Anatahan
The Saga of Anatahan
Synopsis
Set during the dying stages of World War II, Anatahan tells the story of twelve Japanese seaman stranded on a forgotten island for seven years. Accompanied only by Keiko, a young Japanese woman, all rationality and discipline are soon overcome by a struggle for power and control.
Our take
Realized from a first person account of being marooned on the Japanese island of Anatahan after WWII, Josef von Sternberg controversially recreated the disputed events with his baroque, magnetic touch. Whether truth or fiction, Anatahan offers a potent look at social power structures in microcosm.
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Cast & Crew
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Josef von Sternberg Director, Screenplay, Cinematography, Narrator, and 1 moreJosef von Sternberg Director, Screenplay, Cinematography, Narrator, Executive Producer -
Akemi Negishi Cast -
Tadashi Suganuma Cast -
Shôji Nakayama Cast -
Tatsuo Asano Screenplay -
Kang Younghill Novel -
Michiro Maruyama Novel
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Kôzô Okazaki Cinematography
…All of these formal quirks make Anatahan quite the cutting-edge accomplishment for 1953, though the film hardly gives the impression of a work made for aesthetes alone. On the contrary, Sternberg’s distancing maneuvers imply humility in the face of a story far outside his lived experience, and it’s a vantage point that enables the director to very directly probe existential questions that long consumed him.
Carson Lund
February 02, 2017
Somehow, through all this abstraction, the feeling of bearing sobering witness to the breakdown of civilization comes through vividly.
Kenji Fujishima
January 31, 2017
One of the great masterpieces of cinema, ANATAHAN may not be as well known as Sternberg’s 1930’s films with Marlene Dietrich, but it’s a rich and raw culmination of the themes and stylistic attributes he had been pursuing since the 1920s.
Patrick Friel
December 07, 2012
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