The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 16-22
Fuefuki River (1960)
Directed by Keisuke Kinoshita
The quarter-century following World War II saw several Japanese films that told melancholy ghost stories within a wartime context. While some were classical (like Ugetsu) and others more sharply modernist (à la Onibaba) in approach, the films were consistently period works set in ancient times with relevance to the present. Among the best was prolific auteur Kinoshita’s sixteenth-century-set film, based on a novel by Shichirô Fukazawa, who had also written the source novel for Kinoshita’s previous The Ballad of Narayama. The black-and-white work with streaks of color (akin to Japanese scroll painting) tracks a series of battles that unfold around the titular river between the 1520s and the 1590s. The two sides in any given fight are often indistinguishable from one another; the group that comes to register most is instead an impoverished rural family that, over the course of five generations, sees female members captured by victors while many of its young men gravitate towards combat. Fuefuki eventually comes to center on one aging set of parents (played by Hideko Takamine and Takahiro Tamura) who plead desperately with their three sons not to fight, to the point of limping out after them onto the battlefield. A singing narrator wails as loss mounts after loss within a land that has war flowing through its spirit. Aaron Cutler (March 18, 6:30pm at Asia Society’s “Of Ghosts, Samurai and War: A Series of Classic Japanese Film”)