Judith F. Rosenberg on Piano

(Muteki). A brooding tale of power, passion, and violence in 1870s Yokohama, this late silent evokes its setting in darkly atmospheric images. The Yokohama Concession, which was opened to foreign settlement and trade in 1859, is described in an intertitle as a "city of barbarians," less cross-cultural melting pot than seething cauldron of corruption and degradation. Thrown together in the unwholesome stew are Cooper, an unrepentant American colonist, and rebellious youth Chiyokichi, who tries to pick the American's pocket but is caught and enslaved by Cooper. Chiyokichi's only release comes in his violent love for the beautiful Ohana; but even in this, the servant cannot ultimately escape his master's reach. The mood of decadent fatalism is enhanced by the film's twilit photography and its passages of unsettling montage, cutting again and again to the figureheads of ships in the harbor, Western women's faces looming in the mist.

—Juliet Clark

• Written by Shuroku Kunihiro, based on a novel by Jiro Osaragi. Photographed by Junichiro Aoshima. With Eiji Nakano, Akiko Shiga, Ichiro Sugai, Nobuo Kosaka. (94 mins, Silent with Japanese intertitles and English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, Print through special archival exchange with George Eastman House, Courtesy National Film Center, Tokyo)