In the introduction to this film, Kino inserts their opportunity to give a small history to this film, specifically the time period as well as the turmoil the director, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, had endure to merely get this film made. It provides a nice introduction, but not enough to fully develop the story Dovzhenko originally planned. This is a political film. This is a social film. This is a dated film. That is not to say that I am against, or have trouble with, silent film. Eisenstein and von Sternberg are two of my ultimate early filmmakers, but oddly I had trouble with Earth, Doyzhenko's 1930s silent film about collective farming. It isn't that the shots are not beautiful, his eye alone is worth the 75 minutes, but where I just struggled with this film was two-fold. Kino's choice of music - albeit perhaps original - just didn't seem to match accordingly to the scenes as the progressed. While the transfer itself is not a worry of mine (Kino is always a hodgepodge of good or bad depending on the week), I do feel specifically with this film we were missing something in the translation. Words would be loose, images would come and go without any rhyme or reason, and our characters would ultimately end up like stale bread without the crusts. Again, beautiful shots - but perhaps a bit too overwhelming of a mission to endure with a film with such a bold thesis statement. For years, this singular film was on several top ten lists, ranking among the best from Russia, but I just don't see it. These characters were laughing off-screen, and I cannot be persuaded that they were doing that for the story. Currently, as I type this review - watching the film for a second time to be sure I didn't miss anything - I just witnessed this beautifully developed scene with a man and a woman holding each other, only to be followed by a scene of a man "walking"/"dancing" home for nearly five minutes. It is this false juxtaposition that dates this film horribly. I wanted to be involved, I wanted to witness a Russian Birth of a Nation, but all I ended up with what one mixed (nay, underdeveloped) message after the next. It just didn't work - and it sadly felt like a 1930s film. Is it my taste or did I completely misunderstand this film? The world may never know.
Still moving along my book entitled Videohound's World Cinema: The Adventurer's Guide to Movie Watching by Elliot Wilhelm. Here is what he had to say about Earth.
"I wanted to show the state of a Ukrainian village in 1929," wrote director Alexander Dovzhenko in 1930 of his masterpiece, Earth, "that is to say, at the time it was going through an economic transformation and a mental change in the masses." The change that the great director portrays is the struggle to establish a collective farm program in the face of the murderous old-line landowners, the kulaks. But through this struggle forms the spine of Earth's plot at its most conventional level, Dovzhenko's film is far more than a sophisticated piece of advocacy drama. Earth bits of a great deal; it attempts to be nothing less than a poetic cinematic tribute to the cyclical glory of nature, as seen through the eyes of those who tend to and love the land. The complete, stunning success of Dovzhenko's film is all the more staggering when you consider the immensity of its goal. It is capable, even 70 years after its creation, of making one marvel anew at the majesty and logic of the natural world, as well as producing the sheer elation that comes with rediscovering - with all the force of a tidal wave - the primal, incomparable power of cinema. Correctly voted one of the ten greatest films of all time by more than one international panel of film critics".
It is ok to disagree sometimes. I just didn't have the same love as Mr. Wilhelm had for this film. The problem is, I know that I am going to see this film again in many of my books. Not going to leave Earth behind. Maybe I will pick it up again - but this time in my life, it just didn't speak the wonders that I feel everyone else saw.
Mark: Yellow highlight with black mark. Not positive.
From the book Videohound's World Cinema: The Adventurer's Guide to Movie Watching written by Elliot Wilhelm:
"Narcissistic and spoiled, Madame de... (Danielle Darrieux) lives in ostentatious comfort with her military husband (Charles Boyer); she's so accepting of their unemotional marital arrangement - and their separate bedrooms - that she's unashamed to pawn for a little extra cash the earrings her husband gave her. But when the same earrings find their way back to her by way of her new lover, the dashing Baron Donati (Vittorio De Sica), her desire now to keep them as precious symbols of his love drives this dizzyingly romantic, heartbreaking masterpiece to its inevitable, tragic conclusion. The physical perfection and ingeniously symmetrical structure Max Ophuls' The Earrings of Madame de...is easy to see; its surface glitters with the opulent palaces and opera houses of long-ago Paris, and the ceaseless, fluid camera movement plunges the viewer headlong into her vertiginous romantic plunge. Yet that surface is only an elegant means of transportation into the romantic world that Ophuls ruled; his famous tracking shots and swirling images were like the mirrors in a Cocteau film, on the other side of which existed a world of dreams vastly more real and effecting than our own. The power of Madame de... is achieved by Ophuls' alchemy - a confluence of form and truth that is, to say the least, vastly more wrenching than the sum of its parts. There are a dozen or so films - not exactly twelve, perhaps, but hardly a huge number by any measure - that I consistently believe to be THE best movie I've ever seen, every time I see it. That Madame de...is among that number each time I see it remains rapturous proof to me that despite frequent suspicions to the contrary, my lifetime in the dark has not been entirely misspent."
Visit our boys HERE if you want to own a copy of the film.
Mark: Blue Stars with Green highlight. I will watch this film again.
