Kinuyo Tanaka

Film at Lincoln Center announces Kinuyo Tanaka, a retrospective of the Japanese actress and filmmaker’s career, running from March 18-27.

As an actress in over 250 films, Kinuyo Tanaka (1909-1977) was one of the most celebrated and wildly popular artists of her time, regularly collaborating with consummate masters like Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi (15 films, including Ugetsu), and Mikio Naruse (whose 1952 film, Mother, introduced her to an international audience). In 1953, Tanaka boldly turned to directing her own features in an industry deprived of female filmmakers and amid outcries from her mentors (particularly Mizoguchi). Nevertheless, she fulfilled her ambition with the help of the young studio Shintoho and her faithful friends Ozu and Naruse, as well as the groundbreaking gay filmmaker Keisuke Kinoshita, who penned the screenplay for her directorial debut, Love Letter, which went on to receive critical acclaim at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival. Between 1953 and 1962, Tanaka directed half a dozen films with a determined sense of freedom and touches of provocation, placing women at the forefront of her movies as mistresses, prostitutes, poets, heroines, and victims of social injustice. Film at Lincoln Center is honored to pay tribute to Tanaka’s monumental place in film history with a retrospective including these six rare films, newly restored by the studios with which she worked: Nikkatsu, Toho, Shochiku, and Kadokawa. 

Entries in the retrospective include: Love Letter, Tanaka’s first film as director, featuring a repatriated veteran (Masayuki Mori) who helps Japanese women write love letters to American GIs; The Moon Has Risen, a delightful comedy focusing on a widower and the romantic prospects of his three daughters; Forever a Woman, considered to be Tanaka’s first truly personal work, depicting a female tanka poet whose life is brought to a premature end by breast cancer; The Wandering Princess, Tanaka’s first film shot in color and Cinemascope, an exquisite historical fresco bound up in a war melodrama starring Machiko Kyô; Girls of Night, concerning a young woman living in one of Japan’s newly established rehabilitation centers for former sex workers, and struggling to build a new life; and Love Under the Crucifix, Tanaka’s final film, a doomed romance between the daughter of a tea master and a married, devout Christian samurai.

In addition to her directorial triumphs, to celebrate Tanaka’s brilliance in front of the camera as well as behind it, Film at Lincoln Center screens six of her personal favorite films, many on imported 35mm prints. These include: Army, Tanaka’s first collaboration with director Keisuke Kinoshita; Shunkinsho: Okoto to Sasuke, rarely screened in New York and the first of many adaptations of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s classic novel; A Hen in the Wind, made three years after WWII and set amid the squalor of Japan’s recovery; The Life of Oharu, possibly the most beautiful of master director Kenji Mizoguchi’s celebrated joint efforts with Tanaka, who stars as a once-proud concubine whose fate is controlled by the cruel whims of the men in her life; Mother, a collaboration with director Mikio Naruse, which brought the star international attention and acclaim; and Sandakan No. 8, considered to be Tanaka’s last great role, released three years before her death, which earned her the Best Actress Award at the 25th Berlin International Film Festival. 

Proof of full vaccination is required for all staff, audiences, and filmmakers at FLC venues. FLC requires all guests to maintain face coverings consistent with the current CDC guidelines inside their spaces, regardless of vaccination status. Additionally, FLC will adhere to a comprehensive series of health and safety policies in coordination with Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and state and city medical experts, while adapting as necessary to the current health crisis. Visit filmlinc.org/safety for more information.

Presented in partnership with Janus Films. This retrospective was conceived by Lili Hinstin. Organized by Lili Hinstin and Tyler Wilson.

Acknowledgements:
Japan Foundation New York; Kawakita Memorial Film Institute; National Film Archive of Japan


Tickets for the retrospective go on sale Friday, March 4 at noon and are $15; $12 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $10 for FLC Members. Become a member today! See more and save with a 3+ Film Package or All-Access Passes ($79 for General Public and $35 for Students). Learn more at www.filmlinc.org.

FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS
All films will take place at the Walter Reade Theater (165 W 65th St)

Love Letter / Koibumi
Kinuyo Tanaka, 1953, Japan, 97m
Japanese with English subtitles
Released a year and a half after the end of the American Occupation, Tanaka’s first film as director follows a repatriated veteran (Masayuki Mori) who helps Japanese women write love letters to American GIs, meanwhile wandering the streets of bustling postwar Tokyo in search of his childhood love (Yoshiko Kuga). Based on a novel by renowned writer Fumio Niwa, with a script from filmmaker Keisuke Kinoshita and popular stars Mori and Kuga in the leading roles, Tanaka’s male-centric melodrama was well-received by critics and audiences alike upon its theatrical release and in the 1954 Cannes Film Festival. While the returned soldier and the panpan (an independent prostitute working the streets) were two well-represented archetypes in Japanese cinema at the time, critics were nonetheless surprised that Tanaka chose for her first film such a controversial subject, rather than a more traditional domestic melodrama about women. Restored in 4K by TOHO CO., LTD. A Janus Films release.
Friday, March 18, 6:30pm (Introduction by Lili Hinstin)
Tuesday, March 22, 8:45pm
Thursday, March 24, 6:30pm

The Moon Has Risen / Tsuki wa noborinu
Kinuyo Tanaka, 1955, Japan, 102m
Japanese with English subtitles
Based on an unused Ozu script gifted to Tanaka, this enchanting comedy follows a widower and the romantic prospects of his three daughters in Japan’s ancient capital of Nara during late autumn. Critics of the time noted Ozu’s influence in the film, particularly the use of the director’s distinctive “pillow shots,” the mise en scène of domestic spaces, and the casting of Chishû Ryû—one of Ozu’s regulars in the father role—but Tanaka’s controlled direction of her performers and the film’s lively, elegant rhythm are entirely her own. Tanaka also appears in the film alongside Mie Kitahara, the future “it girl” of Nikkatsu, who echoes the director’s characteristic fast and snappy acting style. Restored in 4K by the Nikkatsu Corporation. A Janus Films release.
Friday, March 18, 9:00pm (Introduction by Lili Hinstin)
Sunday, March 20, 3:30pm
Saturday, March 26, 8:30pm

Forever a Woman / Chibusa yo eien nare
Kinuyo Tanaka, 1955, Japan, 110m
Japanese with English subtitles
Tanaka’s third film is usually considered her first truly personal work. Based on the biography of tanka poet Fumiko Nakajo, entitled The Eternal Breasts, Forever a Woman concerns an unhappily married mother of two (Yumeji Tsukioka) who divorces her husband and moves back to her mother’s house. There she regularly attends a poetry circle and falls in love once more, until her life is brought to a premature end by breast cancer. Renowned female screenwriter Sumie Tanaka (who would later write Tanaka’s Girls of Night) fashions Nakajo’s ill-fated story with the same raw energy evident in the poet’s verses. Together with its director’s frank depiction of sickness, desire, and sexuality, the film evinces an audacity rare in Japanese cinema of the time, and still surprises to this day. Restored in 4K by the Nikkatsu Corporation. A Janus Films release.
Saturday, March 19, 6:30pm (Introduction by Lili Hinstin)
Monday, March 21, 9:00pm
Tuesday, March 22, 4:00pm
Friday, March 25, 8:45pm

The Wandering Princess / Ruten no ōhi
Kinuyo Tanaka, 1960, Japan, 102m
Japanese and Mandarin with English subtitles
Five years after Forever a Woman, the most successful studio in Japan at the time, Daiei, offered Tanaka the opportunity to direct a josei eiga (“woman’s film”) with their contracted superstar Machiko Kyô. The project transformed into Tanaka’s own version of War and Peace, told from a woman’s perspective, by adapting the best-selling autobiography of Hiro Saga, a Japanese aristocrat engulfed in the colonial politics of Manchuria after marrying Prince Pujie, the young brother of the Qing Dynasty Emperor Puyi. Quite an expensive production for the time—it was also Tanaka’s first film in color and in Cinemascope—The Wandering Princess revealed an entirely new artistic vision from the director: an exquisite historical fresco bound up in a war melodrama. Restored in 4K by the KADOKAWA Corporation. A Janus Films release.
Saturday, March 19, 9:00pm (Introduction by Lili Hinstin)
Wednesday, March 23, 6:30pm
Sunday, March 27, 1:15pm

