News

As you go through the whole filmography of directors such as Yasujiro Ozu, you start to notice a certain pattern, not only in terms of the visual style but also considering elements of the story. The concept of marriage is, most of the time, when collisions and arguments start to erupt within the family unit, signifying the chasm within Japanese post-war society and some underlying issues in a conformist culture which, to this day, have not been fully resolved. In “Tokyo Twilight”, possibly one of his bleakest features stylistically and narratively, Ozu again shows the family as a mirror of society, its contradictions, regrets and guilt, posing the question of where the culture is headed and whether freedom and independence will bring the solution people wish for.

Tokyo Twilight is screening at Japan Society as part of the Family Portrait program

Shukichi Sugiyama (Chishu Ryu) is a respected employee in a Tokyo bank.

Although she would go on to make feature films as an actress, Kinuyo Tanaka’s last project as a director would be the 1963 jidaigeki “Love Under the Crucifix”, a work based on the novel “Ogin-sama” by Toko Kon. At the same time, given her development as a filmmaker, this is truly an interesting climax to a career which saw her progressing more and more, developing her skills, especially when it comes to cinematic storytelling. Additionally, the themes that defined her previous works such as “Love Letter” and “Forever a Woman” also found a fitting conclusion in a feature that, even though it was not set in the present as her other movies, it certainly made a very relevant point about gender roles within Japanese society as well as the conflict between duty and desire as expressed in the story of the main characters.

“Love Under the Crucifix” is screening at...

Masaki Kobayashi’s six-part adaptation of the book by Jumpei Gomikawa may be the most ambitious, most truthful film about the big-picture reality of war. Idealist Tatsuya Nakadai thinks he can avoid complicity in human evil by volunteering as a civilian to manage a work camp in occupied Manchuria, only to find that he’s expected to starve and torture Chinese slave laborers. Resistance leads to his conscription in a brutal boot camp, and his deployment on the Northern front as the Russians invade leads to an extended struggle to survive amid mounting horrors. There’s no escape: the ‘human condition’ is that barbarity is a given, a constant. It’s nine hours of suffering that can change one’s world view.

The Human Condition

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 480

1959-61 / B&w / 2:39 anamorphic widescreen / 575 min. / Ningen no jôken / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date June 8, 2021 / 59.95

Starring: Tatsuya Nakadai,...

I learned to talk Ozu in the baths. Chin-deep in hot spring, lips pruning, my mother and my grandmother would wait for women to walk just out of earshot. Then, they offered their verdicts: Setsuko Hara forehead. Those Kinuyo Tanaka cheeks. Wrists made for slipping out wallets, like hers, oh you know, that actress so good with showing appetite—Haruko, yes, Haruko Sugimura. I should specify that we talked Ozu women—he gave us so many shades—because there really was only one Ozu man: Chishu Ryu, the poet of sighs. That’s not quite true, of course. There are wagons of men in the four decades of his films. But in the waters of Hakone and Atami, my mother and her mother weren’t quite interested in dissecting man or brotherhood. Disrobed, we wanted to get to the heart of things, to the kinds of truths, and un-truths, mothers pass on to daughters.

Want a nine-hour dose of the truth of existence so harrowing that it will make you feel grateful no matter how humble your situation? Masaki Kobayshi's epic of the real cost of war boggles the mind with its creeping revelations of cosmic bleakness. Yet all the way through you know you're experiencing a truth far beyond slogans and sentiments. The Human Condition Region B Blu-ray Arrow Academy (UK) 1959-61 / B&W / 2:35 anamorphic widescreen / 574 min. / Ningen no jôken / Street Date September 19, 2016 / Available from Amazon UK £ 39.99 Starring Tatsuya Nakadai, Michiyo Aratama, Chikage Awashima, Ineko Arima, Keiji Sada, So Yamamura, Kunie Tanaka, Kei Sato, Chishu Ryu, Taketoshi Naito. Cinematography Yoshio Miyajima Art Direction Kazue Hirataka <Film Editor Keiichi Uraoka Original Music Chuji Kinoshita Written by Zenzo Matsuyama, Masaki Kobayashi from the novel by Jumpei Gomikawa Produced by Shigeru Wakatsuki Directed by Masaki Kobayashi

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The first Blu-ray of perhaps...