Kurosawa questioned the American decision to drop the weapon on a city inhabited only by civilians who had nothing to do with the war, who lived far, far away from the military concentrations.
Seventy-five years ago, on August 6 and 9, 1945, the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered on August 15 (the actual documents of surrender were signed on September 2) and World War II officially came to an end. But cinema has kept the event alive in cultural memory. There are countless war-themed dramas, as recent as Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017) and Aaron Schneider’s Greyhound this year, with Tom Hanks playing an American Navy commander who has to shepherd a supply convoy of ships though waters infested with U-boats. Many of these films are thrill-a-minute affairs, with high physical or ethical or moral stakes.
Akira Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August (1991) is the rare “World War II film” that plays in very quiet registers . The horrors endured by the local populace — the film is set in the surroundings of Nagasaki — are felt in every frame, but the film itself is as serene as a Zen garden. Talking to the writer Gabriel García Márquez in 1990, Kurosawa said, “I have not filmed shockingly realistic scenes which would prove to be unbearable and yet would not explain in and of themselves the horror of the drama. What I would like to convey is the type of wounds the atomic bomb left in the heart of our people, and how they gradually began to heal.”
Read the rest of this article here: https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/akira-kurosawas-rhapsody-in-august-is-a-shrine-to-nagasaki-whose-bombing-ended-world-war-ii-75-years-ago-8709321.html
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Baradwaj Rangan 
Doba
August 15, 2020
I really enjoyed this article, thank you. I remember a conversation with a Japanese lab mate. It was supremely stupid on my part, with almost zero knowledge of history, but I actually asked him how he had come to US after what had happened. Thankfully he was not offended but he shrugged and said, he does not think much about it.
So its not just the aggressors who want to forget. The other side does too. Life goes on. And people forget. They, perhaps, want to forget because remembering means you have to do something about it, you have to again process the pain. And perhaps thats our greatest tragedy and blessing. The history of mankind is one full of brutality and aggression. Even prehistoric evacuations are showing up mass graves suggestive of wars, mass murders and rape. Man’s “natural predator/greatest enemy” is man. The fact that we don’t have a near great ape cousin says so much about our natural instincts. Its a tragedy that we forget because we are quick to go to war without fully trying out diplomacy; and yet a blessing because life would otherwise be simply unbearable. Long story short, I should try out this movie.
p.s. You really knock the Firstpost articles out of the park. There is a sort of stream of consciousness (I don’t know whether that’s the correct term) style of writing in these which I like.
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brangan
August 16, 2020
Thank you, Doba.
My producer says something similar. He says my film festival articles (from Cannes etc) read very differently from the ones I write about Indian films.
A good thing, I hope? 🙂
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