Something Like an Autobiography - Akira Kurosawa [59]
I listened to them, took a second assignment and ended up working for Yama-san. They had been right. I learned there are many kinds of films and many kinds of directors. The work in the Yamamoto “group” was fun. I didn’t want to work for anyone else after that. It was like the wind in a mountain pass blowing across my face. By this I mean that wonderfully refreshing wind you feel after a painfully hard climb. The breath of that wind tells you you are reaching the pass. Then you stand in the pass and look down over the panorama it opens up. When I stood behind Yama-san in his director’s chair next to the camera, I felt my heart swell with that same feeling—“I’ve made it at last.” The work he was doing was the kind that I really wanted to do. I was standing in the mountain pass, and the view that opened up before me on the other side revealed a single straight road.
P.C.L.
“YOU WORK FOR a company that makes blimps?” I was asked by a bar girl who was not very bright. She was looking at the little pin on my chest, which showed a side view of a lens with the letters P.C.L. inscribed in it. Depending on how you looked at it, the lens might appear to be a dirigible.
P.C.L. stands for Photo Chemical Laboratory, and indeed the company was founded as a kind of research institute for sound films. It was only later that the studio was built and the actual production of feature films begun. For this reason the atmosphere differed from the established studios; it was fresh and youthful.
There were few directors, but most of them were progressive and energetic. Yamamoto Kajirō, Naruse Mikio, Kimura Sotoji, Fushimizu Shu—all of these men were young and did not have that odor of flicker-maker hack about them. Their films, too, differed from the Japanese movies I had seen. They had a flavor such as you might find in the springtime category of haiku poetry under headings like “Young Leaves,” “Bright Wind” or “Fragrant Breeze.” The directors’ freshness and vigor was most apparent in works like Naruse’s Tsuma yo bara no yo ni (Wife! Be Like a Rose!), Yamamoto’s Wagahai wa neko de aru (I Am a Cat), Kimura’s Ani imoto (Older Brother, Younger Sister) and Fushimizu’s Furyu enkatai (The Fashionable Band of Troubadours).
But half of this phenomenon was a tendency to obscure or do away with a national identity. While Japan was rushing headlong into dark events, withdrawing from the League of Nations, undergoing the “2–26 Incident” (the assassination of cabinet ministers by young Army-officer fanatics who found their policies too moderate) and establishing the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact, we were making movies as carefree as a song about strolling through the fragrant blossoms of Hibiya Park. In fact, it was immediately after the “2–26 Incident” on February 26, 1936, that I joined P.C.L. The heavy snows of that terrible day still remained in drifts in the shade of the studio building.
Considering all that was going on in the world, it’s amazing that P.C.L. managed to flourish and mature as it did. The intellectual leaders of the company were as young and vigorous in spirit as adolescent movie buffs, and they set about establishing new policies and pushing forward with enthusiasm. Studio personnel were still at the level of a collection of amateurs. But the faltering, stupidly straightforward quality of the work produced was, in my opinion, far superior for its naïveté, honesty and purity to the incoherent films of today. In any event, P.C.L. was really the kind of place it would be correct to call a dream factory.
In accordance with company policy, the newly hired assistant directors were an impressive lot. With the exception of one, they were graduates of the best universities: Tokyo Imperial, Kyoto Imperial, Keio and