree and then graduating in Philosophy from Tokyo University in 1949, he won a scholarship to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia [film school] in Rome – making him one of very few Japanese directors with first-hand experience of living abroad. He returned to Japan in 1954 as an iconoclast (Donald Richie says he called for ‘the destruction of mainstream Japanese cinema’; see A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, 2001) and worked as assistant to Mizoguchi Kenji and then Ichikawa Kon before Daiei allowed him to direct. Unlike the new-wavers who walked away from major companies to work as independents, Masumura stayed at Daiei until it went bankrupt, only occasionally choosing the scripts he filmed; it seems likely that the films written by Shindō were amongst those he chose to make. He took the conformity and fundamental conservatism of Japanese society as givens, but refused to believe that European-style “individualism” and “Japan” were incompatible. Those who read French can find more of Masumura’s musings on “Japaneseness” in his only substantial foreign-published interview, conducted by three Japanese critics and published in Cahiers du cinéma # 224, 1970. Sadly, he wasn’t asked questions about his films in the interview.
The Wife of Seisaku is composed of short scenes briskly edited together: key episodes in the life of Seisaku and his common-law wife Okane, plus scenes of villagers gossiping about the relationship, formal village meetings and celebrations, and montages of newspaper headlines to chart the off-screen political/military context. As always, Masumura refuses to shoot close-ups of his actors; there are mid-shots and wide-shots throughout, and the only big close-up is of chains in an expressionist prison scene. The snippets of village gossip and debate in meetings function like choruses in ancient Greek drama, expressing “common” views and judgments, but also as sharp commentaries on the hypocrisies and evasions behind Japan’s consensus thinking; one cut from the protagonists to a village meeting is especially sardonic.
But the core of the film is the central relationship between an upright, virginal man and an experienced/abused young woman. Masumura films the love scenes between Seisaku and Okane with maximum sensuality, showing their delight in exploring each other’s bodies as frankly as was possible under ‘60s censorship. He relies on Yamanouchi Tadashi’s elegiac-romantic score (once strikingly counterpointed with birdsong) to underpin the fatalistic mood, to particularly poignant effect in the climactic scenes of violence. In the depiction of a couple who reject “consensus” to live in their own world and in detailing the chasm between militarism and sensual living, the film is indeed a daring precursor to In the Realm of the Senses. In 1965 Masumura and his writer Shindō were already assuming the conclusions that the politically disillusioned Ōshima came to a full decade later.
The film is based on a novel by the little-translated Yoshida Genjirō (1886-1956), first filmed by Murata Minoru in 1924; that silent film is now remembered as one of the earliest in Japan to cast a woman rather than a kabuki-style female impersonator. This 1965 remake was scripted by Masumura’s frequent collaborator Shindō Kaneto (elsewhere the director of Onibaba (1964) and many other films); it keeps the storyline and many of the novel’s details but changes the original tragic ending into something much more nuanced and resonant. Shindō’s dialogue sometimes seems overly expository, especially in the early scenes, but it’s always in the service of Masumura’s preference for fast pacing.
The story is set in a ramshackle rural village in the early 1900s, although this version opens in a nearby port. Okane (Daiei contract star Wakao Ayako, who made some 20 films with Masumura) was sold by her impoverished parents at the age of 17 as mistress to a wealthy, elderly widower in the port town; the village they came from has reviled them (and despised Okane as a “whore”) since they left. But when both the patron and Okane’s father die, she and her mother return to the village, where they are treated with contempt and ostracised. The eligible young Kamikaji Seisaku (Tamura Takahiro, fresh from his role as a reluctant army conscript in Masumura’s preceding film Heitai Yakuza/Hoodlum Soldier) returns around the same time from military service, decorated for his valour as a “model soldier” and welcomed home as a local hero. Seisaku is drawn to Okane and sympathises with her situation; the couple meet furtively, admit their passion for each other and begin living together. Japan declares war on Russia over territories in Manchuria and Port Arthur at the start of 1904 and Seisaku is called up to fight. He returns, lightly wounded in one arm and leg, and Okane begs him to stay. But when he elects to return to the front, Okane takes drastic action to prevent it.
