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Freda Freiberg

18 Sepetmber, 1933 — 26 April, 2024

Film Reviews

Dragnet Girl film poster

Dragnet Girl – Japanese title: Hijosen no onna Ozu Yasujiro 1933

In this film, Ozu ventured outside his habitual terrain, in setting and genre. Normally he concentrated on the everyday rituals of the average family, on the rifts and rapprochements between parents and children as they swing between resistance and conformity to social pressures on matters of wide public concern – changes in marriage, education and employment patterns, shifts in morals and manners. In this film he focused on the troubled relationship between a gangster and his moll (who is also a member of the typing pool in a business company during the day). Not noted for his interest in sex and violence, let alone heterosexual relationships, Ozu would seem to be out of his depth. But he characteristically charms us with injections of humour, with visual rhymes and with homages to Hollywood, as well as demonstrating that he could extend his repertoire of imagery beyond washing lines, telegraph poles and kettles.

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Donzoku (The Lower Depths) film poster

Donzoku (The Lower Depths)

As a young man in the 1920s, Kurosawa frequented the little Tsukiji Theatre in Tokyo. This experimental modern theatre, inspired by the performance techniques and production methods of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold at the Moscow Art Theatre and Max Reinhardt at the Deutsches Theater, included in its repertoire Gorky’s The Lower Depths, along with works by Ibsen and Chekhov. According to James Goodwin, the dramaturgy and set design of Kurosawa’s film closely resemble those of the Tsukiji production of the play.

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Beijing Bicycle film poster

Beijing Bicycle

Unlike the other films in the Silk Screen series distributed by Columbia TriStar, Beijing Bicycle was not made by a well-known Asian film director. Wang Xiaoshuai is not a veteran art director with the international status of Zhang Yimou (The Road Home), Chen Kaige (The Emperor and the Assassin), Takeshi Kitano (Kikujiro) or Ang Lee  (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). He is a member of the Sixth Generation of Chinese film-makers, whose work is grittier and less prone to extravagant artistic gestures.

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Twenty Four Eyes film poster

Twenty-Four Eyes

Keisuke Kinoshita was one of the most prolific postwar directors at Shochiku’s Ofuna studios, producing 42 films in 23 years, and then going on to a career in television. He served a long apprenticeship as a cinematographer and as an assistant to senior Shochiku director Yasujiro Shimazu before he was allowed to direct his own films. As regular members of his production team, he employed his brother Chuji, a musician, and his brother-in-law Hiroshi Kusuda, a cinematographer, and together they formed a very active and creative family team.

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Life is Beautiful film poster

Life is Beautiful

Many serious critics, at home and abroad, have acknowledged the charms of Benigni’s film, Life is Beautiful, but maintain a principled resistance to those charms. Their grounds are familiar ones: linking pleasure and humour with the Holocaust, that most horrific chapter in modern Jewish history, is tasteless at best, immoral at worst; failing to treat the subject in a tone of high seriousness and moral earnestness means trivializing it. This attitude has become almost a knee-jerk reaction. It allows righteous people to dismiss and deplore films, plays and novels, without examining them; and it produces disavowals from intelligent people who have succumbed to the experience of pleasure but who feel they can’t be seen to approve such apparent light-heartedness.

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The Piano movie poster

The Piano

"The Piano" scooped all the major prizes at the 1993 Australian Film Institute Awards - for leading performances, cinematography, editing, sound, screenplay, music, costume and production design, and direction. Some commentators questioned its `Australian' credentials, pointing to the facts that it was shot in New Zealand, financed by a French company, and featured two Hollywood stars (Holly Hunter and Harvey Keitel) in the leading roles. However, it was not alone in its problematic national status. Longterm supporters of indigenous filmmaking noted with dismay that three of the four finalists for the Best Film award this year were international co-productions, filmed in foreign locations with foreign crews. They might have noted that the fourth, "The Heartbreak Kid", though a completely local production, was set within the Greek community of Melbourne, so that it too reflected a shift away from the archetypal images of Australia and Australians that dominated the Australian cinema in the 70s and 80s - a shift towards multi-culturalisation if not internationalisation.

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Memories and Dreams on the cover of Cinema Papers

Memories and Dreams

Lynn-Maree Milburn's film, "Memories and dreams", eludes the attempt to define it. To describe it as a spiderly spun and intricately woven tapestry of documentary, dramatized fiction, experimental animation and lyrical romance is accurate but still not adequate. To describe it as an empathetic and experimental attempt to document a life story seems accurate until you realize that it is equally a discourse on the impossibility of such an undertaking. And while it may be accurate to describe the film's subject as the elusiveness and illusiveness of human subjectivity and history, it could also be misleading, as this is a very concrete sensuous film, rather than an abstract theoretical essay film.

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Gojira, 1954 Japanese film poster

Godzilla

Cultural Context

Names

Godzilla is called Gojira in Japan. The monster’s name is a combination of “gorilla” and “kujira”, the Japanese word for whale. In the Japanese language, new words and new terms are often coined by combining part of one word and part of another. Gojira was the nickname of a burly Toho studio employee who worked as a set-builder, so naming the monster after him was also a joke on the part of the production team.

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In the realm of the senses movie poster

In the Realm of the Senses

The unkindest cut of all?  

Some reflections on the recent cinematic release of the uncut version of Nagisa Oshima’s Ai no corrida by Freda Freiberg  

1. What’s in a name?

What could be more appropriate for a journal called ‘Senses of Cinema’ than a film entitled ‘In the Realm of the Senses’? In both cases the title plays on the double meaning of the word, senses. The contributors to ‘Senses of Cinema’ do their best to unpack the meanings of filmic texts, to make sense of them, but also try to explore their sights and sounds, to identify their appeal to the senses. Oshima’s essay in pornography, In the Realm of the Senses, presents the full gamut of sensory experience – adding taste, touch and smell to sight and sound – and provokes a plethora of interpretations.

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