Experimental

Silently, a woman wakes on a beach as the tides go in reverse. Her dreamscape unfolds as she tries to locate a chess piece traveling from the beach to a party to a country road and then back.Read More »

“Umi no uta” takes place in a rural Japanese fishing village, where the inhabitants perform ancient ceremonies by which they prey for the spirits of old boats set to burn.Read More »

Quote:
Picking up where Lives of Performers left off, Rainer’s second, landmark feature tells the story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction masks an enormous anger, with Rainer needling at questions raised by contemporary feminism about the relationship between the representation of romantic clichés and sexual repression. Borrowing techniques from soap opera, the formally fractured yet exuberant Film About a Woman Who… combines voiceover, intertitles, simulated “still” images, and dinner-table discussions to provocative, often contradictory effect. Long silences and Babette Mangolte’s fluid black-and-white images only heighten the darting, doubt-ridden, highly dislocating drama.Read More »

letterboxd:
The psychosexual drama Yoji, What’s Wrong With You? examines the identity of women as mothers in Japanese culture, through an Oedipal narrative of a skewed “family romance.” When Yoji announces to his mother that he wants her to meet a new girlfriend, the mother’s jealousy destroys the relationship. Idemitsu’s signature device of using a television monitor within the domestic space works as a powerful metaphor for the ubiquity of the mother in Yoji’s psychological life. Idemitsu’s melodramas always articulate a double-edged irony: With no identity outside of her maternal role, Yoji’s mother fastens onto her son, ultimately destroying him. Yoji himself is seen as emotionally stunted, unable to leave his mother or experience love for any other womanRead More »

letterboxd:
HIDEO, It’s Me, Mama is a psychological melodrama that introduces narrative and structural devices that are integral to Idemitsu’s work. Exploring the flawed universe of the contemporary Japanese family, she focuses on a woman’s identity as mother through mother-child and husband-wife relationships. Hideo, a young man living away from his parents, is kept under constant surveillance by his doting mother via an omnipresent television monitor. In a cogent metaphor for familial relations in the media-saturated culture of contemporary Japan, Mama can only communicate with her beloved, absent son through the video screen. Idemitsu’s poignant irony is embodied in the scene in which Mama, blind to her husband’s needs, caresses Hideo’s video image. (Electronic Arts Intermix) Read More »

This film shows the images of a dancing woman who is wearing Kimono overlapping another image which a naked man is dancing. This is one of the original psychological concepts of C.G. Jung. For women, Animus is an image of a man by projection of her mental energy.Read More »

The film shows vivid close-ups of a liver with the background music of “My Baby” by Janice Joplin.Read More »

imdb:
The uncle of the young narrator enters his house unexpectedly. In order to offer him some refreshments, he goes to bring a bottle of wine. Through the crevice of the wall which happens to be there, he sees an ethereal girl offering a lotus flower to an old man who bursts into a hair-raising laughter. Surprisingly, this is exactly the picture he keeps drawing on pen cases as a calling. He is then jolted into realities. The thought of the old man gradually begins to loom over his life and sow the seed of anxiety. The narrator embarks on a journey in search of the ethereal girl and the old man. His journey, however, takes him into a study of history and myths. The narrator comes back and realizes that his uncle has left, leaving the door agape like the mouth of a dead man. Desperately he goes out to look for the ethereal girl.Read More »

letterboxd:
A woman’s image as a mind-scape, after she had plastic surgery.Read More »