Round-Up: Pollet, Guitry, Robson/Lewton, Mizoguchi

Mediterranee (1963, Jean-Daniel Pollet) If the endless circuit of repetitive simulations and duplications continues then we should at least attempt to find some ecstasy, some liberty and some echoes of what we have lost within it. Jean-Daniel Pollet’s essay film is an edifice (strong yet weak, monumental but crumbling, still just together but ready to …

Women of the Night (1948, Kenji Mizoguchi)

Here Mizoguchi treads the trails left by the neo-realists and if the result is not a masterpiece (it lacks the sureness and completeness of so many of his best films) it’s still a remarkable and scrappy work of art, a sort of howl of rage and despair so brutal and overpowering that its expresser later …

Apart from You (1933, Mikio Naruse) /Every-Night Dreams (1933, Mikio Naruse)

Two more silent Mikio Naruse films, both from 1933. Every-Night Dreams is currently the more acclaimed of this pair, perhaps because it’s story and feel is closer to some of the social realist Hollywood films  or melodramas of roughly the same period (albeit while remaining distinctly Japanese). It is a film which attempts to present …

Flunky, Work Hard (1931, Mikio Naruse)

Twenty-eight minutes in length, Flunky, Work Hard is the earliest surviving work by Japanese master Mikio Naruse, made just one year after his debut. If Passing Fancy by Ozu belongs to the proletarian-focused cinema on the 1930’s, then Flunky, Work Hard belongs to that tradition too while also straddling a more experimental vein in the …

Passing Fancy (1933, Yasujiro Ozu)

There was something in the air in the 1930s; in the shadow and under the influence of the Great Depression the great, good and average film-makers dedicated themselves to a cinema that now seems the warmest, most sympathetic and charitable (yet angry and sorrowful) there has been on a wide scale. This cinema, to speak …

Ju-On: The Grudge (Takashi Shimizu, 2002)

This is the J-Horror at its most methodical, although it’s not necessarily always grimly methodical. Shimizu is careful and intelligent, constructing a non-linear narrative that at first seems sloppy but reveals itself as quite tight and able to branch out into further unsettling territory with a number of unexplained, inexplicable visions of the future on …

Retribution (2006, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

“… and only despair was left at the end.” Another film, like Pulse (2001, Kurosawa), that is about loneliness. In Retribution Tokyo seems almost as empty as at the end of that film, sparsely populated by the odd human, the ruins of past industrialisation and bulldozed lots where condominiums once stood. In this land, constantly …