Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Tôkyô kôshinkyoku [Tokyo March] (1929)

This Japanese silent film, directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, stars Shizue Natsukawa, Koji Shima, Isamu Kosugi and Eiji Takagi.

Unfortunately, this Mizoguchi film has only survived in an incomplete form.

This DVD edition has been mastered from a good to very-good abreviated 16mm reduction print that has apparently been digitally scanned for this disc. A couple of shots are repeated in the print nearly back-to-back and a cityscape montage of Tokyo is presented at the beginning and repeated at the end of the film. Unfortunately, this edited print represents less than 25 percent of the film’s original running time and may have been prepared in the 1930s for Japanese home use in this truncated form or was later assembled from the only surviving footage of the film.

The film is accompanied by a soundtrack that includes a song by Shinpei Nakayama and Yaso Saijo performed by a small combo of piano, violin and harmonium along with a compilation of what appears to be preexisting recordings. The film is narrated in traditional Japanese fashion by female benshi Midori Sawata and the narration in Japanese is supplemented with optional English subtitles for translation.

Supplemental material includes an introduction to the Digital Meme DVD series of Japanese silent films with a historical overview of the benshi tradition by Midori Sawata (2 minutes); and a video afterword on the work of Kenji Mizoguchi and the evolving style of Japanese films by historian Tadao Sato presented in Japanese with English subtitles (14 minutes).

To our knowledge, this is the only edition of this silent Mizoguchi film available on home video.

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