E-Mail This Article to a Friend Radical will Susan Sontag’s ‘Favorite’ Japanese films at the MFA BY CHRIS FUJIWARA

This eight-film series has acquired a new title since it was first shown in January at the Japan Society in New York, where it was called, less positively, "Critic’s Choice: Susan Sontag on Japanese Film." Whether or not these are in fact Sontag’s favorite Japanese films (that seems in doubt: the renowned critic, novelist, cinephile, and Japanophile told Dave Kehr of the New York Times that only three films from her original list made the final cut), the selection shows consistency. Two themes run through the films: the sufferings of women and the trauma of World War II. Several of the films combine emotional power with social commitment in a manner that seems uniquely characteristic of Japanese cinema during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s.

The earliest film in the series, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sisters of Gion (1936; September 10 at 5:30 p.m., with Sontag present to introduce it, and September 27 at 10:30 a.m.), is one of the director’s masterpieces. It explores the condition of women through a story of two sisters, both geisha, living in the Gion district of Kyoto. The elder, Umekichi (Yoko Umemura), follows the old geisha code by supporting her bankrupt former patron. The younger, Omocha (Isuzu Yamada), uses men for her benefit; as she reminds Umekichi, "Men turn us into playthings. They’re our enemies. We should make them pay and pay." Mizoguchi organizes the swift, tight, but complex narrative into a series of long takes across which the moral values of the story waver and shift. He presents Umekichi’s devotion as irrational and the infatuation of Omocha’s male admirer as destructive; the film condemns not Omocha’s egotism and quest for economic gain but rather the value system that condemns them in her because of her gender.

No Regrets for Our Youth (1946; September 11 at 2 p.m. and September 20 at 11:30 a.m.), one of Akira Kurosawa’s best films, chronicles the fortunes of a professor, his family, and two of his students under Japanese fascism in the 1930s and 1940s. After the university dismisses her father for radicalism, and as she watches her fellow students compromise their ideals to get ahead, the professor’s daughter, Yukie (the luminous Setsuko Hara), becomes convinced that she needs a cause to which she can commit body and soul. The film breaks into two sections; the latter, as the widowed Yukie volunteers for the terrible rigors of peasant life beside her disgraced husband’s parents, is more characteristic of later Kurosawa, with its visual ferocity and its emphasis on sacrifice and suffering. Kurosawa’s early-career experimentalism shows above all in his direction of Hara: her anguished postures and her darting, lunging movements, defying naturalism, express a "radical will" (to borrow a famous phrase from Sontag) to expressive clarity.

Keisuke Kinoshita’s Twenty-Four Eyes (1954; September 14 at 12:30 p.m. and September 18 at 3:10 p.m.), one of the most popular Japanese films of its era, shares with No Regrets for Our Youth a chronicle structure, and the two films cover the same era. But Twenty-Four Eyes is more sweeping, both in its embrace of a group of characters (12 residents of a small village on Japan’s inland sea, whom we follow from childhood to adulthood) and in linking their destinies to Japan’s militarism. "She’s awfully modern," notes a schoolgirl on first seeing the village’s new teacher, Miss Oishi (Hideko Takamine), ride by on a bicycle wearing a Western-style suit. Miss Oishi’s modernity arouses the hostility of the villagers, but her cheerfulness and dedication make her a heroine to her 12 first-grade students, to whom she will be bound for life.

