Kinuyo Tanaka: From Great Actor to Trailblazing Director | Criterion Spotlight

0:10 Kenya Tanaka was quite simply one of the great

0:13 actors in the history of world cinema.

0:16 But people may or may not know that she also directed films

0:29 and that her works stand out among the finest of mid-century Japanese cinema.

0:39 In the early 1950s, Tanaka was at a turning point.

0:42 She had appeared in almost every kind of movie as an actor

0:47 in a career that started when she

0:49 was 14 and eventually encompassed around 250 films.

0:55 She was in her early 40s and she was starting

0:57 to age out of the leading roles she had been playing.

1:01 Also, in 1949, Tanaka had made a goodwill tour to the United States.

1:07 However, when she returned to Japan,

1:10 she was harshly criticized in the press who accused

1:14 her of coming back Americanized and of betraying and embarrassing her country.

1:20 She was deeply upset by this.

1:23 And yet, she emerged from a very difficult

1:26 emotional period determined to make the leap into directing.

1:36 1953 when Tanaka directed her first film was

1:40 one year after the end of the American

1:42 occupation of Japan which had radically changed

1:46 Japanese society in a lot of ways.

1:49 The Constitution imposed by the United States gave Japanese women

1:53 the right to vote and established their equality under the law.

1:58 And Tanaka cited this moment as an inspiration

2:01 for her to try doing something new.

2:04 There was not a single female director working in Japan

2:08 and only one Japanese woman before her, Tazuko Sakane,

2:12 had ever attempted to make films.

2:14 Over the next 9 years, Tanaka directed six features.

2:19 Almost all of them center on women,

2:22 but they cover an amazing range from light romantic comedy to tragic melodrama.

2:31 From black and white contemporary social problem films

2:38 to sumptuous period films in color and widescreen.

2:49 The first film she directed, Love Letter,

2:52 takes on a sensitive and potentially controversial topic,

2:57 namely the many Japanese women who had

3:00 relationships with American GIS and the struggle

3:03 of Japanese men to cope with the humiliation of defeat and occupation.

3:09 This was a bold subject for her to tackle,

3:12 especially in light of the criticism she had received.

3:23 The film talks very squarely about the hardships and losses of the war.

3:31 Love letter was shown and wellreceived at the Can Film Festival

3:34 in 1954 and Tanaka got a lot of attention as a woman director.

3:40 Tanaka was working for big studios

3:43 with fairly substantial budgets and major stars.

3:47 Her status as one of the most beloved actors

3:50 in Japan undoubtedly helped her get a lot of these opportunities,

3:54 but it also meant that she had very high visibility and a lot at stake.

3:59 For instance, the trailer for her last film,

4:01 Love Under the Crucifix, includes behind the scenes footage of her directing,

4:06 which shows how much interest there was in her as a unique figure.

4:16 Kinot Tanaka had support from some of the filmmakers she had worked for.

4:21 Mickey Onad employed her as his assistant for a few months in 1953 so

4:27 that she could learn the craft before she started working on her first film.

4:32 And the screenplay for that film, Love Letter, was written by Kais Kinoita,

4:37 one of the directors she had worked with most often.

4:41 The screenplay for her second film,

4:43 The Moon Has Risen, was written by Yasuajiro Ozu.

4:48 Sad to say, one person who spoke out

4:51 against her transition to directing was Kenji Mizaguchi,

4:55 whose films had often portrayed the oppression of Japanese women.

5:00 He apparently went so far as to try

5:02 to have her black balled from joining the director's guild,

5:06 but she was not deterred and they did

5:10 continue to work together after she moved into directing.

5:20 Starting with her third film, Forever a Woman,

5:23 Tanaka began collaborating with other women artists.

5:27 Both Forever a Woman and Girls of the Night have screenplays by Sumier Tanaka,

5:32 no relation to the director.

5:34 She was one of the most successful female screenwriters working in Japan.

5:38 Tanaka's fourth film, The Wandering Princess,

5:41 also has a screenplay written by a woman, Nato Wada,

5:45 and several of her films are based either on the lives

5:48 of real historical women or on novels by women authors.

5:54 Her last film, Love Under the Crucifix,

5:56 was made for an independent production company called

5:59 Nin Kurabu that had been founded by three actresses,

6:03 Yoshikokuga, Koko Kishi, and Inko Aria.

6:07 all of whom acted in Tanaka's films.

6:10 So there was a network of support

6:13 and collaboration among women in the film industry,

6:16 an industry in which they were and continued

6:19 for a long time to be under reppresented in creative roles.

6:27 One of the things that's remarkable about Tanaka's relatively small body

6:31 of work is that some of her mentors like Ozu and Naray

6:36 were strongly associated with one type of film and worked for long

6:41 periods at a single studio with the same group of actors.

6:45 Whereas Tanaka seems to be trying something new in each of her films.

6:50 She worked for most of the major studios

6:52 in Japan and with a lot of different actors.

6:55 This diversity may make it harder to pin her down as a director,

7:00 but it echoes the diversity of roles she had played.

