Introspection Tower

『みかへりの塔』

Dir. Hiroshi Shimizu. 1941, 111 mins. 35mm print courtesy of the National Film Archive of Japan. In Japanese with live English subtitles. With Shinyo Nara, Chishu Ryu, Kuniko Miyaki, Kimiyo Otsuka, Takeshi Sakamoto, Jun Yokoyama, Yuiko Nomura, Ryo Ofuji, Norio Otsuka. Of Shimizu’s many films about children, Introspection Tower might be the most soberly realistic. This collection of vignettes set in the titular rural hilltop reformatory shows myriad ways a group of troubled boys and girls of differing class come into conflict with their caretakers and each other inside the school’s confines. In the film’s cathartic crescendo, which owes something to King Vidor’s 1934 Our Daily Bread, Shimizu draws the varied strands of this narrative together in a thrillingly detailed display of cooperative labor, as the children must combine their efforts to construct a water path during a severe drought.   

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