A memory.
Alexander Payne burst out of the Jolly Cinema in Bologna way back
in 2013 and said almost to the entire crowd. "My god. Did you see Setsuko
Hara in that movie". The film was Kochiyama
Sochun (Sadao Yamanaka, Japan, 1936). She played a character named Onami.
She is the last person listed in the credits in the Bologna program book and
the accompanying notes by Alexander Jacoby and Johan Nordstrom make no mention
of her role or her appearance. Their focus is on the director Yamanaka and the
film's place in the firmament of early Japanese sound films. In the swirl
of a four films a day event I cannot of course for the life of me remember
anything beyond Payne’s exclamatory moment!
It was not Hara's debut, that occurred in Tamerau nakare wakodo yo (Tetsu Taguchi, Japan, 1935) I suspect
not a film that even any of the cognoscenti will have seen.
Her lasting contribution though was made
in the six films she made for Yasujiro Ozu and we should be grateful to the DVD
company Criterion for immediately posting a wonderful essay by the late Donald
Richie titled Ozu
and Setsuko Hara.
Hara had not acted for close to fifty years but she is as luminous
as ever and will so remain.
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