Noticias

A Fugitive from the PastFilm history is full of holes, but some are filled in more reluctantly than others. Consider, for example, the strange case of Tomu Uchida (1898-1970). In his home country Japan, he is considered a canonized master. In the West, he was mostly a name without any practical meaning, at least until a (still slimmed-down) touring series in the wake of Tokyo FilmEx’s 2004 13-film-retrospective made the rounds for a few years, e.g. to International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2005 and New York’s BAMcinématek in 2008, allowing for the first time the appreciation of a sizable selection from Uchida’s rich and diverse body of work, with emphasis on his fascinating post-war period.Although Uchida is discussed in standard texts on Japanese cinema—especially his realistic classic Tsuchi (Earth, 1939)—and individual films appear time and again in other contexts (back then he was even in competition in...