"Children of Hiroshima" [1952]

"Children of Hiroshima" [1952]

Rejissyor: Kaneto Shindo. Anti-war films are out numbered by war films but that doesn't mean that their few numbers are irrelevant in the analysis of the philosophy of human aggression. Recall Lewis Milestone's "All Quiet on the Western Front", Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun", Stanley Kubrick's "Paths of Glory", or Kon Ichikawa's "The Burmese Harp". Here are some thoughts by "The New York Times'" writer A. O. Scott on the re-release of "Children of Hiroshima" "Japanese Survivors Shaded by Puzzlement and Sorrow" April 21st, 2011 Kaneto Shindo's "Children of Hiroshima" was released in Japan in 1952, when the memories of World War II and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fresh and painful. A sense of immediacy, or working through recent and almost unfathomable trauma, is palpable in the film, much of which was shot in Hiroshima itself. That it is only now opening in the United States --as part of a welcome and revelatory retrospective devoted to Mr. Shindo at the Brooklyn Academy of Music--heightens that uncanny sense of present-tense witness, even as Japan's more recent disasters impart a somber feeling of renewed relevance. Mr. Shindo, who turns 99 on Friday (and whose brand-new feature, "Postcard," will be shown in the 11-film program), has been overshadowed, at least in the West, by some of his predecessors, peers and successors: filmmakers like Kenzo Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa and Shohei Imamura. "Children of Hiroshima" is of interest partly because it is among the first films to address a subject that would preoccupy, both directly and obliquely, so much of postwar Japanese cinema. But it is also the first important work of a distinctive and protean visual storyteller, whose films--ghost stories, violent allegories, quiet neo-realist fables--balance ethical seriousness with an almost voluptuous appetite for natural beauty and pictorial elegance. The Brooklyn Academy retrospective, Friday through May 5..., is subtitled "The Urge for Survival," and while

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