Available to stream from 11 to 13 August at https://stummfilmtage.culturebase.org
In the red-light district of the Japanese capital, a young man who has fallen in love with a courtesan loses his sight in a fight with a rival. To be able to pay for the expensive medical treatment, his devoted sister is forced into prostitution. The sophisticated melodrama CROSSWAYS is considered the first Japanese silent film to be shown in Europe during this period. As was already the case in Teinosuke Kinugasa’s previous masterpiece, A PAGE OF MADNESS (1926), the influence of German expressionist cinema is evident in the elaborate visual design.
Just as Kinugasa finds a metaphor for thecinematic apparatus in the woman dancing behind bars in the asylum, hediscovers an apt historical parallel for modem consumer society and itscinematic “dream factory” in the “floating world” (ukiyo) of courtesans and their patrons in Edo Japan. In theYoshiwara quarter and its contiguous cultural territory, Kinugasa glimpsed an“entertainment” world made possible by an advanced money economy, driven by thepurchasing power of the ascendant merchant class, and promoted by a minorindustry of popular art (ukiyo-e),literature (gesaku), and theater (kabuki).
The critical dimension of Kinugasa’s film liesin the gap between the desire stimulated by the illusions of the floating worldand the bitter economic situation of the film’s protagonists. This theme linksCROSSWAYS with contemporary works of so-called proletarian literature,left-leaning modernist literature, and “tendency” films, which frequentlythematize the gap between the fashionable “modern” consumption that prevailedin the rapidly expanding mass media of the 1920s and the realities of everydaylife for the majority of Japanese subjects during the stagnant economicconditions of that decade.
William O. Gardner: New Perceptions: Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Films AndJapanese Modernism, in: Cinema Journal, Vol. 43, No. 3, 2004
