일본의 경향영화 - <땀(汗)>(1929)의 희극성을 중심으로 -

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze Tomu Uchida’s silent comedy Ase (Sweat, 1929), in order to investigate how the perspective of social criticism observed in tendency films is connected to comedic forms. At the time, Japanese society was experiencing severe poverty and widening class disparities due to the Great Depression and economic recession, and the tendencies of social criticism were increasingly widespread in art and cinema. In this social context, the director Uchida chose to describe the contradictions of reality through the use of humor and satire, rather than directly depicting social issues. This study presents a scene-by-scene analysis of Ase, examining how the relationship between capital and labor is represented by visual devices, such as the spatial contrast between the mansion and the construction site, camera composition and character movement, and costume changes. As a result, Ase indicates the process of class inversion and restoration through a story in which a capitalist becomes a laborer and then becomes a capitalist again and conveys a message of social critique that takes on comedic expressions. Although the ending looks as if it depicted an awakening through labor, it in fact indicates a return to the capitalist order and forms a structure in which lessons and irony coexist. This paper aims to reveal that the early work of the director Uchida presented a new direction in the history of Japanese films at the crossroads of tendency films and comedy films.