Hiroshi Shimizu’s government-pressured, militarism-era film A Star Athlete is a breezy, refreshingly lighthearted, and subtly subversive slice-of-life comedy that centers on an all-day student march in formation and armed combat drills through the rural countryside for military training exercises. Shimizu demonstrates his deceptively facile adeptness and virtuoso camerawork through a series of extraordinarily choreographed plan […]
My first impressions of Hiroshi Shimizu’s films during the Shochiku At 100 New York Film Festival sidebar were the agility of his camera movements that favorably compared to Kenji Mizoguchi’s tensile dolly shots, and a lightness of touch in the development of the narrative that, like Yasujiro Ozu’s cinema, converges towards gravitas without being abrupt […]
On a secluded cottage in the mountains, a retired carpenter and part-time groundskeeper named Rokubei assembles a humble coffin, carefully selects a properly weighted rock from the riverbed, and leaves a last note with the terse inscription “It’s over” scribbled onto the back of a bargain sale flyer before committing suicide – the round rock […]
Faced with a bout of ill health, global traveller, western-educated novelist Kafu Nagai (1879-1959) began to chronicle sundry episodes in his life, as well as thoughts and observations of contemporary Japanese society, in a series of intimate journals that would eventually span the early half of 20th century. Based on A Strange Tale from East […]
A somber retrospective on the final days of the Sakura-tai theatrical troupe that had arrived in the island of Hiroshima to begin preparations for the staging of a play and, at 8:15 on the morning of August 6, 1945, became victims of the atomic bombing, Sakura-tai Chiru is a thoughtful examination of artistic imperative in […]
A melancholic, nickelodeon arcade melody plays against the suffused, dreamlike image of a slow-circling merry-go-round, as a curious assortment of characters seated on the carousel gradually come into focus, then recede, before re-emerging again within the stationary frame. The nostalgic, surreal episode carries through to the voice-over narration of an aging author named Hatsu-rojin (Keiju […]