All posts tagged: Kurosawa

Kiyoshi Kurosawa on Anti-Capitalist Action Film ‘Cloud’

Kiyoshi Kurosawa on Anti-Capitalist Action Film ‘Cloud’

Published by skeptic

The last time the journeyman Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa was at the Venice Film Festival, he took home the event’s prestigious best director award for his period drama Wife of a Spy. He is back in the Italian festival’s main competition this week with Cloud, the first action film of his expansive and acclaimed filmography. The film received a boost on Friday morning ahead of its world premiere on the Lido, as news arrived in Venice that Japan had selected Cloud as its official entry to the Oscars’ best international film race.  The film tells the story of Ryōsuke Yoshii (Masaki Suda in a star-making performance), a worker at a small factory who makes money on the side as an online reseller of random goods — medical devices, handbags, collectible figurines — anything he can flip for a quick profit. Gradually, Yoshii begins shunning those around him — an old friend who taught him the reselling game, his thoughtful boss at the factory, some of the people he does business with online and in person — focussing exclusively …

The Golden Age of Japanese Cinema: Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi & Beyond

The Golden Age of Japanese Cinema: Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi & Beyond

Published by José

?si=k7NS-uM-GjVkL0dP Oliv­er Her­manus’ lat­est film Liv­ing trans­plants the sto­ry of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa’s Ikiru to post­war Lon­don. Apart from its own con­sid­er­able mer­its, it has giv­en view­ers across the world rea­son to revis­it the 1952 orig­i­nal, a stand­out work even in a gold­en decade of Japan­ese cin­e­ma — the decade The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy co-cre­ator Lewis Bond (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here for oth­er explo­rations of Japan­ese cin­e­ma and ani­ma­tion) explains in the video above. In the nine­teen-fifties, “con­cen­trat­ed with­in a sin­gle coun­try were some of the great­est film­mak­ers to ever live, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly pro­duc­ing their great­est works. The result was a com­plete decen­tral­iza­tion of clas­sic cin­e­ma as the world was exposed to its new troupe of mas­ters.” After World War II, the Japan­ese peo­ple were “left with the real­i­ty that they were an eth­ni­cal­ly homo­ge­neous and cul­tur­al­ly uni­fied unit that did not fit in with the new, demo­c­ra­t­ic world.” The Amer­i­can mil­i­tary occu­pa­tion “took con­trol of the entire Japan­ese film indus­try from 1945 until 1952,” forcibly remov­ing any image, theme, or line of dia­logue thought liable stoke recidi­vist pop­u­lar …