Introduction to Best of Japanese Cinema - Part 1 (Kurosawa & Mifune)

The Magnum Opus Of Japanese Cinema : Seven Samurai 

Cinema in Japan has lot in common to Indian Cinema. Like India they have big industry producing third highest number of films annually after India and USA. But like India best work is mostly outside that factory type Studios turning out products each year, as a result true Cinema and great directors and actors you can count on fingers. My focus is on artistic beauty so i will cover later Category of heavy weights.

once again like India, Japan also had it's golden age of cinema in 50's. In india it was time of greats directors like
Bimal Roy,  Guru Dutt, Satyajeet ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Chetan Anand and Buddhadeb Dasgupta 
Similarly Japan also had it's most influential Directors working together in 50's
Akira Kurosawa (Greatest)
, Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, Ishirō Honda, Teinosuke Kinugasa, Hiroshi Inagaki, Masaki Kobayashi
Since movies are like poetry Which requires efforts at three stages for final accomplishment. these are
having an idea about what to show putting together the ideas into rough narrative  finding the best expressions for narrative. Thus without doubt director is central figure to movie like a poet to poem
but here actors are to movie, what language is to poem and just like best of poets are incomplete without language, it is not possible to have masterpieces with efforts of directors alone. so indeed 50's were also the time of greatest japanese actors

Legendry Toshirō Mifune, Great Takashi Shimura, Other notable additions -  Yoshio Tsuchiya,
Tatsuya Nakadai, ken watanbe (later period)

Pather Panchali

Although this the latest movie i watched recently, but it left me amazed with it's sheer depth and beauty of narrative. It was as if you sketch verses of Rabindra Nath Tagore over canvas of Premchand's prose and then add the colors from Jean Paul Sartre existentialism. 

Rating - 5/5


Review :


Pather Panchali feels as real as life itself.It is a narrative of life par excellence as the protagonist of movie is no character but rather life itself which i wonder "what cinema, at its best, is capable of achieving".
It's a quiet, simple tale, centering on the life of a small family living in a rural village in Bengal. The father, Harihar (Kanu Bannerjee), is a priest and poet who cares more about his writing and spiritual welfare than obtaining wages he is owed. The mother, Sarbojaya (Karuna Bannerjee), worries that her husband's financial laxity will leave her without enough food for her two children, daughter Durga (Uma Das Gupta) and son Apu (Subir Bannerjee). 

Satyajit Ray

Harihar's family often lives on the edge of poverty, coping with the unkind taunts of their neighbors, the burden of caring for an aging aunt (Chunibala Devi), and the terrible aftermath of a natural catastrophe.