Japanese Divas

6/17/11 to 8/20/11

The golden age of Japanese cinema shines at BAM/PFA this summer as we spotlight great screen performances by Setsuko Hara, Machiko Kyo, Hideko Takamine, Kinuyo Tanaka, Ayako Wakao, and Isuzu Yamada. Join us for an impressive range of films, including a series of delicate family dramas by Yasujiro Ozu, an existential thriller from Hiroshi Teshigahara, a historical drama from Kenji Mizoguchi, and a comedy from Keisuke Kinoshita, among many others.

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Past Films

  • Ugetsu

    Friday, June 17 7:00 PM
    Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan, 1953). In sixteenth-century Japan, a simple potter is drawn into the realm of a phantom enchantress, played with devilish élan by Machiko Kyo. Director Mizoguchi builds an eerie netherworld entirely out of shadows and lighting, decor and texture, and the graceful chicanery of human desire. (96 mins)
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  • Odd Obsession

    Friday, June 17 9:00 PM
    Kon Ichikawa (Japan, 1959). An elderly man tries to keep his sexual energy alive by arranging liaisons between his still-beautiful wife (Machiko Kyo) and his daughter's fiancé. Perversity and black comedy combine in Ichikawa's adaptation of a Tanizaki novel. (107 mins)
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  • Tokyo Story

    Wednesday, June 22 7:00 PM
    Yasujiro Ozu (Japan, 1953). This simple, sad story of the gap between generations in a Japanese family revealed to Western viewers the poetic acuteness of Ozu's style, and features one of Japanese cinema's greatest performances in Setsuko Hara's role as a becalmed, utterly determined young woman. "Wonderful . . . one of the manifest miracles of cinema" (The New Yorker). (140 mins)
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  • Dragnet Girl

    Friday, June 24 7:00 PM
    Yasujiro Ozu (Japan, 1933). Judith Rosenberg on Piano. The last of Ozu's 1930s excursions into the world of American-style crime drama, with Kinuyo Tanaka as a gangster's moll. "What this beautifully shot movie proves is that...Ozu could have made superlative genre pictures, noirs included" (Village Voice). (99 mins)
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  • Sisters of the Gion

    Friday, June 24 9:00 PM
    Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan, 1936). In this famous melodrama, Mizoguchi strips away the romantic veneer of the geisha ideal in this unsentimental portrait of the sex business as a losing proposition for both the tradition-bound geisha and the modern girl alike. “A masterpiece” (Tadao Sato). (68 mins)
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  • Street of Shame

    Saturday, June 25 8:45 PM
    Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan, 1956). Mizoguchi's last film brought together some of Japan's greatest actresses-including Machiko Kyo and Ayako Wakao-to dramatize the struggles and dreams of five prostitutes in Tokyo's red-light district. “The best of all films examining the problems of women in postwar Japan” (Donald Richie). (86 mins)
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  • The Life of Oharu

    Thursday, June 30 7:00 PM
    Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan, 1952). The story of a noblewoman's fall from grace becomes “perhaps the finest film made in any country about the oppression of women” (Joan Mellen) in the hands of director Kenji Mizoguchi and actress Kinuyo Tanaka. “One of the ten greatest films in the history of cinema” (Derek Malcolm). (148 mins)
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  • Rashomon

    Saturday, July 2 6:30 PM
    Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1950). Featuring Machiko Kyo in a performance that made her the most famous Japanese actress in the West, Rashomon is “one of the most brilliantly constructed films of all time, a monument to Kurosawa's greatness, and a landmark in film history” (James Monaco). (88 mins)
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  • Sansho the Bailiff

    Saturday, July 2 8:20 PM
    Kenji Mizoguchi (Japan, 1954). Bring all your senses and your handkerchief to this haunting tale of a family (led by a haunting Kinuyo Tanaka) victimized by the cruel practices of feudal Japan, “developed with intuition, cunning, and an overarching sense of tragedy” (SF Weekly). (125 mins)
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  • Twenty-Four Eyes

    Wednesday, July 6 7:00 PM
    Keisuke Kinoshita (Japan, 1954). Twenty years in the lives of a teacher (Hideko Takamine) and her twelve pupils in a small Inland Sea village affected by militarism, anticommunism, and a war they despise. Voted in 1999 by Japanese critics as one of the top ten Japanese films of all time. (152 mins)
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  • Carmen Comes Home

