Two big Japanese film events in New York this fall, as I found out from the Criterion Collection's news page. First at Lincoln Center there's Shochiku at 110, at which I'm most looking forward to The Loyal 47 Ronin (Chushingura), three and a half hours long and the closest thing to Japan's national movie, I'm told; Ozu's Late Spring; and perhaps Kinji Fukasaku's Fall Guy, about a washed up samurai film star trying to preserve his image. I'm mostly aiming for directors I'm familiar with, and films of theirs that aren't available on DVD. There are so many other films playing, but it's hard to know what's going to be good based mostly on skeletal plot outlines. I am curious about "The Lights of Asakusa," partly because I think it's really cool to get to see what a neighborhood of Tokyo was like in 1937, and partly because, for maybe the first time ever, I can't find this movie on IMDb. They have 22 movies by the director, including one made in the same year, but nothing resembling the English title or the Japanese, Asakusa no hi.

Sometimes I have to step back and wonder if I'm disappearing down a rabbit-hole in trying to find and appreciate increasingly obscure Japanese movies. First I got into Kurosawa, then Yasujiro Ozu, Seijun Suzuki, Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura. Takashi Miike probably belongs in a separate list. "The Loyal 47 Ronin" would be the first I've seen by Kenji Mizoguchi. I have a tendency to put a lot of stock in the words of respected film lovers and critics, and let my opinions be almost pre-formed for me before I even see the movies. Surely there's an end to the supply of lost masterpieces and gems, and eventually I'm just watching movies that were forgotten for a reason, but that someone loves because of some context or memory that I just don't have. I do want to make sure that I'm still enjoying the movies and not just appreciating them.

I also think a lot about how older movies and oeuvres would be perceived if they were made today. For example, in Donald Richie's Japan Journals, I read that all of Ozu's films are about the destruction of the family. I figured he was talking about deep themes and interpretations that I would never get on my own. But now that I've seen a few of his films, I realize they really are, on the surface, all about families subtly falling apart. There are variations--in "Good Morning" it's a new generation that only cares about television, and in "Tokyo Story" it's the older generation that is no longer welcome. But it's pretty remarkable how similar they are. It's usually the same group of actors, often playing characters with the same names. Setsuko Hara often plays "Noriko", later on "Akiko." In what I've seen so far her character usually rebels against her parents by not wanting to get married despite being of an appropriate age. Then there are the titles: "Late Spring," "Early Summer," "Early Spring," "Early Autumn" (aka The End of Summer). He did direct 54 movies, including "Tokyo Story" and "Good Morning" and "A Story of Floating Weeds" (twice), and I've only seen a few of them, but still it's a rather fugue-like body of work. It makes me think of Wes Anderson and the common criticism that he's too insular and absorbed in his own quirky style. This never held much weight for me--he's making his contribution to cinema, in his voice, and that's a separate issue from the quality of each movie.

The other event coming up is at MoMA, and titled, appropriately enough, Early Autumn: Masterworks of Japanese Cinema. The only one from their list that I'm sure about seeing so far is the titular film, Early Autumn. But several others look intriguing: "Shonen" by Nagisa Oshima, Kurosawa's directorial debut "Judo Saga," Mizoguchi's "Sisters of the Gion", and "Monday Girl" by Ko Nakahira, whose "Crazed Fruit" was just released by Criterion. There's also one called "Attack of the Mushroom People" by the director of the original Godzilla, Ishiro Honda. But, eh.