Watch Momijigari, Japan’s Oldest Surviving Movie (1899)

At first, movie sim­ply document­ed occasions: a person stroll­ing throughout a gar­den, work­ers leav­ing a fac­to­ry, a practice pulling right into a sta­tion. The medi­um quickly matured sufficient to accom­mo­date dra­ma, which for ear­ly movie­mak­ers meant sim­ply shoot­ing what quantity­ed to stage professional­duc­tions from the per­spec­tive of a view­er within the audi­ence. At that stage, let’s imagine, movie nonetheless had­n’t developed previous sim­ple doc­u­males­tary pur­pos­es, hav­ing but to incor­po­price edit­ing, to say noth­ing of the oth­er qual­i­ties we now regard as char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly cin­e­mat­ic. This was­n’t a cul­tur­al mat­ter, however a tech­ni­cal one, as evi­denced by Momi­ji­gari, the outdated­est Japan­ese movie in exis­tence.

Shot in 1899, Momi­ji­gari depicts close to­ly 4 min­utes of a kabu­ki play involv­ing Onoe Kiku­gorō V and Ichikawa Dan­jūrō IX, two well-known mas­ters of the shape on the time. The concept was to pre­serve a document of their pres­ence on stage, no mat­ter how hap­haz­ard­ly or for the way quick a time, earlier than they shuf­fled off this mor­tal coil.

It cer­tain­ly was­n’t too quickly: each males would die in 1903, the 12 months of the movie’s first exhi­bi­tion. No fan of West­ern moder­ni­ty, Dan­jūrō had stip­u­lat­ed that or not it’s proven solely after his demise, however within the occasion, it was screened for the pub­lic in his place at a per­for­mance at which he was too sick to seem, which lengthen­ed to an extended run in hon­or of Kiku­gorō’s current demise.

Like its West­ern his­tor­i­cal equiv­a­lents, Momi­ji­gari depicts a the­atri­cal work. The tit­u­lar six­teenth-cen­tu­ry Noh play, additionally per­fashioned in kabu­ki and dance-ori­ent­ed shosago­to ver­sions, entails a lady and her ret­inue on an out­ing to do some maple-leaf view­ing (the lit­er­al imply­ing of momi­ji­gari). Like all feminine kabu­ki roles, these would have been performed with­out excep­tion by male actors, who have been in any case thought guess­ter in a position to con­vey fem­i­nin­i­ty onstage. The girl entices a cross­ing warfare­rior to drink, and when he cross­es out, he’s knowledgeable in his dream that she’s actu­al­ly a demon. Within the fol­low­ing scene, she reverts to demon kind and the 2 do bat­tle. Pio­neer­ing Japan­ese movie­mak­er Shi­ba­ta Tsune­kichi matches a sur­pris­ing quantity of this nar­ra­tive into a really temporary run­time, which additionally contains the whol­ly acci­den­tal lack of a fan. Dan­jūrō had insist­ed on shoot­ing out­aspect, even on a windy day, and one does­n’t sim­ply say no to a kabu­ki mas­ter.

through Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Japan­ese Kabu­ki The­atre, Fea­tur­ing Twentieth-Cen­tu­ry Mas­ters of the Type (1964)

Watch the Previous­est Japan­ese Ani­me Movie, Jun’ichi Kōuchi’s The Boring Sword (1917)

The Ear­li­est Identified Movement Pic­ture, 1888’s Spherical­hay Gar­den Scene, Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Essen­tial Japan­ese Cin­e­ma: A Jour­ney Via 50 of Japan’s Beau­ti­ful, Usually Weird Movies

Hand-Col­ored 1860s Pho­tographs Reveal the Final Days of Samu­rai Japan

Watch Vin­tage Footage of Tokyo, Cir­ca 1910, Get Dropped at Life with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the e book The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly often known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.