As a young boy growing up in the newly independent nation of Cameroon, Jean-Marie Téno’s grandfather would tell him a great many tales to fuel his fertile imagination, among them, the story of a land inhabited by larks that, on one auspicious day, was stumbled upon by a group of hunters. Realizing the abundance of […]
Category: National Cinema
Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets, 1971
It comes as no surprise that the three filmmakers mentioned near the end of Shuji Terayama’s patently offbeat, garish, unclassifiable, and audacious youth culture film, Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets are Roman Polanski, Nagisa Oshima, and Michelangelo Antonioni. Modulating between a psychological study on alienation and disenfranchisement, and a rallying cry for […]
Rikyu, 1989
An early episode in Rikyu shows the ceremonial tea master, Sen-no Rikyu (Rentaro Mikuni) meticulously poring over his modest garden in search of a perfect flower, carefully cutting his selection behind a retaining trellis, before instructing his apprentice to cut all the remaining flowers in the garden that are in full bloom. Moments later, the […]
Antonio Gaudi, 1984
Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudi is a spare, astonishing, and haunting documentary on the designs of famed turn of the century Spanish architect, Antonio Gaudi (1852-1926). A profound influence on the Spanish art nouveau movement, Gaudi’s sensual adaptation of Gothic, Middle Eastern, and traditional architecture is a truly a unique artistic vision. Teshigahara immerses the viewer […]
The Face of Another, 1966
An off-camera psychiatrist (Mikijiro Hira) overseeing a processed batch of prosthetic appendages describes his fragile role of diplomatically treating – not a patient’s physical imperfection – but rather, the psychological insecurity that underlies his seemingly superficial malady. The curious, fragmented shot of randomly floating, artificial body parts is subsequently reflected in an X-ray profile of […]
Woman in the Dunes, 1964
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 […]