Tokyo
Imagine rebuilding a huge metropolis blasted to smouldering ruins by saturation bombing. That's the undertaking explored in Vision of Tokyo in Twenty Years, a documentary from 1946 that records the enormous urban reconstruction project.
'We have to plan our future,' says the narrator as he describes three comically optimistic architectural scenarios: sunny town, fun city and a capital where 'neighbours will love each other'.
Few Tokyoites would later use the adjectives sunny or fun to describe their hastily rebuilt jungle of squat concrete bunkers and ticker-tape highways, and it hardly overflows with neighbourly love either.
But watching the 50 or so movies selected for a special section of the 2007 Tokyo Film Festival, called How Tokyo was portrayed in post-WWII cinema, which ended today, is to marvel that this city has been resurrected at all, if not always according to plan.
Tokyo is the backdrop for the six-decade retrospective, transformed from the squalid landscape of sackcloth and shadows depicted in Vision to the gleaming glass-and-concrete metropolis of last year's Retribution, the most recent entry.