Rojô no Reikion (1921)

Wordt genoemd in Mark Cousin's "the story of film" Als de eerste significante Japanse film (een uitspraak overgenomen van Donald Richie), maar ook als voorbeeld van een van de eerste films waarin cross-cutting tussen verschillende verhaallijnen wordt gebruikt.

Dit is wat Richie daarover schrijft:

...Among these were a few, like Kaoru Osanai's and Minoru Murata's Souls on the Road (Rojo no Reikon), made in 1921, which were equal to the best from the West. This particular film was composed of two cross-cut stories, one about a prodigal who leaves his father's house and returns penniless with wife and child; the other about two convicts newly released from prison who discover kindness of common people as they wander on an endless journey.

Osanai and Murata used these two situations not to capture events or ideas in conflict, as had Griffith in Intolerance, but to show parallels in feeling among their characters. This interest in the emotional overtones of a situation reveals the origins of the mood film, a most important Japanese genre, the emphasis being on projecting an overall mood or atmosphere rather than in directly telling a story. The directors particularly sought to capture the components of what were for them the greatest forces in the world: love within a family and comradeship between men. These they preferred to examine not in the uncommon moments of high emotion, as in a plotted film, but rather during those characteristic moments of an enduring period of hardship.

Based on two stories, one of them Gorki's The Lower Depths, and filmed on location during early winter among the mountains in central Japan, Souls on the Road placed its characters far apart from the crowded world, in a country of dead landscapes and overcast skies, where the men and women moved almost aimlessly, harshly outlined against the somber mountains and the dark forest.