Cine Margherita (RC) & Aurora (ME) 1954

Knights of the Round Table, I cavalieri della tavola rotonda

Richard Thorpe, 1954

Loves of Three Queens, L'amante di Paride

Marc Allégret, Edgar G. Ulmer, 1954

We tell the truth and write the lies

 

I'm not going to punish you, child,
for being hungry, or having an imagination.

You know, that's something very few people have.

It's very precious.
But it can also be dangerous unless we learn how to use it.

Our everyday lives are real and true, aren't they?
 
But all the stories in the world, all the music
came out of someone's imagination.

So, if we tell the truth and write the lies,
then they aren't lies anymore.
They become stories.
 
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Non ti punirò, ragazzina, perché hai fame.
O perché hai fantasia.
Sai, è una cosa molto rara.
E' molto preziosa.
Ma può anche essere pericolosa, se non si impara ad usarla.
 
La nostra vita di tutti i giorni è reale, vero?
 
Ma tutti i romanzi del mondo, tutta la musica,
escono dalla fantasia di qualcuno.
 
Così, se diciamo la verità, e scriviamo le bugie,
non sono più bugie.
Diventano delle storie.

Elia Kazan, A Tree Grows in Brooklin,1945

Yasuzō Masumura* - Storia del cinema nipponico dal 1896 al 1954 - 1, gli albori

1896 Il Vitascope di T. A. Edison

  Il primo film che il popolo giapponese ebbe occasione di-vedere fu uno dei cortometraggi della «Vitascope» di Edison, proiettato nel 1896 nella città portuale di Kobe. L’anno successive venne importato in Giappone il proiettore cinematografico dei Lumiére. Questa meravigliosa invenzione della scienza moderna venne entusiasticamente accolta dal popolo giapponese che, dopo la vittoria riportata sulla Cina nel 1895, era particolarmente avido di aggiornarsi sulle conquiste della civiltà occidentale. Un giornale del tempo scrisse: «I misteri del XX secolo, caratterizzati dalla magia della scienza, le città del mondo occidentale, simili a fantasiosi paesaggi di sogno, vennero con somma evidenza mostrati agli spettatori comodamente seduti nella sala di proiezione».
  Il primo film giapponese venne realizzato nel I898 da un fotografo di Tokyo: era un cortometraggio che riproduceva la vita quotidiana di questa città. Il primo dilm con un intreccio e dei protagonisti apparve nel 1899. Portava sullo schermo un episodio di cronaca, un coraggioso poliziotto che arrestava un feroce assassino dopo un conflitto sanguinoso. L’anno dopo venne girato a Kyoto, l’antica capitale del Giappone, un film che riproduceva alcune scene dell’antico teatro «Kabuki». Da allora in poi vennero successivamente prodotti molti film di poco meno di 150 metri ciascuno. Nel 1904 venne costruito a Tokyo il primo studio cinematografico del Giappone e l’anno successivo sorse il secondo a Kyoto.
  In base alla tendenza generale lo studio di Tokyo produsse film tratti da avvenimenti contemporanei, interpretati da attori senza esperienza teatrale; viceversa, lo studio di Kyoto realizzava pellicole che riproducevano alcuni drammi famosi del Kabuki, con attori di teatro. I film prodotti a Tokyo vennero chiamati «Gendaigeki» (film contemporanei) e quelli di Kyoto «Jidaigeki» (rappresentazioni in costume). Questa suddivisione avrebbe costituito una rigida tradizione dellacinematografica nipponica, dovuta al fatto che la vecchia città di Kyoto rappresentava il luogo più adatto, dal punto di vista artistico ed economico, alla produzione di film in costume, mentre la nuova capitale, Tokyo, era tutta protesa verso il progresso.
  Alla fine dell’Era Meiji* (1912), il Giappone era dotato di cinque teatri, di posa e di innumerevoli sale cinematografiche: soltanto a Tokyo ve n’erano settecento. Ma tutti i film prodotti in questo periodo erano delle opere assolutamente primitive, riproduzioni semplici e dirette di episodi di vita reale o di scene del teatro drammatico, lontane da qualsiasi interpretazione artistica.

BIANCO e NERO ANNO XV - 1954, n. 11-12

*https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A2%97%E6%9D%91%E4%BF%9D%E9%80%A0

*https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasuz%C5%8D_Masumura

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasuz%C5%8D_Masumura

*https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodo_Meiji

 

安部 公房, Kōbō Abe, 武満 徹 Takemitsu Tōru, 勅使河原 宏, Teshigahara Hiroshi 1962 - 1964 with Walz

Takemitsu Tōru (1930 - 1996, right) Pitfall (おとし穴, Otoshiana), 1962 

Takemitsu Tōru (center) The Face of Another (他人の顔, Tanín no Kao) 1964

Kōbō Abe (1924 - 1993, second from the right) The Face of Another (他人の顔, Tanín no Kao) 1966

Pitfall, The Face of Another, written by Kōbō Abe, soundtrack by Takemitsu Tōru, 

directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927 - 2001)

like also Woman in the Dunes (1964) and The Man Without a Map (1968)

Tōru Takemitsu Waltz from The Face of Another (1966)

 

Garbo

 

The Sunflowers of Iginio Lardani

Iginio Lardani, uncredited, for Vittorio De Sica, I girasoli, 1969

Making a comparison with other works, style, graphics, and animation carry the brand of "maestro" Lardani.

