I know this film for more than 30 years
and I learned to love it a lot. But I remember that I hesitated a lot
with my love during the first watching of this film and other films
by Yamada as well. I was used to appreciate the formal strictness of
the films by Yasujiro Ozu and for some time I considered Yamada´s
concept a kind of anti concept to Ozu´s every day stories. Yes, I even
felt at the beginning disturbed by Yamada´s seemingly unarrested use
of melodrama. Today I am an unconditional admirer of Yoji Yamada,
mostly his films he made between his successful Tora-san Series (that
among the Tora-san films are as well some masterpiece is a subject of
its own).
Recently I saw Kazoku again and I became aware of the
reasons for my earlier misunderstanding of this film (and a couple of other
masterpieces made by him in the same decade). First thing which came to my
mind was the discovery that reality and melodrama are , at least in
this period of Yamadas work, in a very complex and dynamic
relationship. There is of course the melodramatic forced fiction but
equally there are a lot of glimpses and hints to Japanese reality of
the 1970s, especially to working class realities.
The film and this
is typical for Yamada´s other masterpieces like Kokyo (Home From the
Sea, 1971), Harakara (The Village, 1975) and Shiwase no kiroi no
hankachi (the yellow Handkerchief (1977). There is in these films (how
could I have ignored that?) an obvious documentary element. For a long
time I considered him - even after I began to love his films- as a seducer,
a master of feel good movies. But in fact Yamada always leaves the choice to us. You can be absorbed by the melodramatic element, you can be
moved by the story of a christian miner family who travels all the
way by train from the south of Japan to the less populated North of
Hokkaido to begin a new life as farmers. But during the long scenes
which takes place in driving trains you can also look out of the
window. This look out the window reveals traces of reality, not only
the landscapes but also the deformed industrial landscape of this
industry nation like huge factories, concrete buildings in the big
cities etc.
The long geographical journey is well researched, its
actually the skeleton of the plot and it is not the last time a film
by Yamada will base on a geographical journey. Shiwase no kiroi no
hankachi and the last installment of his Gakko-series (Gakko 4, 2000)
are as well journeys. And it is not as easy to distinguish always the
documentary elements from the fiction like I thought. Sometimes the
cinema as the art of visual story telling and cinema as a reflection
of the world claim their right – and sometimes suddenly and
unexpected.
There is one moment which stayed with me over the years
and which is probably one of the most disturbing moments in the films
by Yoji Yamada. It is in a way a harsh confrontation with the drama
of the fiction and the drama of reality. During their long journey
the family reaches Tokyo, the youngest child, a hardly one years old
baby girl gets very sick and they have to make a little odyssey through
Tokyo to find a doctor. Finally they find an emergency station.
The doctors and nurses are very busy, the family´s tragedy is only
one of many. And suddenly and unexpected we see a stretcher with a
heavily bleeding schoolgirl ehivh id pushed through the station (and
through the mighty cinemas cope frame). We hear a small but important
spoken comment that this girl has attempted suicide in an underground
railway station. For a moment these intense seconds push away the
whole fiction. The moment is like a rupture in the earth cause by an
earthquake. Even though this rupture will be closed again the memory
of this horrible moment remains. The family is like this bleeding
girl part of a large group of misfits which really don´t fit in this
economic super power called Japan.
There is a good reason for the enormous
popularity of Yoji Yamada in Japan. Highly respected by the unions
and often called “the voice of the people” the director is indeed
one of the very rare ones in the history of cinema who permanently
focused on the class which obviously paid a hard prize for the
economical raise of Japan after the second World war. And this
interest or let´s call it even tenderness is not ideological founded
like in the majority of western films dealing with the working class.
None of Yamada´s heroes are political conscious fighter for the
labor´s rights. In this sense Yamada follows this unique tradition
of films on every day life, a sensitiveness which was never
approached by the rest of the world. He might be closer to another
master of shomingeki films Keisuke Kinoshita than to the great
stylists Ozu and Naruse or this inspired master of improvisation
Shimizu.
Despite his reputation as one of the
most successful film director in the history of Japanese cinema, even
his most popular films include often daring elements and playfulness.
Even as a studio director in the 1970s the phenomenon Yamada was
already an anachronism. If we have today still an idea how freely the
old masters Ozu, Naruse, Shimizu or Kinoshita moved with
an independent spirit under the condition of the studio
system than we owe that Yoji Yamada.
Rüdiger Tomczak
