Many serious critics, at home and abroad, have acknowledged the charms of Benigni’s film, Life is Beautiful, but maintain a principled resistance to those charms. Their grounds are familiar ones: linking pleasure and humour with the Holocaust, that most horrific chapter in modern Jewish history, is tasteless at best, immoral at worst; failing to treat the subject in a tone of high seriousness and moral earnestness means trivializing it. This attitude has become almost a knee-jerk reaction. It allows righteous people to dismiss and deplore films, plays and novels, without examining them; and it produces disavowals from intelligent people who have succumbed to the experience of pleasure but who feel they can’t be seen to approve such apparent light-heartedness.

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In this book, Prince describes and analyses all of Kurosawa’s films, giving attention to their narrative and formal construction and their thematic concerns. He has tried to situate the films in their historical, social and cultural context, making recourse to the English-language literature on Japanese history and Japanese culture, as well as Kurosawa’s own writings and comments. But his familiarity with Japanese cinema apart from Kurosawa is very limited. So he focuses exclusively on Kurosawa’s films, which are explicated with reference to Kurosawa’s autobiography, samurai ethics, Zeami and Zen aesthetics, Dostoievsky, Brecht and Eisenstein.  

WIZARDS OF OZ: 

INTO THE 90s BETWEEN DOCUMENTARY AND FICTION 

by Freda Freiberg, May 1995. Edited version published in ARTLINK.

In the incredible shrinking space between 1984 and 2001, the distinction between social-issue documentary and surreal fiction is collapsing - almost as fast as Australian capitalism or Soviet communism. This is nowhere more evident than in that genre of filmmaking that has variously been called the experimental documentary, the non-fiction or essay film. The borders of this genre have always been less distinct, more shadowy, than those of other genres of film. Its exponents have typically been free spirits, nomadic types, no respecters of borders and boundaries. They are the men and women with movie cameras who traverse cities, continents, oceans and skies, reading letters to and from home, experiencing vertigo, exploring the inner and outer, higher and lower worlds. 

When writing about the oeuvre of Mikio Naruse, critics invariably lapse into invidious comparisons and a list of negatives. A late addition to the pantheon of Japanese auteurs, he has always been rated below Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi. There is a common chorus of complaints. He made intimate domestic dramas but his work isn’t as playful or charming as Ozu’s. He served his apprenticeship at Shochiku’s Kamata studios, alongside Ozu, but couldn’t or wouldn’t master the lightly entertaining house style. They were glad to dispense with his services because he persisted in being heavy, sombre and depressing. He was a classic director whose career embraced two golden ages of Japanese cinema, but his work doesn’t exemplify the distinctive stylistic flourishes of the Japanese film as celebrated by Bordwell or the radical aberrances of Japanese aesthetic practice as outlined by Burch. He made women’s melodramas but they are not as exquisitely moving as Mizoguchi’s, either stylistically or emotionally. 

On 16 July 2024, there was a Celebration of Freda's Life and Work at the Freda Freiberg Film and Screen Studies Library at Monash University, Caulfield.

Freda's daughter, Lily Tell, and colleagues, Annette Blonski, Barbara Creed, John Gregory and David Hanan spoke. Jennifer Sabine took this photo of Annette and Lily.