As if Our Eyes Were in Our Hands – The Films of Susumu Hani. January 1. 9 - January 2. A Japanese novelist once wrote that we should be very thankful that our eyes are not in our hands, because if they were we would always have to see our own faces. I think this is fascinating concept. Sometimes we can achieve this in the cinema. Of course when you are acting, your ‘eye’ should see your face, but when you view rushes, your eyes are constantly in your hands. I find it extremely interesting to observe the relationship between cinema and the perception of one's own image." – Susumu Hani. Susumu Hani (b. 1. New Wave that reinvented Japanese cinema in the late 1. The director of such indelible, now classic, works as Bad Boys, Nanami: The Inferno of First Love, A Full Life and The Song of Bwana Toshi, Hani forged a unique path through the tumultuous postwar years, pioneering and combining forms of poetic documentary and engaged art cinema to define a singular mode of avant- garde humanism. While Hani's best- known film, Nanami imbibes the same heady cocktail of psychosexual obsession and surrealism as his contemporaries Shohei Imamura and the late Nagisa Oshima, Hani's larger oeuvre reveals the rich diversity of his interests. The son of prominent intellectuals and social reformers, Hani upheld a belief in the cinema as a means of exacting social change while resisting any kind of dogmatism. Beginning in cinema first as a documentarian, Hani directed two stunning short films for the educational film company Iwanami, each about the primary school experience – Children in the Classroom and Children Who Draw – that together offered a remarkably intimate and revealing vision of Japanese children's everyday life and education. Engaging the children themselves in the filmmaking process, Hani's two films count among the very first to explore the documentary as a tool of inquiry into human subjectivity and the imagination. In his extraordinary feature debut, Bad Boys – and its rarely seen follow- up Children Clasping Hands – Hani brilliantly extended his documentary intervention into the realm of narrative cinema, offering boldly frank and unvarnished portraits of Japanese youth that captured their awkward beauty and simmering violence while revealing how familial, social and governmental institutions all ultimately fail to understand the arduous, character- shaping passage into adulthood. Subsequent widely celebrated films such as She and He and A Full Life focused on the status- quo entrapment of middle- class Japanese women, revealing Hani's feminist concerns and the subtle political charge of his cinema. Less expected were his extraordinary, adventurous series of international productions that carried him to South America, Italy and eventually Africa where he filmed The Song of Bwana Toshi, a simultaneously heartfelt and irreverent study of "Japanese- ness" embodied in the figure of a high- strung Japanese engineer transformed by his encounter with tribal culture. Equally unanticipated was Hani's abrupt departure from filmmaking in the mid- 1. Falling outside any easy canon or classification, the unusual arc of Hani's storied career has been largely overlooked, with Hani unjustly remembered only for his most popular, scandalous and award- winning films. The documentary roots and aspirations of Hani's visionary filmmaking are clear. His films are inspired, above all, by a restless search for ways to vividly render the inner lives and everyday of his characters, whether real- life or fictional, in their fullest complexity. Crucial to this larger project is Hani's striking engagement with non- professional actors and his belief in acting and directing as deeply collaborative arts. In this way Hani crafts his films more in direct response to his actors' personalities and lived experiences than to any preconceived ideas of character or story. While early films such as Bad Boys were shaped around the lives and personae of its non- professional cast, integrating the argot and ritualized sadism of the actual ex- reform school youth appearing within it, Hani would go even further in his strikingly experimental 8mm feature Morning Schedule which used footage shot by the high school student cast themselves. Carefully intertwining the different voices and ever- shifting perspectives of their characters, Hani's films offer choral, kaleidoscopic and politically charged portraits of disenfranchised communities and subcultures torn directly from the postwar experience, from the draconian reform school in Bad Boys to the seedy Tokyo underworld of Nanami. The rare energy of Hani's cinema draws from the rich texture and nuance of the diverse worlds it so boldly explores and the ways in which his camera engages and empowers both subject and spectator. The Harvard Film Archive is thrilled to welcome Susumu Hani for a rare visit to the US, together with his wife, actress and producer Kimiko Nukamura. Haden Guest. Select film notes by Takuya Tsunoda, East Asian Languages and Literatures – Yale University. Special thanks: Theodore C. Bestor, Ted Gilman, Stacie Matsumoto – Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard University; Go Hirasawa – Meiji- Gakuin University; the