A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors. Alexander Jacoby

ceiling, clutched by a severed hand. His swordfights had a brutal realism, placing much emphasis on spurting blood and the sound of metal penetrating flesh. Regrettably, he did not extend a comparable realism to his characters who rarely expanded beyond the confines of generic stereotyping. Gosha’s stylistic limitations exacerbated this flaw; adept at choreographing action, he was less skilled at handling the camera. His direction, with its frequent resort to zooms, close-ups, and slow motion, was content to rest on the surface, with the consequence that the impact of his films was generally more physical than emotional.

      1964 Sanbiki no samurai / Three Outlaw Samurai

      1965 Kedamono no ken / Sword of the Beast

      1966 Gohiki no shinshi / Cash Calls Hell (lit. Five Violent Gentlemen)

      Tange Sazen: Hien iaigiri / Secret of the Urn

      Kiba Ōkaminosuke / Samurai Wolf

      1967 Kiba Ōkaminosuke: Jigokugiri / Samurai Wolf: Hell Cut / Samurai Wolf 2

      1969 Goyōkin / Official Gold / Goyokin / Steel Edge of Vengeance

      Hitokiri / Tenchu! / Heaven’s Punishment / The Killer

      1971 Shussho iwai / The Wolves / Prison Release Celebration (lit.)

      1974 Bōryokugai / Street of Violence / Violent City

      1978 Kumokiri Nizaemon / Bandits vs. Samurai Squadron (lit. Nizaemon Kumokiri)

      1979 Yami no kariudo / Hunter in the Dark

      1982 Kirūin Hanako no shōgai / Onimasa (lit. The Life of Hanako Kiruin )

      1983 Yōkirō / The Geisha

      1984 Kita no hotaru / Fireflies in the North

      1985 Kai / The Oar

      Usugeshō / Tracked / Light Makeup (lit.)

      1986 Jittemai / Death Shadows (lit. Truncheon Dance)

      Gokudō no onnatachi / Yakuza Wives

      1987 Yoshiwara enjō / Tokyo Bordello / Yoshiwara Conflagration (lit.)

      1988 Nikutai no mon / Gate of Flesh / Carmen 1945

      1989 226 / Four Days of Snow and Blood

      1991 Kagerō / Heat Haze

      1992 Onnagoroshi abura jigoku / Oil Hell Murder

      GOSHO Heinosuke

      (February 1, 1902–May 1, 1981)

      五所平之助

      One of the outstanding practitioners of shomin-geki, Gosho specialized in the genre after serving as assistant at Shochiku to its pioneer, Yasujirō Shimazu. His twenties films are all lost, but melodramas such as The Village Bride (Mura no hanayome, 1928) and Tricky Girl (Karakuri musume, 1927) apparently focused on themes of illness and physical and mental disability; this concern, rooted in Gosho’s own, and his family’s, experience of poor health, would be carried over into his postwar work. A similar pathos was apparent in some of his thirties films. The Izu Dancer (Izu no odoriko, 1933) was a low-key silent romance based on a Kawabata novella about the love affair between a student and an itinerant actress, which climaxed in a moving scene of separation. Gosho also made realist dramas such as Burden of Life (Jinsei no onimotsu, 1935), in which the most affecting scenes focused on the sadness of a boy neglected by his father.

      However, much of the director’s work early in the sound era was more cheerful in tone. The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (Madamu to nyōbō, 1931), Japan’s first full sound-on-film film, was a diverting comedy about a writer distracted by various noises, a slim plot that nevertheless allowed Gosho to exploit the new medium with creativity and wit. This and the later pair of comedies The Bride Talks in Her Sleep (Hanayome no negoto, 1933) and The Groom Talks in His Sleep (Hanamuko no negoto, 1935) balanced slapstick with satire on contemporary mores. Gosho soon became celebrated for the tension in his work between humor and sadness, and for the expressive editing patterns that earned him a reputation as “the director who uses three shots where others use one.”

      Gosho sought to minimize militarist content in his wartime films, and after the war, in Once More (Ima hitotabi no, 1947), produced a melodramatic account of the plight of liberals during the thirties. His postwar films combined social criticism with affecting personal drama. His most famous work, Where Chimneys Are Seen (Entotsu no mieru basho, 1953), though marred slightly by over-explicit symbolism, was an exemplary depiction of the balance between aspiration and despair in a country recovering from war. Dispersing Clouds (Wakaregumo, 1951), a very touching film, studied a selfish woman’s growth into maturity during a holiday in rural Nagano, where she witnesses the sufferings of the poor and sick. Also most affecting was The Yellow Crow (Kiiroi karasu, 1957), shot beautifully in color on location in Kamakura, and recounting a bittersweet story about a boy’s troubled relationship with his father, lately repatriated from China.

      Despite the frequent pathos of his stories, Gosho’s worldview in his films from the thirties well into the fifties was a relatively optimistic one. Whereas Ozu’s family dramas tended to conclude with the disintegration of families, Burden of Life, Where Chimneys Are Seen, and The Yellow Crow ended with family reunions, while couples who have been divided by quarrels or political circumstances are reconciled or reunited in The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine, Once More, and Twice on a Certain Night (Aru yo futatabi, 1956). In Where Chimneys Are Seen and The Cock Crows Twice (Niwatori wa futatabi naku, 1954), characters attempt or contemplate suicide, but resolve finally to live on. Gosho’s ideals were tolerance, compromise, and rationality, and his films usually manifested a faith in progress. It is significant that the protagonists of Once More and Dispersing Clouds were doctors; Gosho associated their work with the regeneration of postwar Japanese society, and in both films, the heroines achieve moral integrity through nursing.

      From the mid-fifties, however, Gosho’s films began to grow darker in tone. An Inn at Osaka (Ōsaka no yado, 1954), which used an inn in Japan’s commercial capital as a microcosm of society, attacked the materialist values and growing inequality of postwar Japan. Though nominally set in the Meiji period, Growing Up (Takekurabe, 1955) was also a social critique, condemning a purely commercial outlook which overpowers humane feelings. Both films featured women who have no option but to become prostitutes. Twice on a Certain Night, final reconciliation notwithstanding, showed the corruption of family relationships by financial priorities: a wife, believing that she cannot afford to raise a child, has an abortion. The Cock Crows Twice, a bleakly quirky black comedy set in a small coastal town, touched on the unfair lot of the working class as workers drilling for oil strike a hot spring instead, but receive scant payment for a discovery which will bring prosperity to the town.

      Elsewhere, Gosho examined unhappy love affairs. Elegy of the North (Banka, 1957), a study in angst set atmospherically against the bleak backdrop of a Hokkaido port town in early spring, and Hunting Rifle (Ryōjū, 1961), a melodrama which in tone and imagery anticipated Chabrol or Fassbinder, were accounts of the misery and suspicion caused by infidelity; both culminated in suicide. An Innocent Witch (Osorezan no onna, 1965) showed the flip side of Gosho’s faith in rationality: a prostitute is believed to be cursed and dies while undergoing a Shinto ceremony of exorcism. Here, Gosho associated superstition with the wider irrationality that fueled militarism in the thirties. Militarist fanaticism, along with its corrosive effect on human relationships, was also the subject of his last major film, Rebellion of Japan (Utage, 1967).

      Gosho was both an enquiring dramatist and an intelligent visual stylist, with a subtle montage-based technique designed to highlight significant details and elucidate the nuances of character and the particularities of milieu. His work was distinguished, in Arthur Nolletti’s words, by its “compassion and affection for character” and its “unerring sense of life’s injustices, contradictions, and complexities.” This sense of complexity, and the complementary avoidance of easy answers, gave Gosho’s work its remarkable richness and depth. Its poignancy derived from the humanism that he espoused, believing that “only if we love our fellow human beings can we create.”

      1925