As the Pacific War rages on, a group of families prepare to move out of their tightly-knit Tokyo suburb and make way for Japan’s military industries. Jubilation Street is a 1944 drama directed by Keisuke Kinoshita. Given the country and year in which it was made, it is absolutely a propaganda picture. All Japanese films in the 20 years prior to 1945 were subject to increasing censorship by a militaristic government. If a screenplay was not developed for the purposes of promoting Japan’s war on the Allied Forces, or for advocating social unity at home, it would be other rewritten to do so or simply barred from production.

It makes such pictures a fascinating watch 80 years later, when Japan in particular is so profoundly transformed from the context in which war-time dramas were made. What was intended, by the military at least, to be a solemn encouragement of civic duty and nationalism, now feels intensely sad. Scenes of stoic citizens doing their best to aid the war effort now present as ironic; the last gasps of an empire staggering towards defeat. In the case of Jubilation Street, the film already bore strong melancholic undercurrents. When viewed in retrospect, that sense of miserable exhaustion only feels emphasised. Whether leaving one’s home or losing the war: it all feels so grudgingly inevitable.

The two strengths of Jubilation Street are its characters and its setting. Kinoshita builds a convincing and easily recognisable community of neighbours. One couple own a print shop, another operate the local bath house. A mother teaches music to local children while her son works for the air force. It is all contrived together as a melodrama – a missing husband returns home after a decade abroad, two lovers want to marry despite their parents objections – but it carries a certain emotional truth throughout. Duty is emphasised and sacrifices are made, but it all occurs with such dogged misery that it is hard to see it fully convincing an audience to keep fighting for Japan.

What particularly impresses throughout the film is Kinoshita’s masterful sense of space. The action is confined to a small local block of side streets and houses, but shot by shot it is carefully established as a three-dimensional, visibly lived-in environment. It is this, weirdly, that gives Jubilation Street such a strong sense of reality, and not the script or the cast. It is particularly impressive given the growing budgetary restrictions placed on film productions during the war; some months after the film was shot, fellow director Akira Kurosawa had a shoot cancelled because it would have required horses.

Kurosawa was, of course, engaged in making his own propaganda pictures at the time. His own film The Most Beautiful (1944) was released less than six weeks before this, and is a similarly interesting blend of state-approved plots and morose, anti-war treatments. While it would take the end of the war for Japanese cinema to genuinely flourish, watching these earlier films by its best filmmakers is a surprising – and rewarding – experience.