Early Colour Films in Japanese Cinema(RTRI 2020)

Movie Name: The Thousand-Stitch Belt
Language: Japanese(English Subtitles)
Category:--
Duration: 20 mins
Director: Genjiro Saegusa
Cast: Fukui Matsunosuke, Shizuko Takizawa, Tachibana Hoshiko
Story: The senninbari, or one thousand-stitch belt, is a sash worn by Japanese soldiers in World War II as a momento of the endless longings of the women of their families who made them. Filmed in the same year as the Second Sino-Japanese War, The Thousand-Stitch Belt is the oldest surviving Japanese coloured sound film, made using the American Cinecolor two-colour system by the production company Dainihon tennenshoku eiga seisakujo (Greater Japan Natural Color Productions), a pioneer of colour cinema and the first company to adopt the Multicolor process in Japan. An incomplete, 20-minute nitrate colour positive was discovered at Moscow’s Gosfilmofond archive. Staff from IMAGICA and IMAGICA West in Japan scanned the severely damaged print on site at Moscow, produced a 4K version and devised a new method of digital restoration by applying an innovative system of Look Up Tables that analysed photochemical simulations data to identify colour that cannot be expressed in a two-colour system and keep that range from being picked up in colour grading, so as to retrieve the colour of the film.

Genjiro Saegusa (1900－？)
Director and screenwriter Genjiro Saegusa was contemporary with Kenji Mizoguchi at Nikkatsu Studios. His rediscovered action film, Special Express: 300 Miles (1928), has been screened and well received across Europe over recent years.

Movie Name: Natsuko's Adventure in Hokkaido
Language: Japanese(English Subtitles)
Category: --
Duration: 95 mins
Director: Noboru Nakamura
Cast: Rieko Sumi, Masao Wakahara
Story: After World War II, Fuji Photo Film Co. Led. developed and launched colour film stocks, with which the first Japanese natural colour features Carmen Comes Home (1951) and Natsuko’s Adventure in Hokkaido were produced by Shochiku; the latter has seldom been presented as its existing print is an incomplete one. Adapted from an early serial fiction by Yukio Mishima, it is a melodrama with women as subjects—a genre Nakamura was best at, with excellent representation of Mishima’s persevering characters. Born to a prestigious family, Natsuko is not impressed by any one of her suitors. Determined to spend her life serving god, she sets off to a convent in Hakodate, Hokkaido and meets along the way a young bear-hunter with whom she begins an adventure. A few scenes are missing in this print, one of which near the end is without a soundtrack; lines in the original script are inserted in these scenes to make up for these defects, which do not discount the film’s status as a valuable film capturing Hakodate in its glorious and vibrant colours.

Noboru Nakamura (1913－1981)
Born in Tokyo, Nakamura majored in English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. He began working as an assistant director for Shochiku Studios in 1936 under directors such as Yasujiro Ozu. Contemporary of Keisuke Kinoshita, he directed 82 films during his career and was known for female-centric narratives.