Intersections of Japanese Art and Film

The Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle is a reasonable collection, of Edwardian origin, of local and national decorative arts. Seemingly bereft of an international perspective, the collection's native art illustrates, according to Mark Fisher (Britain's Best Museums and Galleries, Penguin, 2004) 'how impervious painting in Britain has been to foreign influences'. Fisher's piece on the gallery lists many of its significant holdings, but makes no mention of the wondrous sample of the visual culture of Japan's Edo period that is the basis of an ongoing exhibition (entitled Japanese Wave). The artworks, many of them woodblock prints, are largely from the bequeathed private collection of a Newcastle merchant, A.H. Higginbottom, who had an enthusiasm for the traditional arts of Japan, as was quite common in the late nineteenth century. Higginbottom, however, amassed an exceptionally rich cluster of art and artefacts: here there are landscapes (such as examples of Hiroshige's Fifty Three Stations on the Tokaido), depictions of kabuki theatre and its actors, and images of geisha.

Those interested in the classical era of Japanese cinema and especially in the proliferation of jidaigeki (historical film) will find a great deal to stimulate them here and I would strongly recommend a vist before the exhibition ends on 5 September. The focus, however, is less on the world of samurai and swordplay most often brought to mind by the popular Japanese cinema of the chanbara genre, than in the the representation of the 'floating world' - the pleasure-seeking, middle-class urban culture of the Edo period, of which many of the everyday customs perpetuated into twentieth century (indeed, Kazuo Ishiguro's excellent second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, concerns an old Japanese painter looking back on his life after the Second World War and noticing how attitudes and traditions have changed in his society).

In particular, I was fascinated by Kitagawa Utamaro's sequence of woodprints depicting 'Women Working in Silk Culture', wherein courtesan beauties are seen to process silk (shown above, right). The lives of the female models and their relationship with the artist is the subject of Mizoguchi's 1947 film Utamaro and His Five Women, a work that is significant for the cross-currents in which it was made: Mizoguchi was greatly enthused by the subject matter, having trained as a painter himself and being naturally drawn to the oppression of women, but was working within the restrictive circumstances of the American Occupation (see http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/03/25/utamaro.html).

There are several other points of connection with 20th century Japanese cinema within the exhibition, even to my untrained eye. The display notices (sadly there is no accompanying catalogue) at the Laing informs us that the kabuki theatre 'embodied both the escapism and extravagance of Edo's ukiyo (i.e the. floating world)' and it is this essence of performative fantasy that is central to one of the post-war classics of Japanese film, Kon Ichikawa's An Actor's Revenge (1962). I was driven to an immediate re-watch of Ichikawa's stupedously rich and beautiful widescreen project. One of the most visually daring films ever made (I'd strongly recommend Ian Breakwell's BFI Modern Classic monograph), it also boasts one of the screen's most powerful perfomances, with the veteran Kazuo Hasegawa reprising a role he had played three decades previously, playing a kabuki actor looking to avenge his parents' suicides. The actor is a female impersonator (onnagata), a familiar role of the time for, just as boys took female parts in Renaissance theatre in England, lavishly garmented and made-up men stood in for women on the kabuki stage, rendering a symbolic ideal of feminine beauty, especially the face. Two of the portraits in the Laing exhibition depict actors who specialised in such roles, with Utagawa Kunisada's woodblock of Onoe Kikujiro II being especially evocative.

The above notes represent my immediate impressions after a visit to the gallery; others who are better versed in Japanese visual representation will no doubt find a variety of other, equally rewarding lines of inquiry. Those wishing to pursue the links between film and older Japanese graphic traditions are advised to check out the sumptuous Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Visual Arts and Cinema of China and Japan (edited by Linda C. Ehrlich and David Desser, University of Texas, 1994).