"My goal is to create an exaggerated depiction featuring only the ideas and passions of living human beings."-Yasuzo MasumuraWhen this country saw its first extensive Yasuzo Masumura retrospective, in 1997, the critical reaction was a lot like that which greeted this maverick director when he came on the scene in Japan forty years earlier. At that time, Nagisa Oshima recalled, "I felt now that the tide of the new age could no longer be ignored by anyone, and that a powerful and irresistible force had arrived in Japanese cinema." In San Francisco, writer Chuck Stephens called Masumura "one of the...greatest, gravest social satirists (of the fifties and sixties)...seriously berserk and sumptuously nihilistic....Miss any one of these masterworks at your peril." Chicago critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, "It was like discovering Sam Fuller or Frank Tashlin for the first time."We are delighted to further delve into the richly evocative cinema of Daiei studio's resident intellectual and renegade social critic, as we combine gems from the PFA Collection with three spectacular West Coast premieres courtesy of The Japan Foundation. In explicit dramas and subversive satires, Masumura examined individual identity in a society mechanized by tradition, war, and postwar economics. Masumura was a brutal humanist-that is, without a shred of sentimentality, but rather with the daring it takes to break the mold in a culture that emphasizes conformity. The weight of the institutions makes the necessary gestures of rebellion in his characters more extreme. "There is a secret song that lies unvoiced in the heart of every Japanese that I want to express in my films with a boisterous, even lunatic cry," he said. And Oshima notes: "Masumura achieved shocking effects by creating characters with completely free hearts and bodies." (JAPAN FOUNDATION LOGO) This series is presented with the cooperation of The Japan Foundation and Daiei Co., Ltd. The series is programmed at PFA by Mona Nagai.Sunday March 7, 1999
