The great Kenji Mizoguchi once said that Ozu and him made movies by hard work. “But Shimizu is a genius.” Born in 1903, the same year as Ozu, Hiroshi Shimizu directed his first film at 21 and is credited with directing 163 films during a career that ran from 1923 to 1959. The majority of his work is sadly unavailable to us, and he has been largely overlooked in the West where Ozu has always overshadowed him. In his book To The Distant Observer, Noel Burch writes that Shimizu is “the most ‘spontaneously Japanese’ director of his generation’”, that “his ‘work on the signifier’ has none of the advanced complexities of Ozu, Mizoguchi, Ishida or even Naruse at his best”, and highlights the director’s “’spontaneous’ insistence on camera distance”. On his blog, David Bordwell writes that “Shimizu wasn’t an obsessive planner (…) Some days, uncertain about what to do, [he] would shut down the shoot and take people swimming”. But “I don’t want to leave the impression that Shimizu was careless”, Bordwell begins the next paragraph.
This seems to be the Western critic’s general attitude towards Shimizu’s work. He is appreciated as a strong craftsman, but ultimately falls short of the sacred cows Ozu and Mizoguchi. I am obviously not arguing that these directors are anything less than cinematic giants, but while Ozu’s work (which I reviewed here) satisfies me primarily on an intellectual level, Shimizu tickles me emotionally while also showing an impressive stylistic range. Ozu’s rigorous editing and staging might be unmatched, but Shimizu’s more flamboyant, or “spontaneous” style is engrossing and exciting and visceral in a way Ozu’s films are simply not. It would be tempting to approach Shimizu’s films in comparison to Ozu's but that would mean to deny Shimizu to stand on his own, which would be unfair. Both men were highly influential to the Japanese cinema (and beyond!) and Shimizu’s stylistic and narrative techniques merit the same critical scrutiny as Ozu’s.
Eternal Heart (also known as Undying Pearl) is Shimizu’s oldest surviving film, but his 56th directorial effort. It tells the story of Toshie (Emiko Yagume, who appeared in a number of Ozu’s pre-war films) who works as a secretary and is in love with her fellow co-worker Shozo. But the young man is more interested in Toshie’s sister Reiko who wears Western clothes and seems generally more appealing to him. Toshie selflessly promotes the relationship while being courted by her elderly boss Katayama. When Reiko begins flirting with other men because she grows increasingly bored with her marriage, Toshie tries to fix the relationship but ultimately fails. Never fully realizing what kind of feelings Toshie harbors for him, Shozo leaves Japan for the United States – alone.
Shimizu’s “spontaneity” becomes immediately apparent: he likes to play around with camera angles. Wholly uninterested in 180 reverse shots, he places the camera at various distances to his main subjects, separating the shots with intertitles. In one long confrontation between Reiko and Toshie, Shimizu even uses one single shot, but orchestrates an elaborate choreography for his two leading ladies and tracks his camera back and forth. To give his frames more depth, Shimizu frequently blocks one half of the image with a large object (a car, a table), squeezing the characters in the upper half of the frame, but also distancing them from the audience on a vertical axis. At other times, he uses shadows, or objects hanging from the ceiling to suggest depth of image, but also to give his frames more texture. There are some visual repetitions (a pan shot from a moving vehicle, an umbrella tossed around by Toshie and then Reiko) but nothing as systematic as in Ozu's work.
The script, written by Tokusaburo Murakami, clearly pits "modern" women against "traditional" women. Shozo has the choice between Reiko, who wears Western clothes and is interested primarily in money, material things and shallow entertainment, and Toshie who wears kimonos, is more submissive but wants to find true love and commitment. Reiko, the presumed "modern" one, has nothing but contempt for Toshie's job and makes fun of her because of it, oblivious to the fact that Toshie is independent and, in fact, much more "modern" thanks to her employment even if she has "traditional" values. It is ironic then that Shozo, who couldn't find his happiness with a westernized woman, leaves for the United States at the end of the film. And Toshie, who entertained the thought of going out with her boss Katayama to compensate for her deceived love for Shozo, finally decides against it and keeps her integrity. These rather broad characterizations may seem simplistic, but Eternal Heart is very interesting in that it is an early incarnation of the social realist film Shochiku, who employed Shimizu, would be famous for in the following years.
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