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March 28, 2024, 02:29:47 PM

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Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate (Kawashima, 1957)

Started by Smeraldina Rima, August 02, 2022, 07:04:03 PM

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Kinema Junpo film watch

The Sun Legend of the End of the Tokugawa Era or Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate was the fifth placed film in the top twelve of the KJ 1999 critics' list:

1. The Seven Samurai (1954) (Dec)
2. Floating Clouds (1955) (Nov)
3. Straits of Hunger (1965) (Oct)
4. Tokyo Story (1953) (Sep)
5. The Sun Legend of the End of the Tokugawa Era (1957) (Aug)
6. Rashomon (1950) (Jul)
7. Intentions of Murder (1964) (Jun)
8. The Yakuza Papers, Vol. 1: Battles Without Honor and Humanity (1973) (May)
9. Twenty-Four Eyes (1954) (Apr)
10. Ugetsu (1953) (Mar)
11. Ikiru (1952) (Feb)
12. Life of Oharu (1952) (Jan)

In the 2009 critics' list it was voted the fourth best Japanese film.

In the readers' list from 2009 it was voted the thirty-first best Japanese film.

In the 1957 KJ year-end list it was voted the joint fourth best Japanese film of the year, tied with Throne of Blood:

1.    The Rice People (1957)
2.    The Story of Pure Love (1957)
3.    Times of Joy and Sorrow (1957)
4.    The Sun Legend of the End of the Tokugawa Era (1957)
4.    Throne of Blood (1957)
6.    The Unbalanced Wheel (1957)
7.    Dotanba (1957)
8.    Bakuon To Daichi (1957)
9.    Stepbrothers (1957)
10.    The Lower Depths (1957)
11.    Chijo (1957)
12.    Untamed Woman (1957)
13.    Yukiguni (1957)
14.    Nankyoku tairiku (dir. ?)
15.    Mesopotamia: Iraku Iran tanken no kiroku (1957)
16.    Sekai wa kyofu suru: shi no hai no shotai (dirs. Fumio Kamei, Hiroshi Teshigahara and Haruo Osanai)
17.    Hanging By a Thread (1957)
18.    Osaka monogatari (1957)
19.    Tokyo Twilight (1957)
20.    Righteousness (1957)
20.    Kisses (1957)
22.    The Crowded Streetcar (1957)
23.    Yellow Crow (1957)
24.    Korosita noha dareda (1957)
25.    Fun'nyotan (dir. Yoshitaro Nomura)
26.    A Geisha In the Old City (1957)
27.    Banka (1957)
27.    倖せは俺等のねがい (dir. Jukichi Uno)
27.    Doshaburi (1957)
30.    Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War (1958)



There have been some comic characters and situations so far: Tobei's vain ambitions, yubitsume among the chickens, the bandit's sword shaking from fear, the school children joking in class and the gossip about the new teacher, bureaucrats drinking at the wake and then abandoning the drunken resolutions, Imamura's black comedy and sudden shocks. Life of Oharu is the only film in the top twelve without much humour in it and there was a mention of finding some through miserable exhaustion there.

But this looks like the most recognised comedy genre film in the top twelve. Before watching it I wanted to read something about the history of genres of Japanese comedy films. I haven't seen many Japanese comedies but enjoyed The Million Ryo Pot and Good Morning as much as the films in this top twelve. It was hard to find web-magazine articles about this subject but I found a chapter in a book including this bit about Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate describing its use of rakugo ('fallen words') and kyōgen ('mad words', 'wild speech') traditions. 





When watching Rashomon, I was wondering if the filtering of visual reality through the characters could have been done with less preparation, just showing different things in the forest, or if you would lose the idea of the subjectivity, and how far other films go to indicate a focalised perspective, throughout or intermittently. So I was interested to read the mention there of inducing empathy for one character and showing the others as caricatures seen through his eyes.

As mentioned there, Imamura was the assistant director for the film. He was also the or one of the scriptwriters. In June when we were watching one or two Imamura films I read a book with some interviews and his writing about working with Kawashima and about his mixed feelings about this film. Some of it made me worry that the film might demand too detailed knowledge of the fairly recent period setting and of the reasons it was made in the 1950s. The extracts below don't seem like very bad spoilers but they comment on the film in ways that would be hard to forget if read first. So I'll be watching it with some ideas about its failure in Imamura's eyes.

From an interview:



From "The Sun Legend of a Country Boy":




What do you think of Kawashima, this film, or Japanese films from 1957?

Could you make a chronological or preferential list of favourite comedies?