The prevalence of extreme long shots and the emphasis on the passage of time link Kinoshita’s film to another moving classic about children and teachers, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. Both films quickly make clear their social commitments. Miss Oishi’s pacifism draws suspicion in a society where teachers must prepare their students to serve the war machine. In one sequence, she finds that a former pupil, pulled from school by her father, now works as a waitress. After a hasty meeting that’s disturbed by the insistent presence of the grubby restaurant owner, Kinoshita’s camera discovers the girl weeping alone on the shore while watching her old friends depart on their excursion boat. Later, Miss Oishi talks with a girl whose parents, for economic reasons, force her to drop out of school. The two discuss the girl’s prospects: at 16, she can work for a dressmaker; at 18, she can be a maid in Osaka. "And then you’ll marry," Miss Oishi says. "Yes, you’ll marry. Just like your mother did." Throughout the film, Miss Oishi’s idealism conflicts with the recognition of the limited prospects reality offers young people. Although sentimental (notably in its use of music), Twenty-Four Eyes is finally less reassuring than No Regrets for Our Youth, and Kinoshita’s portrait of Japanese society seems more rooted in social reality.

Hideko Takamine, Kinoshita’s Miss Oishi, is the unofficial star of the series, appearing in three films. In Heinosuke Gosho’s Where Chimneys Are Seen (1953; September 13 at 2 p.m. and September 18 at 1 p.m.), she plays a member of one of two middle-class couples who share a small house in an industrial section of Tokyo. When a baby is abandoned in the apartment of one of the couples, the other couple come to their aid, tracking down the baby’s parents and helping fight to save her when she falls sick. In an undidactic and relaxed manner, and through startling shifts in tone, the film poses a conflict between the lethargy that has overtaken the post-war Japanese spirit and the sense of shared responsibility that Japan must summon in order to rouse itself. Where Chimneys Are Seen reveals a major stylist in Gosho: he creates a rich interplay of movement, light, and shadow; and the film’s generosity, and its concern with the practicalities of living arrangements, recalls the contemporary films of another underrated artist, Jacques Becker.

In Mikio Naruse’s excellent Floating Clouds (1955; September 14 at 3:30 p.m. and September 25 at 1:30 p.m.), Takamine gives a tour-de-force performance as Yukiko, a poor woman who amid the chaos of Japan in the immediate-post-war period obsessively tries to resume her wartime affair with the weak-willed, married Tomioka (Masayuki Mori). "Walking together, we look like man and wife," Yukiko notes at one point, illuminating a motif in the film, which she spends trying to get Tomioka to recognize her as real while he persists in thinking of her as a memory from the past. Behind the squareness with which Naruse views his characters, complexity gathers. Although Naruse, like Mizoguchi, blames men for women’s suffering, some of the deepest insights in Floating Clouds have to do with Yukiko’s perverse conspiracy with men to make herself a victim.

Nagisa Oshima’s Death by Hanging (1968; September 17 at 5:30 p.m. and September 27 at noon) can be seen as an ironic justification of capital punishment (along the lines of Thomas De Quincey’s "Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts") in the form of a fantasy in which society (represented by officials responsible for managing the death chamber) tries to persuade a convicted rapist and murderer, who’s known as "R," that it has the right to kill him. The stages in R’s awareness of his own case and in his capacity to see it in the same terms that society does are marked by Brechtian intertitles that announce the action of each part of the film: "R Acknowledges the Existence of R," "R Tries To Be R," and so forth.

By making the condemned man a Korean, Oshima links the critique of capital punishment with an attack on Japanese racism and imperialism. This strategy could be seen as loading the issue and weakening the force of the director’s argument. But it becomes clear that the rhetorical manner of Death by Hanging is deceptive and that Oshima is uninterested in using rational argument to sway the pro-death members of his audience. (An opening title announces that, according to a then-recent poll, 71 percent of Japanese opposed abolishing the death penalty.) As the officials and R get caught up in their re-creation of R’s life, the film becomes a sometimes farcical exercise in dream logic, which spreads from the abstract space of the death house to the reality of streets, industrial buildings, and riverbanks (where, in a startling moment, R pauses to meow at a cat), culminating in the ghostly apparition of R’s sister. If Oshima’s style marks a radical break with Japanese film tradition, it remains, as this series shows, continuous with that tradition — in exposing injustice, attacking prejudice, and giving a central role to the figure of the victim.