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- VIEW POINTS, Page 67CINEMALearning to Accept History
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- In RHAPSODY IN AUGUST, three generations of a Japanese family
- contemplate a great and terrible event, the bombing of
- Nagasaki. But the milieu director Akira Kurosawa creates for
- their deliberations is small and serene: a farm where a
- grandmother, who witnessed the blast from afar and lost her
- husband in it, gently and indirectly informs her grandchildren
- about the past. And about the proper way to confront it -- with
- calm, unblinking acceptance. This is a part of their education
- their parents have neglected. For the middle generation, seeking
- economic advantage, especially with a branch of the family that
- has immigrated to the U.S. and prospered, has preferred to deny
- history's impact on their lives. It is touching to watch a bond
- being created between wise age and innocent youth and wonderful
- to experience the grace of Kurosa wa's art as he explores, with
- a new simplicity, one of his preoccupying themes: man's
- inability to control, or even think coherently about, the mighty
- historical forces he so often and carelessly unleashes.
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- By Richard Schickel.
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