By Rowena Aquino

Writer Rowena Aquino leads us on the journey through Eclipse's Hiroshi Shimizu box set -- from Japanese Girls at the Harbor, Mr. Thank You, The Masseurs and a Woman, to Ornamental Hairpin.

An Ozu box set is a multi-course meal whose taste and deliciousness you already have an idea. A steady diet of circulation in both theatres and DVDs, and innumerable essays, monographs, interviews, etc. outside of Japan since the 1970s  have forcefully aided in shaping our taste buds to get to know and engage with Ozu: loving parents, rebellious children, anthropomorphic teapots, and all. From the first to the last bites, there's rarely -- if ever -- disappointment. When confronted with a Shimizu Hiroshi box set... wait -- Shimizu who?

Scholars have often remarked on the fact that Ozu and Shimizu were exact contemporaries: both were born in 1903, both began their film careers at Shochiku (where they made a majority of their films), both contributed to Shochiku's "Kamata" modernist style, theme, and content. But the remarks have been tinged with irony since, clearly, the shadow of Ozu looms incredibly large and solitary. In fact, while Ozu films made the international rounds in celebration of his centenary in 2003, one had to strain to find screen traces of Shimizu's "genius" (as another of his contemporaries, Mizoguchi Kenji, once said).

But there have been appreciations, however belated, outside of Japan. In 2004, the Hong Kong International Film Festival held a 13-film retrospective titled "Shimizu Hiroshi: 101st Anniversary." The accompanying catalogue recognised the dearth of both visual and verbal materials (a lot of his silent films are lost), but still managed to produce a great primer. And last year the folks at Shochiku realised it was time to issue some of Shimizu's output on DVD. What hopes to be an on-going series has so far produced two box sets  (Shimizu Hiroshi collection: Part 1, Shimizu Hiroshi collection: Part 2). "Ongoing" is the operative word, since Shimizu was incredibly prolific: between the 1920s and 1950s, he made over 160 films.

I've taken a roundabout way to begin my review on the newest Eclipse box set, Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu. In the context of Shimizu's main themes and visual style, a detour is poetically and practically appropriate. In a word, Shimizu's cinema can be described as itinerant. To my knowledge, Eclipse provides the first digital instances of Shimizu's films traveling to our region, and it's a grand welcome. The set contains one silent film from 1933, Japanese Girls at the Harbor, and three sound films, Mr. Thank You (1936), The Masseurs and a Woman (1938), and Ornamental Hairpin (1941). (Incidentally, this set offers the same films as Part 1 of Shochiku's Shimizu collection.)

Given the films' year of release, one could easily think that they reflect Imperial Japan's expansionist and militarist policies at home and abroad. But if they do, they do so from the perspective of the underbelly, i.e. the marginalised, the peripheral, the transitory. If Ozu deals specifically with the life cycles of the family unit, arguably Shimizu deals with those who fall through the cracks, in search of a pseudo-family, in some cases fleeing from one, or both.

The implication is that they are in motion, going from point A to point B and maybe back again. And if ever the saying that "it's all in the journey, not the destination" applies, it does so to these four Shimizu films. Take, for example, Mr. Thank You. The title refers to Uehara Ken's character of a bus driver, who respectfully and even affectionately says "thank you" to each and every passerby who makes way for his bus on the gravelly mountain road, from country to train station and back. And that's the film.

But wait, give it a chance. Consider that the entire film is shot on location, that almost all the film takes place in the bus, and as the bus ride progresses, that the film presents a microcosm of depression-hit Japan in the countryside -- especially its effects on women and immigrants -- and community ties being tested. What could have perhaps become a travelogue is actually a quasi-documentary or neorealist depiction of the economics of movement. Poignant moments such as the conversation between Mr. Thank You and an actual Korean woman labourer migrating to a job site owe a great deal to Shimizu's preference for improvisation that location shooting can provide, and affection for shooting locations and scenery.

Shimizu equals the constant movement of his characters with the constant movement of the camera. In fact, most striking about the tracking shots in all the four films is that there's an effortlessness in instilling a kind of pathos in them, without being saccharine about it, whether it's following in devotion Mr. Thank You's bus, or shyly but persistently lagging behind Sunako and Dora in Japanese Girls at the Harbor. Both Luc Moullet and Jean-Luc Godard once said, each in his own way, that the tracking shot is a matter of morality. If morality can be found in Shimizu's tracking shots, so be it. But more fitting here is that the tracking shot is a matter of emotion.

There's a different kind of storytelling at work here, or even a redefinition of storytelling, given that three out of the four films unfold on a gossamer-like strand that constantly unravels into several more strands at every turn. Mr. Thank You pivots around a day-long bus ride, The Masseurs and a Woman around a hot springs resort hosting different social groups (masseurs, students), and Ornamental Hairpin around a man who accidentally steps on, you guessed it, a hairpin.

The tight narrative arc of the silent Japanese Girls at the Harbor makes it the exception. There's the element of travel involved, as Sunako emerges from a tragic adolescent love triangle that takes her to Nagasaki, Kobe, and back to Yokohama. But there's also real, heightened melodrama -- sustained by a logic of redemption and hope -- that's absent in the other films. Japanese Girls also has an explicitness about facts that Shimizu begins to play with in the rest of the films. These last points are not a critique of Japanese Girls or the rest. But the contrasts are notable.

Another notable aspect that actually unites these four films is Shimizu's use of locations (Shimizu more often than not shot on location), and imbuing them with emotion and memory. It should be no surprise, then, that his films begin as one is in the process of embarking on a journey, be it on foot, by bus, or otherwise. In Japanese Girls, the film returns to one of Sunako's and Dora's walking sites when they were young, to better highlight how far their friendship has declined and their lives changed.

A similar sequence occurs in my favourite of the bunch, Ornamental Hairpin, which is set at a hot springs resort like The Masseurs and a Woman. As the end of summer nears and members of the pseudo-family -- an ornery professor, a young couple, an elderly avid go player, and a wounded soldier who steps on the hairpin (Ryu Chishu) -- leave the resort one by one, the woman with a past and owner of the hairpin (Tanaka Kinuyo, Shimizu's ex-wife) quietly walks through the sites where they had convened and encountered each other.

Without dialogue and in long shot, this sequence finally becomes quite moving without claiming itself as such. As one watches this sequence, one cannot help but remember what Ryu's character says: "There's something almost poetic about finding a hairpin in the bath. It's like the sole of my foot has been pierced by poetry." Thanks to this new Eclipse box set, people can now "find" (again) Shimizu -- and that's poetic, period.

Published: Friday, March 20, 2009