Das Geschriebene Gesicht
Japan / Switzerland,
1995, 89 min
Shown in 1996
CREDITS
- dir
-
Daniel Schmid
- prod
-
Marcel Hoehn, Kenzo Horikoshi
- scr
-
Daniel Schmid
- cam
-
Renato Berta
- editor
-
Daniela Roderer
- cast
-
Tamasaburo Bando, Han Takehara, Karuko Sugimura, Kazuo Ohno, Yajuro Bando
- source
-
T & C Film AG
- gga award
-
Certificate of Merit, The Arts
-
COMMENTS
Shown in the Spirit of the Dance sidebar. Daniel Schmid in person.
OTHER
The newest film by Daniel Schmid, shot in Japan, features the great actor Tamasaburo Bando in a work that approaches (because it cannot enter) the world of kabuki. Bando is one of the last practitioners of the art of the onnagata, the male actor playing the woman’s role on the kabuki stage. Far from the Western idea of cross-dressing, the onnagata does not try to imitate a woman but to capture her significance; Bando compares it to a man painting a portrait of a woman. His comments lend insight into the work of three of Bando’s idols who appear in the film: the screen actress Haruko Sugimura, best known for her work with Naruse and Ozu; the legendary geisha dancer Han Takehara and Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno. In interviews with the artists and in a privileged look at the backstage rituals of costume and makeup, we see that, for those for whom theater is life, life is ceremony. But this is no straight performance documentation; rather, it is a collaborative interpretation, with an exquisite use of music and sound, and camerawork by Schmid’s longtime cinematographer Renato Berta. Swiss director Schmid is as well known in Europe for his opera productions as for his cinematic interpretations of melodrama which themselves explore the “mask” of female beauty (his lead in films like La Paloma is the Dietrich-like Ingrid Caven). Schmid indulges his art in the film’s second half, when he, Bando and Ohno team to create a modern kabuki-noir-opera called Twilight Geisha Story. It’s a fitting title for a tribute to Japan’s ancient and disappearing performing traditions.
—Judy Bloch
FACTOID #80
Irving ’Bud’ Levin, owner of San Francisco’s Metro Theatre, founded the SFIFF in 1957. However, Levin credited the idea for creating the Festival to the Italian consul general at the time, Pierluigi Alvera, who became one of its staunchest supporters.
