Skip to main content

港の日本娘 (Japanese Girls At The Harbor)

Director: Hiroshi Shimizu
Year: 1933
Run-time: 1 hr 8 min
Source: The Criterion Channel

Notable For: This list would be entirely different had not the great bulk of Japanese films in the 20's and 30's been lost in the destruction of war.  Hiroshi Shimizu was an incredibly prolific director who made over 160 films, and was a great influence on Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, but he's relatively unknown today.

 Verdict: Japanese Girls at the Harbor reveals the maturity of his style, with a simple, effective silent melodrama (very Borzage-esque) with few close-ups, but rather some of the most emotional long shots so far yet.  The director conveys a lot with the way that his wonderful actors position themselves in relation to each other, and how they hold their bodies.  As with Mizoguchi's work, the focus is on the women - the male characters are weak-willed, and helpless without the support of these women.  Also, I don't often say this, but the wardrobes are fascinating - the film contrasts traditional Geisha-style kimonos worn by prostitutes with western-influenced 1930's clothes worn by a middle-class couple.  This is definitely an unknown classic.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Killers

  The Killers  uses up every noir cliche that had developed by this time - the detective story with flashbacks from Laura , the insurance investigator from Double Indemnity, the seductive femme fatale from Gilda - but somehow manages to feel wholly original. I thought that I'd grow weary of noirs by this point, but they are getting better, and there's no doubt that it's a fun genre, if there's not always much going under the pristine surface. There's some tremendous acting, and I unabashedly love the opening scene with the titular killers - the only part that seems to have been actually adapted from the Hemingway short story (Ernest himself was nevertheless a fan) - but the ending doesn't really work. It's a bit easier to follow than The Big Sleep, but it has a few too many twists for what is ultimately a pretty straightforward story without any real morals. Still, I have to recommend it, and it would definitely be up there in my list of best noirs.
Post a Comment
Read more

Fétiche Mascotte (The Mascot)

Director: Ladislas Starevich Year: 1933 Run-time: 26 min Source: Youtube Notable For : The second animated short on the list from 1933 is this stop-motion piece from the Polish-Russian film-maker Ladislas Starevich.  Stop-motion is almost as old as cinema itself (Starevich had been innovating since 1912).  The craft here is as good as any modern film, and Starevich's twisted imagination is on full display, with dolls and household objects coming to life in a dark version of Toy Story.  For animation fans, it almost goes without saying that Starevich was an influence on Jan Svankmajer's work much later. Verdict :  Every frame is a bizarre delight. There didn't seem to be an overarching plan to this work (indeed, it's possible that The Mascot  is an amalgamation of several shorter films featuring the same dog character), and so the film veers from one strange scene to the next, with much of the second half taking place in some kind of tchotchke hell governe...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Trip to the Moon

Director: Georges Méliès Year: 1902 Seeing the painstakingly restored hand-colored print of A Trip to the Moon, in a literally mind-numbing 14 frames per second, makes it utterly clear that cinema is and has always been witchcraft. Every frame of this short feels bursting with magic, and even watching it on a modern TV in a space age that would have blown the mind of any of the actors of this film, you're left thinking "How did they do that?".
Post a Comment
Read more