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

At first, film sim­ply record­ed events: a man walk­ing across a gar­den, work­ers leav­ing a fac­to­ry, a train pulling into a sta­tion. The medi­um soon matured enough to accom­mo­date dra­ma, which for ear­ly film­mak­ers meant sim­ply shoot­ing what amount­ed to stage pro­duc­tions from the per­spec­tive of a view­er in the audi­ence. At that stage, we could say, film still had­n’t evolved past sim­ple doc­u­men­tary pur­pos­es, hav­ing yet to incor­po­rate edit­ing, to say noth­ing of the oth­er qual­i­ties we now regard as char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly cin­e­mat­ic. This was­n’t a cul­tur­al mat­ter, but a tech­ni­cal one, as evi­denced by Momi­ji­gari, the old­est Japan­ese film in exis­tence.

Shot in 1899, Momi­ji­gari depicts near­ly four min­utes of a kabu­ki play involv­ing Onoe Kiku­gorō V and Ichikawa Dan­jūrō IX, two famous mas­ters of the form at the time. The idea was to pre­serve a record of their pres­ence on stage, no mat­ter how hap­haz­ard­ly or for how short a time, before they shuf­fled off this mor­tal coil.

It cer­tain­ly was­n’t too soon: both men would die in 1903, the year of the film’s first exhi­bi­tion. No fan of West­ern moder­ni­ty, Dan­jūrō had stip­u­lat­ed that it be shown only after his death, but in the event, it was screened for the pub­lic in his place at a per­for­mance at which he was too sick to appear, which extend­ed to a longer run in hon­or of Kiku­gorō’s recent death.

Like its West­ern his­tor­i­cal equiv­a­lents, Momi­ji­gari depicts a the­atri­cal work. The tit­u­lar six­teenth-cen­tu­ry Noh play, also per­formed in kabu­ki and dance-ori­ent­ed shosago­to ver­sions, involves a woman and her ret­inue on an out­ing to do some maple-leaf view­ing (the lit­er­al mean­ing of momi­ji­gari). Like all female kabu­ki roles, these would have been played with­out excep­tion by male actors, who were in any case thought bet­ter able to con­vey fem­i­nin­i­ty onstage. The lady entices a pass­ing war­rior to drink, and when he pass­es out, he’s informed in his dream that she’s actu­al­ly a demon. In the fol­low­ing scene, she reverts to demon form and the two do bat­tle. Pio­neer­ing Japan­ese film­mak­er Shi­ba­ta Tsune­kichi fits a sur­pris­ing amount of this nar­ra­tive into a very brief run­time, which also includes the whol­ly acci­den­tal loss of a fan. Dan­jūrō had insist­ed on shoot­ing out­side, even on a windy day, and one does­n’t sim­ply say no to a kabu­ki mas­ter.

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Intro­duc­tion to Japan­ese Kabu­ki The­atre, Fea­tur­ing 20th-Cen­tu­ry Mas­ters of the Form (1964)

Watch the Old­est Japan­ese Ani­me Film, Jun’ichi Kōuchi’s The Dull Sword (1917)

The Ear­li­est Known Motion Pic­ture, 1888’s Round­hay Gar­den Scene, Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Essen­tial Japan­ese Cin­e­ma: A Jour­ney Through 50 of Japan’s Beau­ti­ful, Often Bizarre Films

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

Watch Vin­tage Footage of Tokyo, Cir­ca 1910, Get Brought to Life with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.