Roslindale Monogatari

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (F.W. Murnau, 1931) On a frigid winter day, what could be more consoling than watching a movie about the South Seas? Because the weather was so arctic, and my copy of the new Masters of Cinema DVD of Murnau's Tabu had just arrived, this seemed like an obvious viewing choice. An island maiden and a young fisherman are in love, but torn asunder when the maiden is chosen to be a new "sacred virgin". They flee from one island to another in the South Seas, and think they have found a place they can be safe and happy together. But they are followed by an old warrior sent to proclaim the taboo -- and bring the girl back. Their attempt to flee further is undermined by corrupt behavior by the residents of the more "civilized" island they had fled to. The story sounds rather hokey -- and the entire cast is made up of non-professionals. But the South Sea settings are beautiful -- and the young leads are good-looking. And Murnau and his...

Gion bayashi / Gion Festival Music / A Geisha (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953) The first Mizoguchi films I saw were the two that are most highly touted in the West, Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff . While I didn't dislike either of these films -- and I admired Mizoguchi's visual sensibility quite a bit -- neither did I fall in love with with them. It was not until I saw Street of Shame that I discovered there was another side to Mizoguchi's work -- one more closely aligned to the world of Ozu and Naruse. When I finally saw Gion Festival Music for the first time, it too was added to the list of Mizoguchi films I liked best. This film, like Naruse's 1933 Apart From You and 1951 Ginza Cosmetics and Mizoguchi's own 1936 Sisters of Gion, depicts the rather precarious lives of contemporary geisha. All four films involve a pair of women, an older, more experienced one and a younger, comparatively naive one. As in Naruse's two films (and unlike the case in his own olde...

Due to the (increasing) tendency of my posts to slip further and further behind my viewing of movies, I've decided to start breaking my weekly posts up into smaller pieces. And I may take more radical action soon, separating the list of what I watch on an an ongoing basis (which I would try to keep as current as possible) from the reviews (which might take longer to appear). In any event, this week's submission comes in two parts. Part two will move from 1930s Russia to early 1950s Japan. Yunost Maksima / Maxim's Youth (Grigori Kozintsev & Leonid Trauberg, 1935) The previous film by Kozintsev and Trauberg was Alone , a pre-talkie with a synchronized score by Dmitri Shostakovich, sound effects and even snippets of speech. With this first film of their Maxim trilogy, they entered the realm of talkies. Nonetheless, this film (and its two successors) retained many features from the silent era -- like long wordless sequences and occasional intertitles. This film als...