Earth – 1939, Tomu Uchida

by Allan Fish

(Japan 1939 115m) not on DVD

Aka. Tsuchi

Ad flamus!

d  Tomu Uchida  w  Tsutoma Kitamura, Yasutaro Yagi  novel  Takashi Nagatsuka  ph  Michio Midorikawa  m  Akihiro Norimatsu  art  Yasuji Hori

Isamu Kosugi (Kanji), Mieshi Bando (Katsu), Donguriboya (Yokichi), Masako Fuhimura (Tami), Akiko Kasami (Otsugi), Mari Ko (Ohume), Bontaro Miake (Heizo), Chieko Murata (overlord’s wife), Chie Mitsui (Yoshie), Miyoko Sakura (Aki),

Make a note of the director Tomu Uchida.  Take yourself to your PC/laptop/mobile device or whatever you get your internet from and search for him on DVD sites.  Chances are the majority of references will be to his Miyamoto Musashi films of the 1950s, a popular series, but of no real interest to serious cineastes.  The oldest film you will find for him anywhere on a legitimate DVD is from around 1955.  Yet once, long ago, there was a film, some said it was only a myth, called Tsuchi, or Earth.  It was seen as one of the great Japanese films of the 1930s, one of the first realist films of its national cinema, but it was lost – in the allied bombings of World War II one assumes, and like much of the great work of Sadao Yamanaka, it was consigned to the flames of history.  Versions did survive, but only shortened versions, around 93m in length, and it’s in this version I saw it, in a third generation print, ending as abruptly as it started, as if both scenes had been entered and left halfway through, and with unreadable white German subtitles burnt in.  Someone had done English subs over the top, but they were hardly adequate, missing half the dialogue, but it was all we had…and it was enough.  These eyes could peer through the murk, the gloom, and see the masterpiece that lay in piecemeal on the cutting room floor. It had originally been 142m, as near as dammit the exact same duration as the legendary sangraal of the lost cut of Ambersons.  The 2001 restoration got the length back up to 115m, but who ever saw it outside of Japan?  Why did no-one pick it up for release?  Why did Janus films not get off their derrières to release it for Criterion?  All good questions…

            So we have what’s left, the story of a family of four, of father, mother, son and grandfather.  The father is bitter because he had to take on his father-in-law’s debts.  He has to work effectively for two and scrimps for the tiniest luxury, a few eggs, 4 feet of crape to make his wife a new belt cover (the full 10 feet is beyond their means) and a bottle of sake wine to drink with the wife of his overlord on receipt of their crops.  It’s not much, but it’s all he has, and he has to overcome the desolation of losing it all as his old father-in-law contrives to accidentally burn their house down.  The old man dies soon after and the father is left to start from scratch.

            There had been another film called Earth in which a grandfather’s passing was critical to the story, on the previous page.  Dovzhenko’s film was poetic, almost spiritual, where Uchida’s is hard and ultra-realistic.  One can feel the backbreaking existence, the digging, the sowing, the packaging of the rice, the threshing of the corn, tasks which makes the tiny arrow slits of light all the more welcome, juggling freshly hard-boiled eggs like Ron Moody’s Fagin with chestnuts, savouring them.  But then as soon as the light appears it’s taken away, the sense of the heavy burden reappears, and father Kanji is left bemoaning his fortune; “I have paid off my debts, scrimped and saved, worked for two and never eaten enough to be full.  Despite that I am burnt and everything is gone.”  Simple folk not destroyed by the viciousness of Kurosawa’s bandits or the locusts of The Good Earth, but by mother nature, by the eponymous earth, by drought.  It’s hard, sombre viewing, but amongst the despair there’s a sense of the unbreakable power of the human spirit, which may be broken on the wheel but never totally destroyed.  It’s little wonder it was so highly praised and it leaves us with feelings of how fantastic the original must have been, as we subconsciously place Uchida with Yamanaka, with Von Stroheim, Welles and the other masters whose work was interfered with by forces beyond their control. 

 

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