Anyone who has ever met her in a film is likely to never forget this frail silhouette with the radiant presence, this oval face so quick to slip from one emotion to another, this formidable intelligence of play mixing the precision of gesture with emotional depth.
Domestic ghost shattering in The Tales of the Moon wave after the rain (1953), blind mother in The Steward Sansho (1954), geisha descending the social ladder in The Life of O’Haru, gallant woman (1952), Kinuyo Tanaka was much more than the queen of melodrama: the greatest actress of Japanese cinema, whose classical age she crossed in fifty years of career (from the 1920s to the 1970s).
If the Light Festival, high mass of restored cinema which takes place in Lyon from October 9 to 17, dedicates a retrospective to her, it is to bring to light a little-known part of her filmography: the six feature films that she shot between 1953 and 1962, becoming in fact the first director to build a work within a then exclusively male industry (after the pioneer Tazuko Sakane, 1904-1975, of which only one film has survived). The shock is equal to their rarity: far from being just curiosities, these six films of unusual splendor reveal a first-rate filmmaker.
Desire for emancipation
Born in 1909, after having started on the boards as a very young player of biwa (the Japanese lute), Kinuyo Tanaka was hired by the production house Shochiku in 1924. She found her first important roles with Heinosuke Gosho (Intimate dream, 1927), turns comedies and thrillers with Yasujiro Ozu (I graduated, but …, 1929) and eighteen films with Hiroshi Shimizu, a great social and progressive filmmaker, whom she married in 1927 – a marriage that lasted only one year, the only one that the actress would ever contract. In just a few years, she established herself as one of the studio’s most popular young premieres, so much so that the films took her first name (Doctor Kinuyo, 1933; Kinuyo’s First Love, 1940).
In 1949, the actress made a trip to Hollywood: she went there in a traditional kimono and returned in Western pants.
During the war, she met Kenji Mizoguchi, a touchy genius with whom began a collaboration of fourteen films, mostly heartbreaking melodramas (The Tales of the Moon Wave after the Rain, The Life of O’Haru…) who will do a lot for the recognition of Japanese cinema abroad. His roles are tinged with a commitment and an incredible strike force: in Flame of my love (1949), she plays an activist for women’s rights betrayed by her mentor; in Women of the night (1948), a prostitute leading a guerrilla war against men to inoculate them with syphilis.
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