Japanese
Articles and Essays on Japanese Films
Life of Oharu, The (1952)
The film begins on a chill dawn in the dark outskirts of Kyoto, while the heroine named Oharu, her face hidden behind a fan, encounters some of her fellow prostitutes. “It’s hard for 50-year-old women to pass as 20,” she observes. The women ultimately find a friend who has built a fire, and huddle around […]
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Floating Weeds (1959)
Everyone understands what it is like to have a family. Yasujiro Ozu was a man whose films made you feel what it’s like to be part of a family. Most of his films focus on domestic family life and how changes within that family change relationships between each other forever. Film critic Roger Ebert once stated, […]
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Harakiri (1962)
Samurai films similar to westerns have the ability to tell the most complex and challenging stories on the ethical and moral questions of a character in the form of tradition and human tragedy. Masaki Kobayashi’s masterpiece Harakiri is one of the most powerful and also the most complex because its story not only questions the morality of the individuals within the […]
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Woman in the Dunes, The (1964)
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Woman in the Dunes which won the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival, is one of the most haunting and beautifully shot parables on the themes of human nature, identity and civilized life. The story is about a man named Junpei Niki who is a teacher and entomologist off on an expedition to collect several […]
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Yojimbo (1961)
Every western audience should be able to recognize the theme in the beginning shots of Yojimbo, Akira Kurosawa’s most popular film in Japan. A ronin and a ‘man with no name’ played by the legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, walks into what appears to be an abandoned village with dust and leaves blowing across a wide, empty street as […]
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