Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...defenseless noblewoman and her family are seized by bandits. She is sold for a whore. Her children become slaves of the ruthless Sansho, fief-holder to one of Japan's most powerful nobles. By linking the exploitation of the weak to the separation of a family, the film achieves a simple unity of immense power. The children's motivation to escape and find their mother is at the same time a political motivation. When the boy Zushio decides to become Sansho's man, his sister Anju taxes him not only for his cruelty to his fellow-slaves but for rejecting...
...WITHOUT mercy a man is like a beast... All men are created equal... Everyone is entitled to happiness." There is the progress of Kenji Mizoguchi's great tragedy Sansho Day?. The film perfectly embodies the themes of his career: the struggles of the oppressed, the enslavement of women. But it goes beyond these themes to describe the desolation of a family torn apart...
...scream, for the first image established the man's plight indelibly. And by avoiding a sensational treatment, by refusing to show the man's head being branded. Mizoguchi achieves a drama of superior continuity and emotional force. He feeds the horror of the branding into the flow of the film, the continuously maintained imprisonment and oppression of the slaves, instead of interrupting that situation for one man's pain. Tracking away from the man to Sansho, he transfers our anger from the act to the man responsible for the oppression...
...tracking shots allow Mizoguchi at once to shoot every situation with unbelievable guts and to keep his film flowing onward. They combine anguish and beauty, human motion and a fixed setting. In the beginning they glide with the noblewoman and her children through a forest, playing with the light and shade of the passing trees. When the bandits take her from them, fast tracks of incredible violence following them running along the shore after the women are cut against shots of her being carried off in a boat. In every track characters and setting, foreground and background, seem...
...Hoffman, he was airlifted from off-Broadway to Rome for Madigan's Millions and given a fast $5,000 for his first film role as a fumbling, bumbling G-man. Today he could light his cigars with bills of that size-and may be tempted to put his screen debut to the same use. At first glance, he can hardly be blamed. The movie's garish color and lighting would give an aspirin a headache, and its flubbed, dubbed screenplay is sheer, towering Babel. Yet here and there are some amusing hints of the ludicrous student who became...