A few years ago Japanese film critic Shigehiko Hasumi, the finest of his kind, sought to trace a coherent thread through the oeuvre of Yasuzo Masumura (1924–86), but eventually surrendered and admitted that Masumura is difficult to categorise in a meaningful way, not least because he has no representative film. Not only does Masumura have no representative film or a consistent visual style like his more celebrated compatriots – from Ozu and Mizoguchi to Kurosawa and Oshima – but his oeuvre lacks a distinguishing thematic framework or a standout masterpiece that would make even not so much ardent cinephiles prick up their ears. While without a "heyday", he does have a career turning point, taking place in the early 1970s with the bankruptcy of the Daiei studio which was a major obstacle in Masumura’s filmmaking career. The director with an output of sixty films over the course of 35 years who had annually made three to four films under Daiei was then lucky to direct one each year – with mixed results.

He did have a star of his own, though: Ayaka Wakao, whom he discovered while assisting Mizoguchi on his last film. He made one third of his films with this wonderful actress. In short, it is safe to say that Daiei and Ayako Wakao were the most tangible fixtures in his oeuvre. As a studio director, he tackled diverse themes, peer violence in the context of post-war "youth culture", anti-war and anti-capitalist films, corporate espionage, titillating erotic films that tapped into the Japanese tradition of pinku eiga, or "pink film", and above all films with intrepid heroines, usually embodied by Ayako Wakao. And if a central motif has to be pinpointed, let's identify it in the male and female protagonists who often push their individual instincts to the brink of frenzy, e.g. in The Spider Tattoo, All Mixed Up and Blind Beast, three expressive classics from our short retrospective, the first showing of Masumura's lifework in our region. Masumura was not only an apologist for genre cinema, but he loved to subvert the genres he worked in; especially when dealing with women and their bodies, the initially oppressed and humiliated heroine usually manages to reverse the power dynamics, outdoing the aggressor not only in the game of dominance, but also in perversity!

Masumura is not a director of exploitation films – this label would have been unjust – but an auteur who knew how to brew a potent cocktail of elements of Japanese popular genres and a critique of Japanese post-war reality. In doing so, he successfully rejected any sentimentality and addressed ethical dilemmas – brilliantly so in the superb, inimitable Red Angel where a nurse sent to the field hospitals during the Sino-Japanese war, a fascinating "angel of salvation", sexually services the badly wounded soldiers and prostitutes herself to obtain a much-needed blood transfusion for her rapist.

The American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of the first in the Anglo-Saxon world to draw attention to the work of the criminally unrecognised auteur at the turn of the century, identified in Masumura’s films stylistic and thematic elements of Sam Fuller, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk and Frank Tashlin. He finds parallels with the last named, for example, in the brilliant social satire, Giants and Toys, a critique of the growing "corporate culture" and cutthroat competition, where, in the context of the confectionery industry, the heroine's rotten teeth become a promotional sensation.

Masumura was no stranger to Western European or American influences; after studying philosophy at Tokyo University, he trained as a filmmaker in the early 1950s at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Rome) under Antonioni, Fellini and Visconti. After returning to Japan, he worked as an assistant director for Mizoguchi and Ichikawa before making his directorial debut for Daiei. His body of work is highly eclectic, colourful, occasionally violent and ruthless, but invariably honest and expressly individual. He abhorred cheap manipulative tricks, as he liked to put it, such as close-ups or picturesque landscapes, but adored "negative space". He mastered every genre he tried his hand at, and subverted every genre in his own singular style. Long overlooked as one of Japanese cinema’s best-kept secrets, some of Masumura’s major works have been digitally restored in preparation for the centennial of his birth. It’s high time he finally received the recognition he is due.

Simon Popek