Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Humanity and Paper Balloons
1937 · Sadao Yamanaka · Humanity and Paper Balloons on Sightlines
Start with the scabbard. A poor samurai has hanged himself in a tenement in Edo. He pawned his real sword long ago, and the scabbard at his side holds a bamboo blade. Nobody weeps much. For his neighbors the death is mostly an excuse to drink.
Sadao Yamanaka puts this in the opening of Humanity and Paper Balloons, and it is worth staying with, because the whole film is folded inside it. In a samurai picture the sword is what settles things. A man draws, and the situation changes. Here the sword is a prop for keeping up appearances, and the man who carried it settled nothing except his own account.
Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, has a name for the kind of film that sword belongs to. He calls it the action-image. Its 'large form' runs like this: a situation presses on a character, the character gathers himself, and a decisive act transforms the situation. Westerns run on it. So does most jidaigeki, the Japanese period film, with its duels and its vindicated codes of honor. The term is useful here because it lets us see exactly what Yamanaka took out. He kept the costumes, the topknots and the Edo calendar. He removed the hinge between seeing and doing.
Watch Unno Matajūrō, the ronin played by Chōjūrō Kawarasaki. His dead father served a great lord, and Unno hopes the lord will take him into service. So he goes to petition. He is turned away. He goes again. Each visit is a small humiliation, and the film never lets any of them become a turning point. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image: a character who sees his situation clearly and can find no act equal to it. Unno is no coward and no fool. The world has just stopped answering the gesture he was raised to make.
Shinza, the barber played by Kan'emon Nakamura, is his opposite. He has no honor to protect, and he acts. He runs an unsanctioned gambling game. Then, to spite the local boss and the money behind him, he kidnaps the pawnbroker's daughter. In an older film this would be the decisive blow. Here it is a gesture the system can absorb, and it changes nothing about who owns the alley. One man can't act. The other acts, and it doesn't count. Between them Yamanaka shows both halves of the same broken circuit.
Then there's the place itself: the nagaya, a long tenement row with a narrow alley, overhanging eaves and a shared well. Yamanaka's compositions are horizontal and boxed in. Doorways, lattices and wooden partitions cut the image into compartments and keep people inside them. Deleuze calls the frame a 'closed set', a system holding everything the image contains, and some films use the edges of the frame to suggest a wider world. This one rarely lets you feel the sky. The frame is the tenement, and the tenement is the social order: landlord, gamblers, a blind masseur, wives doing piecework, drunks. Rain streaks the alley and pools in the gutter.
The crowd matters. Deleuze names another sign of the action-image in crisis, the 'dispersive situation': many characters loosely linked, with no hero the story bends toward. Most of Yamanaka's cast came from Zenshinza, a progressive kabuki troupe used to working as a company, and you can feel it. The talk overlaps. Scenes move between the ronin's cramped home and the barber's schemes without hurrying. The camera behaves like a neighbor.
And everything runs downhill. The film opens on a suicide, and everything after it slopes down. Deleuze describes films where the setting itself becomes a slope, the 'line of slope', an irreversible slide toward ruin. He took the idea from naturalism, from Stroheim and Buñuel, where appetite drives the slide. Yamanaka's version is quieter and more social: money, rank and obligation pull people down. The shape is the same, though. The circle closes, and its closing is the film's argument that there is no way out.
Against all this stands one fragile object. Otaki makes paper balloons as piecework in that cramped home. They are pretty and nearly worthless. Deleuze would call it a symbol in his specific sense: an object that holds the film's central relation. Put it next to the bamboo sword and you have the film's two poles. The sword fakes power. The balloon is real labor that buys almost nothing. Both exist to keep up an appearance. Only the balloon is light enough to float.
Where does the film sit in the history of cinema? Deleuze dates the decisive break to postwar Italy, when neorealism gave us characters who can only look at situations they cannot act on. He also credits Ozu with getting there first, in the 1930s. Yamanaka learned from Ozu too. He took the shomin-geki, the drama of ordinary working people, and the patient look at people humiliated by a rigid hierarchy that Ozu used in I Was Born, But... (1932), and he moved them into period costume. From Mizoguchi's Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion (both 1936) he took the static, boxed frame that lets economic structure do the trapping, and the idea of honor as a debt that someone else collects. His own Tange Sazen and the Pot Worth a Million Ryo (1935) had already sent a famous swordsman home to be henpecked, for laughs. Priest of Darkness (1936) gave him the Zenshinza ensemble and a lowlife Edo milieu adapted from Kawatake Mokuami. In Paper Balloons the joke turns sour. A year later in France, Port of Shadows built its own rain-soaked trap for the powerless, bracketed by doom, as if the same weather were passing over two continents.
The line forward is the hard part. Yamanaka was drafted around the time the film came out and died of illness in China in 1938, before he turned thirty. Only three of his films survive complete. We can say what this one did. We can't trace what he would have done next.
What it did was this. It took a genre built entirely on the decisive act and made it run with the act missing. It did this inside a commercial studio, years before the break Deleuze describes. The empty scabbard isn't decoration laid over the story. It drives the story, and it shows in the first scene that the sword was hollow all along.
So watch it for the hands. Notice who carries the bamboo, who folds the paper, and who reaches for a blade and finds nothing there. Then watch the balloons and ask what they are still carrying.
Concepts in play
- action-image (large form) — The jidaigeki form the film empties out. Its emblem, the sword that settles a situation, turns up in the opening as a bamboo substitute in a hanged samurai's scabbard.
- crisis of the action-image — Unno's repeated, humiliating, fruitless petitions to his father's former lord, and Shinza's kidnapping, a defiance the system absorbs.
- dispersive situation — The tenement staged as a continuous, overlapping community (landlord, barber, blind masseur, drunkards, wives at piecework, gamblers), played by the Zenshinza troupe as an ensemble rather than a set of stars.
- the frame as closed set — Horizontal, boxed-in compositions of the nagaya, where doorways, lattices and wooden partitions divide the frame and trap figures, rarely opening onto the sky.
- line of slope (degradation) — The film opens on a suicide and slopes downward from there, a shape driven by money, rank and obligation.
- symbol — Otaki's paper balloons, piecework that is fragile and worthless, set against the bamboo sword in the empty scabbard.