From the seemingly effortless opening tracking shot through a middle-class neighborhood that terminates to a shot of two young men practicing baseball pitches in the backyard of their suburban home (and accidentally breaking the window of a neighbor’s home), Yasujiro Shimazu illustrates his remarkable agility with the medium in the sublime shomin-geki (home drama), Our […]
In a pivotal encounter during Children of the Wind, the Aoyamas’ rambunctious younger son, Sanpei (Jun Yokoyama, credited in the film as Bakudan kozo, or “explosive boy”), having been sent to live temporarily with his uncle (Takeshi Sakamoto) and aunt (Fumiko Okamura), befriends an orphaned circus performer played by frequent prewar Ozu child actor Aoki […]
One of my favorite sequences in any film is the remarkably fluid lateral dolly shot through the financially ruined Furusawa household that opens Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sisters of the Gion, so it is particularly satisfying to see Hiroshi Shimizu further refining this technique in the seemingly effortless, long take, outdoor tracking shot of a pair of […]
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 […]