Jujiro Week

Welcome to the slightly-belated beginning of Jujiro Week here at Hell on Frisco Bay. Teinosuke Kinugasa's 1928 film is playing at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival this coming Sunday at 6:10 PM, and I can't wait to see it for the first time on the towering Castro Theatre screen.

I was bowled over by Kinugasa's 1926 a Page of Madness when I saw it on that screen back in 2002. Jujiro, (frequently known in the English-language world as Crossways or Crossroads) while considered not quite as avant-garde in its narrative approach, was the director's attempt to apply the experimental technique of that film to a jidai-geki (period) piece; it's a samurai film without swords.

Jujiro will be accompanied by a newly-composed score by Stephen Horne, who wowed last year's festival audiences with his performance to a Cottage on Dartmoor.

As I've mentioned here before, I was charged with researching Jujiro, writing an essay for the festival program guide available to each festival attendee, and preparing a slide show that will be presented while the audience files into the Castro's seats on Sunday. Much of the material I collected on the topics of Teinosuke Kinugasa and Japanese silent cinema had to be left out of these educational materials for space concerns. Over the next several days, I'll be putting up some of this here on my site.

In the meantime, make sure you check out the terrific advance coverage of the festival on The Evening Class: A preview by Michael Hawley and Michael Guillén's two-part interview with the festival's artistic director (and not-so-secret Bollywood enthusiast) Stephen Salmons.