Japanese Girls at the Harbor

Hiroshi Shimizu's 1933 Japanese film follows Sunako and Dora, pupils at a mission school in Yokohama. They promise to stay friends; the moment Henry arrives on his motorcycle and takes Sunako for a ride, it is clear the promise cannot hold. The film was made at the end of the silent period and builds its narrative almost entirely through image. The port, the foreign architecture and the sea are constantly in frame; Shimizu moves the camera along with his walking characters, and those tracking shots came to be seen as his signature. Sunako's life after school is not offered as a moral lesson. The narrative does not judge her and stays unusually cool for a Japanese melodrama of the period. Who it's for: those curious about silent Japanese cinema and the studio era of the thirties. Who it's not for: viewers used to sound; the film proceeds through intertitles and its pace follows the convention of the time.