Japanese Cinema

[rischka]

so i AM wrong. why are there so few lady japanese directors

at least we have momoko andō. i hope she'll make more features

[nrh]

naoko ogigami would be the biggest missing figure besides ando, since .05mm made all the japanese best of lists when it came out.

[rischka]

kamome diner -- enjoyed it! also



rentaneko

[rischka]

for anyone else wanting to see the kinuyo tanaka film, this hard subbed youtube video is better than the copies on kg

https://youtu.be/gOz0iYg8054

[wba]

lol i meant kinuyo tanaka (she stars in several ofc but one of her directorial efforts)

Yeah, I was just teasing you.
But Noboru really is great as well.

i will watch tanaka's film tonight. in fact i have two i haven't seen i think

unless i'm wrong there are 3 female directors in that entire list and one is the kawase woman

Report back when you've seen them! Always wanted to watch something by Mrs. Tanaka.

It's really baffling that there are so few Japanese female filmmakers, but I'd think that's because of Japanese society being way more sexist than even US society (or many a country in Europe).

[rischka]

astounding these haven't been restored. world cinema project where are you

[nrh]

finally managed to watch takahisa zeze's nearly 5-hour long heaven's story epic, which was actually streaming on netflix at some point in the early 2010s before disappearing from the internet for about a decade.

a young woman's family is murdered when she is a child; when the killer dies by suicide she becomes obsessed with another man whose family was murdered and who speaks on television about his desire to get revenge. the killer is released from jail and ends up caring for a woman suffering from early onset dementia; the man whose family was murdered gets married and starts a family; a policeman who lives in the area has a second job as a low-rent hitman, flirts desultorily and tries to raise an unruly son as a single father.

that the film was shot over something over something like a two year period means we actually get to see a lot seasonal variation, cherry blossoms in springtime and snow at christmas and everything in between. a variety of landscape too, both urban and rural, and characters ranging from early childhood to old age. and full of sharp, almost tactile sensory detail.

the pure emotional desolation of zeze's world, as bleak as earlier more abstract films like a gap in the skin or dirty maria in its own way, is kind of hard to take over such a long period of time, and i'm not sure the revenge part of the story really avoids cliche in any meaningful way, even if the sheer amount of weight of the film does a lot to help this. kind of think i'd like it more if i hadn't seen zeze's my friend a which covers some similar ground but is less tied to something like this film's revenge story.

[nrh]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... e=emb_logo

using video seema captured from miike's rainy dog.

great film. like the evil kikujiro, except i get the sense miike knows what it is to be an orphan in very different ways than kitano (and it realize that is a difficult statement to support).

[nrh]

have been increasingly interested in the '80s kadokawa produced "idol films," which were famously despised by most critics in the '80s but based on the last two i've seen seem pretty intriguing.




the tragedy of w, from 1984, stars hiroko yakushimaru as a young woman hoping to become a theater star, navigating relationships within and without the troop, all interspersed with many scenes from the play (also called traged of w) within the film. there is eventually a dead body that needs to be dealt with but pleasantly the film never shifts genres away from melodrama into crime or anything like that. and it's interesting to see the company that introduced the idol concept putting that actress that gave them their first huge successes in shinji somai's early films into a movie about the dangers and compromises of a young woman wishing for stardom.

director is shinichiro sawai, and i'm pretty impressed with the way he handles this - lots of careful compositions, often long takes that shift emphasis through one or two decisive camera movements through the course of the scene; carefully stylized wardrobe and room decor; and a very smart use of a low key joe hisashi soundtrack that pushes this somewhere dreamy and even subdued.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHhBfuyu-oI

yoichi sai's someday someone will be killed, also from '84, is even odder - noriko watanabe plays a high school student who ends up on the run from mysterious government agencies when her father drops a floppy disk in her bag and promptly disappears; she ends up with a kind of bohemian multicultural found family who make knockoffs of luxury goods. there are long, impromptu musical performances, lots of motorcycle chase scenes. all the while, in an entirely unconnected subplot, she is being pursued by a wealthy older woman who wants to invite her to a party. throughout there is a strange mix of innocent lark and explicit danger, the latter being insistent enough that it never turns into a total trifle (even if it never gets near something like rivette's conspiracy games or kiyoshi kurosawa's own idol movie, the seventh code). soundtrack is great. fashion is great.

i haven't seen enough yoichi sai to see how this compares (his murder investigation film marks is good but doing something totally different) but there's a lot of thought and energy put into making this work.

