BAMcinématek hosts the first New York retrospective of director Tomu Uchida, featuring rare samurai and crime films, comedies, and dramas in the series Tomu Uchida: Discovering a Japanese Master (April 11—30).

Tomo Uchida: Japanese Master
by Kyoko Hirano

Tomu Uchida (1898—1970), a major Japanese director who made more than 60 films between 1922 and 1970, was a contemporary of Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Mikio Naruse. Uchida has been praised for his dynamic portrayal of the predicament and anger of the socially exploited, and recently his innovative cinematic experimentation has also attracted international attention. BAMcinématek will feature ten films by Uchida in a series from April 11—30.

Born to a wealthy merchant family in the Inland Sea area of the mainland, young Uchida had to quit high school because of his family's financial decline and worked at a piano factory in Yokohama. In 1918 he joined the nationwide strikes and wandered north, starting his lifelong affiliation with the working-class masses and his habit of and fascination with wandering. In 1920, Uchida became an assistant to director Thomas Kurihara who had returned from the US, followed by a variety of work as an actor, assistant cameraman, and prop man. Uchida moved from one studio to another, and directed his first film Officer Konishi (1922) with Teinosuke Kinugasa.

Uchida then joined a traveling theater troupe as an actor and lived in Tokyo's entertainment district, working as a theater stagehand, an adman on the street, a sewer cleaner, and a construction laborer. After briefly joining a small studio, Uchida made his first solo film Blood of Justice in 1925. Several films followed. In 1929 at Nikkatsu Uzumasa Studio in Kyoto, he made Living Doll featuring actor Isamu Kosugi who collaborated with Uchida during the next 25 years.

The film became one of the most famed works of the keiko eiga (leftist tendency film) genre. After making Police Officer (1933) about a policeman's earnest effort to capture armed robbers, in 1934 Uchida moved to the newly opened Nikkatsu Tamagawa Studio in Tokyo specializing in contemporary drama and directed a series of films popular with both critics and audiences—Theater of Life (1936), The Naked Town (1937), Unending Advance (1937, based on Ozu's story), and Earth (1939). All featured Kosugi and established Uchida as one of the most outstanding directors realistically portraying socially oriented stories.

In 1941, Uchida left Nikkatsu to set up a new studio with several other filmmakers, however this venture could not fully function under wartime governmental control. Disappointed, Uchida joined his former Nikkatsu boss Kanichi Negishi, then with the Manchurian Film Corporation, established by the Japanese government to propagate its war effort in China. Although Uchida did not direct any films there, this period is controversial in terms of how much Uchida collaborated with the Japanese military government—he did not discuss much about it. After WWII ended in 1945, Uchida decided to live in a newborn China under the Communist rule, serving as a technical advisor to Chinese filmmakers.

After returning to Japan in 1953, he made A Bloody Spear at Mt. Fuji at Toei Kyoto Studio in 1955 on which directors Ozu, Hiroshi Shimizu, and Daisuke Ito all helped. The film's visceral indictment of the feudal class system successfully landed Uchida back in the Japanese film industry. Uchida made two more films that year: Shin-Toho studio's contemporary drama Twilight Saloon about colorful characters gathered at a bar, and Nikkatsu studio's melodrama A Hole of My Own Making, portraying postwar social changes.

A number of masterpieces in period film genre were made for Toei Kyoto Studio, including Chikamatsu's Love in Osaka (1959) based on Monzaemon Chikamatsu's eighteenth-century joruri (traditional puppet play) drama about the doomed love of a young shop clerk and an indentured prostitute; The Master Spearman (1960), focusing on the rebellious spirit of a master spearman amidst the intrigues and betrayal of the civil war period; Yoshiwara, The Pleasure Quarter (1960) written by Mizoguchi's screenplay writer Yoshikata Yoda, based on a Kabuki play about the tragic love of an ugly man who falls in love with a beautiful prostitute; and The Mad Fox (1962) written by Yoda based on joruri and Kabuki plays about a female fox falling in love with a man. Uchida also made remarkable contemporary dramas: The Outsiders (1958), presenting the discrimination issue of the indigenous people in the northern island; and a postwar spiritual saga of a criminal, the woman who loves him, and the detective who follows the case—A Fugitive from the Past (1965).

Critic Ro Takenaka describes Uchida's style as follows: "his theme was consistent in portraying human will to survive in their despair and chaotic situations; eternal struggles between humans and their social system; and in restrained style, he pursued the problems of discrimination avoiding stereotypical sense of justice. Japanese cinema never had such a powerful director."

Uchida's formal experiments include the raw texture of 16mm images blown up to 35mm in A Fugitive from the Past in which the bleak mental landscape of the protagonists are vividly reflected; limiting his story set in one place where several characters are introduced through the course of a night in Twilight Saloon, demonstrating his inventive camera positions and movements; audaciouscrane shots in the last sequence of Bloody Spear at Mt. Fuji and Killing in Yoshiwara, manifesting the frenzied and delirious rage of the victims of the social system and human destiny; and the bold and imaginative theatricality in The Mad Fox—all swirling and torrid human emotion, victims of human desire and deeds.


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Notes: 1. Ro Takenaka on Tomu Uchida in Nihon Eiga Kantoku Zenshu (Encyclopedia of Japanese Film Directors) (Tokyo: Kinema Jumpo-sha, 1976). P.67. The best sources for Uchida in English include: the official catalogue of Tokyo Filmex which featured the Tomu Uchida retrospective in November 2004; and James Quandt's introductory essay and film notes of Uchida retrospective in the Fall 2007 Programme Guide of Cinemathéque Ontario (Toronto).

Kyoko Hirano is an independent scholar and writer and has taught cinema studies at New York University, New School University, the University of Ljubljana, the University of Tokyo, Keio University, Graduate School of Film Producing, and Temple University in Japan. She is the author of Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo: Japanese Cinema Under the American Occupation and co-translator of Ozu's Anti-Cinema.