 

1967: Cassio, Iago, Roderigo, PPP, Otello

From left to right: 

Franco Franchi (1928 - 992), Totò (1898 - 1967) Ciccio Ingrassia (1922 - 2003),

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922 - 1975), Ninetto Davoli (1948)

 

若松孝二 会う 塞吉歐·李昂尼 - Koji Wakamatsu meet Sergio Leone

 Screenshot from: 現代好色伝　テロルの季節 Season of Terror (1969) Koji Wakamatsu

狂沙十萬里 1968年12月21日: Diecimila miglia di sabbie selvagge

Aka C'era una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West

导演 direttore 塞吉歐·李昂尼: Sergio Leone

编剧 sceneggiatori:   

達利歐·阿基多 Dario Argento

柏納多·貝托魯奇 Bernardo Bertolucci

謝爾吉歐·多納蒂 Sergio Donati

配乐 Colonna sonora:  恩尼奥·莫里科内 Ennio Morricone

摄影  fotografia:  東尼諾·戴笠·寇利 Tonino Delli Colli 

剪辑 montaggio:  尼諾·巴拉利 Nino Baragli

克勞蒂雅·卡汀娜 Claudia Cardinale - 吉尔·麦克贝恩（Jill McBain）

亨利·方达 – Henry Fonda 弗兰克（Frank）

贾森·罗巴兹 – Jason Robards 夏安（Cheyenne）

查爾斯·布朗森 – Charles Bronson 哈莫尼克（Harmonica）

silenzio SI GIRA

Enzo Trapani 1922-1989), Viva il cinema!,1962

 

会田 昌江 alias 原節子

HARA SETSUKO (1920-2015)

By Tony Rayns

 

ONE OF JAPAN’S BEST-LOVED FILMED ACTRESSES since her teenage years, Hara Setsuko left the film industry in 1963 at the age of forty-three—a few months after the death of Ozu Yasujiro, for whom she’d acted memorably in six features. She withdrew completely from public life, living outside Tokyo in Kamakura, refusing to be photographed and declining requests for interviews. This Garbo-like retreat inevitably fostered a powerful mystique, which endured until her death last September, itself kept secret by her relatives for two months after her funeral. The Togeki Theater in Tokyo’s Higashi-Ginza district happened to be presenting newly restored Ozu films in the week her passing became known, and a large, uncaptioned photo of her was posted front-of-house. The sixty-two-year-old image (from Ozu’s Tokyo Story, 1953) alone was enough to trigger grief and nostalgia.

Much Japanese cinema of the 1930s was lost in the Allied fire-bombing of Tokyo, but one of Hara’s earliest featured performances miraculously survives. She plays the market stall-holder Onami in Yamanaka Sadao’s excellent Kochiyama Soshun (1936), a young woman worried about the increasing delinquency of her brother. It’s clear that she was cast not only for her sweet-sixteen-ness (she seems credibly older), but also because she responded to Yamanaka’s demand for a naturalistic acting style, quite removed from the kabuki conventions that dominated period dramas of the time. A year later she was cast in a then-prestigious Japanese-German co-production as a young woman pushed away by her fiancé on his return from Nazi Germany, and she went on to appear in several wartime propaganda films, all designed to bolster the military government’s call for self-sacrifice and loyalty to the codes of bushido, “the way of the warrior.”

Her reluctance to give interviews even during her heyday leaves us unsure how Hara felt about the roles she was asked to play, but her radiance in postwar Ozu and Naruse pictures—almost always playing unmarried daughters, widows, or unhappy wives, internalizing unspoken emotional pain and disappointment—suggests a high degree of consonance between her off-screen life and feelings and her frequent on-screen roles. Like Ozu, Hara herself never married. She chose to live alone after her early retirement; her countless Japanese fans dubbed her “the eternal virgin,” partly because she had no reported romantic attachments, partly because she made such a mark as Noriko, the daughter who chooses to look after her widower father rather than get married and move out in Ozu’s Late Spring (1949).

She was born Aida Masae, one of eight children in a Yokohama family, and used family connections to get an acting contract with the production company Nikkatsu in 1935, when she was just fifteen. (Her elder sister was married to the then-leftist director Kumagai Hisatora, a Nikkatsu employee.) We’ll never know what ambitions she had in her mid-teens, but she would certainly have seen Japanese movies in which women protagonists, played by the likes of Yamada Isuzu and Tanaka Kinuyo, protested loudly against the social, moral, and economic constraints on women’s lives. The distinguished Japanese critic Sato Tadao argues that Hara’s postwar status reflects her embodiment of the silent sufferings of Japanese people in general as they struggled to reconcile traditional values with the adjustment to “modernization” under the US occupation.

Ozu and Naruse, in their formalized melodramas, used Hara’s smiling-through-adversity persona as a subtle signifier of hidden social pressures. Their slightly younger contemporary Kurosawa Akira, more comfortable with full-blown melodrama, had her star in two movies that plunged into the strains and contradictions of postwar life much more explicitly. In No Regrets for Our Youth (1946) she plays Yukie, the complacently bourgeois daughter of a liberal professor who is punished for his anti-war views in the ’30s; she has a torrid affair with an anti-war activist who dies in police custody and enters peacetime as a proudly dishevelled farmer, working to support her late partner’s peasant parents. And in The Idiot (1951), in which Kurosawa transposes Dostoyevsky’s novel to post-war Hokkaido, she plays Taeko (Dostoyevsky’s Nastasya), a kept woman since her mid-teens, who refuses to be ashamed of her past and mocks the various suitors who think they can buy her as a wife. These assertive, proto-feminist roles are the flip-side of Hara’s usual reticence; they hint at what lies behind her “eternal virgin” image. They also help us understand why Hara Setsuko was so revered in Japan, and around the world.

https://www.artforum.com/columns/tony-rayns-on-hara-setsuko-1920-2015-227761/