Kōzaburō Yoshimura
1911 - 2000
安城家の舞踏会
Kōzaburō Yoshimura
Setsuko Hara, Yumeko Aizome
After Japan's loss in the war, the wealthy, cultured, liberal Anjo family have to give up their mansion and their way of life. They hold one last ball at the house before leaving. The seemingly cold, cynical son secretly grieves for his defeated father and the values that the war destroyed, while the daughter tries to prevent father from taking his life and to find her own place in the new Japan.
The Ball at the Anjo House
偽れる盛装
Kōzaburō Yoshimura
Machiko Kyō, Keiju Kobayashi
Clothes of Deception initiated Yoshimura’s most characteristic vein. This geisha story is often described as a loose remake of Mizoguchi’s pre-war masterpiece Sisters of Gion (1936), but this is inexact. Whereas in Mizoguchi’s study of two sisters, both women had been geisha, in Yoshimura’s film only Kimicho (Kyo Machiko) is, while her sister works in the Kyoto tourist office. Juxtaposing a traditional Kyoto profession with a modern one, Yoshimura shows how life in the old capital was changing in the wake of wider transformations in Japanese society.
Clothes of Deception
眠れる美女
Kōzaburō Yoshimura
Takahiro Tamura, Yoshiko Kayama
About an establishment where old men pay to sleep besides young girls that had been narcotized and happen to be naked, the sleeping beauties. The old men are expected to take sleeping pills and share the bed for a whole night with a girl without attempting anything of bad taste like putting a finger inside their mouths.
The House of the Sleeping Virgins
千羽鶴
Kōzaburō Yoshimura
Michiyo Kogure, Nobuko Otowa
Kazuo Miyagawa’s prizewinning black-and-white cinematography draws out the moral shadings of Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata’s 1952 novel Thousand Cranes, a quietly devastating story of a young man, orphaned during the war, who stumbles into a passionate yet tragic relationship with his late father’s mistress and her daughter.
Reminiscence
