Six Fantastical and Horror Films from a Bygone Age
December 9-16, 2023
Featuring Rare Screenings of
Toshio Matsumoto’s Final Feature Dogra Magra,
plus International Premiere of Zigeunerweisen 4K Restoration
Japan Society is pleased to announce Taisho Roman: Fever Dreams of the Great Rectitude, a six-film series running December 9-16. This exclusive two-week event will bring together premiere and rarely-seen screenings of Japanese films from the 1920s to the 1980s all focused on dreamlike and nightmarish depictions of the Taisho era (1912-1926), Japan’s own “Roaring ‘20s”.
From horror to cult classics, to provocative arthouse films, Taisho Roman is the first time this selection of films from some of Japan’s most radical filmmakers will be presented together. And from the International Premiere of a new 4K Restoration to ultra-rare 35mm prints imported from Japan, Taisho Roman is your only chance to see these spellbinding tales. This is a can’t miss event for NYC cinephiles exclusively presented at Japan Society (333 East 47th Street).
Coined in reflective terms, “Taisho Roman” (short for romanticism) brings a nostalgia for the libertine pre-war era that preceded the militaristic Showa period and its imperialist displays.
“Taisho is the best,” Seijun Suzuki would wryly proclaim when considering the period of his birth. A new era born from the passing of Meiji, the Taisho period, with its elaborate, decadent fantasies, amounted to Japan’s own belle epoque–a short-lived age where Western thought, modernization, liberalism and arts would convene. This was a time of juxtapositions amidst changing mores, social trends and attitudes – from the blending of Western and Japanese cultures and the rise of hedonistic ideals, to Taisho democracy and the beginnings of ero guro—the all-too-brief epoch signified “great righteousness” or “rectitude.” Its tranquility, however, was abruptly upended with the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, followed by a tide of ethnic and political violence, rising militarism, and the death of the sickly Emperor Taisho in 1926.
Drawing inspiration from the otherworldly writings of Kyoka Izumi, Hyakken Uchida, Kyusaku Yumeno and beyond, The Taisho Roman series presents films from some of Japan’s most radical filmmakers—Shuji Terayama, Toshio Matsumoto and Akio Jissoji—whose approach to the prosperous period is marked by creative, daring, and distorted re-imaginings. The results offer a nostalgia from a bygone age that never really existed.
Opening on December 9th with an ultra-rare imported 35mm print of the head-spinning Dogra Magra (1988), the final feature by Funeral Parade of Roses director Toshio Matsumoto, series selections include an imported 35mm print of Shuji Terayama’soedipal Kyoka Izumi adaptation Grass Labyrinth; 1926 Taisho-era production A Page of Madness, Teinosuke Kinugasa’s singular expressionist work based on a story by influential novelist Yasunari Kawabata; the international premiere of a 4K restoration of Seijun Suzuki’s critically-lauded Zigeunerweisen; Teruo Ishii’s deranged Edogawa Ranpo adaptation Horrors of Malformed Men featuring butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata; and late 80s occult fantasy epic Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis.
Taisho Roman captures an obsession with madness, morbidity, and perversions within the decadence of the time. Despite its short-lived permanence, the legacy of the Taishoperiod (not unlike that of the Edo era), has become the object of fascination among filmmakers for its cultural and political shifts—lending itself to be an open canvas for romanticized depictions of the era.
“Exploring one of Japan’s most fascinating periods, Taisho Roman pulls from some of Japanese literature’s most occult and imaginative texts—writings that to this day remain untranslated,” said Alexander Fee, Japan Society’s Film Programmer and curator of this series. “Featuring films that range from exploitation to avant-garde and angura, this series collects both well-known and forgotten works that envisage differing realities of the often-mythologized era of Japanese history.”
Tickets for each film screening are $16 (general admission), $14 (students and seniors), and $12 (Japan Society members.)
Specially priced tickets for the December 9th screening of Grass Labyrinth are $10 (general admission), $8 (students and seniors) and $5 (Japan Society members.)
Screenings take place in Japan Society’s landmarked headquarters at 333 East 47th Street, one block from the United Nations. Lineup and other details subject to change.
For complete information, visit HERE. Tickets are available now.
FILM DESCRIPTIONS
All films are listed alphabetically.
Dogra Magra
『ドグラ・マグラ』 (Dogura Magura)
Saturday, December 9 at 6:00 PM; Friday, December 15 at 9:00 PM
Dir. Toshio Matsumoto, 1988, 109 min., 35mm, color, in Japanese with live English subtitles. With Yoji Matsuda, Shijaku Katsura, Hideo Murota, Eri Misawa.
