Trevor Steele Taylor
A FILM by the master of the “transcendental style”, Yasujiro Ozu, is one of the principal attractions of the Japanese Film Festival, at Johannesburg’s Rosebank
Equinox Flower (1958), Ozu’s first colour film, is an examination of the stringent codes of morality that exist in Japanese society. A corporate businessman finds himself torn between his support for a friend’s daughter, who flouts convention to live with her lover, and his resistance to his own daughter’s desire to marry.
Akira Kurosawa, probably Japan’s best-known director, is represented by two films: Doomed (To Live) and Red Beard. The former, made in 1942, is the touching story of a municipal worker who discovers he has cancer. He gives up his job and devotes himself to reclaiming a swamp, in order to build a children’s park.
Essentially an epic director, Kurosawa has often been compared with Britain’s David Lean. Both Doomed and Red Beard (about a doctor working in a 19th-century clinic for the poor) have more intimate subjects than the films for which he is renowned: the samurai productions The Seven Samurai and Kagamusha.
Another of Japan’s filmic greats is Kon Ichikawa. At the festival he is represented by the 1988 production, Tsuru, a folkloric tale about a beautiful girl who arrives one night at the home of a peasant and offers herself to him in marriage.
Among the 16 titles there is also a Ken Ogata thriller, Rainbow Kids (1991); a pair of films by the most popular director in Japan, Yoji Yamada — The Yellow Handkerchief and Tora San; and an intimate look at Sumo wrestling, Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t.
The Japanese Film Festival runs until September 28; miraculously, admission to all shows is free. Phone the cinema at (011) 880-2866/7 for details