One more 'lost' film revived from the dead ... partly, at least. I saw a 26-minute excerpt of 'Zanjin Zanbaken' in October 2005 at Le Giornate del Cinema Muto in Sacile, Italy: the festival screened a 35mm print, digitally restored by Tokyo's National Film Centre, featuring the original Japanese title cards, with English subtitles superimposed. (This review is based on the English titles.) The Sacile programme also featured an excellent new score by Kensaku Tanikawa, with jazzy syncopated themes which this movie's original audiences in 1929 Japan likely would have regarded as very modern.
The opening credits attribute the extremely impressive photography to Hiromitsu Karasawa.
I'm intrigued that different cultures have their own film genres. 'Zanjin Zanbaken' was one of the Japanese films of the late 1920s known as 'keiko eiga': 'tendency movies', which extolled a leftist political worldview. As is often the case in movies with political agenda, this story is told as a period piece ... with modern audiences expected to recognise their own situation within the injustices of the past.
SPOILERS COMING. In dynastic Japan, the peasants are exploited (well, they would be, wouldn't they?) by Osuga (Misao Seki), the local evil magistrate. The estate of the local feudal lord is about to pass to his rightful heir, a child ... so Osuga plots to kill the child and substitute an orphan who will wrongfully inherit the title, and whom Osuga expects to manipulate as unofficial regent. Eventually the people are saved from Osuga's machinations by Raizaburo (Ryunosuke Tsukigata), one of those Lone Ranger-type wandering heroes who shows up to save everyone's hash, then rides into the sunset. (Or into the Rising Sun, in Japan's case.)
There are some startling visual compositions here. Not content with the mere white hats and black hats of cowboy shoot-'em-ups, in this movie's climactic battle sequence director/scenarist Daisuke Ito mounts Raizaburo's army of goodies on white horses and Osuga's legion of baddies on black horses: the two cavalries, clashing on the battlefield, are an astonishing sight ... and audiences have no difficulty telling which side is which.
Until this fragment (from a 9.5mm nitrate print) was rediscovered in 2002, 'Zanjin Zanbaken' was believed entirely lost. Apparently its absence was at least partly down to government interference immediately after its release. The original prints -- total running time about 125 minutes at 18 fps -- contained a sequence in which the mediaeval farmers shout their complaints to the impassive Osuga: conveniently (and intentionally), those were the same complaints which Japan's leftist factions of the 1920s levelled against the emperor's repressive regime. Shortly after the film's premiere, the release prints were confiscated by the government, heavily edited by censors, then suppressed altogether. By all reports, the prints were edited so heavily that the 'approved' versions no longer made narrative sense.
Based on what I saw at Sacile, 'Zankin Zanbaken' in its original form may well have been a visual masterpiece ... perhaps even an unofficial influence on 'The Seven Samurai', and therefore also an influence on 'The Magnificent Seven'. I'm less certain as to how I feel about this movie's politics, since I have objections to both of the political factions in Japan at the time that this movie was made. Since I saw only an excerpt, I shan't rate this movie ... but I would be keenly interested in seeing a more complete print.
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