Twenty-Four Eyes (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954)
wikipedia
On DVD at home with Lucía on 31 May 2009 pretty late at night.
Twenty-Four Eyes was a very interesting film. It really drags on at times, and I got pretty tired of the gossip => cry => sing routine that the film employs throughout. On the other hand, it’s a pretty amazing portrait of a particular place (Shodoshima) through the hard times of the early thirties, the overseas expansion and surge in ultra-nationalism, the war, and defeat.
The acting was not great. There were a lot of child actors playing somewhat contrived roles, and that resulted in a fairly amateurish feel. On the other hand, when the actors were doing more ordinary things—walking about, rowing, attending class—they seemed very much to fit the parts. The film seemed to straddle traditional drama and realism in a fairly awkward way. There was, among other things, a sort of constant appeal to tragic emotion that made the film seem sort of endless.
The cinematography in the film was memorable. There was a lot of long, super-long, and super-super-long shots that provided a lot of context in the way of scenery. Most of the film was fairly low contrast, and brought out the surrounding environment in tremendous detail. After the film, I felt that I knew that little corner of Shōdoshima intimately. To use a cliché: the setting was so thoroughly felt throughout the film that the island itself was as much a character in the film as any of the people.
Twenty-Four Eyes is a sort of flawed film that through its earnestness, careful construction, inclusive photography, and capturing of a historic moment is elevated to a sort of special realm in cinéma—it’s not a masterpiece, but it is an important and unique work.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.