After Summer, Ogawa Pro attempted a more epic scale with Winter in Sanrizuka. It was roundly criticised as a failure. In the wake of this criticism, the collective became increasingly militant. They decided to make a quick and dirty report from the front, calling it a “bullet film.” They shot this agit-prop film in three days, when 2,500 protestors battled 6,500 police. Even the school had been let out so children could participate in the action.Read More »
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PICTURE OF LIGHT (1994) feature documentary, takes a film crew to the Sub Artic to capture the wonder of the Northern Lights. While combining glimpses of the characters who live in this remote environment and the crew’s both comic and absurd attempts to deal with extremes, the film reflects upon the paradoxes involved in trying to capture the natural wonder of the Northern Lights on celluloid. Aurora Borealis…the lights with no bodies, pouring colours from the sky…images provided by nature more special than any special effect. Their majesty and their mystery lead the film to a most unexpected and haunting finale which considers the future of our relationship to technology and nature, in an increasingly artificial or “virtual” world. Read More »
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Shot in the foothills of Iwate Prefecture’s mystical Mt. Hayachine, the film records a year in the life of the area’s villages and villagers as they prepare for kagura performances, a dance-theater form with origins in religious rituals (now mainly performed for tourists). The film can be enjoyed and processed on many levels: a musicologist’s fascinating glimpse into kagura traditions and performances; an ethnographic portrait of rural life and village hierarchies; and most of all, a study of a key moment in Japanese society, when, even as Haneda filmed, rural lifestyles were exposed to modernity: paved roads, cars, and tv sets. Fittingly, the film’s true beauty comes not through its thesis, but in its attunement to the mountain’s own intricate rhythms. (Pacific Film Archive)Read More »
Gathering sounds and images from the land and seascapes of the Outer Hebrides, Joshua Bonnetta’s lush, eerie film is a compendium of ghost stories, weird tales of premonition, and supernatural lore told by the islands’ inhabitants. Throughout, the film’s richly textured images, captured on 16mm stock, complement a dense audio track layered with the sounds of nature, machines, and the human voice, creating a remarkable synesthetic experience of the environment and its embedded oral histories. The result is both a vivid, haunting portrait of a place and an absorbing exploration of the uncanny limits of the human senses.Read More »
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Baby’s Toilet is a 1905 British short film directed by Cecil Hepworth. The film features Hepworth’s baby daughter Elizabeth being bathed and dressed by her nurse, and was categorised by Hepworth as a “Domestic Scene”. In the film Hepworth combines a series of shots to produce a narrative depicting the bathing process from beginning to end. He would later acknowledge the influence of the pioneering work of the Lumière brothers on this and other similar films he produced in the 1900s. The print of Baby’s Toilet survives, and Patrick Russell of the British Film Institute observes: “Long after Elizabeth Hepworth’s own death, the affecting innocence of infancy remains a basic human theme. Baby’s Toilet has lost none of its charm.Read More »
One day in 1966, the Maysles brothers filmed Marlon Brando as he did what we would now call a junket, where the idea is to let scores of television reporters meet the star in order to sell his latest movie, Morituri. Brando however, had other plans: declaring that he hates being ‘a hawker’ he turns the situation upside down, interviewing the interviewers, mocking the vacuousness of the set-up and flat-out refusing to promote Morituri. “Don’t you have ANYTHING to say about the film?” asks an exasperated journalist, to which Brando replies: “Bernie Wicky smokes the worst cigars I’ve ever known!”. With a lesser personality, this might be perceived as the arrogant posturing of a spoiled movie-star, but the mischievous twinkle in Brando’s eyes, combined with the fierce intelligence and wit of his answers, make it a joy to behold. The documentary does not get us any closer to Brando the actor, but in its half hour it does offer an insightful glimpse into the mind of a man who was too smart to go with the flow, too independent to compromise and who, throughout his life, refused to play by the rules.Read More »
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Marcel Łoziński’s Jak to się robi / How It’s Done is a provocative vision of the Polish model of democracy as well as being an ironic and at the same time terrifying portrait of Poland’s political stage, based on a three-year observation of an experiment conducted by the Polish political marketing guru Piotr Tymochowicz whose objective was to prove that anyone could be elevated to the summits of power. At a time when the make-up of Polish political elites leaves a lot to be desired, Łoziński’s bitter-sweet documentary shows that the ‘rule of souls’ is just a couple of neat socio-technical tricks, cynicism and political effectiveness weigh more than ideas and party colours are just a more or less colourful addition to the colour of the tie bought under the image expert’s tutelage. The product of Łoziński’s cool observation is as comic as its is horrifying.Read More »
The film was made by the Japanese visual artist Satoshi Uemine, and DVD released in 2005. This silent, personal movie bears and reflects the traces of the re-encounter between the director and his girlfriend, who had been hospitalized because of her deteriorating mental condition. Almost all scenes were shot in Hokkaido, the north island of Japan. Although nothing dramatic happens here, Sizuka no Umi builds a series of beautiful images that are raw, honest, and passionate.Read More »
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Welcome to Riotsville, a fictional town built by the US military. Using all archival footage, the film explores the militarization of the police and creates a counter-narrative to the nation’s reaction to the uprisings of the late ’60s.Read More »