The Resurgence of Kinuyo Tanaka
The Criterion Channel is paying tribute to the great Japanese actress and filmmaker.
Because I write for a few American outlets, I like to stay up to date with what happens on The Criterion Channel, the streaming platform that is a veritable treasure trove for fans of world cinema. And I was particularly delighted to learn their new additions for March include the complete directorial oeuvre of Kinuyo Tanaka, a talent worth (re)discovering.
Known primarily as an actress, perhaps the most important one in Japan during her time, Tanaka is someone most cinephiles will have come across at least once, even if they were to forget her name: over the course of a five-decade career, from 1924 to 1976 (a year before she died of a brain tumor), she worked with all the great masters, becoming associated mainly with Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujirō Ozu.
Like many of her contemporaries, such as Ida Lupino (US), Mai Zetterling (Sweden) and Ana Mariscal (Spain), she eventually leveraged her clout in front of the camera to start working behind it, becoming the second female director in the history of Japanese cinema. This was not without some professional and personal heartache: Mizoguchi objected to a recommendation that the famed Nikkatsu studio hire her as a director, a decision that put an end to their fruitful collaboration and friendship.
Between 1953 and 1962, Tanaka directed six films: Love Letter (1953), The Moon Has Risen (1955), The Eternal Breasts(1955), The Wandering Princess (1960), Girls of the Night (1961) and Love Under the Crucifix (1962). Despite some prestige (Love Letter competed in Cannes in 1954, and The Moon Has Risen boasted Ozu as a co-writer), these movies were largely overlooked during her lifetime, but have been re-evaluated in later years for their depiction of women’s lives in Japan.
In fact, full disclosure, I have something of a (very minor) personal connection to Tanaka’s recent resurgence in the cinephile sphere: since 2015, I’ve had a working relationship with the Locarno Film Festival, and in January 2020 it was announced that, for the first time, the festival was going to devote its retrospective to a woman. The plan was to show restored prints of all six of Tanaka’s directorial efforts, as well as a selection of her acting credits, for a total of around 35 titles.
It was an ambitious project (Roberto Turigliatto, who was curating the retrospective, told me that locating the prints was sometimes a Herculean task), complete with a planned special appearance by the Oscar-winning musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, who had agreed to come to Locarno to provide the live accompaniment for one of the silent films featuring Tanaka.
It was all very exciting, until the pandemic hit and upended all plans for that year’s festival (the edition still took place, but with very few screenings and no proper retrospective). And then, that September, Locarno and Lili Hinstin, the artistic director who had thought of the Tanaka program, parted ways.
The initiative resurfaced elsewhere, less than a year later: The Moon Has Risen premiered in its new 4K version at the Cannes Film Festival in July 2021, and three months later, the Lumière Festival in Lyon screened all six movies, with introductions by Hinstin and Pascal-Alex Vincent, one of the foremost European experts on Japanese cinema.
This set the stage for the theatrical reissue of the films in France, as well as the release of a gorgeous DVD/Blu-ray box set by Carlotta Films, a label that specializes in prestige editions of classic films (in addition to the movies and trailers, the box set contains a documentary and booklet by Vincent). If you understand French and have the right player, the Carlotta catalogue is worth a closer look.
And now, thanks to Criterion, Tanaka’s lesser-known works are ready to re-emerge in the English-speaking community (one imagines the streaming premiere will lead to some kind of physical release, perhaps also in the UK which has become the label’s go-to market for select Region 2 discs). A six-film journey to the Japan of yesteryear, captured on screen by one of its finest cinematic talents.