These Japanese directors have already been presented in earlier programs of Japanese films organized in collaboration with the Japanese Foundation and the Embassy of Japan in Zagreb. The main characteristic of this year’s program is the pastiche melodrama or in memoriam of melodrama



Two scenes were shot on the coast in the autumn of 1908. Director and cinematographer Kichizo Chiba shot the film My Sin, one of the first adaptations of a shimpa melodrama featuring the star of the Shimpa theatre troupe Nobuchika Nakano, who later reminisced: “Yoshizawa Shokai suggested that we film our shimpa play. At the time, the longest format was 1000 feet so we decided to film two scenes each of 500 or 600 feet. One scene showed an episode on the beach and the other the drowning of two boys. I arranged with a local fire squad to lift poles on the beach for us and we stretched a curtain between them. That way, we could lift the curtain and show the beach and the drama taking place… We got dressed and took our places behind the curtain. Then we heard the sound of applause. It came from a group of observers who patiently waited for the curtain to lift. We heard our cinematographer Chiba moaning. He did not know how to film the “moving people”. The scene of two boys drowning was shot at Enoshima. The boys were so terrified that they refused to go into the water. They yelled and did not want to let go of the rocks. We had to force them to play their parts. Finally we did get our film done.”
The two beach scenes, one at Katase and Enoshima, were shown separately in two films My Sin 1 and 2 with a dialogue (kowairo) and musical (narimono) background. By 1957, Japanese film industry had made twenty-five film adaptations of the original melodramatic model (for a theatre play and film), the novel with the same title by Yuha Kikuchi. The 1927 version was directed by Kenji Mizoguchi.
These two scenes announced Takeshi Kitano’s film about surfing without waves and urged to think about the melos without melodrama or the melodrama as the most enduring characteristic of Japanese film. Officially, melodrama as a genre does not exist in Japan anymore. In the beginning of the 20th century a new word, merodorama, entered Japanese film jargon, influenced by the early European and American melodramas. Consequently, the modus of melodramatic imagination of Japanese art forms in earlier different historical and social contexts began to get a new name.

Film historians emphasize the influence of early American Blue Bird Photoplays on the dominant Japanese genre of contemporary themes and its more popular variances of social and family melodrama, which, since 1920, with their pronounced symbolization of everyday life and “laughter through tears” (nakiwarai), reflected the contradictions of modernity and critical moments of Japanese society: tension between colonizers and those who got colonized before the war, post-war conflict of the individual and collective, national and transnational and the problem of globalization. From the “real” Japanese melodrama about life misses sure chigai, through the anti-melodrama of Yasuza Masumura, Yoshishige Yoshida, Koji Wakamatsu, Nagisa Oshima, which represents a radical critique of the ideology of the “victim’s syndrome” and “subjective will”, which is promoted by the Japanese melodrama, all the way to contemporary forms of nostalgic evoking of melodramas, we discover the melodramatic modus of existence in the changing esthetic and political-economic circumstances.

These Japanese directors have already been presented in earlier programs of Japanese films organized in collaboration with the Japanese Foundation and the Embassy of Japan in Zagreb. The main characteristic of this year’s program is the pastiche melodrama or in memoriam of melodrama. We directly reminisce about it in the most peaceful film by Takeshi Kitano, then in contemporary versions of melodrama suge chigai about substitute and other lives in Kazuo Kuroki and Junji Sakamoto’s films, and in the unbelievable genre mutation by Hideo Nakata, whose mountain “fever” combines film of catastrophe (the biggest airplane crash in history) and journalistic film with the melodramatic sensibility of mountain films and westerns. Before WW II, its inventor Arnold Fanck did not succeed in transfering the “escapist fever” of German mountain film to Japan. Instead we recall the mountain delirium of Yasuza Masumura’s modernist anti-melodrama A Wife Confesses (Tsuma wa kokuhaku suru) from 1961, about how to liberate yearning in a mutually dependent society.

After the 1970s, melodrama was unintentional. It remains to be seen if it will ever again be done consciously and contribute to the restoration of historical awareness, as the film historian Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto said. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Japanese film, Nagisa Oshima announced a new era of pure film liberated of Japanese charm, and it seems that the reason for the most recent popularity of Japanese film in our country is its somewhat different take on “normal” (American) film. Whether by intention or not, directors of Japanese films in this program melodramatically reminisce about Japanese film.