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Sunday, February 5, 2012

Ninjo kami fusen (Humanity and paper balloons) 1937 - A pre-war Japanese milestone


IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029314/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
IMDB rating: 7,8


Director: Sadao Yamanaka
Main Cast: Chojuro Kawarasaki, Kan'emon Nakamura, Tsuruzo Nakamura



"Humanity and Paper Balloons (based on a Kabuki play known as Shinza the Barber), unlike most other Japanese films of this period, is a historical film with a critical edge. Refusing to glorify samurai, the film instead deflates the myth around them with a gentle humanity. The film opens directly after a penurious ronin samurai has taken his own life. At his funeral his neighbors from his slum mourn his death. Here the film introduces another ronin samurai who lives in equal poverty. Having pawned his sword for food, the samurai searches for work but to no avail. The family's only income comes from the little balloon children's toys made by the wife. Out of desperation, the samurai abets in an attempted kidnapping. After finding out, the wife kills him in his sleep and then takes her own life, closing the film's narrative circle.
Filmed in conjunction with the radical Zenshin-za theatre group, Humanity and Paper Balloons, Sadao Yamanaka's tragi-comic tribute to the poor and working classes in the 18th century during the Edo period is a treasure of world cinema. A contemporary of Ozu, Naruse, and Mizoguchi, Yamanaka made 22 films before his death in Manchuria in 1938 at the age of 29 but sadly only three have survived. Humanity and Paper Balloons is a jidaigeki or historical period film whose power lies not only in the social realist message that depicts the hardships endured by the poor but in its delineation of character, its humor, and the beautiful cinematography that captures the claustrophobic nature of the village in which the story takes place."

Download links:


(DVDrip, mkv, 409 MB, Japanese audio with English subtitle
password: TinyBearDs):

http://www.filefactory.com/file/57hks70fm32p/
http://www.filefactory.com/file/5py4obr20a9/
http://www.filefactory.com/file/547xkj58iarz/

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