Monday Morning Foreign-Region DVD Report: "Hiroshi Shimizu Film Collection Volume One: Landscape"

At a sym­posi­um on films and film cri­ti­cism held last fall in Brookline, Massachusetts, the great crit­ic and essay­ist Phillip Lopate, in the middle of an elo­quent and inar­gu­ably cor­rect dis­quis­i­tion against nar­ciss­ist­ic ’70s nos­tal­gia and for a film his­tory that priv­ileges beauty and integ­rity over “edge,” allowed that he now pre­ferred films that had “some­thing to do with human­ity” to any oth­er pic­tures. While fully respect­ing that per­spect­ive, the genre aes­thete in me had to raise a hand in favor of putat­ive genre form­al­ists (I think Mario Bava came up). 

Which is not to say I object to pic­tures that have some­thing to do with human­ity. I just like films that offer some­thing to do with human­ity in ways I haven’t seen. And it’s true that such films can be found in all periods—but alas, these days, you’re more likely to find the most elo­quent and start­ling expres­sions and explor­a­tions of human­ity in the films of the past. Such as, say, Toni, the Renoir pic­ture released by Masters of Cinema and fea­tur­ing a com­ment­ary by Phillip and Kent Jones, which I reviewed here.

All of which is a round­about way of offer­ing an unqual­i­fied recom­mend­a­tion for this first box set of the work of Japanese dir­ect­or Hiroshi Shizumi, who lived from 1903 to 1966, dir­ec­ted for 1924 to 1957, was admired by Ozu and Mizoguchi, loved to take his cam­era on the road instead of set­ting it down in a studio…and who seemed to live to provide notes and images of human­ity that always sur­prised with both their truth and artistry. 

The shot repro­duced above, for example, depict­ing the frank and beguil­ing gaze of a woman played by Takamine Meiko, is a point of view shot, or should be. Only in the reverse angle, the per­son whose point of view this should be is a blind man, the young mas­seuse Toku (Saburu Shin). The blind mas­seuse is fas­cin­ated by this woman from Tokyo, and as the sur­round­ing moun­tain resorts where he works are robbed, he sadly puts two and two togeth­er, with unfor­tu­nate res­ults. The storyline of the 1938 Anma to Onna (The Blind Masseurs and the Woman) has a remark­ably brisk pace, espe­cially giv­en that none of its putat­ive action is actu­ally depic­ted onscreen—no rob­ber­ies, for instance. What are onscreen instead are moments like the above—startling, mov­ing, pictori­ally gor­geous glimpses of…humanity.

The oth­er films in this first volume of gor­geously pack­aged, fant­ast­ic­ally presen­ted (yes, there are English titles) works are the equally knock-your-block-off 1936 Mr. Thank You, 1941’s Ornamental Hairpin, and the del­ic­ate 1933 silent Japanese Girls at the Harbor. The box’s theme is land­scape; chil­dren provide the theme for the upcom­ing Volume Two. The English lan­guage lit­er­at­ure on Shimizu is sparse but grow­ing, but film lov­ers won’t need any of it to recog­nize a mas­ter; he’s worth get­ting to know feet-first, as it were.