Den'en kôkyôgaku

She was born blind, and by the time she was discovered, she seemed a wild animal, a child dirty with lice. But a Christian family, led by Minoru Takada and Ryô Sayama took her in and loved her. They realized that although she could not see with her eyes, her ears and hands would tell her about the outside world. When she heard music, particularly Beethoven, she realized that the world could be beautiful, and as she grew up to be Sestuko Hara, she hungered to understand the things that only vision could tell her: colors, and what the people she loved looked like.

The Japanese film industry long made a fetish of ts insularity. Their films were made only for a Japanese audience, and only the Japanese could understand them. Why then, did Ozu fill his pre-war movies with Hollywood posters, references to American stars and themes from Leo McCarey? Why did Satsuo Yamamoto make this movie from a novel by Andre Gide, the first of four film versions, eight years before Delannoy tackled it? I think it's because the concerns of people are pretty much the same everywhere, and when you're a smart, literate film maker, you look for ideas everyone. And if you find a good source in a novel published in French, you hector your production company until they let you do it, and do it with the performers and technicians you want. If they choose not to try to sell it overseas, that's their lack of imagination, not Yamamoto's.