December 9th screening introduced by Japanese literary translator Daniel Joseph.
45th Anniversary—Imported 35mm Print. Based on one of the Sandaikisho (Three Great Occult Books) of Japanese mystery fiction, Toshio Matsumoto’s fourth and final feature adapts the unadaptable: a filmed version of surrealist 1935 avant-garde classic Dogra Magra written by Yumeno Kyusaku—the famous detective novelist whose pen name fittingly translates to “person who always dreams.” In Taisho 15, the period’s final year, an amnesiac awakens in a sanatorium without recollection of his name or face. Forced to reconstruct his memory, the patient is accosted by two doctors (including one purported to be deceased) who relate his condition in differing fashions, complicating whether physicians are telling the truth, or playing a Fowlesian godgame. Working with frequent cinematographer Tatsuo Suzuki (Himiko, Pastoral: To Die in the Country), Matsumoto constructs a disorientating Jungian work, overwrought with conspiracies and intermingling tales. Delivering intra-womb fetuses, red herrings and false revelations, Dogra Magra unfurls a complex tapestry of alternating histories—resulting in a whirlwind tragedy brought on by fantasies of eternal recurrence.
Grass Labyrinth
『草迷宮』 (Kusa Meikyu)
Saturday, December 9 at 8:30 PM; Friday, December 15 at 6:00 PM
Dir. Shuji Terayama, 1979, 35mm, 40 min., color, in Japanese with English subtitles. With Takeshi Wakamatsu, Hiroshi Mikami.
Imported 35mm Print. Shuji Terayama’s haunting childhood melancholia finds young Akira deep within reminiscences of his youth, searching for the forgotten verses of a lullaby his mother once sang to him. Originally released as part of the three-film erotic omnibus Private Collections (featuring the work of Walerian Borowcyzk and Just Jaeckin), Terayama’s short adapts famed writer Kyoka Izumi’s story into garish psychosexual hysteria with suitably oedipal undertones—resulting in a metaphysical journey that emboldens the traumas of adolescence to take on new forms. Akira’s labyrinthine voyage resurfaces past figures and memories—from a tryst with a powder-faced nymphomaniac to the shifting threads of his mother’s weaving loom. A transient wanderer lost within his subconscious, Akira inevitably draws closer to childhood’s end in his ceaseless quest for the lyrics of a lilting melody. Screens with A Page of Madness on December 15th.
Dir. Teruo Ishii, 1969, 99 min. DCP, color, in Japanese with English subtitles. With Teruo Yoshida, Tatsumi Hijikata, Yukie Kagawa.
Set in Taisho 13, Teruo Ishii’s singular Edogawa Ranpo adaptation is a classic of Toei’s exploitation horror, consummate in its embrace of the ero guro genre. Piecing together a selection of Ranpo’s works, notably Strange Tale of Panorama Islandand The Demon of the Lonely Isle, Ishii’s bizarre cult feature begins in an asylum where Hirosuke Hitomi, a sane man with no recollection of his past, escapes the grounds of the sanatorium, tracing an eerie tune that might provide clues to his history. Taking on the identity of a deceased man—one who inexplicably resembles him—Hirosuke is drawn to a deserted island governed by the aberrant Jogoro, ferociously portrayed by butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata. Jogoro possesses an insatiable desire to contort humans into new forms, and the island houses his dream for a new world—manifested through his experimental subjects. Macabre and brooding, Ishii’s transgressive Horrors of Malformed Men is a hallucinatory descent into madness, the rare Ranpo adaptation that truly evokes and evinces its author’s macabre sensibilities.
A Page of Madness
『狂った一頁』 (Kurutta Ichipeiji)
Friday, December 15 at 6:00 PM
Dir. Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926, 59 min. DCP, b&w, 70s re-release “New Sound” version. With Masao Inoue, Yoshie Nakagawa and Ayako Iijima. Story by Yasunari Kawabata.
Teinosuke Kinugasa’s monumental A Page of Madness has been hailed as one of the great works of the silent era, an independent film produced in the final year of Taisho that channels avant-garde experimentalism and modernism in its bold cinematic form. In part inspired by Kinugasa’s visit to a mental hospital and an encounter with Emperor Yoshihito, A Page of Madness tells the story of a repentant man who takes on the job of an asylum custodian to take care of his ill wife. With ties to the Shinkankaku(New Impressionist) School—including the involvement of novelist Yasunari Kawabata—Kinugasa’s radical film omits intertitles, utilizing rapid montages and oblique storytelling to create a dizzying masterwork that occupies the uninhibited emotions of its protagonists. Praised in a contemporaneous Kinema Junpo review as “the first filmlike film born in Japan,” Kinugasa’s feature was lost for decades until a nitrate print was miraculously found in the filmmaker’s storehouse in 1971. Revived in the 1970s with a reworked “New Sound” version, the film’s rediscovery was a revelation. Screens with Grass Labyrinth.
Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis
『帝都物語』 (Teito Monogatari)
Saturday, December 16 at 8:00 PM
Dir. Akio Jissoji, 1988, 135 min., DCP, color, in Japanese with English subtitles. With Shintaro Katsu, Kyusaku Shimada, Mieko Harada. Screenplay by Kaizo Hayashi.
45th Anniversary. A resurrected 10th-century general hellbent on bringing about the fall of Tokyo drives the narrative of one of Japan’s most expensive live-action films of the ‘80s. Directed by New Wave acolyte and Ultramandirector Akio Jissoji (This Transient Life, Mandala) and based on the first three volumes of natural historian and polymath Hiroshi Aramata’s esoteric Teito Monogatari, Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis is an occult retelling of the history of Tokyo, imbued with dark fantasy, horror and folkloric histories. Incorporating a mix of historical figures and events that include writer Kyoka Izumi and industrialist Eiichi Shibusawa as well as the Great Kanto Earthquake, Jissoji’s sweeping cult film envisions a new mythology for Tokyo’s modern era. Aided by creature design from visionary artist H.R. Giger (Alien) and anchored by Kyusaku Shimada’s towering performance as the immortal general Yasunori Kato, Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis is overly ambitious, reeling from the sheer scope of its material and unabashedly a true spectacle to behold.
Zigeunerweisen
『ツィゴイネルワイゼン』 (Tsigoineruwaizen)
Saturday, December 16 at 5:00 PM
Dir. Seijun Suzuki, 1980, 145 min. DCP, color, in Japanese with English subtitles. With Yoshio Harada, Naoko Otani, Toshiya Fujita, Michiyo Okusu, Akaji Maro. Screenplay by Yozo Tanaka.
International Premiere of 4K Restoration. Freely adapting Hyakken Uchida’s Disk of Sarasate and Yamataka boshi, Zigeunerweisen ushered in a late career renaissance for director Seijun Suzuki following his decade-long blacklisting and the commercial failure of 1977 comeback A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness. Aochi, a professor of German, relates the peculiar events that transpire in the months and then years following a chance gathering at a seaside ryokan with the devilish Nakasago (Yoshio Harada), a former colleague suspected of murder, and a geisha in mourning named Koine (Naoko Otani). Tied by the winds of fate, Aochi finds himself enveloped in the complicated affairs of their personal lives—from sexual dalliances to imagined encounters. Yozo Tanaka’s script unfolds a patchwork of episodic digressions, interludes and puzzling parables. One such is a gramophone record of Pablo de Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen that is said to hold the voice of the composer himself within the recording—his words embedded yet unintelligible to the mortal ear in a strange voice that emanates when the record is played. Spinning tales beyond comprehension that cross into the afterlife, Suzuki’s independent comeback forms the bizarre, lyrical beginnings of his late career success.
SCREENING SCHEDULE
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 9
6 PM Dogra Magra
8:30 PM Grass Labyrinth
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15
6 PM A Page of Madness / Grass Labyrinth
9 PM Dogra Magra
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16
3 PM Horrors of Malformed Men
5 PM Zigeunerweisen
8 PM Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis
Special Thanks to Bret Berg (AGFA); Laurence Braunberger & Frédérique Ros (Films du Jeudi); Beth Rennie (George Eastman Museum); Shun Inoue & Akinaru Rokkaku (Japan Foundation); Daniel Joseph; Carl Morano (Media Blasters); Rikako Kosugiyama & Jo Osawa (National Film Archive of Japan); Shuji Shibata.
Japan Society programs are made possible by leadership support from Booth Ferris Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Film programs are generously supported by ORIX Corporation USA, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and Yen Press. Endowment support is provided by the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Endowment Fund and The John and Miyoko Davey Endowment Fund. Additional season support is provided by The Globus Family, David Toberisky, and Friends of Film. Transportation assistance is provided by Japan Airlines, the official Japanese airline sponsor of Japan Society Film. Housing assistance is provided by the Kitano Hotel, the official hotel sponsor of Japan Society Film.
