Or; 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."
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)
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