Directed by Kinoshita Keisuke.
With Takamine Hideko, Sano Shuji, Ryu Chishu.
Japan, 1951, 35 mm, color, 86 min. Print source: HFA.
Japanese with English subtitles.
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Only eight years into what would become a forty-five-year career as a director, Kinoshita Keisuke shot what was to become one of the best-known films of his illustrious career. Often billed as Japan’s first feature-length color film, it in fact is the first feature-length color film made using Japanese domestic color film technology, Fujicolor. Kinoshita capitalized on the eye-popping reds and greens for a story in a distinctly comedic mode that became a blockbuster hit. Takamine Hideko—one of the great actresses in global film history—stars in the story of the Tokyo stripper Okin who returns to her small rural hometown in flamboyant dress. She and her co-worker Maya soon find that they must navigate a mix of curiosity, desire and rejection, and find a way to convince the villagers of the value of their work as artistic practice. Carmen is among the films of Kinoshita’s that have recently been revisited with attention to the queer aspects of his work. Saito Ayako has argued that it is Kinoshita’s queer perspective that allows Carmen Comes Home to critically and parodically assess the gender politics of postwar Japanese cinema, in which unruly female bodies serve both as symbols of liberation from wartime militarism and as commodities for a male gaze. – Alex Zahlten

Details and tickets purchase information: https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/carmen-comes-home-2024-10

Harvard Film Archive The Shochiku Centennial Collection special film screenings co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute