City of love and hope
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | City of love and hope |
| Original title | 愛 と 希望 の 街 Ai to Kibō no Machi |
| Country of production | Japan |
| original language | Japanese |
| Publishing year | 1959 |
| length | 62 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Nagisa Ōshima |
| script | Nagisa Ōshima |
| music | Riichirō Manabe |
| camera | Hiroyuki Kusuda |
| cut | Yoshi Sugihara |
| occupation | |
| |
City of love and hope ( Japanese 愛 と 希望 の 街 , Ai to Kibō no Machi ), also a city full of love and hope , is the first work of the Japanese film director Nagisa Ōshima . The film, made in 1959, didn't get a little attention in Europe until fifty years later.
action
The student Masao lives with his mother and little sister, who are in poor health, in a shabby barrack in a dirty spot on the outskirts of Tokyo . The mother hardly keeps her family afloat by shining shoes. In order to supplement the insufficient family income, Masao offers pigeons for sale in the city. These regularly escape their new owners back to him so that he can sell the same animals several times. One day the noble girl Kyoko is touched by her poverty and buys one of his pigeons.
Because of the upcoming high school entrance exams, Masao and his mother are concerned about his career prospects. The teacher complains that, despite all their talents, it is difficult for boys from the poorest backgrounds to find a decent job after graduation. She is committed to Masao and goes to the electronics factory. The owner, Kyoko's father, does not believe in hiring city boys because they could have problems. But Kyoko's older brother, who works for the company himself, falls in love with the teacher, invites her to upscale restaurants and promises to bring her concerns to the father again. Meanwhile, Kyoko develops a fascinated interest in Masao's life and looks for him in his dwelling, in the vicinity of which she proves herself in a fight with ragged boys. Ultimately, however, Kyoko's brother has to tell the teacher that Masao's betrayal with the pigeons has been learned and that he cannot get a job. The teacher turns away from him, disappointed. Masao beats the pigeon cage short and sweet, and Kyoko, who in anger bought the pigeon that had flown back to him, lets her brother shoot it down.
To the work
Some stylistic elements in Ōshima's first work are reminiscent of Italian neorealism , such as the blunt depiction of poverty in black and white. The mother sacrifices everything, including her health, so that Masao can get a good education; instead of going to school, he would like to take up gainful employment immediately in order to enable mother and sister to live more dignified; Kyoko pays with a large bill and waives her remaining money; the teacher is selflessly committed to the welfare of her students. From this point of view, the city of love and hope in the first half corresponds to the traditional melodramas of the Shochiku studio .
This suffered some box office failures in the second half of the 1950s and decided to rely on some of his hopeful assistant directors. The studio management expected a film that was supposed to be new and different, but was not prepared for the militancy with which Ōshima attacked Japanese class society. “I started with films that were an open revolt against society, films that stood for protest against the sickness of that society.” The Japanese middle class manifests itself as a crowd of people rushing on the sidewalks, but they are merely the protagonists of the drama represented by the teacher. The remaining figures all belong either to the poorest or to the richest. The sharp separation of social classes and the failure of mediation between them have accused the work of the studio and film journalism of being a keiko , a Marxist trend film . The studio banned him for six months and then gave him his current title against Willshima's will - the director wanted to name his debut work The Boy Who Selling His Dove .
A manufacturer of televisions, Kyoko's father works in a technically advanced, prosperous industry. In order to protect the company, he can only employ impeccably reputable employees. There is no understanding for Masao's livelihood fraud. So Masao remains trapped in poverty: It leads him to delinquency, which in turn prevents him from getting out of the misery. The symbolically inserted pigeon circulates between the layers. As a sold good that soon returns to the seller by itself, the dove subverts the logic of market-economy exchange. Mostly long and medium long shots capture what is happening. The wide format is able to capture almost the entire living room of the Masao family - the barrack has no other rooms. In rich houses, on the other hand, the action often takes place on stairs and in hallways, vertical passageways that indicate the presence of larger rooms.
Reception in Europe
Released in Japan on November 17, 1959, the film was barely distributed in Europe. It was not performed until half a century later. In 2007, Positif judged that nothing gave the 27-year-old debutant an inkling of the fact that the film was staged in such a controlled manner and that he bravely broke the conventions of the time. “The young director knows how to make all the scenes interesting and dynamic, to open them up to the following sequence, and in this way he manages to follow the action with constant interest, even though the dramaturgy is rather weak. There are neither major conflicts nor situational twists and turns, only micro-situations that are linked to one another solely through the power of the mise-en-scène (...). ”The composition of the widescreen is also masterful. In 2009, an Ōshima retrospective by the Austrian Film Museum brought the work to a wider audience. In the same year a German subtitled DVD was released. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung said that because of the urgency of his indictment, the work had triggered a new movement in Japanese cinema.
further reading
Web links
- City of love and hope in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Turim 1998, pp. 30–31, Stähli 2009, p. 50
- ↑ Nagisa Ōshima in Shomingeki , No. 2, summer 1996
- ↑ For the history and form, see Maureen Turim: The Films of Nagisa Oshima. University of California Press, Berkeley 1998, ISBN 0-520-20665-7 , pp. 28-33; Hubert Niogret: Nagisa Oshima, cinéaste sous contrat puis indépendant . In: Positif , October 2007, pp. 76-77; Nelson Kim: Nagisa Oshima . Senses of Cinema, 2004; Donald Richie: Japanese Cinema. An introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1990, ISBN 0-19-584950-7 , p. 66
- ^ Hubert Niogret: Nagisa Oshima, cinéaste sous contrat puis indépendant . In: Positif , October 2007, pp. 76-77
- ↑ Alexandra Stähli: Nuberu Bagu I In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , November 24, 2009, p. 50