Filmmaker Hiroshi Shimizu and cinematographer Taro Sasaki collaborate on a film’s worth of stark, lovely, extraordinary images in the Japanese silent Minato no nihon musume, but for all that are unable to transcend a sickly, melodramatic screenplay in which neither had a hand. (Mitsu Suyama wrote the script from a story by Itsuma Kitabayashi.) It […]
Daily Archives: March 17, 2009
“We will become a nation of automobiles and tractors.” — Josef Stalin Having toured the Soviet Union at Pudovkin’s invitation, Dutch documentarian Joris Ivens promised to return and make a film there; Komsomolsk follows the process by which cast iron is produced, beginning with the extraction of iron ore from Magnetic Mountain. We begin “[o]n […]
Dennis Grunes 