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 […]
Tag: Japanese Cinema
A Star Athlete, 1937
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 […]
Japanese Girls at the Harbor, 1933
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 […]
A Last Note, 1995
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 […]
The Strange Tale of Oyuki, 1993
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 […]
Sakura-tai Chiru, 1988
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 […]