NEW YORK, NY.- Japan Society and Museum of the Moving Image will co-present a 27-film retrospective devoted to Hiroshi Shimizu, an unsung master of Japanese cinema, from May 4 through June 1. Co-organized with the National Film Archive of Japan and the Japan Foundation, New York, the two-part series will offer the first New York survey of the major, yet often overlooked filmmaker in more than 30 years and the largest ever assembled in North America—featuring rare, imported archival 35mm prints; live piano accompaniment; and newly commissioned subtitles.

A prolific filmmaker with 163 films to his name—of which only around a quarter survive—Shimizu (1903–1966) worked as a star director for leading Japanese studio Shochiku (alongside his close friend Yasujirō Ozu) from the mid-1920s until he left to form his own independent production company in the late 1940s, continuing to make work until 1959 through what has come to be known as the Golden Age of Japanese Cinema. He was highly regarded by contemporary critics, as well as peers like Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, for his seemingly effortless formal ingenuity, distinguished by his signature linear traveling shots, and his naturalistic, open-air depictions of regional Japan. Shot on location and frequently employing non-actors, the loosely plotted, low-key tragicomedies that comprise his most characteristic work foregrounded the transient lives and hardships of everyday people with a marked regard for those pushed to the margins of society, including drifters, migrant workers, war veterans, persons with disabilities, outcast women, and especially children, in whom the director took a personal philanthropic interest and of whom he remarked: “They are natural. They breathe the air. Films must have humans who breathe the air.”

Divided in two parts, the retrospective will begin with Part I: The Shochiku Years, presented at Museum of the Moving Image from May 4–19, gathering the best films of Shimizu’s protean and varied career with the studio, from his stark, strikingly modernist early melodramas, both silent and sound, to the lyrical tours of provincial life with which he would become chiefly associated. Highlights include the filmmaker’s hitherto best-known films in the United States––Japanese Girls at the Harbor (1933), Mr. Thank You (1936), The Masseurs and a Woman (1938), and Ornamental Hairpin (1941, starring Ozu stalwart Chishu Ryu and Shimizu’s one-time wife, the great actor-director Kinuyo Tanaka)––alongside rarer contemporaneous works that display the full stylistic and tonal range of this consummate craftsman’s accomplishments, such as two of his best silents, the harrowing, two-part fallen woman saga Seven Seas (1931–32) and the bitter family tale A Hero of Tokyo (1935); his richly atmospheric first talkie A Woman Crying in Spring (1933), a bleak Chekhovian drama set in wintry Hokkaido; the virtuosic sports comedy A Star Athlete (1937), featuring the apotheosis of Shimizu’s limpid sense of camera movement; the elegant period piece, exceptional among Shimizu’s typically contemporary-set films, Notes of an Itinerant Performer (1941); the stoic, King Vidor-esque treatise on a child’s reform school Introspection Tower (1941); the ethnographically detailed propaganda film Sayon’s Bell (1943, starring Shirley Yamaguchi), photographed and set in Taiwan; and two of the director’s supreme masterpieces Children in the Wind (1937) and its two-volume sequel Four Seasons of Children (1939).

From May 16–June 1, Japan Society will present the inaugural John and Miyoko Davey Classic Film Series Part II: The Postwar and Independent Years. Shimizu’s postwar films have seldom screened internationally, despite being achievements on equal footing with his prewar output. Capturing Japan in a state of regeneration, these films illustrate a society trying to pull itself together, weaving themes of collective struggle and hope while zeroing in on the plight of the dispossessed underclasses. Highlights include Shimizu’s complete Children of the Beehive trilogy. Rarely screened in its entirety and for the first time in North America, this late-period saga is the culmination of the director’s postwar work, featuring the eight war orphans Shimizu himself adopted and brought up in a rented Buddhist temple after World War II. In addition, the program includes the international premiere of Tomorrow There Will Be Fine Weather (1948), lost for 70 years until it was rediscovered in 2022 by the National Film Archive of Japan. Shintoho productions include the tragicomedy Mr. Shosuke Ohara, a personal favorite of director Shinji Somai, and The Shiinomi School. Four of Shimizu’s Daiei productions will also screen, notably his tragic melodrama Sound in the Mist (1956, recently revived in Portugal to overwhelming acclaim) and Image of a Mother (1959), Shimizu’s final film. As part of the series, Japan Society has commissioned new English subtitles for five films—some never-before screened in English-speaking countries—Tomorrow There Will Be Fine Weather, Sound in the Mist, Image of a Mother, Children of the Beehive: What Happened Next (1951), and Children of the Great Buddha (1952).