    Thursday, July 7 7 PM
    Keisuke Kinoshita (Japan, 1951). Hideko Takamine proves herself a fine comic actress, playing a country girl turned stripper, in this barbed satire on postwar society. Japan's first color film. Repeated on July 9. (86 mins)
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  • Carmen Comes Home

    Saturday, July 9 6:30 PM
    Keisuke Kinoshita (Japan, 1951). Hideko Takamine proves herself a fine comic actress, playing a country girl turned stripper, in this barbed satire on postwar society. Japan's first color film. (86 mins)
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  • When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

    Saturday, July 9 8:20 PM
    Mikio Naruse (Japan, 1960). Hideko Takamine portrays the consummate Naruse heroine: high-minded, determined, and out of her element in a sordid world. "An elegant essay in black-and-white CinemaScope and tinkling cocktail jazz, this tale of a bar hostess's attempt to escape her lot could give heartbreak lessons to Fassbinder and Sirk" (Village Voice). (110 mins)
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  • Woman of Tokyo and A Hen in the Wind

    Sunday, July 10 5:00 PM
    Yasuziro Ozu (Japan, 1933). Judith Rosenberg on Piano. Ozu's Depression-era melodrama presages his later style in "a subtle riot of discordant formal devices"(Village Voice). With A Hen in the Wind, Ozu's tragedy of a destitute woman (Kinuyo Tanaka). (131 mins)
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  • Immortal Love

    Friday, July 15 7:00 PM
    Keisuke Kinoshita (Japan, 1961). In the shadow of Mount Aso, a CinemaScope saga of a little community where a forced marriage impacts generations. With Hideko Takamine and Tatsuya Nakadai. (105 mins)
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  • Late Spring

    Thursday, July 21 7:00 PM
    Yasujiro Ozu (Japan, 1949). Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara as father and daughter in a deceptively simple, eloquent story of filial devotion and parental sacrifice. A near-perfect film, and one of Ozu's own favorites. (107 mins)
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  • Early Summer

    Sunday, July 24 5:00 PM
    Yasujiro Ozu (Japan, 1951). "I was interested in getting much deeper than just the story itself; I wanted to depict the cycles of life, the transience of life" (Ozu). An exquisite, faintly melancholic portrait of a family, with the radiant Setsuko Hara as the daughter on whose marriage everything depends. (135 mins)
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  • Throne of Blood

    Saturday, July 30 6:30 PM
    Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1957). Kurosawa's Noh-influenced version of Macbeth is “the most brilliant and original attempt ever made to put Shakespeare on screen” (Time). The towering Toshiro Mifune is paired with the legendary Isuzu Yamada in “a partnership of titans” (Film Forum). (107 mins)
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  • The Face of Another

    Saturday, July 30 8:35 PM
    Hiroshi Teshigahara (Japan, 1966). A man (Tatsuya Nakadai) whose face is scarred has a mask made-of a stranger-and attempts to seduce his own wife (Machiko Kyo), in this black-and-white fever dream from Hiroshi Teshigahara, based on the novel by Kobo Abe. “A metaphysical thriller imbued with stylistic touches of surrealism and elegance. A film of the intellect” (S.F. Film Festival). (124 mins)
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  • Equinox Flower

    Saturday, August 6 6:30 PM
    Yasujiro Ozu (Japan, 1958). Modern girl Kinuyo Tanaka quietly rebels against her traditional parents' plans in Ozu's first color film. "Gentle and amused in the way that it acknowledges time's passage, the changing of values, and the adjustments that have to be made between generations" (N.Y. Times). (118 mins)
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  • A Wife Confesses

    Thursday, August 11 7:00 PM
    Yasuzo Masumura (Japan, 1961). Cult director Masumura combines film noir and steamy sexuality in this tale of a young widow (Ayako Wakao) standing trial for the murder of her husband. “One of Japanese cinema's most striking portraits of a modern woman” (TIFF Cinematheque). (91 mins)
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  • Seisaku's Wife

    Saturday, August 13 6:30 PM
    Yasuzo Masumura (Japan, 1965). An engrossing tale of rebel lovers linking sensuality, war, and l'amour fou, starring Ayako Wakao as an outcast woman with an all-consuming love. “Perhaps Masumura's masterpiece, and certainly one of the great Japanese films of the sixties” (TIFF Cinematheque). (93 mins)
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  • Late Autumn

    Saturday, August 20 6:30 PM
    Yasujiro Ozu (Japan, 1960). Coming full circle from Late Spring, Setsuko Hara plays a widowed mother pushing her unwilling daughter to marry. "Exquisite and not to be missed" (New Republic). (127 mins)
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