The Joy of Movies | Tomoyuki Kojima (Dean, Faculty of Policy Management)
2006.10.27
I often watch movies. And I make it a point to see them in a movie theater, not on DVD. This is because the large screen makes me feel like I've stepped right into the film. Recently, I went to see films like "Hanada Shonen-shi: The Movie," "United 93," and "Hula Girls." They were all enjoyable, but for me, the standout was "Hanada Shonen-shi: The Movie." This is because it allowed me to relive my own boyhood while, in a sense, projecting an idealized version of the childhood I wished I had.
Perhaps that is what movies are all about. China, along with India, is one of the countries with the largest movie audiences. It may be hard to believe now, but in the early 1980s, the most popular actors in China were Momoe Yamaguchi for women and Ken Takakura for men. Momoe Yamaguchi became a national idol in China when the popular TV drama "Akai Meiro" (Red Maze), part of the "Akai Series" (Red Series), was broadcast there. For Ken Takakura, it was the film "Kimi yo Fundo no Kawa o Watare" (Manhunt). This film was produced in 1976, but when it was screened in China in the late 1970s as one of the first foreign films in a long time, Ken Takakura instantly became the most popular male actor in the country. It was likely this admiration from "Manhunt" that led Zhang Yimou, a film director who has won awards at festivals like Berlin and Venice, to cast Ken Takakura as the lead in his film "Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles." These Japanese films likely projected the wishes of "what could have been" and "what one hopes to be." The era had just moved past the "tragic civil strife" of the Cultural Revolution and shifted toward prioritizing economic development, a time when the call to "learn from Japan" was frequently heard.
Now that China has achieved a certain level of economic development, its films are beginning to tell the stories of their own era. I find films that carefully and warmly depict life to be interesting. Among such films, my favorite is "Postmen in the Mountains." It is a story about a postman nearing retirement in a mountainous region left behind by economic development, who travels with his son, who is contemplating whether to take over his father's job. The film portrays the quiet routine of delivering and receiving mail between the father and the people living in the mountains through the son's wavering eyes, and ends by suggesting that he will decide to become his father's successor. It conveys the hope that the son, despite the changes, will also come to cherish "that mountain, that man, that dog" (a translation of the original title, "Na Shan Na Ren Na Gou"), which his father knew so well.
(Posted on: 2006/10/27)