A Woman Crying in Spring

『泣き濡れた春の女よ』

Dir. Hiroshi Shimizu. 1933, 96 mins. 35mm print courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan. In Japanese with English subtitles. With Den Obinata, Shigeru Ogura, Yoshiko Okada, Sachiko Murase. Shimizu’s first talkie, completed the same year as Japanese Girls at the Harbor, enacts another tale of fallen womanhood and migrant struggle, but this time the regional setting is a remote mining town in Hokkaido, the snow-capped northern island of the Japanese archipelago. The beloved child actor Aoki Tomio (billed as Tokkan-kozō in films like I Was Born, But...) recalled that Shimizu, who briefly attended an agricultural college in the region, nursed a lifelong dislike for Hokkaido, which may account for the film’s cold, bleak, nearly Chekhovian tone, unique among the director’s surviving work. Yet the vividness of that tone is rendered in the director’s remarkably assured, atmospheric use of sound, which his friend Ozu took as a challenge to embark on his own talkie experiment, The Only Son. 

Tickets: $15 / $11 senior and students / $9 youth (ages 3–17) / discounted for MoMI members ($7–$11). There is a $1.50 transaction fee per ticket for all online purchases. The cost of admission may be applied toward a same-day purchase of a membership. 

Order tickets. Please pick up tickets at the Museum’s admissions desk upon arrival. All seating is general admission.