The Most Beautiful (Ichiban utsukushiku, 1944) was written and directed by Kurosawa Akira. The main female actress is Tsuru Watanabe. The director shot many of The Most Beautiful scenes at the Nippon Kogaku factory in Hiratsuka. After Kurosawa’s success in Sanshiro Sugata, he directed this wartime propaganda film which was set in an optics factory during the Second World War. However, this propaganda film was made from a different perspective, which is unusual. Instead of depicting wartime efforts of male, the film focuses on the women’s contribution as factory workers.
The film starts with the factory director demanding his workers generate outstanding production in order to beat the enemy’s widespread counteroffensive. The story depicts a group of girls working in the optical factory making lens, binoculars and targeting scopes. The life of these factory girls is not easy and they often encounter hardship such as sickness and homesickness. The strength of spirit is evident in this film. One girl becomes ill and she is forced to go home, but she finally comes back, strong again. Another falls from the roof and breaks her leg, but she insists on going back to work. At this point, their productivity begins to decline. The girls try to lift up their spirits by playing a volleyball game. Their sense of cooperation is so strong that they encourage each other for doing well in the game. Yet another has “a persistent fever which she attempts to hide and enlists the sympathies of their girl-leader who is then accused of partiality to the sick girl” (Donald Richie 26). Towards the end of the film, the girls are extremely tired as their productivity declines sharply. The girl-leader Tsuru Watanabe who consolidates the band of women in factory “mislays a lens and must hunt for it though all the thousands of boxes of finished lenses, but who eventually emerges as a kind of production-line heroine” (26).
The most conspicuous feature is the movie’s semi-documentary style. Regarding his directing, the director states that, “When I received this project to direct, I decided I wanted to try doing it in semi-documentary style. I began with the task of ridding the young actresses of everything they had physically and emotionally acquired that smacked of theatricality. The odor of makeup, the snobbery, the affectations of the stage, that special self-consciousness that only actors have — all of this had to go. I wanted to return them to their original status of ordinary young girls” (Akira Kurosawa 132). He wanted to depict the sense of realism by shooting the film in a real factory with real workers. Camerawork is an important part of his realistic portrayal in terms of his directing technique. According to Donald Richie, this real documentary fashion was a combination of Russian and German techniques. For example, while Shimura, the head of the factory, is making a speech in the opening, one shot of his talking into the microphone is followed by a series of five or six shots showing the standing listeners and then return again back to Shimura again. Each cut of employees, all back-lit in the German manner, is slightly shorter, making a noticeable acceleration (Richie 26). In order to create Japan’s best documentary, he sought to invent more subtle ways to express emotions. Specifically, he wanted “a kind of empathy which the documentary technique cannot usually afford” (26). One of his invented techniques is short-cut which is different from the use of camerawork in Mizoguchi Kenji’s Sisters of the Gion series of long shots, and long takes. The girl with fever, for example, uses thermometer under her arm and there is a long wait for it to register. The first cut shows Watanabe waiting, cut again showing the same girl in different position and a third cut showing same girl, same background, but the position and expression is different—going on for several cuts (27). The purpose is not to wait for the result of the thermometer but for another lady to come. His camerawork approach does fairly well directing a realistic documentary performance.
Themes in this film are also one aspect of the movie that is noteworthy. The title gives the audience a message regarding the beauty of girl spirits or inner beauty. In other words, this film does not refer to “the most beautiful of girls but to the girl who has the most beautiful spirit” (27). The main female character Watanabe is obviously the one with the spirit. It is she who reminds other girls the importance of wartime tasks, helps the rise in the production graph and encourages girls by repeating “do your best.” Her challenge comes when she mislays the lens and has to find it by examining hundreds of finished lens. The director shows the audiences how exhausting this work is by showing shots “dissolve to the clock, dissolve to her, dissolve to numbed fingers reaching for another lens” (27). She never gives up even though the other girls encounter much uncertainty and fatigue. The film is to convey a message that the world needs us to get together in order makes a better one.
The Most Beautiful not only examines a moving portrait of the Japanese values of community but also illustrates the idea of self-sacrifice. It is surprising how a standard propaganda film is free of reference to politics of war and how it uses a group of Japanese women as a source in a wartime film instead of making a violent war picture with a group of men. Kurosawa showed that he was able “to extract performances that few other Japanese directors could, to make real tears flow and real screams sound” (27). The actresses manage to interconnect their spirits with one another through working in a factory while working in stress with higher quotas. The perspective of this film is rarely seen compared with other wartime film, thus this film is one worth watching as a brilliant and powerful portrait of the time period of Japan.