Keebleman

Saw this on Mubi a year or two ago and loved it.  Its energy and the vivid characterisation put me in mind of Frank Capra. 

Herbert Ashe

Ah, a film of a million aka's (a couple sources already gave me: The Shinagawa Path / Sun Legend of the Shogunate's Downfall (lit.) / Not Long after Leaving Shinagawa / The Sun Legend of the End of the Tokugawa Era / Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate).

I've seen this a couple of times, but not for many years. IIRC used to be a mainstay of those 'Popular Foreign-Language Films No-One Knows In Other Countries' things that used to pop up, I think it's only in the last few years it's had official distribution in the West. I found it quite underwhelming, but put it down to the fact it was a comedy, after all, and probably something was lost in the translation and loss of cultural context. Possible also that the subs back then were non-professional, looking forward to revisiting this.

Here's Jacoby on Kawashima:



I don't know Kawashima very well:

Our Town (1956) didn't make much impression
Suzaki Paradise: Red Light District (1956) I liked more, occupies somewhat the middle ground of films dealing with night life and sex workers between earlier ones Mizoguchi, Naruse etc and 60s/New Waveish ones (Imamura, etc).
Yoru no nagare (Evening Stream or Lovelorn Geisha, 1960) curiously co-directed with Mikio Naruse. It's good but the authorship  maybe means it's only tangentially related for this film. Dan Sallitt gives a good overview for the curious.

Quote from: Smeraldina Rima on August 02, 2022, 07:04:03 PMhaven't seen many Japanese comedies but enjoyed The Million Ryo Pot and Good Morning

I also think those two are about the funniest I've seen, in the sense of being more 'pure comedies', although I've mostly only seen comedies by directors I'm interested in rather than seeked them out.

Dayraven

The title alludes to the Sun Tribe (taiyouzoku), contemporary figures when the film was made. They were the local equivalent to beatniks.

zomgmouse

Managed to watch this today. Refreshed at the level of pure silliness on display, real broad, farcical daftness. I found that my lack of proper understanding of the context or any commentary it was making didn't impede my enjoyment. The writing was very fresh as well, seemed like every time it would make a predictable joke it swerved to something surprising - like the pushing in the lake. Delighted to find out Imamura co-wrote the screenplay.

Enjoyed the main character of the "grifter", a mischievous scamp who always put on a happy demeanour for everyone around him but the moment he was alone the weight of his character comes crashing down in his eyes. Really he was trying to cheat life itself. And he got good at getting things to go his way - except for tuberculosis. Though he still seemed happy-go-lucky despite that diagnosis. A sort of "evil" happy-go-lucky but still in a sense happy-go-lucky.

Chopsticks from coffin wood.

Thanks for setting up this watch-a-long, probably would never have discovered this film or this director without it!

Herbert Ashe

Briefly on the 1957 poll - like most of these lists, after the half dozen or so i've seen, there's another half dozen by directors I know (always seems to be Imai, Tomo Uchida), then lots of utterly-obscure outside Japan genre/popular stuff.

1, 2 both Imai. Recurring theme is that KJ during this period *loved* Imai, feels like more than any other director.
3 is Kinoshita's 1st lighthouse film; 12 is Naruse;  Ozu's Tokyo Twilight languishing at 19 (i remember from Bordwell's book it was one of his worse-received films). Also there's a Masumura (Kisses) and an Ichikawa I've wanted to see for ages (Crowded Streetcar).



Found it curious that the passage from Reframing Japanese Cinema doesn't mention the introduction, as that seems to me to be a fairly crucial element; I read that the original script had Saheji breaking the 4th wall at the end, ending up in the film studio. The mention of the Japan-US treaty (in-film, I presume the one signed after the Commodore Perry incident) made me check, but it was 1959 or 1960 that the signing & protests occured (although there was increasing unease at US military throughout the 50s, which must have informed the film somewhat).

In general though I struggled to pick up much in the film in terms of specifically contemporary comment, in the way that some others have. The rudderless Samurai class, unrespected, overtaken as a dynamic societal force by supposed 'inferiors', don't feel like 30-40s militarists, unless maybe in an anachronistic sense. dayraven mentioned the sun-tribe allusion in the title, maybe that works (although if so, not for me). Also Imamura's comments above seem dead-on to me; it hints at the societal change going on, but most of the characters are passive with respect to it, being carried along.