Girls of Night/ Onna bakari no yoru
Kinuyo Tanaka, 1961, Japan, 93m
Japanese with English subtitles
In the wake of the 1956 Prostitution Prevention Law, a young woman living in one of Japan’s newly established rehabilitation centers, which attempted to reform sex workers, struggles to build a new life. For this Toho production, Kinuyo Tanaka reunited with screenwriter Sumie Tanaka (Forever a Woman), and together they spent time researching correctional homes and the women who passed through them, recording their individual efforts and failures, their solidarity, and the past events that followed them through life. Without the slightest moral judgment, Girls of Night forms an empathetic yet uncompromising portrait of sex workers and a sharp critique at the country’s mistreatment of these communities in postwar occupied Japan. Restored in 4K by TOHO CO., LTD. A Janus Films release.
Sunday, March 20, 6:00pm (Introduction by Lili Hinstin)
Friday, March 25, 6:30pm
Sunday, March 27, 8:30pm

Love Under the Crucifix / Ogin-sama
Kinuyo Tanaka, 1962, Japan, 102m
Japanese with English subtitles
For her sixth and final film behind the camera, Tanaka embarked on making a jidai-geki, or period drama, a genre considered difficult by the studios and challenging to seasoned filmmakers. Set in 16th-century Japan, this doomed romance follows two lovers—one the daughter of a famous tea master and the other a married, devout Christian samurai—come to ruin for their forbidden mutual attraction. With the look of a costume blockbuster like those of Japan’s Golden Age, Love Under the Crucifix (Miss Ogin in its Japanese original title) flamboyantly depicts a heroine who declares to the man she loves: “I come here as a woman who has decided to take control of her destiny.” Though distributed by Shochiku, the film was produced independently by Ninjin Kurabu (“The Carrot Club”), a film company founded by the actresses Yoshiko Kuga, Keiko Kishi, and Ineko Arima (the young star of Ozu’s Equinox Flower, cast here in the lead role), who sought to enable better working conditions for actors within the studio system. Restored in 4K by Shochiku Co., Ltd. A Janus Films release.
Saturday, March 19, 4:00pm
Sunday, March 20, 8:15pm (Introduction by Lili Hinstin)
Wednesday, March 23, 9:00pm
Saturday, March 26, 6:15pm

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To coincide with the presentations of her restored directorial work, Film at Lincoln Center is pleased to celebrate Tanaka’s artistry in front of the camera with a selection of some of her personal favorites and brilliant collaborations with Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, and Kinoshita.

Shunkinsho: Okoto to Sasuke
Yasujirō Shimazu, 1935, Japan, 35mm, 100m
Japanese with English subtitles
Among Tanaka’s personal favorites, the first of many adaptations of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s classic novel A Portrait of Shunkin casts the 25-year-old actress as a blind music teacher, Okoto, living affluently in Osaka during the Meiji era. She rejects nearly every male suitor, but her servant Sasuke (Kōkichi Takada), who escorts her to lessons, takes his growing adoration for her to bizarre lengths. Employing a sharply confined, period-specific space and a sync soundtrack of koto-shamisen music, Shimazu transforms the source text’s masochistic romance into something more like a chaste melodrama, while Tanaka’s magnetic, astonishingly modern performance instigates the film’s palpably tense climax. 35mm print courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan.
Monday, March 21, 6:30pm
Thursday, March 24, 8:45pm

Army / Rikugun
Keisuke Kinoshita, 1944, Japan, 35mm, 87m
Japanese with English subtitles
In her first collaboration with director Keisuke Kinoshita (who penned the screenplay for Love Letter), Tanaka plays the patriotic mother of a young WWII army recruit. Amid strong pressure to make pro-military propaganda during the war, the authorities took one look at Kinoshita’s Army and knew exactly where his sentiments lay. The film chronicles a family that for generations has produced military officers, but the values of tradition seem to serve no one well in contemporary Japan. With the outbreak of war, attention falls on a representative of the youngest generation, a young man plagued by ill health who, through great effort, grows strong enough to follow in his family’s footsteps. In its iconic final scene, the boy’s mother (Tanaka) sees him off to war, and the play of emotions across her face reveals everything about the film’s true attitude toward Japanese militarism. 35mm print courtesy of Japan Foundation. A Janus Films Release.
Tuesday, March 22, 6:30pm
Thursday, March 24, 4:15pm

