Masumura Yasuzô

February 6 to 21, 2008

Yasuzô Masumura (1924-1986) is one of the major secrets of Japanese cinema: a brilliant and highly influential director who has been barely noticed in the West. Partly, this is due to his own modest attitude towards his profession: like many masters of classical Hollywood cinema, Masumura saw himself less as a "great artist" than a story-teller for a wide audience, a studio-craftsman, and a commentator on his time.

An attack against the norms and conformism of Japanese society lies at the heart of his ethic. He often used violent constellations for this purpose, utilizing figures who are teetering on the brink of insanity as well as erotic and obsessive subject matter. With two exceptions, his principal works were all created in a relatively brief period, between 1957 and 1969. The Film Museum now presents a large tribute to Masumura, including 18 pivotal works from his oeuvre

With his first films from 1957, such as Kisses, Blue Sky Maiden and Warm Current, Masumura opened a breach through which the Japanese New Wave was to swarm shortly thereafter. Nagisa Ôshima, its most prominent representative, made explicit reference to Masumura's influence on his work. In contrast to Ôshima & Co., however, the anarchist Masumura refused to play along with the ego-economy of the art industry. Despite the pleasure he derived from public polemics, he always remained a man of the studio system and, in between projects of personal interest, staged seemingly minor works which were intended to keep the company alive. The one didn't necessarily lead to the exclusion of the other: two of his best films, Black Test Car and Yakuza Soldier, were so successful that the Daiei Studio ended up making entire series of films out of them.

After such early masterpieces as the hyper-charged, cartoonlike Giants and Toys and a Yakuza film with cult author Yukio Mishima in the lead, the mid-1960's brought a quick succession of strokes of genius. From now on, there were no holds barred as Masumura broke one taboo after another, assailing the evils of capitalism in general and Japanese militarism in particular (as, for example, in Yakuza Soldier and Red Angel). His energetic female characters, who desecrate and kill with the same ease as they heal and love, gradually developed into models for a new femininty. Their roots can be traced back to the origins of Japanese civilization, to the eros of the first female shamans. Masumura's scandal-drenched adaptations of Tanizaki Junichiro's novels mark the culmination of this phase. In Manji, Irezumi and Love for an Idiot lesbian passions, femmes fatales and masochism rule.

Masumura became addicted to films when he was just a child, but ended up studying law and philosophy when he went to university. Afterwards, he became the first Japanese film student to enrol at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome (1952-54). It Italy he also published a history of Japanese cinema, the first treatise ever on the topic in a Western language. It was also a manifesto of his intentions, with Masumura inveighing against the patient suffering women à la Mizoguchi and against the "delicacy" of Japanese Realism. His own films would be entirely different: freely flowing in their movements, hip, and above all fast-paced, with a leaning towards the spectacle of sex and death – in both the most inhospitable and most unreal circumstances.

The American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who has done more for the rediscovery of the director than anyone else, feels constantly reminded of Masumura's American contemporaries Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, Frank Tashlin and Douglas Sirk – ideally: all of them together, in one and the same film.