The Urge for Survival: Japanese movies about the horrors of at home1 min read
Reading Time: < 1 minuteKaneto Shindo’s melodramas are about war, but they’re not about combat or fighting.
In focusing on the domestic aftermath of violence, Shindo’s movies are like the war movies that Francois Truffaut tried to imagine when he posited that there was no way to make an anti-war film.
Onibaba and Kuroneko, Shindo’s most well known films, are about scars, and the dehumanization of women and mothers in particular.
“The Urge for Survival,” a retrospective of Shindo’s work hosted by BAM Cinemathek and presented in part by Benicio del Toro, showcases a number of draining films about the horrors of war at home.
