May 2020 | Sight&Sound | 59OUTRAGE
Ida Lupino, US, 1950
What an expressionist image!
A young woman has been
followed after work. Night-
time. No one’s around. Shards
of shadows. Deep space
compositions. We see her
feet, then her tears, then we’re
below a steering wheel. Here we
glimpse her in a strip of light,
between slats. She falls. Director
Ida Lupino builds a sequence
of graphic shapes as if the
woman’s fear has invaded the
frame. A low-budget B movie,
Outrage was one of the first films
in the era of the Hollywood’s
restrictive Motion Picture
Production Code to look at rape.LOVE LETTER
Tanaka Kinuyo, Japan, 1953
Love Letter (Koibumi) is the first
film of legendary actor turned
director Tanaka Kinuyo. The man
writes love letters to make a living.
One of the women who asks him
to do so is someone he’s been
searching for. He pursues her,
almost like James Stewart pursues
Kim Novak in Hitchcock’s Vertigo
(1958). Here they are chess pieces.
Their sadness is the sadness of
post-war Japan. The geometry
of Tanaka’s staging is masterful.Camera positions and eyelines
capture the mood, poetry,
expectation and uncertainty of
the story. Tanaka had worked
with the greatest Japanese
directors, but her style was less
reserved than Ozu, less heroic
than Kurosawa. She was closer to
Michael Curtiz, perhaps, in her
depictions of love and heartache,
her brilliant scene breakdowns
and her total control.
Women Make Film: A Road Movie
Through Cinema is released on BFI
Blu-ray and on BFI Player on 18 MayTHE ASTHENIC
SYNDROME
Kira Muratova, USSR, 1989
A young man lies on a sofa in
an apartment. A cluttered shot
- flowers, cushions, ornaments.
Outside, the whole of society
seems sick. The world is diseased,
mourning, conflicted and
aggressive. In these few moments
alone, he looks around his room.
Respite from the anxiety of his
times. Like Marleen Gorris’s A
Question of Silence, Kira Muratova’s
masterpiece The Asthenic
Syndrome (Astenicheskiy sindrom)
is flooded with unease. Her film
boldly depicts a social malaise
without diagnosis or cure. It so
unsettled the authorities in the
Soviet Union that it was perhaps
the only film to be banned
in the years of Gorbachev’s
glasnost – transparency.