No Regrets for Our YouthOr; Kurosawa's sings "Stand By Your Man"
World War II ends, and Akira Kurosawa picks up his camera once again to give us a story that pre-dates Seven Samurai and Ran, that develops a bit stronger than Throne of Blood or Red Beard, but probably stands as his most passionate film until his 1990 release of Dreams. It is an unsung film with no official DVD release in the US up until Criterion's box set labeling it "Post-War Kurosawa", and a mere VHS to tie over those Kurosawa completionists. Like many Kurosawa films, this is not for the fly-by-night film watcher, but instead a dedicated picture to the culture of facism, the role of women in society, and the fate of Japan between the dates of 1933 to 1945. It begins very slow and very youthful, with a swallow of University students galloping through the land, singing, laughing, being playful, and as we see the clear blue sky of Japan (or in this case, the clear black & white sky) near the edge of the screen, it is quickly pulled from our fingers as a wounded soldier as well as gunshots in the distance are introduced. We are then pulled deeper into history. Guided by Kurosawa's only female lead in his catelog, Yumie (played with unbridaled perfection by Setsuko Hara), moves from a literal lifestyle of playing the piano for freedom, to plowing the fields of justice. It is a small part love story, small story of independent thought, small story of loyalty, and a small part family drama - but as a whole, it creates No Regrets for Our Youth. Again, a difficult film to watch, merely because it takes Kurosawa a least 45-minutes to full detail his direction for our characters, but once you see Yumie's soul - it becomes one of the strongest films in his catelog. The final 20-minutes will pull at your heartstrings, and to see him bring Yumie back to the beginning, seeing the changed/unchanged nature of Japan post-war, is brilliant. Stick with this one until the end, depsite the dry season known as the beginning, to watch Yumie plant the rice patties at the end, fighting sickness and destroyed piano hands - it is worth it every time.
A new element to my reviews (as I am discovering I have less and less time for this site, but don't want to see it die out), it is going to be the quote [long or short] on the referring book or site that lead me to this film. First my paragraph thought, then what pulled me into this - then my final review. Let's see how this one holds up:From Criterion Collection website written by Michael Koresky"As Japan was coming out of World War II, Akira Kurosawa was coming into his own as a filmmaker. And this was hardly a coincidence: though he had made a name for himself as a promising popular craftsman at Toho Studios during the war, Kurosawa later said he didn’t feel he could express himself as an artist until the censorship restrictions of that era had been lifted and he could take the new Japan as his subject. Devastated by the human and material losses of the war and facing widespread homelessness and economic collapse, the now Allied-occupied Japan became the canvas on which this trained painter would make his mark as a filmmaker.
For Kurosawa, social commitment and visual artistry would always go hand in hand, although this particular phase of his career, from right after the war until the mid-fifties, would see him tackling more directly the pressing issues of contemporary Japanese life than ever again. In between 1946’s No Regrets for Our Youth and 1955’s I Live in Fear, Kurosawa would become an international sensation, all the while creating a body of work that dealt, either straight-forwardly or through metaphor, with the struggles of his fellow citizens.
All of Kurosawa’s wartime films were affected by censorship, no matter the content—from personal projects like his masterful debut, Sanshiro Sugata (1943), a classically heroic master-pupil narrative, to assignments such as the overt propaganda film The Most Beautiful (1944), about women helping the war effort. Postwar American occupying forces had their own review board, of course, but its far-less-restrictive guidelines, encouraging the glorification of democracy and freedom, were much more suited to Kurosawa’s political ideas. His first postwar project for Toho was indeed a great fit in this regard: a narrative of national collapse and recovery, No Regrets for Our Youth is a sweeping tale of antinationalist revolt whose central quote, “there is sacrifice in the struggle for freedom,” becomes its guiding principle.
Opening idyllically, with a joyous band of college students whistling along a riverbank as they climb a hill that overlooks Kyoto University, the “garden of freedom,” No Regrets for Our Youth stands out among Kurosawa’s films of the period in beginning before the devastations of war—in the peace and prosperity of early 1930s Japan. And alone in Kurosawa’s body of work, this film aligns itself with the point of view of a female protagonist: Yukie, played by the brilliantly expressive Setsuko Hara. Moving from bourgeois complacency to social activism, Yukie—the daughter of a conservative university professor and eventual wife of one of his students, an anti-imperial intellectual from a peasant family—is the film’s emotional anchor, guiding us through the political and cultural turmoil of Japan from 1933 to 1945.
No Regrets for Our Youth was shot during a series of workers’ strikes at Toho, at a time when the left was resurgent in Japan. And the film’s glorification of radical activism and peasant workers (with low-angle shots evocative of the socialist realism of Alexander Dovzhenko) reflects both Kurosawa’s political spirit and Japan’s newfound social freedom—a multifaceted concept that Kurosawa would continue to examine in the decade to come." 
Mark: Pink highlight (good, but not the greatest)
Still moving along my book entitled Videohound's World Cinema: The Adventurer's Guide to Movie Watching by Elliot Wilhelm. Here is what he had to say about Earth.
