“Army” ( Japanese 陸軍 , rikugun ; English Army ) is a black-and-white drama film directed by director Keisuke Kinoshita and released in 1944 . The film is an adaptation of the novel by , first published on the pages of Asahi Shimbun. Originally planned as a propaganda film in support of hostilities in militaristic Japan, and commissioned by the military, it tells the story of three generations of the same family, who sent their sons to the front during the Meiji era ( 1867 - 1912 ), during the Russo-Japanese and World War II. However, the finale, where the mother’s sufferings still come to the fore, overshadowing patriotic pathos, caused discontent of the authorities, and until the end of the war the director was deprived of the opportunity to shoot.
| Army | |
|---|---|
| Jap. ри ( rikugun ) English Army | |
 | |
| Genre | movie drama |
| Producer | Kaisuke Kinoshita |
| Producer | Kenichiro Yasuda |
| Author script | Tadao Ikeda |
| In the main cast | Chisu Ryu Kinyo Tanaka Ken Uehara |
| Operator | Yoshio Taketomi |
| Film company | " Shёtiku " |
| Duration | 87 minutes |
| A country |  Japan |
| Tongue | Japanese |
| Year | 1944 |
| IMDb | |
Content
Story
The story begins with a screening of the ancestors of the main character of the film Tomosuke Takagi. In the second year of Keio ( 1866 ), a wounded warrior who stopped at their dressing room would leave the Takagi family as a sign of respect, a collection of Great Japan Stories, which would be kept as a relic and passed on from generation to generation. Young Tomosuke, who went through the battles of the Russian-Japanese war of 1904 and was injured, will be inculcated in his father reverence to the emperor, as well as the sacred duty of every citizen to pay his debt to his homeland, serving in the army. Years will pass and we will see how Tomosuke is already raising his eldest son Shintaro, instilling in him the same principles and attitudes on which he grew up. Tomosuke and his wife Waka are worried that Shintaro will be too weak to become a good soldier and are working hard on his physical and spiritual education. Owing to constant sermons and instructions from his parents, Shintaro is growing up as a sporting youth and, having reached the draft age, will be called up to the Chinese front in the 1930s . In the dumb final scene of the film, a heartbroken mother finds her son in a column of marching soldiers and watches him, as long as he does not hide in the distance.
Cast
- Chishu Ryu - Tomosuke Takagi
- Kinyu Tanaka - Waka
- Ken Mitsuda - Tomonojo, son
- Kazumasa Hoshino - Shintaro, son
- Ken Uehara - Nishina
- Haruko Sugimura - Setsu
- Shin Saburi - captain
- Shuji Sano - Kaneko
- Eijiro Tono - Sakuragi
- Toshio Hosokawa - Hayashi
- Yasumi Hara - Takeuchi
- Fujio Nagahama - Fujita
Premieres
- - November 22, 1944 held the national premiere of the film in Tokyo [1]
- - from December 7, 1944, the film was shown at the box office throughout Japan [2] .
About the movie
The government of militaristic Japan wanted to remind the audience of the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and to do it in such a way as to prepare the public for the inevitable armed conflict with the Soviet Union [3] . Kinoshita moved the audience, showing the despair of the mothers who had their sons taken, and this approach hardly corresponded to the intentions of the War Department.
Military censors were unhappy with the final shots, because Japanese mothers in films should not cry, escorting a soldier to the front, according to the authorities, on the contrary, mothers should be shown on the screen proud and happy, sending their sons to the war and not show any frustration on this about [4] . It was possible to circumvent censorship before the film was released on the screen only due to the fact that in the script this “scene without words” was described by the following line: “Mother sees her son at the station” [1] . The scene was played by purely cinematic techniques - expressive editing, camera movement variations and the amazing acting of Kinyu Tanaki.
According to reports in the post-war Japanese press, officers from the Imperial Army’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Mass Media Department broke into the Shichiku film company after the premiere of the film on November 22, 1944 , accusing the director of Kinoshita of treason [1] . He was forbidden to make films, and his next picture after that would be done only after the war.
The criticism of the film was the most controversial. So for example, one of the most famous Japanese film critics Tadao Sato he writes: “... the film is fascist in content, despite the sentimental image of a soldier’s mother” [5] , and the American researcher of Japanese cinema Donald Ritchie speaks of the famous final scene of a crying mother as “an unfortunate and unnecessary spot in a really beautiful film” [ 4] .
Notes
- ↑ 1 2 3 High, PB The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years' War, 1931–1945. University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. pp. 402–403.
- ↑ IMDb-Release Info
- ↑ Toeplitz, Jerzy , The History of Cinema, Vol. 4, (translation from Polish by A. Golemba, M. Chernenko ), M. - Progress, 1974, P. 253.
- ↑ 1 2 Richie, D. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film. Kodansha, 2012. Pp. 93, 105.
- ↑ Sato, Tadao . "Cinema of Japan": Translation from English - M., "Rainbow", 1988. - S. 72. - 224 p.
Links
- Army on the Internet Movie Database
Literature
- Tadao Sato . "Cinema of Japan": Translation from English - M., "Rainbow", 1988. - S. 72-73. - 224 p. ISBN 5-05-002303-3 .
- “ Director's Encyclopedia : Cinema of Asia, Africa, Australia, Latin America”, Research Institute of Cinema, Vetrova TN (ed.), Mainland - M., 2001, S. 55-56. ISBN 5-85646-053-7 .
- High, PB The Imperial Screen: Japanese Film Culture in the Fifteen Years' War, 1931–1945. University of Wisconsin Press, 2003. pp. 402–403. ISBN 9780299181345 .
- Jacoby Alexander A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors. - Berkeley, California: Stone Bridge Press, 2008 .-- ISBN 978-1-933330 -53-252295.
- Richie, D. A Hundred Years of Japanese Film. Kodansha, 2012. Pp. 93, 105. ISBN 9781568364391 .