板车之歌 荷車の歌

Yamamoto Satsuo’s poetic and socially aware lens shines bright in this compassionate chronicle of working-class life across turbulent decades of Japanese history, and Ballad of the Cart assures his place as a master of the medium.

Japan held a particular place at the Afro-Asian Film Festival. Having not attended the Bandung Conference, the country also did not send official delegations to Tashkent, Cairo or Jakarta – while the cinema industry proper always participated on its own account, with choice films as well as creatives. Ballad of the Cart, directed by card-carrying Communist Yamamoto Satsuo, was a perfect fit for the festival’s ideals and aims: the story of a peasant couple’s life through tumultuous decades of Japanese modern history was as much an emotionally moving crowd pleaser, as a perfect example of the socially conscious poetic realism deemed desirable by the Left-wing establishment. Half a century later, Yamamoto’s masterpiece has only grown in depth, as today we almost never get to see working class life told with such dignity, care and kindness. Those who liked The Great White Tower (1965), which we screened last year as part of Cinema Regained, will surely agree after also watching Ballad of the Cart that Yamamoto Satsuo is a master in dire need of discovery.