Sound
Illegal immigrant, neglect, chastisement, air guns, alcohol, paper planes, apartments. The battlefield is also right beside us in Japan. With a deep gaze and transparent kindness, it depicts the fleeting sympathy of a boy and a girl who are trying to survive there.
Original Music Composer
A Fond Face from the Past is also set in a rural community, specifically a village outside Kameoka, near Kyoto. In some ways this short, thirty-six-minute film is Naruse's most moving negotiation of the militarist restrictions of the time, perhaps because it is also his most direct engagement with the culture of war. When a newsreel comes to Kameoka featuring a local man named Yoichi, it causes some excitement in the community and, of course, in Yoichi's own family. First of all his mother makes the newsreel (Nippon News, no. 14), which begins with the same marching music that opens his own film, followed by a curious baby judging context in Los Angeles featuring two hundred Japanese babies. Released in January 1941, almost a year before the pacific war begins, this “found footage” is indicative of Japanese imperialist ambitions beyond Asia long before Pearl Harbor.
Music
9th directorial work by Yamamoto Satsuo.
Music
A forceful indictment of the devastating effects of war and nationalistic fanaticism on the average man, who, in the face of the absurdity of violence, is reduced to apathy or victimhood.
Music
The Whole Family Works, Mikio Naruse's adaptation of a Sunao Tokunaga novel, feels more of a piece with the writer/director's quietly observant and psychologically charged later work. For the Naruse-familiar, it is an anomaly only in its placement within his filmography—indeed, this could be a film made by the elder, stasis-minded Naruse momentarily inhabiting, through a metaphysical twist of fate, his stylistically exuberant younger self. Set in depression-era Japan around the time of the Sino-Japanese War (which the director evokes, during a brief dream sequence, by dissolving between children's war games and actual adult warfare), The Whole Family Works gently observes a family coming apart at the seams. Ishimura (Musei Tokugawa) is the jobless father of nine children.
Original Music Composer
에도 시대의 도쿄 빈민가, 무사 계급이라 해도 돈이 없으면 하층민들 사이에서 겨우 입에 풀칠만 할 수밖에 없는 시대. 주인 없는 무사 마타주로는 아내가 집에서 싸구려 종이 풍선을 만드는 사이 일자리를 찾으러 다닌다. 한편, 어느 비 내리는 밤, 이발사 신자의 일당이 부유한 상인의 딸을 납치해 마타주로의 집에 숨긴다. 일당은 몸값을 요구하지만 일은 점점 꼬여만 가고, 마타주로 역시 곤경에 처한다. 자살로 시작된 영화는 자살로 막을 내리며, 봉건 제도 하의 일본에서 계급의 밑바닥을 살아가는 사람들의 삶이 얼마나 끔찍한지를 보여주는 야마나카의 비극적인 걸작. 야마나카가 그의 짧은 생애 동안 만든 작품 중 마지막 작품이자 현존하는 세 작품 중 하나. (2014 영화의 전당 미지의 일본 거장전 I : 시미즈 히로시 & 야마나카 사다오)