Japan Foundation; Takuya Tsunoda – Yale University; Alex Zahlten – East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department, Harvard University; Documentary Film Preservation Center, Japan; National Film Center at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Consul General Akira Muto – the Consulate General of Japan in Boston. This series is presented in conjunction with a major symposium on the films and career of Susumu Hani, presented by the Reischauer Institute on Monday January 2. Saturday January 1. A Full Life (Mitasareta seikatsu)Directed by Susumu Hani. Gozenchu no jikanwari / The Morning Schedule (1972)DVDRip | MKV/AVC x264 ~1800 kbps avg | 1Hr 40Mins | 23.976 fps | 716x478 | 1.40 GB Audio: Japanese | AC3 2 Ch 192. The Morning Schedule | Gozenchu no jikanwari (1972. Children in the Classroom | Kyôshitsu no kodomotachi: gakushû shidô e no michi (1954, 30 min). The Morning Schedule (1972) - Movietube Trailer, Reviews & News $ Rent Gozenchu No Jikanwari. Release Date: Runtime: Rated: (based on votes). With Ineko Arima, Koshiro Harada, I. George. Japan 1. 96. Japanese with English subtitles. Hani's stylish and understated second feature has been frequently compared to Antonioni for its subtle telling of a young woman's growing awareness of her environment, and herself. Dissatisfied with her failing marriage, the woman abruptly joins a political theater trope and is pulled into the feverish activist scene ignited by the massive and unprecedented anti- US Security Pact protests. While Hani's dazzling use of Tokyo locations and documentary style camerawork clearly link A Full Life to his earlier work, Hani’s compelling and feminist fable of political awakening introduced a new sophistication into his cinema. Saturday January 1.
gozenchu No Jikanwari
Bad Boys (Furyo shonen)Directed by Susumu Hani. With Yukio Yamada, Hirokazu Yoshitake, Koichiro Yamazaki. Japan 1. 96. 1, 3. Get more information about The Morning Schedule on TMDb. Gozenchu no jikanwari (The Morning Schedule) (2011) Directed By: Susumu Hani. Are you sure? Deleting a title from your collection is like throwing away a DVD. Japanese with English subtitles. Inspired by Children Who Draw Hani turned once again to the subject of the Japanese school for his break- through feature, a radical fusion of documentary and narrative cinema that created nothing less than a sensation when it was released in Japan. Working closely with a group of ex- reform school students, Hani directly channeled their own life experiences and voices into Bad Boys, only loosely adhering to his screenplay (adapted from an anthology of writings by "reformed" youth), with much of the dialogue and action improvised by the boys on set. More than simply an indictment of the Japanese reform school system, the cruelty and harsh violence of the boys revealed, in Hani's words, a "totalitarian spirit" still lingering in the postwar era. Although Bad Boys was originally produced by Daei, the studio dropped the film during post- production, fearing that it was too "revolutionary" in style and subject. While Toru Takemitsu composed the film's haunting and melancholy score, the almost entirely hand- held cinema verité camerawork was by Noriaki Tsuchimoto, who would later become a celebrated documentarian, best known for his series of films about the tragic mass mercury poisoning in Japan's Minamata Bay region. Sunday January 2. Children in the Classroom (Kyoshitsu no kodomotachi)Directed by Susumu Hani. Japan 1. 95. 4, 1. Japanese with English subtitles. Initially conceived as an instructional film on the discipline of troubled children, the Ministry of Education sponsored Children in the Classroom became an important showcase for Hani’s remarkable observational filmmaking and a catalyst for decisive changes in Japanese documentary cinema. Boldly anticipating its Anglo- European counterparts of American direct cinema and French cinema vérité, Hani’s objective camera exhaustively and masterfully interrogated his subjects’ inner worlds. This sensational debut by the then only twenty- six year old Hani stunned documentary and educational film circuits in Japan, who heralded the young director as the emblem of a new breed of film artist. Print courtesy the Japan Foundation. Followed by. Children Who Draw (Eo kaku kodomotachi)Directed by Susumu Hani. Japan 1. 95. 5, 1. Japanese with English subtitles. Children Who Draw explores the delicate chemistry of school children interacting in an art class through a constant juxtaposition of observational black- and- white portraits of the young children with lyrical passages shot in vivid color exploring their imaginative and expressive paintings. Experimenting with color as an intimate expression of the children’s inner worlds, a tool for deeper psychological investigation, Hani allows his camera to roam freely across the drawings, “de- framing’” and enagaging the artwork in a manner reminiscent of Alain Resnais’s Guernica (1. Although originally intended as an educational study of children’s psychology, Children Who Draw became a surprise hit thanks to wide distribution in Japan by Toho and Nikkatsu studios.
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