Masumura is often described as a progenitor of the Japanese “new wave”, largely because Ōshima (writing as a critic) was very impressed by the free-spirited attitudes and visual style in his debut film Kuchizuke (Kisses, 1957), but the director himself always declined to be pigeonholed. After dropping out of a law degree and then graduating in Philosophy from Tokyo University in 1949, he won a scholarship to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia [film school] in Rome – making him one of very few Japanese directors with first-hand experience of living abroad. He returned to Japan in 1954 as an iconoclast (Donald Richie says he called for ‘the destruction of mainstream Japanese cinema’; see A Hundred Years of Japanese Film, 2001) and worked as assistant to Mizoguchi Kenji and then Ichikawa Kon before Daiei allowed him to direct. Unlike the new-wavers who walked away from major companies to work as independents, Masumura stayed at Daiei until it went bankrupt, only occasionally choosing the scripts he filmed; it seems likely that the films written by Shindō were amongst those he chose to make. He took the conformity and fundamental conservatism of Japanese society as givens, but refused to believe that European-style “individualism” and “Japan” were incompatible. Those who read French can find more of Masumura’s musings on “Japaneseness” in his only substantial foreign-published interview, conducted by three Japanese critics and published in Cahiers du cinéma # 224, 1970. Sadly, he wasn’t asked questions about his films in the interview.
The Wife of Seisaku is composed of short scenes briskly edited together: key episodes in the life of Seisaku and his common-law wife Okane, plus scenes of villagers gossiping about the relationship, formal village meetings and celebrations, and montages of newspaper headlines to chart the off-screen political/military context. As always, Masumura refuses to shoot close-ups of his actors; there are mid-shots and wide-shots throughout, and the only big close-up is of chains in an expressionist prison scene. The snippets of village gossip and debate in meetings function like choruses in ancient Greek drama, expressing “common” views and judgments, but also as sharp commentaries on the hypocrisies and evasions behind Japan’s consensus thinking; one cut from the protagonists to a village meeting is especially sardonic.
But the core of the film is the central relationship between an upright, virginal man and an experienced/abused young woman. Masumura films the love scenes between Seisaku and Okane with maximum sensuality, showing their delight in exploring each other’s bodies as frankly as was possible under ‘60s censorship. He relies on Yamanouchi Tadashi’s elegiac-romantic score (once strikingly counterpointed with birdsong) to underpin the fatalistic mood, to particularly poignant effect in the climactic scenes of violence. In the depiction of a couple who reject “consensus” to live in their own world and in detailing the chasm between militarism and sensual living, the film is indeed a daring precursor to In the Realm of the Senses. In 1965 Masumura and his writer Shindō were already assuming the conclusions that the politically disillusioned Ōshima came to a full decade later.
THE RESTORATION
Source: Kadokawa Pictures
Restored in 4K in 2024 by Kadokawa at Imagica Entertainment Media Services, from the original 35mm negative and the 35mm sound negative. Grading supervised by Masahiro Miyajima.
Director: Yasuzô MASUMURA; Production Company: Daiei Film Company; Producer: Masaichi NAGATA; Screenplay: Kaneto SHINDÔ; based on The Woman of Seisaku by Genjirõ YOSHIDA; Photography: Tomohiro AKINO; Editor: Tatsuji NAKASHIZU; Art Direction: Tomoo SHIMOGAWARA // Cast: Ayako WAKAO (Okane), Takahiro TAMURA (Seisaku), Yuka KONNO (Oshina), Mikio NARITA (MP), Yûzô Hayakawa (Sergeant), Nobuo CHIBA (Heisuke).
Japan | 1965 | 93 mins | 4K DCP | B&W | Japanese with English subtitles | Unclassified 18+
Restored in 4K in 2024 by Kadokawa at Imagica Entertainment Media Services, from the original 35mm negative and the 35mm sound negative. Grading supervised by Masahiro Miyajima.
Director: Yasuzô MASUMURA; Production Company: Daiei Film Company; Producer: Masaichi NAGATA; Screenplay: Kaneto SHINDÔ; based on The Woman of Seisaku by Genjirõ YOSHIDA; Photography: Tomohiro AKINO; Editor: Tatsuji NAKASHIZU; Art Direction: Tomoo SHIMOGAWARA // Cast: Ayako WAKAO (Okane), Takahiro TAMURA (Seisaku), Yuka KONNO (Oshina), Mikio NARITA (MP), Yûzô Hayakawa (Sergeant), Nobuo CHIBA (Heisuke).
Japan | 1965 | 93 mins | 4K DCP | B&W | Japanese with English subtitles | Unclassified 18+