Heinosuke Gosho

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“Rooted in “salaryman” comedy and family drama, Burden of Life represents a marked advance over Gosho’s previous three shomin comedies. It placed sixth in the 1935 Kinema Jumpo polling, and has been praised by Burch for its seriousness and slice-of-life quality. Concurring with this judgment, John Gillett finds the film “imbued with a naturalistic tone and ‘lived in’ visual texture quite beyond American and European cinema.” David Owens is similarly enthusiastic, adding, “As is typical of the best Japanese directors, Gosho concentrates on developing characters rather than plot. Each of the family members is carefully drawn and each grows before us as an individual, surpassing the sort of character typing that was usual for family melodramas.” These comments effectively sum up the film’s most notable achievement.”Read More »

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Winner of the International Peace Prize at the 1953 Berlin Film Festival and considered “one of the really important postwar Japanese films, Where Chimneys Are Seen focuses primarily on the interconnected lives of two couples in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Senju, a poor industrial section of Tokyo. The narrative is structured as a series of juxtaposed scenes that dramatize this connection and show the cause and effect of events on the couples’ lives. As part of this structure, there is the central motif of the chimneys and the kinds of “lyrical” interludes for which Gosho is famous.Read More »