Twenty-Four Eyes

Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954
Kinoshita favours the very long shot with his largely still frame, even the very very long (whole mountains), to really establish a place. This is different from establishing a space; he usually doesn't cut around enough to need to do that. His establishing shots rather let us into the locale, the enviroment, the rythms of the place. His dissolves, not necessarilly elliptically, in between these long shots at the start. When it comes to the human scenes, we often have full body, single shots. There is no urgent need to cut in, and often he does without this entirely. When he does cut in, it is to close-ups, often from a low angle, and is usually of the children.
The lack of backlighting means the characters don't have halos, so snuggle into rather than pop out of the environment. A typical shot is often straight on, looking from one room to the next, with screen doors just peeking in on either side of the frame, to act as another frame. Often behind there are doors or windows, though rarely are these used as dramatic space. Oddly, he does uses depth for dramatic purposes (relating situations on both planes), but that is usually outside the house.
This is a drama of situation, most importantly. There are not motivations, excpet the want to live, but all dramatic actions takes place as a result of outside forces, those beyond the screen's control. Perhaps most notably, these forces are nearly entirely unseen. What would be the dramatic moments in most cinema simply doesn't happen on screen here; it is referred to after the event (a common, almost cliched trope of classical Japanese cinema, but correct here). With the drama of the locale, the children form an almost collective subject, not exhaustively indiduated. Even the teacher is quite a distance from us for long periods, despite a couple of priveliged glimpses into her subjectivity (and one into the children's, too be fair).
This film is clearly trying to redeem something, to rpject a certain image. There is the resistance to authority, which we don't see as violent, but as rather stifling, stupefying conformity. All the systems of control are really chucked in here; capitalism, sexism, nationalist militarism, warmongering are all condemned here, perhaps as a result of this film's engagement with a very specific period in Japan's history.
The rather chaste nature of the film (it's a shock when the husband is lying next to his wife) gives way to melancholy that is certainly piled on, and surely affecting to a degree in what is indeed a superbly rendered classical film. It also clearly wants to say something, to blame one side rather than another. I'm not really qualified to comment, but it can't be that easy, can it?