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 […]
Tag: Japanese Cinema
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 […]
The Pitfall, 1962
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) […]
Humanity and Paper Balloons, 1937
At an unassuming, low-rent tenement district in Edo, a group of street vendors setting off to hawk their wares at the dawn of a seemingly auspicious bright, sunny day following several days of steady rain are detained by a team of police inspectors on a routine investigation of an elderly neighbor’s suicide. The news immediately […]