Re: Director Hani Susumu at Yale

From: Gerow Aaron [[email protected]]

Japanese Director HANI SUSUMU
January 29-30, 2013

Please join us in welcoming Director HANi to Yale University for two-days of film screenings!

Susumu Hani is one of the central and most diverse filmmakers who set the tone for the Japanese New Wave in the late 1950s and 1960s. Outside the mainstream commercial studios, Hani and his films became a crucial force in reinventing postwar Japanese filmmaking.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 29, 2013 7:00 PM
BAD BOYS AND NEW WAVES: THE CINEMA OF HANI SUSUMU
BAD BOYS (Furyō shōnen, 1960)
Q&A to follow screening with Director HANI Susumu
Auditorium, Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street
Co-sponsored by CEAS and the Japan Foundation

Bad Boys (Furyō shōnen), 1960-1961. Japan.

Directed and scripted by Susumu Hani.
Cinematography by Manji Kanau.
Music by Tōru Takemitsu.
With Sachio Yoshida, Kōichirō Yamazaki.

Considered one of the fundamental films of Japanese New Wave, Bad Boys was voted the best Japanese film of 1961 in Kinema Junpo, outvoting Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (Yōjinbō, 1961), Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition (Ningen no jōken, 1959-1961), Nagisa Ōshima’s The Catch (Shiiku, 1961) and other titles by major filmmakers. The film portrays the inner maturation of the juvenile delinquents who were sent to a special reformatory. The protagonists, performed by actual ‘bad boys’ recruited from an actual reformatory, also created most of their own dialogues. Hani’s signature observational style to approach the spontaneity of the subjects vividly captures adolescents swinging between innocence and experience. The assistant director of the film was Noriaki Tsuchimoto, who would later become one of the most important documentary filmmakers in postwar Japan.

Courtesy Harvard Film Archive. In Japanese: English subtitles. 89 min.


WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 2013 7:15 PM
BAD BOYS AND NEW WAVES: THE CINEMA OF HANI SUSUMU
CHILDREN IN THE CLASSROOM and CHILDREN WHO DRAW
Screenings followed by a Round Table Discussion with Director HANI Susumu
Auditorium, Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall Street
Co-sponsored by CEAS and the Japan Foundation

Children in the Classroom (Kyōshitsu no kodomotachi), 1954. Japan. Directed and scripted by Susumu Hani. Cinematography by Shizuo Komura.

Hani considers this educational film as his directorial debut. Sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Children in the Classroom was initially designed to be a tutorial film that would demonstrate how to discipline troubled children. However, employing uniquely observational methods to film real children in a real school, the film brought a decisive change in the history of documentary cinema in Japan. Hani’s sensational debut as a so-called vérité documentarist in fact predates its Anglo-European counterparts, i.e., direct cinema in the United States and cinema vérité in France. Beyond the rhetoric of objectivity, his exhaustive and masterful use of close-ups in the film cinematically interrogates the inner world of the subjects he filmed. The film stunned entire documentary and educational film circuits in Japan, and Hani, just turned 26 that year, came to represent a new breed of filmmaker.

Courtesy Japan Foundation. In Japanese: English subtitles. 30 min.

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Children Who Draw (E o kaku kodomotachi), 1955. Japan. Directed and scripted by Susumu Hani. Cinematography by Shizuo Komura. Music by Norihiko Wada.

Shot as the sequel of Children in the Classroom, the film captures actual school children interacting in an art class in a similar fashion to his previous work. Constantly juxtaposing seemingly objective portrayal of children in black and white with their paintings in vivid color, this time Hani experiments with the color technology to engage with the interiority of the individuals he filmed. The camera in Children Who Draw also roams freely across the drawings laid out as if their frames are removed for a deeper psychological investigation reminiscent of Alain Resnais’s Guernica (1950). Hani’s camera, ‘de-framing’ the paintings, reflects the filmmaker’s subjective gaze. The film, originally planned to be an educational film to study child’s psychology through their paintings, eventually distributed nationwide through Toho and Nikkatsu studios.

Courtesy Japan Foundation. In Japanese: English subtitles. 38 min.

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ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION

Panelists:
Director HANI Susumu
Dudley Andrew (Yale University)
Roland Domenig (University of Vienna/Meiji Gakuin University)
Aaron Gerow (Yale University)
Charles Musser (Yale University)

Moderator: Takuya Tsunoda (Yale University)