Anatahan (1953)

Original title

アナタハン

Directed by

Josef von Sternberg

Genre

drama film

Country

Japan

Runtime

1h 32m

Rating

6.8 of 10 from 46 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A group of Japanese soldiers stranded on a remote island after World War II refuses to believe the war is over. They struggle with isolation, dwindling resources, and internal conflicts as years pass.

bleakslow-burntenseatmosphericisolatingintrospectivestarkmeditative

What happens

Anatahan (アナタハン), also known by its on-screen title of The Saga of Anatahan, is a 1953 black-and-white Japanese war drama film directed by Josef von Sternberg, with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya. It was adapted by Sternberg from Michiro Maruyama's nonfiction account of the seven years he and a group of World War II Japanese holdouts spent on Anatahan island, which was then part of the South Seas Mandate of Imperial Japan and is now one of the Northern Mariana Islands of the United States. This story also inspired the 1998 Japanese novel Cage on the Sea. The film was the final one directed by Sternberg (although Jet Pilot, which he worked on earlier, was his final film to be released), and he had an unusually high degree of control over the project, which was made outside the studio system, allowing him to not only direct, but also to write, photograph, and narrate. It opened modestly well in Japan in 1953 and was screened in competition at the 14th Venice International Film Festival, but it did poorly in the US, and Sternberg continued to re-cut the film for four more years. Eventually, he abandoned Anatahan and went on to teach film at UCLA for most of the remainder of his life. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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