The Most Beautiful

Akira Kurosawa’s artful propaganda film provides a fascinating portrait of female volunteer workers in an optics factory during wartime.

An artful propaganda film that anticipates the social realism of his post-war films, The Most Beautiful provides a fascinating portrait of female volunteer workers in an optics factory manufacturing lenses for binoculars and gunsights.

Kurosawa takes an approved wartime theme - of personal inclination willing sacrificed for the sake of national emergence - and turns it into a documentary on women in an optics factory. It is their dedication which is most beautiful, but most impressive is Kurosawa’s grasp of his material, the way he makes us care about whether a lens is ground properly.