A Hen in the Wind / Kaze no naka no mendori
Yasujirō Ozu, 1948, Japan, 35mm, 84m
Japanese with English subtitles
With its screenplay completed in 1947, The Moon Has Risen (realized by Tanaka in 1955) was meant to be Ozu’s second film after WWII, but due to a number of production issues—not least the inability to film its story in war-ravaged Tokyo—the project was scrapped for A Hen in the Wind, a more immediate comment on the conditions of Japan’s reconstruction period. This rare melodramatic turn from the director follows a mother (Tanaka) who, while waiting for her husband (Shūji Sano) to return from war, resorts to prostitution to pay her sick child’s medical bills. The director’s delicate humanism is no less apparent in this genre, but perhaps the driving force of the film’s deep emotional impact is Tanaka, whose elegant and staggeringly honest performance gives clear expression to the domestic troubles faced by Japan’s family unit in the postwar era. A Janus Films Release.
Friday, March 18, 4:30pm
Sunday, March 20, 1:30pm

The Life of Oharu / Saikaku ichidai onna
Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952, Japan, 35mm, 136m
Japanese with English subtitles
Perhaps the most sublimely devastating of master director Kenji Mizoguchi’s celebrated collaborations with Tanaka, The Life of Oharu stars the actress as a once-proud concubine whose tragic fate is governed by the callous whims of men and the cruel jealousies of women as she slides into a life of prostitution in Edo-era Japan. Sensitive as always to the rigid social structures that subjugate his heroines, around whom the subtlest movement or camera angle is calibrated for maximum heartbreak effect, Mizoguchi offers a finely wrought, small-gesture melodrama to Tanaka, who in a single film inhabits a perfect synthesis of her most iconic roles—from noble lady, mother, and middle-class wife to geisha, prostitute, and pilgrim. A Janus Films Release.
Saturday, March 19, 1:00pm
Wednesday, March 23, 3:30pm

Mother / Okaasan
Mikio Naruse, 1952, Japan, 35mm, 98m
Japanese with English subtitles
Among her multitudinous onscreen personas—from career woman and prostitute to radical feminist—Tanaka played mother figures intermittently from the early 1940s, perhaps never more memorably than in Mikio Naruse’s contribution to the haha-mono (“mother movie”) genre. As one of the few works from the director distributed theatrically in the West, Mother brought international attention to the actress, who stars as an afflicted yet fiercely independent matriarch in postwar Japan providing for her four children. Exquisitely heartbreaking in her depiction of the enduring pain of loss, Tanaka conveys a world of emotion in a glance. 35mm print courtesy of Japan Foundation. A Janus Films Release.
Friday, March 25, 4:15pm
Sunday, March 27, 3:30pm

Sandakan No. 8 / Sandakan hachiban shōkan: bōkyō
Kei Kumai, 1974, Japan, 35mm, 120m
Japanese and Malay with English subtitles
Tanaka won the Best Actress Award at the 25th Berlin International Film Festival for what may be considered her last great role, in Kei Kumai’s Sandakan No. 8. Released just three years before her death, this adaptation of Tomoko Yamazaki’s pioneering work takes on the subject of karayuki-san, the young women forced into sexual slavery throughout Pacific Rim territories in the early 20th century. A young female journalist (Komaki Kurihara) tracks down one such person—Tanaka’s character, now an impoverished older woman living in isolation—who gradually divulges painful memories of her experiences at a brothel in Borneo. Prompting the film’s dreamlike flashbacks, in which Yoko Takahashi plays the younger version of the former prostitute, Tanaka guides the harrowing saga into the present with knowing magnetism. 35mm print courtesy of the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute. A Janus Films Release.
Monday, March 21, 3:45pm
Sunday, March 27, 5:45pm