Anatahan

Directed by Josef von Sternberg

Release Year: 1953
Running time: 91
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese, English
Subjects:
$149.00 - Face-to-Face Classroom
$349.00 - With PPR
$499.00 - With DSL
$499.00 - With DSL and PPR
MSRP: $599.00
Screening Request
Directed by: Josef von Sternberg

NEW RESTORATION!  Inspired by an actual event during WWII, Josef von Sternberg's Anatahan, tells the story of a dozen Japanese sailors who are stranded on the remote island of Anatahan during the waning days of the war. The war ends, unbeknownst to the men, and they engage in their own private war for dominance of their island domain and possession of the sole woman in their midst, Keiko (Akemi Negishi), the so-called "Queen Bee" of Anatahan.

Reviews

“There are…sequences…that immediately evoke some of the best work ever done by this great motion-picture stylist.”

- The New York Times
 

"[Anatahan] could be his masterpiece.  [T]he feelings that emerge are incredibly pure and immediate: Sternberg seems to be photographing the absolute essence of human emotion."

- Dave Kehr, The Chicago Reader
 

"If the material is fascinating, the treatment is just amazing.  Sequences of dream-like abstraction and images of staggering beauty are recognizably the work of the man who created the image of Marlene Dietrich, but here they go way beyond Hollywood evasions and compromises.  [T]he film works subversively by implicating its audience in the patterns of desire and violence, discipline and surrender.  It's brilliant.  When was the last time you felt stark naked after a movie?"

- Time Out
 

“Masterpiece... Long celebrated but too often difficult to see, AnatahanJosef von Sternberg's final film, reemerges in a new 2K restoration from Kino Lorber—and what a strange and still-radical swan song it remains.”

- Kenji Fujishima, Village Voice
 

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