As before, I'm a bit disappointed, I wanted to enjoy this more than I did and to get what others get out of it. Certainly don't find it as consistently funny as I remember The Million Ryu Pot being, or maybe it's because in that the humour feeds into the plot better, and gives it momentum? All the choreographed movement of people around the brothel was excellent.

Crenners

Sorry I've lost my drive to offer my own thoughts in this sub but I just want to say how much I enjoy these spectacular OPs and the insights shared by the regular contributors. Unbelievable knowledge and insights. Cheers.

Keebleman

Quote from: zomgmouse on August 04, 2022, 12:20:47 PMfarcical daftness.

It's possibly the most successful rendering of farce, as a genre, on film that I know (Fawlty Towers is superior but that's a different medium).  The conventions almost always fall so boringly flat in cinema, but here it works beautifully and doesn't feel in any way theatrical.

Before getting round to this one I watched two of the Sun Tribe films alluded to in a couple of posts to get some idea of the crossover history intended: Season of the Sun (and the short story by Shintaro Ishihara which has been translated as "Season of Violence") and Crazed Fruit.



The Sun Tribe films could be seen as an earlier beginning of the Japanese new wave I guess but they usually get separated off as their own youth culture thing instigated by Shintaro Ishihara's stories. The story was published in 1955 and the two films mentioned came out in 1956, a year before Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate. I don't think either of these films made the annual KJ list for 1956 but Crazed Fruit is in both of the retrospective lists and is now regarded as a classic. I had read that both of these films starred Shintaro's younger brother, Yujiro Ishihara (an actor/musician described as a Japanese James Dean and Elvis Presley in some of the recent things written about him) and that in Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate he acts in a style that viewers would have recognised as a Sun Tribe rebellious youth style. Don't know if it's just coincidence that we get some shots by the sea but they make a good comparison with the Sun Tribe. They're ahead of quite a lot: the Japanese New Wave, The French New Wave, The Beach Boys.



He doesn't really star in Season of the Sun though, I was misled by an inaccurate description and initially watched it thinking that Hiroyuki Nagato who plays the main part was the famous Yujiro Ishihara. It wasn't a complete waste of time wrt Kawashima's Sun Tribe casting because if I've got this right Yōko Minamida plays the other main character before playing Koharu in Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate. Her and Nagato are dynamite in this and, I think, they got married in real life.







Ishihara in a small role gets a boring decision win on the undercard before the main character's fight:



He's also shown in the fourth square down on the poster. His older briother, the novelist Shintaro Ishihara has a cameo bumping into the main character coming out of hospital after the boxing match.



There are a few bits of emphasised English in the film, here about not being able to open 'my heart'



and another bit translated as a confusion of the sounds of the title 'Bel Ami' and 'blimey', if the English translation isn't just trying to make things make sense here (ie. if it were a Japanese word that sounds like 'Bel Ami'). Was 'blimey' a popular word in English (or American) films from the 1940s and 50s?

QuoteHey, I have a good idea for this year. I got it from French literature!

"Red and Black"?

It's nothing strict like that! "Bel Ami"! I'm picking "Bel Ami". Definitely "Bel Ami"?

It sounds like "blimey".

Well, whatever!



Which all made it seem quite new wavey to me. Sort of like the American influences in the French new wave or the indistinct word at the end of Breathless; underwater in L'Atalante, beach conversations in Rohmer. The last scene is similar to the end of the first Yakuza Papers film. Loved this film, not heard of the director Takumi Furukawa. Yujiro Ishihara has a bigger part in Crazed Fruit, which seems to be more popular as a representation of the Sun Tribe movement but I preferred Season of the Sun.

In Imamura's tribute to Kawashima called "My Teacher", he describes Kawashima's films as falling apart by design and as a revolt against the 'authoritarian and traditional' base of the Japanese new wave:



Coming from this angle I was trying to watch Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate as an alternative sun tribe/new wave overlapping sort of film then but got lost with the history involved having not bothered to read about the period. My bad. What was the significance of setting it in 1862 specifically, 6 years before the fall of the Shogun? Any ideas about what Kawashima meant when he told Imamura the film was about 'the positive flight' and Imamura didn't understand him? The scene on the boat with Ishihara's character and the grifter seemed to be the main part that spelled out the class relations theme that Imamura thought the film should have got more stuck into. Just looking up Ishihara's character's name now I see that he was the real historical figure, Takasugi Shinsaku! This seems like it could be a quicker way into the historical situation than reading about the Bakumatsu and the Tokugawa shogunate in general from the beginning and this bit provides an explanation for the time when the film is set. From his Wiki page:

