Hiroshi Teshigahara crafts a spare and haunting allegory for human existence in Woman in the Dunes. An entomologist (Eija Okada) on holiday from Tokyo has come to a remote desert in order to study and collect specimens from the local insect population. As he momentarily rests on the sand dunes, he ponders a fundamental existential […]
Under the cover of darkness, a visibly harried miner (Hisashi Igawa) and his young, impassive son (Kazuo Miyahara), accompanied by another desperate co-worker, desert their employers at an unidentified mining village in order to strike out on their own as migrant hired laborers away from the inhumane working conditions of (and overreaching control exercised by) […]
Novel City, 2008 (Leslie Thornton) While Leslie Thornton’s 1983 film Adynata posed questions of exoticism and alterity in its cultural examination of China, Novel City represents a different, yet equally jarring notion of otherness – one borne of China’s rapid industrialization, economic transformation, and cultural amnesia at the turn of the century. Interweaving excerpts from […]
When avant-garde filmmaker Leslie Thornton created There Was an Unseen Cloud Moving, Islamic culture was not yet defined by antiseptic, then turbulent images of unresolved Gulf Wars (or conveniently stigmatized as the face of terrorism) but rather, by the evocation of alien landscapes, life-altering adventures, mysticism, isolative awakening, and passionate rendezvous of films such as […]
Adynata is a figure of speech, a form of hyperbole that has been exaggerated to the point of impossibility. Similarly, Leslie Thornton’s seminal film, Adynata is also a densely assembled rhetoric: an exposition into the social representations of a perpetuated, exoticized otherness – an alien culture, an irretrievable past, an impenetrable psyche – a conjured […]
In distilling the life of one of the greatest (if not the greatest) Go players in history, Wu Qingyuan (Chen Chan) – an ethnic Chinese who immigrated to Japan (where he is referred to by the Japanese reading of his name, Go Seigen) in order to continue his pursuit of the game through officially sponsored […]