Cinema
Souls on the Road
路上の霊魂
Minoru Murata · 1921
Synopsis
Two stories run in parallel. Kōichirō, a violinist dismissed from his orchestra for striking a critic, leaves Tokyo with his wife and daughter and returns to his father's home in the mountains; Windows on Worlds places the village in Hokkaidō, under snow, and specifies that the father, master of an estate, refuses to help the son who left him. Two former convicts cross paths with the family and share their bread with it. Elsewhere, the daughter of a wealthy household gives a Christmas party open to all.
Context
The film was released on 8 April 1921, from a screenplay by Ushihara Kiyohiko and under the supervision of the playwright Osanai. It borrows from Gorky's play The Lower Depths and from a drama by the German Wilhelm Schmidtbonn, and its cross-cutting owes much to Griffith, whose Intolerance had triumphed in Japan in 1919, according to the UCLA film archive. Murata himself plays a part in it. Windows on Worlds points out the dissolves and superimpositions that depict ghosts and memories. The running time varies according to the prints, eighty or ninety-one minutes.
Who it is for
A silent film of about an hour and a half, with intertitles, which interweaves several stories. No release in France.
Prizes and reception
Mark Cousins regards it as the first great film in the history of Japanese cinema, and an American university archive as a major milestone of its early years.
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