Five Men in the Circus and more

Mon. May 11, 2015 at 4:00pm EDT
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Five Men in the Circus

1935. Japan. Directed by Mikio Naruse. With Masako Tsutsumi, Ryuko Umezono, Heihachiro Okawa, Hiroshi Uruki, Kamatari Fujiwara. "'Life is a journey,' declares one of the heroines of this early Naruse sound film, but Naruse’s films, as Catherine Russell writes, 'are journeys without final destinations.' With its provincial setting, artistic milieu and itinerant theme, this comedy about circus artists, loosely based on a novel by comedian Roppa Furukawa, might evoke the contemporary work of Shochiku-based Hiroshi Shimizu. But it is also characteristic of Naruse’s work in the first decade of sound with its focus on performing artists, a theme to recur in Tochuken Kumoemon (1936), Tsuruhachi Tsurujiro (1938), The Song Lantern (Uta andon, 1943) and The Way of Drama (Shibaido, 1944). In so far as we can trace, it has never previously been screened in North America, so its presentation here is a unique opportunity for admirers of this great director to see how Naruse’s thematic concerns took shape in the first years of sound." In Japanese; English subtitles. 65 min.

Ino and Mon aka Older Brother Younger Sister

1935. Japan. Directed by Sotoji Kimura. With Sadao Maruyama, Chieko Takehisa, Yoshio Kosugi, Yuriko Hanabusa, Setsuko Horikoshi, Heihachiro Okawa. "Sotoji Kimura is one of the unsung minor masters of Japanese cinema during the 1930s. While he was available for humorous works such as Intoxicated Life, his tone was usually more sombre and often politically charged, as befits a filmmaker who had earlier been connected to the left-wing Prokino movement. This atmospheric and powerful drama is his version of a prizewinning short story by Saisei Muro. Kimura’s film faithfully reproduces the working-class milieu of the story, with some striking Soviet-style imagery of workers by the river in the opening shots, and compellingly captures the dramatic intensity of the relationship between brother and sister and the familiar antagonism between the country and the city. Muro’s story was to be filmed twice more, by Mikio Naruse in 1953 and by Tadashi Imai in 1976." In Japanese; English subtitles. 74 min.

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Venue Details
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The Museum of Modern Art Theater 2 11 West 53 Street
New York, NY 10019