The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 2-8
Earth (1939)
Directed by Tomu Uchida
Uchida makes for a wonderful case study of how great older Japanese cinema is still largely undiscovered by US-based cinephiles and critics. The director (who lived between 1895 and 1970) worked prolifically and excellently on many different kinds of films, such as stylized historical works (samurai and kabuki epics included), socially invested crime drama (like his best-regarded film, Straits of Hunger aka Fugitive from the Past), and even contemporary musicals (i.e., the sad and delicate Twilight Saloon). His diverse stories and approaches were united by a compassion for human suffering, a quality that MoMA’s ongoing Uchida retrospective (the largest ever held outside of Japan) makes plain.
Earth is one of Uchida’s most celebrated works; even so, the film has primarily circulated in a version only two-thirds the length of its original 142-minute running time, a handicapping somewhat mitigated by the recovery of over 20 minutes of footage within the past decade. (MoMA will screen this 2006 restoration.) The realistic drama (whose story was initially rejected by the studio Nikkatsu, leading Uchida and his crew to shoot the film in secret) follows a peasant family in northern Japan over the course of four seasons, with a focus on widowed patriarch Kenji (Isamu Kosugi), who must work hard to pay off debts accrued by his elderly father-in-law (Kaichi Yamamoto) while keeping a protective eye out for the well-being of his teenage daughter (Akiko Kazami). The film interweaves fictional scenes of confrontations between characters with documentary images of daily labor in the interest of showing people struggling against environmental disasters and threats of man-made harm alike. Earth looks with clarity and sympathy—and, perhaps, a call for change—at people placed in vulnerable conditions by a system of indentured servitude. Aaron Cutler (November 5, 1:30pm at MoMA’s Uchida retrospective)