PALE FLOWER: SCREENING INTRODUCTION BY John MAGUIRE
Pale Flower In Context
By 1964, Masahiro Shinoda was ready to make Pale Flower. Bursting to make it. He had been an assistant director to Yasujirō Ozu, a master, among other leading lights at the renowned Shōchiku production company in Tokyo. He’d made his directorial debut around the age of 30 in 1960 with a trendy rock and roll adventure called One Way Ticket to Love - which was a flop - and had made half a dozen more successful films over the next couple of years, including 1962’s Tears On The Lion’s Mane - a bitter dockside thriller imbued with a remarkably bleak attitude toward the westernisation of the Japanese national spirit.
Alongside Nagisa Ōshima and Yoshishige Yoshida, Shinoda was the hot young thing, making films that focused on youth culture - still a fairly new concept in 1960s Japan - that sketched the social and political turmoil outlines of what would prove to be a violent and divisive decade in Japanese history. They all worked for Shōchiku, who were at the vanguard of this film revolution, making fast, hip movies in all sorts of genres for the in crowd and the cineaste alike. Shinoda would make 16 feature films for them in the 1960s: the man was a machine.
The Japanese New Wave, like film new waves all over the world at that time and since, traces its roots back to the tap root - the Nouvelle Vague, a group of French film directors in the late 1950s and 1960s who reacted against established cinema form, grammar, and language, and sought to make more individualistic and stylistically innovative films.
That new way of seeing film was also a new way of shooting film, with lighter, easier to operate cameras, quicker film stock (which meant less heavy, expensive lighting), and the new freedom to shooting on the street off the shoulder, quickly and urgently. You’ll see passers by-staring down the camera lens in the exterior shots in Pale Flower. It didn’t matter to Shinoda. He was experimenting, as Jean-Luc and François had shown him. Multiple set-ups, lots of footage; he could play with shadow and light, movement and editing, in ways he didn’t learn working with Ozu a decade before. He was on the barricades.
Yakuza films weren’t exactly revolutionary though. The yakuza are the Japanese mafia, a network of organised criminal gangs that control gambling, prostitution, drugs, extortion, and protection rackets and, being Japanese, they are very well organised. They’ve been making yakuza films since the silent era, with the gangsters then depicted as Robin Hood figures, so called “chivalry films” where the honourable outlaw is torn between the girl and his loyalty to his criminal boss. In Japanese cinema of that time, before, and since, the mob are depicted as strict, almost feudal, hierarchies, commanding total loyalty with a blood price attached to stepping out of line. There’s some crossover with samurai cinema - the period adventures known as “chanbara” - but yakuza films are predominately contemporary and tend to focus on bottom rungs of the hierarchical ladder - the street level men, and the next grade up - with the lords only appearing now and again to scheme and plot.
With the influence of the Hollywood gangster films of the 30s and 40s and 50s, the character of the yakuza films hardened into realism. And the character of the characters changed - they became more ruthless, more thuggish, no longer the heirs to the ancient samurai codes and feudal fealties but proper violent bastards on the make.
It’s for all these reasons that Pale Flower is a seminal film in the yakuza genre, not only for how it captures that moment when the form was shifting into modernity - catching the new wave with all those new wave techniques - but also how it makes its central figure reflect on himself. That was new - using the genre to tell a story that holds a mirror up to its characters morality and the morals of the society they are living in.
Pale Flower is a key text in understanding what would be named the Taiyozoku, the so-called “sun tribe” generation of postwar Japanese youth, who had seen death and destruction on an unimaginable scale, had their faith in every institution destroyed, were the first generation not to believe their emperor was a God, and had every right to their rebellion.
With Pale Flower, Shinoda came decisively into his own - but he didn’t do it alone: shot by Masao Kosugi (who would work with director more than a dozen times); anchored by the coolness of his stars Ryo Ikebe and Mariko Kaga: Butch, macho enforcer called upon to do terrible things and the rich girl slumming it in the gambling dens, looking for thrills on the wrong side of the tracks. He was a well known movie tough guy but she was a 19 year old virtual unknown and this film made her a star. Ikebe is long dead but Kaga is still with is, as is Shinoda, at the age of 91.
A special mention for the score by Shinoda’s regular collaborator, the avant-garde classical composer Toru Takemitsu, where you will hear echoes of this story of thwarted desire between two beautiful people, of an unrequited relationship that crosses all sorts of strictly enforced social divides, of a love that could never be for lots of deeply painful and personal reasons on both sides, him and her.
Pale Flower is a special film that has endured because it's a perfect storm of talent, with Shinoda confidently at the helm. An often dazzling film it’s the perfect gateway film to yakuza cinema, and the entire era of films being made around it in this wave: artful but its accessible, it’s often breathtakingly beautiful but it’s grim and dirty too, the brooding silences and use of ambient sound means its not overloaded with subtitled dialogue but it creates astonishing atmospheres - right from the start and all the way through.
John Maguire, film critic and feature writer for the Business Post newspaper, broadcaster and journalist