Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/22/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, August 22, 2019

Carmen's Innocent Love (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1952)

Cast: Hideko Takamine, Masao Wakahara, Chikage Awashima, Toshiko Kobayashi, Eiko Miyoshi, Chieko Higashiyama. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita. Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda. Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada. Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara. Music: Chuji Kinoshita, Toshiro Mayuzumi.

Hideko Takamine returns as the ditsy strip tease artist, first seen in Keisuke Kinoshita's popular Carmen Comes Home (1951), who really thinks that stripping is an art. She gets involved with an avant-garde sculptor, whose mother is a fierce political activist, but the comedy is rather scattershot. The great character actress Chieko Higashiyama, for example, plays a maid who is terrified of another atomic bomb, freaking out at any loud noise. That this anxiety is played for laughs strikes us as odd, but the film is one of the first that was made after the end of the occupation in Japan, which forbade any mention of the bomb.