Bilgi :Schoolteacher Hisako Oishi struggles to imbue her students with a positive view of the world and their place in it, despite the fact that she knows full well that most of them will die in the war.
Review :
Keisuke Kinoshita's popular tearjerker, award-winning actress Hideko Takamine is a teacher who wins her pupils' hearts, if not minds, during a tumultuous period of Japanese history
1954 was a landmark year in the history of Japanese cinema, seeing in such classics as Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Mikio Naruse's Late Chrysanthemums and Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho The Bailiff and The Crucified Woman.
However, the release which would win that year's national critics' prize for best film (as well as the 1955 Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film), was Kinoshita's Twenty-Four Eyes (Nijushi No Hitomi), the saga of a modern teacher's lasting relationship with her first 12 pupils (hence the title) during a period that encompassed the poverty of the Great Depression, and the disaster of the Second World War.
In 1928, the same year that universal suffrage was introduced to Japan, replacement teacher Hisako Oishi (Takamine) breezes into her new job at a village primary school on Shodo Island, where her bicycle-riding, her Western suit, and her informality in the classroom, all rouse the suspicions of colleagues and parents, while winning over her six-year-old pupils.
Injured in a prank gone wrong, Oishi transfers to a post in the Consolidated School, closer to her home. Five years later, now married and pregnant, Oishi finds herself teaching the same pupils again; but depressed by the rise of militarism and repression, and silenced by the schoolmaster from any discussion of politics, she quits teaching altogether. As Japan's Pacific War broadens, Oishi keeps up with the tragedies of her former pupils, and suffers many of her own, before finally, after Japan's surrender, she returns to teaching and is invited to a reunion in her honour by the survivors from her old class. |
