Rojô no reikon

So few silent films in general and Japanese silents in particular survive that - as Bob Lipton observed sixteen years ago - it's impossible to assess how typical this film was of the Japanese cinema of the early twenties. Donald Richie, however, claimed that it was a major production so maybe we're just very, very fortunate that this little gem happened to survive; and in such good condition.

Now exactly a century old, it still looks fresh, with natural acting, attractive locations and a delightful performance by Haruko Sawamura.

I saw this Japanese movie in 2005 at the Cinema Muto festival in Sacile, Italy. The festival screened a print from the National Film Centre, Tokyo that had its original Japanese intertitles, with English subtitles added. The film's title is offered in English as 'Souls on the Road'.

Idealistic young Koichiro is the sensitive artistic type; he longs for success as a violinist. Worse luck, he's a small-town boy from the Hokkaido provinces: if he hopes for success as a fiddler, he'll have to up sticks (fiddlesticks?) and move to Tokyo. Koichiro's practical-minded father Yasushi is dead-set against this, and Yasushi has an even better reason for his argument: Koichiro has a wife and young daughter. In order to follow his fiddling dream, Koichiro brings his wife and daughter to the big city with him. Sure enough, he finds only disappointment in Tokyo, and he trudges back towards Hokkaido with his family in tow.

While the projectionist changes the reel, two convicts named Kamezo and Tsurikichi escape from prison. They meet Koichiro and his family on a mountainside. This is where I lost interest.

I was slightly intrigued that this movie attempted to depict the escaped convicts sympathetically ... but that may be down to this story being adapted from a work by Maxim Gorky. Also, in this movie's favour, the editing seemed a bit more rapid than in other Japanese movies from this period.

I sat through the second half of this film with my eyes glazed, barely following the action ... especially since there really wasn't much action. Part of my ennui might have been down to the fact that there were two simultaneous programme tracks at the Sacile festival (in two separate cinemas, at opposite ends of town), and I was somewhat exhausted at that point. However, I did manage to stay through the end of this film, yet it seemed to me that I'd missed the resolutions of several subplots. I compared notes with several other people who had attended the same screening; all of them assured me that, indeed, those plot points were well and truly left unresolved in the movie. So I hadn't nodded off, then. Might this perhaps be an incomplete print, with scenes missing? Apparently not. Evidently, the film-makers just never got round to finishing their story.

I try to be generous to movies from cultures radically different from my own, as I want to make absolutely certain that I'm not misjudging them due to cultural shortcomings of my own. In this case, though, I feel confident to say that this movie is boring and poorly made. My rating is just 4 out of 10, and I'm likely being generous.

I first heard about SOULS ON THE ROAD from Donald Richie's seminal book 100 YEARS OF JAPANESE FILM. It's one of a precious few pre-WWII Japanese films to still exist. It's not exactly a great movie in and of itself-- outside of those interested in film history, I cannot see any other enthusiastic audience for it. In its day, it was groundbreaking for presenting actual actresses in female roles, rather than the more traditional use of men in drag, and it was considered a benchmark for cinematic realism.

Today, the film plays as a riff on DW Griffith's pastoral films like THE GREATEST QUESTION. There's extensive use of parallel editing in the Griffith mode. One of the heroines looks like a cross between Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, and that's hardly the only western influence. The opening and closing titles quote Maxim Gorky, the Russian writer, and the characters celebrate Christmas.

The story is sentimental and sometimes hard to follow (this latter problem might stem from the translation of the intertitles I had to work with). I wasn't always sure what the characters' motivations were either. I would be lying if I said the film wasn't something of a drag. However, as a historical curiosity, it's worth 80 minutes.

Let us imagine you are someone from Japan who enjoys a lot of different films. You like American films, and have seen several hundred of them, mostly westerns, but only about twenty made before 1945. You've seen almost all the pictures that Frank Capra directed from 1928 on, one non-Capra drama from 1926 -- let us say, FLESH AND THE DEVIL -- and enjoyed it, thinking it full of weird and wonderful images, and then you are confronted with a melodrama from 1921. I submit you may like it or not like it, but you have little context to understand whether it is good or bad, either innately or for the year 1921. It might be Ingram's FOUR HORSEMAN OF THE APOCALYPSE or it might be an utter piece of hackwork.

Well, that's my problem with SOULS ON THE ROAD. I like Japanese films, but more than half of them have been Samurai flicks. I have seen a about ten of Ozu's silent films and one silent drama from 1926. So what can I tell you about this movie?

I can tell you that, by and large, I thought it interesting, but the style of acting is not something I can comment on. Characters' motivations are not clear -- the main character has suffered a nervous breakdown, but we're not sure of the pressures that led to it -- and they maintain their positions until something drastic happens. People do things for the sake of the plot, seemingly to illustrate the story's moral, not because of who they are. Perhaps to a Japanese audience of 1921, motivations and actions would be clearer.

Is it a good movie? Is it a good movie for a 1921 Japanese production? I don't know. I enjoyed it, but in large part I enjoyed it because it helps fill in a little of my background of Japanese films. I have a somewhat academic appreciation of early film and can spend hours pleasurably looking at Zecca experiments in scene changes or industrial films of Westinghouse factories.

You probably can not .... but then, you're reading this review, are you not?