Anatahan

After the war ends a group of Japanese soldiers remains on a small Pacific island. They do not believe the leaflets announcing the surrender and go on waiting for years. There is also a woman on the island: Keiko, the surviving member of a couple who worked a coconut plantation. Twelve men and one woman. The deaths begin before long. The subject is not the war but what order is built where the rule of loyalty has collapsed. As men are killed the question of whose the woman is changes hands, and nobody questions it; the film relays this at a distance through a narrator, in an almost ethnographic register. The form was built entirely in a studio. The island, the jungle, the sea and the reeds were constructed in Kyoto; there is no location footage. The artifice is not hidden, and Josef von Sternberg's known lighting reaches its furthest point here in the shadows falling through leaves. It was Sternberg's last film. He read the English narration himself; the actors speak Japanese and are not translated. He re-edited the film several times over the years and different versions stayed in circulation. The source is real: the group on the island only surrendered in 1951 and the case was widely discussed in Japan. Akemi Negishi plays Keiko. Who it is for: viewers who like classical-era formalism and unusual production histories. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by how the woman is constructed; the narration treats her as an object and does not examine it.