7:04 You get a sense of her curiosity and appetite

7:08 to take on new challenges and explore different subjects.

7:12 Her masterpiece undoubtedly is Forever a Woman from 1955.

7:18 It's based on the life of the Tonka poet

7:21 Fumiko Nakajo and it depicts her battle with breast

7:25 cancer with a frankness that was unprecedented and that would

7:30 have been unthinkable in Hollywood at the time.

7:42 But it's also about a woman's emergence as an artist

7:46 and a portrait of a protagonist who is complicated and contradictory

7:52 and fully human in a way that all too few

7:56 female characters in cinema have been at any time or place.

8:09 Fair warning, it is a film whose ending could ring tears from a stone,

8:14 but I think it is well worth it.

8:21 Some of the directors that Tanaka worked with most often as an actor,

8:26 such as Mizaguchi and Nar were particularly known for women centered dramas.

8:32 So, it's interesting to compare her treatment of similar material with theirs.

8:38 For instance, her 1961 film Girls of the Night is

8:42 a kind of companion piece to Mizaguchi's Street of Shame from 1956.

8:49 Both films deal with the passage of a 1957 law outlawing prostitution in Japan.

8:55 But while Mizuchi's looks at the last days of legal brothel,

9:00 Tanaka's later film follows women who are trying to rebuild their lives after

9:06 leaving sex work and the social

9:10 and practical and psychological challenges they face.

9:25 It's a collective portrait that captures

9:28 a diversity of responses and relationships

9:32 among these women and also an individual portrait of one woman's journey.

9:50 It's a hard but ultimately hopeful look at the possibility

9:55 of change both in society and for individuals.

10:03 In terms of their visual style,

10:04 Tanaka's films range from neo realalism to heightened artifice.

10:15 Love under the crucifix conveys the extreme formality

10:19 of the feudal era and the highly composed

10:22 aesthetic of the tea ceremony while also using

10:26 rich saturated color suitable for a heated melodrama.

10:31 Tanaka also has certain stylistic signatures.

10:35 In traditional Japanese interiors, doors and windows slide open horizontally,

10:41 and she often uses the opening and closing of shoji screens

10:45 like a wipe to reveal or conceal a scene from the camera.

10:51 This becomes a recurring motif in Forever a Woman where

10:54 the protagonist is constantly seen framed by doors or windows

11:00 or barred gates underscoring the way that she is trapped

11:05 literally framed in social expectations

11:09 and conventional narratives of gallant sacrifice.

11:15 But the opening and closing of doors also serves to heighten

11:20 our awareness of what we can and can't know about other people.

11:25 About halfway through Love Letter,

11:27 there's a momentous reunion at a train station between a man and woman

11:31 who've lost touch for many years during the war and meet again by chance.

11:37 And just as they come face to face on the station platform,

11:42 a train door slides closed and we realize

11:45 that the camera has moved back into the train car.

11:48 And the movement of the train then carries us into a flashback that fills

11:54 in their past together and shifts us

11:57 from the man's into the woman's perspective.

12:00 It's a thrilling moment where you're suddenly aware of being

12:04 in the hands of someone with a truly cinematic vision.

12:09 Similarly, there are a lot of close-ups in her films,

12:13 but there are also scenes where,

12:15 especially at particularly intense, emotional moments,

12:20 she uses long shots of people walking or has

12:24 actors turned away from the camera as though intentionally giving

12:29 the characters space and relying on compositions to subtly convey

12:35 what they are feeling rather than relying on the actor's emoting,

12:40 which is a particularly interesting choice for an actor turned director to make.

12:48 Tanaka directed some of the biggest stars in Japan at the time,

12:53 including Machikoko and Tatsuya Nakadai.

12:57 Some veteran actors with very familiar faces appear in her films,

13:02 including many that she had shared the screen with.

13:05 Masayyuki Mori, her co-star from Mizuguchi's Ugetsu,

13:10 is the star of her first film, Love Letter.

13:13 And Chishiru, who anchored so many of Ozu's films,

13:17 he was a kind of institution, plays a similar role in The Moon Has Risen.

13:22 It's not surprising that the performances in her films are uniformly excellent,

13:28 and some of the best ones are by actors who may be less familiar to people.

13:34 Yummeuk Kiyoka in Forever a Woman and Chisakohara in Girls

13:38 of the Night are both excellent in really meaty roles.

13:52 Tanaka herself appears in each of her first three films

13:56 and she casts herself in very small and humble roles.

14:08 There's often an element of comedy in these appearances

14:18 and she disarmingly presents herself very modestly in films

14:22 where she is also the presiding creative spirit.

14:32 The qualities of the films that she directed are often

14:36 similar to the qualities that she had as an actress.

14:40 A natural warmth, honesty,

14:43 emotional openness alongside an awareness of social masks and expectations.

14:51 Her cinema can certainly be called women- centered,

14:54 but it's also really human centered.

14:58 Tanaka liked to say that she chose to marry

15:01 cinema to explain why she had never had a family.

15:05 And this phrase conveys the commitment that she had

15:08 to movies and how much of herself she put into them.

15:20 That's good.

15:22 Good one.