HUMANITY AND PAPER BALLOONS
Sadao Yamanaka, 1937
The sad story of director Yamanaka"s life is almost enough to overshadow this wonderful final film from one of the true greats of Japan"s "Golden Age" of cinema. A contemporary and friend of Ozu, "Humanity and Paper Balloons" marked the end of a six-year run directing period melodramas. The day the film premiered, Yamanaka was drafted into the army and sent to Manchuria, where he died on the front aged only 29.
His second collaboration with the leftist theatre troupe Zenshin-za, the film represents a direct challenge to the militarist ethos rampant in other period movies of the time. Both beginning and ending with a suicide, the film focuses on the denizens of a low rent tenement district in Edo, a world of class stratification, insular privilege, and social immobility is exposed, suggesting that life for those at the bottom of the social ladder was both brutal and short in feudal Japan. We follow luckless samurai, Matajuro, as he looks for work, while at home his wife creates the paper balloons of the title. Meanwhile, his neighbour Shinza, a barber, kidnaps a young heiress and hides her in Matajuro's home; his attempt to extort a ransom from her father ends in grief.
Though the story is in fact drawn from a nineteenth century kabuki play, Yamanaka realises the film utterly cinematically, and the performances from the Zenshin-za are surprisingly naturalistic (and what we would call "modern"). Yamanaka's uses seamless, transitional wipe-cuts throughout the film that suggest an intrinsic interrelation between the classes, that connects the residents' boorish actions with the desperate, underhand tactics similarly used by the merchant and samurai classes to achieve their own aims.
This is a pessimistic (but brave) film; like the patiently crafted paper balloons created each day by Masajuro"s wife to help make ends meet, inescapable social class proves to be a carefully a constructed fragile shell of empty, disposable ideals.
This is essential viewing not only as a historical curio (it is one of only three surviving Yamanaka films), but as one of the lost classics of Japanese cinema. Yamanaka"s premature death was a real tragedy, and the impression this film gives is of a man who would have been regularly mentioned in the same breath as Ozu and Mizoguchi, had he lived.