Posts by acquarello:

The Other Half, 2006

In its fractured, interpenetrating (or rather, colliding) realities, Ying Liang’s The Other Half foreshadows Jia Zhang-ke’s 24 City, capturing China’s transforming industrial landscape through its alienated and displaced humanity. The opening frontal shot of job seeker, Xiaofei being interviewed by an off-camera recruiter establishes a sense of division – the unseen economic, social, educational, and […]

Eros Plus Massacre, 1969

Like Shohei Imamura’s A Man Vanishes and Nagisa Oshima’s The Man Who Left His Will on Film, Yoshishige Yoshida’s dense and self-reflexive Eros Plus Massacre explores the murky, often turbulent intersection between reality and fiction, history and memory, angst and revolution – the implication of what Yoshida prefaces as the viewer’s “ambivalent participation” – in […]

The Ball at Anjo House, 1947

Filmed during American postwar occupation, The Ball at Anjo House is a curiously atypical Japanese film that hews eerily closer to the privileged, dysfunctional families and moral abandon of The Magnificent Ambersons or a Douglas Sirk melodrama than a Shochiku middle-class shomin-geki: the proud family patriarch, Tadahiko (Osamu Takizawa) who continues to harbor the illusion […]