The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 59
Bean Cake, or the Emperor’s New Clothes
Mark Le Fanu
The militant and chauvinist spirit that asserted itself increasingly in
Japan from the 1920s onwards, at some stage in the 1930s converting
itself into fully-fledged fascism, must inevitably, one would think,
have made its mark on the arts – especially on a public art form like
cinema. Doubtless a fair number of crude propaganda films were
made and circulated in that epoch, but either they have not survived,
or else (what amounts to the same thing) they are still
invisibly lodged in the archives. For paradoxical as it may sound,
the thirties were a golden age for Japanese film. The great early
masterpieces of Ozu, Naruse and Gosho that began to come out at
this time were far from being militant spiritually: a good case could
be made for claiming that they are among the most “humanist”
films ever made. Their subject matter is the comedy of petitbourgeois
life, and like the slightly later films of Italian neo-realism
(Bicycle Thieves for example) they cast a particularly tender eye on
the behaviour of children; in the best instances, the gaze itself is
childlike, you could say.
In Bean Cake, which won the main prize for Best Short at last
year’s Cannes Film Festival, the young American director David
Greenspan sets out to recapture that particular cinematic innocence,
and he does so in an original way. Without going to Japan
(downtown LA and Pasadena serve as locations), he has made a
Japanese movie, complete with an all-Japanese cast: a homage to