A Flame At The Pier (1962) - Masahiro Shinoda

​Shinoda's A Flame at the Pier is an incisive rumination on the conflict between capital and labor in post-war Japan in which transnational exchange and the influx of foreign investment exacerbate class division. Shinoda's visual tableaux enunciate the stark dichotomy between those who profit and those who work, deploying compositions that routinely enunciate the strict hierarchy on display as it follows its principal protagonist - a union-busting, disenfranchised youth who feels obligated to serve management despite his place among the working class. A Flame at the Pier is quite poignant in the way it details the confusion and internal conflict of its main protagonist. It's a deeply tragic story exhibiting how a boy's false sense of allegiance ultimately destroys his chance for love and happiness. The milieu displayed throughout A Flame at the Pier is one of dissonance, not only across the strict dichotomy between labor-capital but also within each. The entirety of the social arena of Japan and collective identity has been disrupted post-war by the influx of foreign investment and the rapid changes it has placed on the social apparatus and the film really does a great job at elucidating how this affects both the cultural identity and the individual agents that make it up. ​The docks - the primary access point for trade, where the flow of goods and capital is directly carried out by manual labor is the perfect spatiality for this tale of deception, greed, and inevitably tragedy. In the end, class consciousness is an essential tool for collective progress and economic justice. The great societal disruption of post-war Japan has made this paramount. Honestly, I'm surprised this isn't a more heralded film in Masashiro Shinoda's oeuvre, it really works on every level, being masterfully crafted and effective both in its expressive, emotional core and its pointed, social-economic observations of Japan.