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Keisuke Kinoshita - Twenty-Four Eyes (1954)


Twenty-Four Eyes is without a doubt Kinoshita’s most well-known film in the West and, by all accounts, is unmatched in its popularity in Japan. In the year of the film’s release, Kinoshita won the prize for Best Film of the Year by the national critics association, upsetting Kurosawa who released Seven Samurai that year, as well as Naruse and Mizoguchi. But filmmaking is not a competition, and it is understandable how Kinoshita struck a nerve with Twenty-Four Eyes. Released after the occupation and its censorship, the film fully indulges in an appreciation of values like family, community, humility and friendship, as well as a sorrowful dismissal of the second World War. Unapologetically sentimental and nostalgic, the film refrains from being overly declamatory by concentrating on a strong main character, Miss Oishi, played by the incomparable Hideko Takamine who delivers here an unforgettable performance, and poignant social commentary.

Twenty-Four Eyes follows the teacher Miss Oishi over the course of two decades, as she sees 12 first graders she is teaching age into adults. Some of them are drafted to war, some of them can’t escape poverty, some of them marry and have a happy life, some of them die. Miss Oishi who strongly bonded with all of them during their time as first graders, often has difficulty coping with the fact that life tears at them as they get older. One of the main concerns of the films is to inquire when these children lose their innocence, when the cruelties of life become too apparent for them to overlook. Kinoshita’s script, based on a novel by Sakae Tsuboi, uses the kids as symbols for the aspirations of a rural youth and how life deceives all too often. Miss Oishi wants to see all of her students go to high school and succeed, but when the mother of a girl dies after giving birth, the girl must stay home, take care of her despondent father, and finally work as a waitress although she is still a girl.

Some of the boys want to become soldiers and fight for their country, although Miss Oishi tells them that she prefers fishermen and shop keepers. Some of them are drafted (the draft age in Japan was lowered to 14 by the end of the war) and die in combat, while others go off to the mainland to work. One girl can’t participate in a field trip because her family is too poor to pay for it and refuses to come back to school out of shame. While Kinoshita never pursues any of these destinies in depth, he offers us a compelling survey of what it meant to live in the countryside at that time, untouched by most of the sweeping historical events of pre- and post-war time. There is a clear sense that life is a circle, a process that eventually takes up everyone, and Miss Oishi, while unable to do so, tries to protect her favorite “twenty-four eyes” from it because she knows that life can be unforgiving and nothing matches the innocence of childhood. Twenty-Four Eyes is the most powerful and bittersweet testimony to the joys and carelessness of childhood I have seen to date.

Kinoshita’s social commentary is more oblique. He had always been criticized for his dismissal of Japan’s partaking in the war, and Miss Oishi clearly doesn’t feel pride for her country’s soldiers but sees the war’s destructive effects on a generation of children and adolescents who were sacrificed to a cause they and most everyday people couldn’t grasp remotely. There is also a minor storyline about one of her colleagues being arrested because he is accused of being a “Red”, but for the most part, Kinoshita refrains from moralizing and lets Miss Oishi’s view speak for itself. For being a Kinoshita film, Twenty-Four Eyes looks surprisingly chaste. The director refrains from formal experiments, but a lot of the elements that he would develop later on (the reliance on outdoor location shooting, the Western-influenced music and singing that comments directly on the action, the wide angles, the extended period of time covered by the story, the theme of time and how its passing affects us) are already in place. For me personally, it is noteworthy that Twenty-Four Eyes and Immortal Love were the two films I was most invested in, and they are the ones that display the least formal experiments. Kinoshita’s handwriting is clearly visible, but he concentrates more on the narrative and it makes for more poignant storytelling. While I admire his audacity as a visual artist, I enjoy his storytelling sensibilities even more. I hope that more of his films will be available to us in the near future, as the small sample of his body of work I was able to see thus far made me curious and hungry for a lot more.

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