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Johnny Get Your Gun  /  Light of Sympathy

Light of Sympathy
April 30, 2017 - 7:00 pm
Billy Wilder Theater
In-person: 
film historian Daisuke Miyao.

Read an interview with Daisuke Miyao on our blog.

As part of Hollywood and Holy Wood: Silent Cinema Connections between Los Angeles and Japan, Daisuke Miyao will present a talk on the transnational career of Henry Kotani, a cinematographer who worked under Cecil B. DeMille until he was wooed in 1920 by the Shochiku Company to bring Hollywood-style lighting to the Japanese-based studio as a director.

Curator of Hollywood and Holy Wood, Daisuke Miyao is the Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language and Literature at UC San Diego, and the author of The Aesthetics of Shadow: Lighting and Japanese Cinema (Duke University Press, 2013) and Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (Duke University Press, 2007).

This program is also part of Archive Talks, which pairs leading scholars with screenings of the moving image media that is the focus of their research.

Told in the Hills  (1919)


Shot by Henry Kotani, Told in the Hills, about a frontier prospector hiding from his past, survives only as a fragment, presented here to illustrate Kotani’s Hollywood lighting style.

35mm, b&w, silent, approx. 20 min.  Director: George Melford.  Screenwriter: Will M. Ritchey.  Cast: Robert Warwick, Ann Little, Tom Forman.

Johnny Get Your Gun  (1919)


Another, longer, fragment from Kotani’s American career tells the story of a motion picture cowboy enlisted to save a family’s fortune.

35mm, b&w, approx. 40 min.  Director: Donald Crisp.  Screenwriter: Gardner Hunting.

Print courtesy of National Film Center, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

Light of Sympathy  (Japan, 1926)


Nasake no hikari

While none of Kotani’s films for Shochiku survive, Light of Sympathy, the story of a poor boy who overcomes disadvantage with the help of a rich girl, offers an example of the innovative shooting strategies he brought to the studio from Hollywood.

Live musical accompaniment provided by Cliff Retallick.

35mm, b&w, silent, 62 min.  Director: Henry Kotani.  Screenwriter: Keiichi Kondo.  Cast: Koji Iwasaki, Yachiyo Shizuka, Tomu Uchida.

Part of: 
Hollywood and Holy Wood: