The Unbreakable Frame
In 1979, film scholar Noël Burch strongly criticized the films from the 1950s by Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse. He would be stuck in a "western mode of representation", and his work would be "academic" and "over-edited". Maybe even almost like the soap operas on TV! What Burch failed to see is how Naruse transforms a seemingly simple decoupage into his secret form of mise-en-scene, with endless variations and modulations. Let's look at eighteen consecutive shots from Sound of the Mountain (1954)…
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Canine CaddyFilm, 1941Rated 6.5 on TMDB
Mickey's going golfing, and Pluto is his caddy. Besides the usual caddy duties, Pluto runs to the ball and points to it. But when the ball lands in a gopher hole, Pluto's got another task: chase the gopher. They eventually chase each other through a number of holes in a knoll where Mickey is trying to putt out, causing the knoll to collapse.
