The wounded Russian Orloff, being treated in a Japanese hospital, is devotedly looked after by the volunteer nurse Hanako. Hanako, small and dressed like a Japanese doll, seems charming in the mawkish décor of things over there. He falls in love with her and offers her his name. When Hanako's father refuses, Lieutenant Orloff kidnaps the little geisha and takes her back to Moscow. In Moscow, the honeymoon lasts a few weeks, then Orloff gets bored and sees his old friends again. His return is celebrated with joy. To honour Orloff's guests, Hanako mimes a dance from her homeland. The beautiful Rayskaya, jealous of the little geisha's success, tries to humiliate her and provokes the lieutenant with a lascivious dance. Far from her homeland, little Hanako no longer seems so pretty to the fickle Orloff, who now prefers the beautiful Rayskaya. Hanako, determined to defend herself, goes to see her rival and humbly begs her not to disturb his happiness. But Rayskaya taunts the poor geisha and the violent instinct of her race, which lies dormant in Hanako's soul, awakens under the insult. Skilled in the art of jiu-jitsu, she quickly gets the better of the cruel Rayskaya and prepares to plunge a knife between her shoulders, when Orloff's hand stops her. In order to punish Hanako, Orloff no longer hides his infatuation for Rayskaya from her. Unable to overcome her pain, the little geisha prefers to die. While Rayskaya laughs in Orloff's arms in the next room, Hanako cuts a vein and dies. Suddenly, Rayskaya, who has set up a Japanese-style tea party on mats to mock her rival, puts her hand in a pool of blood. Orloff, horrified, opens the door and discovers, bathed in her blood, the poor little geisha who, in her doll's body, possessed the heart of a woman capable of loving and suffering.
commentaries
These two films ["The Love of a Japanese Woman" and "Better Death than Dishonour"] are the sole surviving moving pictures of the dancer and actress Ohta Hisa, known as Hanako (1868-1945); a photographic record of her performances also exists. Public infatuation with the diminutive Japanese artist (some reports describe her as 4 ft. 6) predates these films: “She is like a kitten, whose every movement is a success,” enthused the New York Times (27.10.1907). Hanako (“Little Flower”) was first spotted by the dancer and entrepreneur Loïe Fuller, who provided her with a repertoire of “suicide” pieces. American and European newspapers, especially the French ones, describe her hara-kiri enactments when she was performing in La Martyre at the Théâtre Moderne in Paris, also noting her facial expressivity when conveying love and jealousy.
Hanako’s style first fascinated France in 1906, around the time that Europe was discovering kabuki theatre (Rodin, who met her that year in Marseille, made her one of his models; she posed for over 50 of his works), and she returned to France during a tour in the 1910s. Her friendship with the wife of Albert Carré, director of the Opéra-Comique and cousin of Michel Carré, the film director at SCAGL, led to several performances of Madame Butterfly, which may have inspired the screen adaptation of La Petite geisha. In Moscow in 1912-1913, her sophisticated acting earned praise from Nikolai Evreinov and Vsevolod Meyerhold, and she performed before the students of the Art Theater. The newly christened Le Film Russe, registered in 1910, marked the transformation of the Moscow branch of Pathé into a local production company with its own studio. This initiative helped launch the careers of several young directors; Peter Bagrov and Anna Kovalova have recently posited that these two films with Hanako were probably directed by Yakov Protazanov rather than Kai Hansen.
These restorations were carried out in 2021 by the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé and the Cinémathèque française, based on the original Pathé negatives. Editing and intertitles were reconstructed from the original scenarios and information on the prints. The 4K digital transfer was done by L’Immagine Ritrovata, Paris-Bologna.
– Stéphanie Salmon, Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé
