Kamikaze
Produced and written by Perry Wolff
Video Yesteryear, 1961, 85 min., Video
This documentary's title, Kamikaze, is a misnomer.
The film covers the war between Japan and the U.S. from 1941 to 1945, with the
first 20 minutes devoted to the story of the Pearl Harbor attack. Film clips
showing kamikaze pilots and attacks make up only a little more than 10 minutes
of this 85-minute video.
The film's narrative provides few historical details on
Japan's kamikaze operations and the rest of the war in the Pacific. The
narrator rarely mentions specific dates or months, so viewers will have a
difficult time following the timing of events. For example, right after a
segment on the Tokyo fire bombing of March 1945, the film switches to show a farewell
ceremony in October 1944 in the Philippines for the first kamikaze unit [1].
The narrator does not mention the date of the ceremony, but this example
illustrates how the film often jumbles the war's basic chronology.
The segments on Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima utilize extended
segments from postwar Japanese-produced films in an apparent attempt to pass
these off as history with no explanation to viewers. The rest of the
documentary shows battle and other wartime footage. Sometimes little or no narration
accompanies this footage for extended periods, so the documentary moves very
slowly in places. The video has about three minutes of dramatic footage of
kamikaze planes crashing into the sea or ships, but this segment has little
commentary from the narrator.
Despite the title of Kamikaze and some footage of
kamikaze attacks, this documentary contains almost no history of Japan's
kamikazes.
Note
1. At 1:03:35 in video.
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