[flip]

director is shinichiro sawai

i don't review much but i reviewed a shin'ichiro sawai film on letterboxd a while ago (maison ikkoku, 1986), the film was bananas, but sawai did a lot of interesting things spatially, like showing simultaneous action in extreme foreground and distant background of a single shot, or using unusual camera positions to capture everything without cuts in otherwise unfilmable scenes with complex choreography. he won the kinema junpo best director award once in the mid-80s, not sure if that means anything, but otherwise i hadn't heard or read anything about him until now

[nrh]

i reviewed a shin'ichiro sawai film on letterboxd a while ago (maison ikkoku, 1986)

your review of the maison ikkoku film made it sound really interesting, but i have to say as someone who loves the rumiko takahashi comic and the cartoon adaptation i'm not sure how it could work in a single feature film - her whole program is watching this doofus audience identification figure grow as a person in between a serious dramatic story of the grieving young woman he's fallen in love with and the raucous comedy of the drunken wastrels who live in the apartment building.

kind of loved fine, with occasional murders by kazuyuki izutsu. the one dismissive letterboxd review complains its like a 30s/40s b movie you fall asleep to on tcm, as if that's a problem. it has a fairly complicated set-up but turns into a great one location murder mystery, less stylish in a tumblr screenshot sort of way than the other kadokawa idol films from this period but very smart in its wandering handheld camera. and it all turns out to be a surprisingly harsh film about a young woman asserting her agency in a world of leering, condescending, and "friendly" men.

[cinesmith]

so i AM wrong. why are there so few lady japanese directors

at least we have momoko andō. i hope she'll make more features

Per my own roster of Japanese directors which comes to about 130 including a few in anime and maybe Roman-porn aka pink films. All I can tell you is that when it comes to the chauvenism. Japan has LOTS of issues between the sexes and it sticks out in cinema.

The sole contemporary one I'm aware of is Naomi Kawase who has continued to excel. When I looked under wikipedia, it listed 42 names and that included Yoko Ono?!? Aya Domenig has excelled in documentaries but she resides in Switzerland. Sachi (ko) Hamano was a celebrated female director in 'pink' films and there's a number of contemporary female animators including Michi Himeno and Atsuko Ishizuka. Sadly, it is NOT a wide variety but it's changing..slowly.

[nrh]

had been meaning to catch up with garm wars: the last druid ever since we did the mamoru oshii poll awhile back and it's...kind of great?

the sort of strange late career work you can only get if you have both spent decades developing a very personal set of signs and obsessions (both formal and thematic) and have enough clout to get someone to finance something of this scale.

as with pretty much all of oshii's work this seems designed to disorient, if not outright alienate - throwing a ton of strange terminology and alien imagery at the audience in the first few minutes in order to establish the strangeness of the world is a time honored technique used by science fiction but i have to guess most people more or less checked out in the chaotic first few minutes. and the strange, clashing visual style - the logical extension of the mix of animation techniques and intrusions of computer imaging in ghost in the shell 2, fast food grifters etc - probably put the nail in the coffin; it is sort of fascinating and more than thematically justified, but i can see it being a very hard sell.

at the very least i don't think i've seen anything quite like it.

[...]

Great is maybe a bit much, but strange and interesting works, even with that awful title.

[Rabie]

which ryuichi hiroki films are actually worth watching ? he made many films and i sense director for hire role in most of them