[KineJapan] Kawashima Yûzô series on Mubi

[Paul Berry]

Dear Anne,
Thanks for bringing this up to everyone's attention. One of my favorites
among his works was the brilliant and jaw dropping satire on an "Ozu-like"
family called 1962 *The Graceful Brute
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Graceful_Brute>* (しとやかな獣, aka *Elegant
Beast*) which is on DVD and online now. One of the more over the top
fast-paced Japanese satires with biting dialogue by the master of that
Shindo Kaneto.
It is so true that his work deserves much more attention overseas.
Best,
Paul Berry
Kyoto

On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 7:43 AM Anne McKnight via KineJapan <
kinejapan at mailman.yale.edu> wrote:

> Hi all~
>
> I happened to notice that Mubi is having a fairly substantial Kawashima
> fest running—the first (洲崎パラダイス 赤信号) only has two more days to run, then
> there are a few more weeks for some others, and a couple that have not been
> released yet. For info: https://mubi.com/specials/yuzo-kawashima
>
> Anne
>
> An essential voice of post-war Japanese cinema, director Yûzô Kawashima is
> surprisingly unknown outside of Japan, where his 1957 comedy Sun in the
> Last Days of the Shogunate is considered one of the country’s greatest
> films. Coming to artistic maturity in the 1950s before tragically dying at
> the age of 45 in 1963—at which point he had already made 47
> features—Kawashima forms a key bridge between the classical cinema made in
> Japan before the Pacific War and the Japanese New Wave of the 1960s, one of
> whose key figures, Shohei Imamura (Vengeance Is Mine), served as
> assistant director and screenwriter under Kawashima.
>
> Working at the Nikkatsu studio, in the 1950s Kawashima crafted numerous
> melodramas and comedies that brilliantly reflected the changing social
> standards and morals of a nation trying to recover from both the war and
> American occupation. Ably directing large ensembles in a mixture of adult
> romance and drama on the one side and ribald comedies on the other,
> Kawashima proved himself a studio director with an acute sense of Japanese
> society, eager and willing to explore the limits of what is permissible and
> what is transgressive. We are proud to present a large retrospective
> devoted to Kawashima’s work in the 1950s, with many films rarely if ever
> screened outside of Japan, and most shown in brand new restorations.
>
> <https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmubi.com%2Fspecials%2Fyuzo-kawashima%3Futm_campaign%3D%26utm_source%3Dfacebook>
> _______________________________________________
> KineJapan mailing list
> KineJapan at mailman.yale.edu
> https://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/kinejapan
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20200213/2326903c/attachment-0001.html>