By Betsy Sherman

Planet’s holdings include nearly 20,000 film prints, as well as ephemera such as posters, scripts, and film magazines.

Planet at 50 – A film series at the Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge

A scene from Asia Is One. Photo: HFA

Starting on April 11 and winding up on May 9, the Harvard Film Archive will unspool treasures from a small but important film archive in Kobe, Japan. The series Planet at 50 ends with a visit from the repository’s director, Yasui Yoshio, who in 1974 co-founded the Planet Bibliothèque de Cinéma in Osaka, and in 2007 established the Kobe Planet Film Archive.

Planet’s holdings include nearly 20,000 film prints, as well as ephemera such as posters, scripts, and film magazines. The HFA will be showing a selection of restored features and shorts — all on 35mm or 16mm film — with the earliest title from 1930 and the most recent from 1973. The types of films range from lighthearted entertainment to committed, activist documentaries.

The screenings will feature English subtitles on the films. However, of the digital versions made available to me so I could preview the series, only the feature Asia Is One had English subtitles, and the short Tyosen had English narration. I’ll discuss those first and then describe the others.

The 1973 Asia Is One (April 28 at 7 p.m.) was thought to be a lost film; through the efforts of Planet, it can be seen again. Its directing credit goes to the Nihon Documentarist Union (NDU), since all their works were signed collectively. The group was founded at Waseda University during the tumultuous year of 1968. The members went on to produce 16mm films with asynchronous sound, with a mission to uncover injustices of the past and present.

Planet at 50’s curator, Alexander Zahlten of Harvard’s East Asian Languages and Civilization Department, has called Asia Is One a “bitter investigation of the legacy of Japanese colonialism.” The filmmakers traveled to the island of Okinawa, which had been returned in 1971 to the sovereignty of Japan, after its post-World War II control by the United States. With visuals switching between gritty black-and-white and interludes of color, the documentary is notable for its panoply of voices. In a nursing home, a poverty-stricken, frail old Taiwanese man tells the sad story of how, in the 1920s, he was duped by Japanese traffickers into thinking he was being taken to a good job in Okinawa. He was then forced to work in a coal mine there, under prison-like conditions, paid in a currency that was worthless away from the mine. Others tell similar stories of being exploited during the prewar years, war years, and into the 1970s. Generations became stuck on Okinawa, given no hope of Japanese citizenship. The movie observes the texture of these stolen lives.

The camera also follows fisherman, smugglers, and younger Taiwanese men doing construction work (they complain that the American GIs give the local prostitutes nasty diseases). There are bamboozled women workers too, some from Korea. A woman evinces one source of hope: she says, “You raise children, they go to Japan and marry a Japanese — that’s happiness.” The last passage is filmed in the mountains of Taiwan, among the Atayal indigenous tribe. In the visuals, there’s picturesque traditional dancing, on the soundtrack jaw-dropping reminiscences from the men on how they “became Japanese” during the war, fighting for the Axis. “I killed 20 prisoners in Bataan,” brags one man. “Who’s the emperor?” someone asks. “Still Hirohito,” he’s told. Asia Is One contains important revelations; it’s too bad such practices can’t be relegated to the past.

A scene from To the J**ps: South Korean A-Bomb Survivors Speak Out. Photo: HFA

The program on April 11 at 9 p.m. opens with the 1939 short Tyosen. Directed by Kokusai Kankyo-kyoku for Japan’s International Tourism Office, the film promotes the “seductive charms” of the Korean Peninsula (referred to then as Chosen). Women are used as decoration in this 13-minute travelogue. It precedes another exposé by the NDU, the 1971 To the J**ps: South Korean A-Bomb Survivors Speak Out. This film documents a group of South Korean hibakusha, or atomic bomb survivors, who tell their stories and show their wounds. Foreign laborers in Japan during the war were affected by America’s nuclear attack but not given the medical care received by citizens. From Busan in South Korea, the eight hibakusha travel by train to present a petition to then-prime minister of Japan, Sato Eisaku, who was in Seoul to attend a party for President Park Chung-hee (in Seoul, the hibakusha would be detained by South Korean authorities).

On a lighter note — the opening show of the series is cartoons! Pre-War and Wartime Animation Part One (April 11 at 7 p.m.), features Japanese cartoons from the early ’30s, to be followed on April 21 at 7 p.m. by Part Two, with works from the mid-to-late ’30s and early ’40s. Collecting animation has been a priority for Yasui and Planet. Some of the cartoons to be shown are silent with intertitles, while others have music, narration, and/or actors speaking characters’ dialogue.

It was a treat to watch them, even with no translation (which there will be at the HFA shows). Most adhere to a ’30s aesthetic we’d recognize from studios such as Disney and Fleischer, with rounded character design, bouncy movement, and anthropomorphic animal characters. There are depictions of Japanese daily life, animal teams playing baseball, military settings, gags galore, and fantastical takes on history, folklore, and the supernatural. Exploring the bottom of the sea is a common theme. Masaoko Kenzo’s joyful 1934 The Dance of the Chagamas was the first completely cel-animated Japanese film. I especially liked the simple but artful cut-paper animated Chopped Snake (1930) by Kouchi Junichi, in which a frog escapes from the inside of a snake, but then has to go through a series of negotiations with its sneaky former captor.

The poster for The Sea Demon on Land. Photo: HFA

The April 12, 7 p.m. show boasts one of the weirdest movies I’ve ever seen (and that’s saying a lot). I didn’t get to preview the nine-minute 1930 short that precedes it, Sea Palace. That one is a live-action fable about a sea princess, directed by the pioneering animator Masaoka Kenzō. The 1950 The Sea Demon on Land, directed by Igayama Masamitsu, is 53 minutes of wtf?!?. OK, it starts out conventionally enough, with a Japanese narrator explaining (I assume) what creatures we’re seeing in undersea documentary footage. We see an octopus snuggle into a clay jar that is pulled up by a fisherman onto a boat. The tentacled prey, seemingly destined for the fish market, is transported toward town on a cart. But when the driver stops, the octopus slithers to the ground and hides.

Now we’ve got a story! Will it make it back home to the sea? Across dusty terrain, the octopus crawls, rolls and tumbles. Hey, watch out for that oncoming train! This is a real octopus, guys. In the forest, it meets other animals. I tell ya, land-bound octopus confronted by frog may be the most lethargic kaiju movie of all time. The thrilling climax has the octopus fighting for its life when attacked by an eel. A heartwarming subplot shows the octopus and a (fake) butterfly save each other’s lives. You won’t want to consider (at least for long) the well-being of the “star” on location (Is this one octopus or many? Is it getting the water it needs in between takes? Are there stunt octopuses?). If you can compartmentalize, take advantage of probably our only chance to see this oddity.

The series ends on May 9 at 6 p.m. with Yasui Yoshio in person, presenting Document of Collision: The Whiplashed Ones. This 1969 experimental feature by Ko Hiroh is another exposé, this time of chronic symptoms affecting Osaka taxi drivers. The film’s dramatic visual style incorporates images of head-and-neck x-rays to really, um, get under the skin.

Betsy Sherman has written about movies, old and new, for the Boston Globe, Boston Phoenix, and Improper Bostonian, among others. She holds a degree in archives management from Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. When she grows up, she wants to be Barbara Stanwyck.