Jujiro

In cooperation with the Filmmuseum, the festival is presenting a rare copy of a Japanese film classic. Charles Janko was commissioned by the Filmmuseum to compose a new score for the film, for an ensemble of piano, oboe and percussion. The festival sees the world première of this musical accompaniment.Yoshiwara, the famous entertainment area of Tokyo, in the eighteenth century. The young man Rikiya is convinced that he has killed his rival in a duel. From the house of the geisha O-Ume he hurries to his sister Okiku and allows himself to be cared for by her. Then he returns to O-Ume, but there he finds his rival not just alive, but with O-Ume. He furiously starts fighting again. When his rival throws hot ashes in his eyes, he hurries blindly to Okiku for help, but she doesn’t have enough money for a doctor. A matchmaker suggests that Okiku prostitutes herself. Everything goes wrong when someone pretending to be a policeman tries to rape her. A delirious Rikiya returns to O-Ume, with tragic consequences.Unlike the films in the festival’s ‘The Bridge in the Rain’ programme, Jujiro reveals a Western influence on a Japanese film-maker. In his film, Kinugasa used style influences such as German Expressionism and the Kammerspiel, as in Rikiya’s hallucinations and visions, that are reminiscent in editing and set usage of Dr Mabuse and Metropolis. Kinugasa himself described his film as a ‘samurai film without duels’. Jujiro was the first film that brought the Japanese film industry to the attention of the West; it was screened in Paris and Berlin at that time.