By Chris Fujiwara
Hiroshi Shimizu was one of the most distinctive and
interesting directors of the golden age of Japanese cinema, and remains one of
the most underrated. Shimizu was born in 1903, the same year as Yasujiro Ozu
and two years before Mikio Naruse. Like both Ozu and Naruse, Shimizu began his
career in the silent era at Shochiku studios. Most of his more than 160 films
are now lost, but enough of his oeuvre remains that it is possible to identify
a Shimizu style. This is based on exploring the unity of a complex space
through forward and backward camera movement, and through cutting on the
180-degree axis. This style is firmly recognizable by the mid-1930s, the period
of such masterpieces as Mr. Thank You (1936), A Star Athlete (1937), Forget
Love for Now (1937),Masseurs and a Woman (1938), and the film now under
consideration, Children in the Wind (1937).
Children in the Wind reveals not only Shimizu’s characteristic
visual style, but two of his constant preoccupations: physical journey as
self-testing and self-discovery, and the problems and pleasures of children.
The film is based on a 1936 novel by Joji Tsubota, a well-known writer of
children’s literature praised for the naturalism with which he portrayed
children who observe and are affected by the difficulties faced by their
parents. The two young heroes of Children in the Wind, brothers Zenta and
Sanpei, reappear in Tsubota’s 1937 follow-up novel, Four Seasons of Childhood,
which was also filmed by Shimizu in 1939.
Under Shimizu’s direction, the performances of the children
in Children in the Wind are excellent. Yet it is not their personalities which
leave the strongest impression, but rather the presence and movement of their
bodies in space. The early parts of the film feature numerous wide shots
through which children run, completely harmonized with the space and completely
free in it. Later in the film, during Sanpei’s ordeal of being separated from his
family, the vastness of space becomes a sign of loneliness. One of the most
striking scenes shows Sanpei playing alone forlornly in a courtyard, as three
successive shots, filmed from the same camera setup and linked by dissolves,
bring the boy closer and closer to the camera.
In The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, Joseph L. Anderson
and Donald Richie, noting that Shimizu was a leader in a trend of films about
children in Japanese cinema of the late 1930s, observe aptly, “It is perhaps
ironic that this opening of the world of childhood should have occurred just at
the time when Japan itself was again closing up for a state of protracted war.”
Warning signs of this closing are visible inChildren in the Wind: there are
several appearances of the Hinomaru, the national flag, a symbol of Japan’s
militarisation; and in the final scene, the children run off to follow a
parade. This parade publicizes a circus and has no overt military or patriotic
purpose, but it resonates disquietingly in the mind after the end title, with
the knowledge of the national mass movement that Japan’s children were, in
1937, already being compelled to join.
Source: cinemaofchildhood.com
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