Hiroshi Shimizu: Notes of an Itinerant Director

July 19–August 28, 2024

One of the great directors of the Golden Age of Japanese cinema, Hiroshi Shimizu depicts the struggles of people on the margins with a light touch, avoiding melodrama and inflecting even the most serious stories with humor and profound humanity.

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Mr. Thank You
Children of the Beehive
Ornamental Hairpin

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Ornamental Hairpin
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan, 1941
35mm Archival Print
Friday, July 19 7:00 PM
Yasujiro Ozu regular Chishu Ryu and legendary actress/director Kinuyo Tanaka star in Hiroshi Shimizu’s elegiac tale of two strangers brought together by fate at a mountain onsen resort.
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Mr. Thank You
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan, 1936
35mm Archival Print
Sunday, July 21 7:00 PM
"Mr. Thank You is the driver of a bus chugging its way through the hills and villages of rural Japan. Shooting entirely on location, [Hiroshi] Shimizu merrily tracks along the winding paths. Irresistible” (National Film Theatre, London).
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Forget Love for Now
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan, 1937
Saturday, July 27 7:00 PM
A single mother turned bar hostess struggles to raise her son in the face of social condemnation and economic exploitation in this set-bound, fog-drenched noir of sinister alleyways, Art Deco nightclubs, and maternal duty.
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A Hero of Tokyo
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan, 1935
35mm Archival Print
Wednesday, July 31 7:00 PM
A woman turns to operating a hostess bar in order to save her children from poverty, only to find her secrets revealed, in Hiroshi Shimizu’s melodrama, tinged with social critique and noirish influences.
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Notes of an Itinerant Performer
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan, 1941
35mm Archival Print

Sunday, August 4 4:30 PM
A wandering performer is welcomed into the home of a tea merchant but must fight for the family’s business after his death, in Hiroshi Shimizu’s classic melodrama of social obligation and women’s sacrifice.
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Children in the Wind
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan, 1937
35mm Archival Print
Friday, August 9 7:00 PM
Two brothers are separated when their father is falsely arrested in one of Hiroshi Shimizu’s most beloved films, shot in a variety of outdoor locations and filled with the director’s sweetly observational approach.
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Four Seasons of Children: Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan, 1939
35mm Archival Print
Sunday, August 11 3:00 PM
Two young protagonists weather the death of their father and the changes of the four seasons in Hiroshi Shimizu’s follow-up to his beloved Children in the Wind. With a lyricism that “looks forward to early Satyajit Ray” (John Gillett).
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Children of the Beehive
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan, 1948
Friday, August 16 7:00 PM
A group of orphans and a returning veteran search for jobs across a scarred postwar Japan in Hiroshi Shimizu’s remarkable work of Japanese neorealism, filmed entirely on location—including in a Hiroshima still marked by the atomic bomb.

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Mr. Shosuke Ohara
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan, 1949
Sunday, August 18 7:00 PM
A kindly rich man gives away his fortune to all who ask for it in this village comedy of manners and misfits. Its 1949 postwar setting provides the film a surprisingly elegiac look at how “times have changed.”
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Dancing Girl
Hiroshi Shimizu
Japan, 1957
BAMPFA Collection
Wednesday, August 28 7:00 PM
1950s Japanese sex symbol Machiko Kyo stars as a young sister ready to shake up her older sibling’s safe life in the Asakusa entertainment district in Hiroshi Shimizu’s bouncy postwar melodrama of dance-hall girls, lecherous men, and women’s sacrifice.
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Hiroshi Shimizu: Notes of an Itinerant Director

July 19–August 28, 2024

Born in 1903 (the same year as Yasujiro Ozu), Hiroshi Shimizu made some 150 films between 1924 and 1959. While the majority of those have been lost, a significant number of excellent films have survived. Drawing from a retrospective organized by the Japan Society and the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, Hiroshi Shimizu: Notes of an Itinerant Director offers a chance to rediscover the work of one of the great directors of the golden age of Japanese cinema.

Shimizu’s films depict characters on the move, out of place, or in the margins—performers, migrant workers, people with disabilities, working women, and, especially, children. His protagonists are buffeted by economic vicissitudes and social or political circumstances. As they endeavor to find their way, they may traverse the pathways of a quiet spa town or the teeming streets of Tokyo, grassy rural fields or dusty mountain roads. Usually shooting on location—creating a sense of openness, space, and place—Shimizu’s camera observes them, usually from a distance, and sometimes taking a journey of its own, tracking across a landscape or interior, revealing as if unscrolling the details of the surroundings. He chronicles the struggles of his characters with a light touch, avoiding melodrama and inflecting even the most serious stories with humor and profound humanity.

—Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator

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Co-organized with the National Film Archive of Japan and the Japan Foundation, New York.

Thanks to Alexander Fee, Japan Society; Edo Choi, Museum of the Moving Image; Akinaru Rokkaku, the Japan Foundation, New York; Kenta Tamada, Mika Tomita, the National Film Archive Japan; Brian Belovarac, Janus Films; Osamu Minakawa, Kokusai Hoei; Hitomi Hosoda, Shochiku; Yasui Yoshio, Kobe Planet Film Archive; and Chiyo Mori, Miki Zeze, Kadokaw.