![]() ![]() Yasuzō Masumura: The main character in the original novel, Ushimatsu Segawa is a “New Commoner,” the popular name given in the late nineteenth century to those born in the hisabetsu buraku (settlements of outcasts under the previous Tokugawa administration). ![]() In fact, one critic points out: “Generally, Ichikawa’s method is to accommodate the original source to his own taste and critique it through visual images.Īccordingly, his film version of The Broken Commandment reflects this mode of representation and is highly acclaimed, as The Broken Commandment is in a sense Ichikawa’s own. Instead, he lets us see and feel the suffering and pain of the outcast in a more direct way. Counting on the camera’s expressive power and temporal freedom Ichikawa dispenses withToson’s lengthy literary discourse. Ichikawa, in contrast, relies on cinematic properties, especially visual legibility. Making the best use of “literary properties,” Toson took pains to explore the psychological dimensions of his hero’s struggle in great detail. Set in 1903, during the late Meiji period, both novel and film depict a young teacher’s coming to terms with himself and society’s lingering feudal prejudice against his class of burakumin, then Japan’s minority group.īut novel and film take strikingly different approaches to a topic still sensitive in the Japan of the 1960s. The prestigious film journal Kinema Junpo ranked it as the fifth best film of 1962. Toson’s pioneering work of social realism created a sensationon television, so the director collaborated again with his wife and scenarist, Natto Wada on the film the following year. ![]() McDonald: Kon Ichikawa’s Hakai (The Broken Commandment) began in 1961 as a televised dramatisation of Toson Shimazaki’s novel of the same title first published in 1906. Responsibility: by Shimazaki Toson translated by Kenneth Strong. ![]()
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