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The portrayal of women in Kinuyo Tanaka’s Love Under the Crucifix and Girls of the Night

“It is sad to be a woman,” says the protagonist Ogin (Ineko Arima) in Kinuyo Tanaka’s Love Under the Crucifix (Ogin-sama, Japan, 1962) while watching a woman on her way to the execution site. The woman has refused to be the concubine of Hideyoshi, Japan’s ruler in the late sixteenth century, which is the historical […]

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Feature

Searching for salvation: Kei Kumai’s Deep River

Kei Kumai’s Deep River (Fukai Kawa, Japan, 1995) starts with images of a Hindu temple in ruins and shots of the countryside in India through which a bus is passing. The camera eventually hones in on the group of Japanese tourists inside the vehicle, picking out in a succession of close-ups the film’s three main […]

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Feature Thousand Words

Toshiro Mifune – Intense acting and inventive spirit

When I began working on Akira Kurosawa, the pivotal role for his cinema of Toshiro Mifune (b. 1 April 1920 d. 24 December 1997) sprang immediately to mind. I could not help thinking how much Mifune’s presence and vitality contributed to the strong sense of movement in Kurosawa’s films. Mifune’s intense acting already fascinated the […]