Hidden Pearls-Hayakawa Sesshu September 14, 2007

Friday, September 14, 2007, 6:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2 (With piano accompaniment by Ben Model)

Excerpts from Hidden Pearls. 1918. USA. Directed by George H. Melford. With Florence Vidor, Theodore Roberts, James Cruze. Although the plot is hardly discernible in these fragments rescued from nitrate deterioration, Hidden Pearls features Hayakawa as a Hawaiian prince who finds greater comfort among the islanders than among the "civilized" whites. Silent. Approx. 25 min.

The Dragon Painter. 1919. USA. Directed by William Worthington. With Tsuru Aoki, Toyo Fujita, Edward Peil. Hayakawa left Jesse L. Lasky's Feature Play Company in 1918 to establish his own production company. This film was an attempt to bring authentic Japanese values and culture to the attention of the West. In this tinted print, Hayakawa reconstructs the shrine at Hakone and plays a half-mad artist obsessed with mystical demons. Although based on an American novel, The Dragon Painter anticipates the haunting, spectral imagery in the cinema of Kenji Mizoguchi, Kaneto Shindô, and Masaki Kobayashi that was to come decades later (and which, in turn, influenced much of contemporary anime). Silent. Approx. 50 min.