February 2012
5 posts
2 tags
The Fire Festival (1985)
I went into this without expecting it to be such an intellectual affair. The film is about a woodsman on a mountainous rural coast. It ambiguously depicts his life and the events of the people and community around him, much of this life revolving around the base physicality of man. This aspect reminded me of Imamura, but where Imamura focuses on this physicality as an end, Yanagimachi uses this...
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Scattered Clouds (1967)
Naruse’s final film. A story about the relationship between a pregnant widow and the man who (accidentally) killed her husband. There were moments where I thought the film was heavy-handed and silly, but other moments where Naruse displays his subtlety as a director. This also sums up my opinion of Naruse’s filmography. Having watched all the canonical works, I probably won’t...
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Daughters, Wives, and a Mother (1960)
A (typical) family drama. As always, Naruse’s direction baffled me at parts. So wide a screen feels wasted on a story which mostly happens indoors in intimate settings.
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Flowing (1956)
This was ok. The story’s general thrust seems to illustrate some of the sadness accompanying the dying geisha profession in post-war Japan, but it feels a bit more ambiguous than that. There is an interesting tension between the mundane existence in the geisha house and the nostalgic, somewhat romantic view the older geishas are inclined to take of the their work. The drama is contained to...
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Late Chrysanthemums (1954)
I was looking forward to this but didn’t particularly like it.