QuoteIn spite of Japan's policy of national isolation in the Edo period, in 1862 Takasugi was ordered by the domain to go secretly to Shanghai in Great Qing Empire to investigate the state of affairs and the strength of the Western powers. Takasugi's visit coincided with the Taiping Rebellion, and he was shocked by the effects of European imperialism even on the Chinese Empire. Takasugi returned to Japan convinced that Japan must strengthen itself to avoid being colonized by the western powers, or to suffer a similar fate as the Qing Empire. This coincided with the growing Sonnō Jōi ('expel the barbarians and revere the Emperor') movement, which attracted certain radical sections of Japan's warrior class and court nobility, and Takasugi's ideas found ready support in Chōshū and other parts of Japan. Takasugi was implicated in the 31 January 1863 attack on the British legation in Edo.

There was another series of cuts that get closer and more central that I don't know the name for but which have been used in lots of the films we've been watching:

Spoiler alert







[close]

From the beginning I was wondering how much the watch would be involved in driving the film like the pot in The Million Ryo Pot. But then I didn't really pay attention. I got most into the the film as it was ending and liked the final scene in the graveyard best - easily won over by snow - when the guy Koharu wants to avoid complains about the big discrepancy between the sizes of the first and second tombstone that the grifter said were the ones marking Koharu's grave and then condescends to him as an idiot instead of realising that he's been lying.

Quote from: Herbert Ashe on August 11, 2022, 02:39:44 PMFound it curious that the passage from Reframing Japanese Cinema doesn't mention the introduction, as that seems to me to be a fairly crucial element; I read that the original script had Saheji breaking the 4th wall at the end, ending up in the film studio.


What did you make of the introduction? Iirc the narrator says the film isn't about the present, or the prostitution laws specifically and I didn't know if this was sincere dropping of the subject or meant to imply the opposite. Where did you read about the alternative ending in the script?

QuoteAlso Imamura's comments above seem dead-on to me; it hints at the societal change going on, but most of the characters are passive with respect to it, being carried along.

I came across this Imamura film from 1981 called Why Not?, set closer to the Meiji Restoration, and wondered if it was an attempt to do more of what he'd spoken about in that interview from the 1960s:

QuoteThe film depicts carnivalesque atmosphere summed up by the cry "Ee ja nai ka" ("Why not?") in Japan in 1867 and 1868 in the days leading to the Meiji Restoration. It examines the effects of the political and social upheaval of the time, and culminates in a revelrous march on the Tokyo Imperial Palace, which turns into a massacre. Characteristically, Imamura focuses not on the leaders of the country, but on characters in the lower classes and on the fringes of society.

Have you seen this one?

Quote from: zomgmouse on August 04, 2022, 12:20:47 PMEnjoyed the main character of the "grifter", a mischievous scamp who always put on a happy demeanour for everyone around him but the moment he was alone the weight of his character comes crashing down in his eyes. Really he was trying to cheat life itself. And he got good at getting things to go his way - except for tuberculosis. Though he still seemed happy-go-lucky despite that diagnosis. A sort of "evil" happy-go-lucky but still in a sense happy-go-lucky.

I really liked this character too and the way you described his spirit here. I'm still quite puzzled by his illness and the thing Imamura said about their directing him without clear instructions about his illness. Was there a scene where he gets diagnosed?

Quote from: Keebleman on August 26, 2022, 06:22:40 PMIt's possibly the most successful rendering of farce, as a genre, on film that I know (Fawlty Towers is superior but that's a different medium).  The conventions almost always fall so boringly flat in cinema, but here it works beautifully and doesn't feel in any way theatrical.

Are there some conventions that distinguish a true farce from ordinary farcical comedies? Is The Rules of the Game a farce, for instance? I'd be interested to know what your next favourite farces are but that might be stuff for a new topic.

Quote from: Crenners on August 12, 2022, 01:39:18 PMSorry I've lost my drive to offer my own thoughts in this sub but I just want to say how much I enjoy these spectacular OPs and the insights shared by the regular contributors. Unbelievable knowledge and insights. Cheers.

No worries. Join in with any of the rest if you feel like it. Have you already done a giallo for beginners recommending post? Tenebre is coming to a cinema near me.

zomgmouse

Quote from: Smeraldina Rima on August 27, 2022, 06:19:38 PMWas there a scene where he gets diagnosed?

IIRC it was a creeping cough that gets identified as tuberculosis, I might be imagining a medical examination scene but it could have just been everyone at the brothel telling him he had TB. It does seem like the sort of trick he might pull in line with his character (though to what end - to run away?) but I interpreted it as being very real and thematically providing some bitter irony.

Quote from: zomgmouse on August 28, 2022, 12:30:52 AMIIRC it was a creeping cough that gets identified as tuberculosis, I might be imagining a medical examination scene but it could have just been everyone at the brothel telling him he had TB. It does seem like the sort of trick he might pull in line with his character (though to what end - to run away?) but I interpreted it as being very real and thematically providing some bitter irony.

I think it works best that way too. I wouldn't question it if I hadn't read the interview where (ignoring that he presumably mistakenly says or is translated as saying cancer rather than TB) Imamura mentions that he and Kawashima gave Takei different answers when he asked if he was really suffering from cancer (which is brought up less for its relevance to the particular plot than to illustrate Kawashima's preference for ambiguity and innatention to detail). I wonder what their answers were - if not just yes and no - and who gave which answer. I'll have to watch it again to catch a few things, but, like you, I don't think there was anything that would have implied the cough itself was faked.

zomgmouse

Quote from: Smeraldina Rima on August 28, 2022, 10:53:12 AMI think it works best that way too. I wouldn't question it if I hadn't read the interview where (ignoring that he presumably mistakenly says or is translated as saying cancer rather than TB) Imamura mentions that he and Kawashima gave Takei different answers when he asked if he was really suffering from cancer (which is brought up less for its relevance to the particular plot than to illustrate Kawashima's preference for ambiguity and innatention to detail). I wonder what their answers were - if not just yes and no - and who gave which answer. I'll have to watch it again to catch a few things, but, like you, I don't think there was anything that would have implied the cough itself was faked.

Yes at the very most it would have been subtextually implied but I don't think it was ever made explicit if so. I'm inclined to go the real route.

Herbert Ashe

Quote from: Smeraldina Rima on August 27, 2022, 06:19:38 PMComing from this angle I was trying to watch Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate as an alternative sun tribe/new wave overlapping sort of film then but got lost with the history involved having not bothered to read about the period. My bad. What was the significance of setting it in 1862 specifically, 6 years before the fall of the Shogun? Any ideas about what Kawashima meant when he told Imamura the film was about 'the positive flight' and Imamura didn't understand him?

Don't know about 1862 specifically, but the 'Opening' of Japan is dated to 1853/4 following Commodore Perry's expedition, so enough time would have elapsed so that there would be a plausible degree of flux and change making waves in wider Japanese (urban) society.

That positive flight comment still lost on me as well. (maybe this was a thing for some Japanese directors to fob off their younger assistants with gnomic comments, I recall Yoshida had an anecdote about Ozu along similar lines)

QuoteWhat did you make of the introduction? Iirc the narrator says the film isn't about the present, or the prostitution laws specifically and I didn't know if this was sincere dropping of the subject or meant to imply the opposite. Where did you read about the alternative ending in the script?

From this letterboxd review. No source, so maybe take with a pinch of salt. Maybe it's from extras on the MoC release:

Spoiler alert
"The film ends with Saheiji running away to the distant seashore at dawn, but the ending is originally much different and bolder than what we have here. In the script, Saheiji would walk away and into the studio while the set falls apart, and enter the modern day of Shinagawa. The modernistic ending is perhaps too incomprehensible for the studio in the 1950s, Kawashima eventually had to settle with the "normal" ending. Shohei Imamura, the apprentice of Kawashima and the co-scriptwriter (along with Kawashima and Keiichi Tanaka) of this film, would later employ the set-breaking scenario in the documentary A Man Vanishes (1967) to blur the discrimination between reality and fiction"
[close]

It's quite a hedge, isn't it. No idea if, without it, contemporary audiences would have made these links; but it's hard not to then have it in your mind throughout watching it. Regardless of intent (whoever's - Kawashima's or Imamura's, if he scripted it) to me it felt very much like it was a narration with a wink to the audience.

QuoteI came across this Imamura film from 1981 called Why Not?, set closer to the Meiji Restoration, and wondered if it was an attempt to do more of what he'd spoken about in that interview from the 1960s... Have you seen this one?

I haven't, no, so I might have to investigate in this light, thanks for mentioning!

Thanks for those suggestions. The idea for the ending reminds me of La Chienne, which begins and ends going through a window onto the street from a puppet theatre. I see the letterboxd review then mentions Imamura using the idea in A Man Vanishes.

zomgmouse

Imamura's Pigs and Battleships which I've mentioned a couple of times certainly has some outrageous energy which one could say borders on the farcical.