inhalt / last days of berlin (and zürich)

spätzle express: vip-card: 10%, diese karte ist nicht übertragbar, www. spätzleexpress.de

tilsiter lichtspiele: stempelkarte die dritte vorstellung geschenkt, www.tilsiter-lichtspiele.de (x2)

yorck-kinos: yorck-karte, sammeln sie kinos!, www.york.de

videodrom: kundenkarte, montag bis samstag 15-24 uhr

filmmuseum berlin - deutsche kinemathek, bibliothek: benutzerausweis, www.filmmuseum-berlin.de

xenix bar: getränkepass

kino xenix: mitarbeiter/in

filmpodium: persönliches abonnement, www.filmpodium.ch

last week in letterboxd

The Balloon, Yuzo Kawashima, 1956

An expansive family melodrama, but structured around a woman for whom family life is closed off forever. Michiyo Aratama as the sad mistress, clinging to a cruel, unworthy man, is the center of the film, her oval face not quite fitting in with the modern, western-oriented middle-class sensibilities surrounding her. The only one who understands her is a round-faced girl everyone else talks down to. From her first scene, emerging out of bed and throwing herself at cold Tatsuya Mihashi, Michiyo's desperation is palpable. Like everything else, sex is a serious thing for her. She's haunted by the past, too, by the war that took her husband, and she is not the only one. Everybody feels boxed in one way or another, everyone's presence is a betrayal either of the past of the future, everyone's looking for escapes big or small. Some will even make it, but not Michiyo.

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It's mostly set in entertainment spaces and homes that aspire towards entertainment spaces, but there are also quiet side-streets and a traditional matriarch trying (in vain) to hold things together in the old way. Kawashima is always curious, never judgmental. Rodin's "Thinker" makes an appearance in one of the most beautiful scenes. In a bar, German tourists sing a Franconian drinking song:

Trink mer noch eTröpfsche,
trink mer noch e Tröpfsche,
aus dem kleinen Henkeltöpfsche
Oh Susanna...

Emanuelle Around the World, Joe D'Amato, 1977

The real deal. In EMANUELLE IN BANGKOK the animal-snuff- and rape-scenes almost felt out of place, with the camera lingering on, as if without consciousness, an automaton gaze just killing time before moving on to more pleasant things again. Here however, you just have to take everything in, and when you think you've managed to escape, D'Amato manages to squeeze in another gang rape in the last few minutes.

A true exploitation rollercoaster ride from start to finish, the highest highs, the lowest lows, the India scene in the beginning is very funny, and everything is served with maximum conviction. This is the Emanuelle way, and her libertarian philosophy is on full display, too. Fittingly, this is also the film in which D'Amato discovers that any sex scene can be enhanced by a well-placed low-angle shot. Essential gutter filmmaking.

Probably the best soundtrack of the series so far. That groovy theme that always hits when things are going to be really dark is so damn effective, and I'm especially glad they ditched that stupid "Black Emanuelle" title song.

Still not sure if I want to see EMANUELLE IN AMERICA again just now, though. (Well...)

Wild Geese, Shiro Toyoda, 1953

Another tale of people hustling each other and their desperate dreams of escape. It looks absolutely astonishing and maybe it is first and foremost a showcase of the amazing level of technical skill in the Japanese film industry of the 50s. I don't know if there ever was anything comparable anywhere else in the world at any time.

Still, not quite my kind of film. Toyoda certainly knows how to push its buttons, but it is a bit too much in love with its plot mechanics for my taste and it lacks the sense of lived-in social reality of the best Japanese films of the era. Here, everything feels a bit closed-off, world as function of story instead of story function of world. Takamine is marvelous, of course, but her performance too is much more showy than in her films for Naruse and Kinoshita.

Toyoda obviously is an expert Metteur en scene, though, ingeniously combining quotidian realism (the use of space in Otama's house is pretty much perfect) with poetic, almost abstract flights of fancy. Like when she sees the student for the first time: Otama's face trapped between the bars of her window, but suddenly surrounded by pure black and therefore freed. Also the stuff with the umbrellas and bittersweet the last few minutes. Somewhere hidden between all of those stage-tricks is a great melodrama of defeat closer to John M. Stahl than Mizoguchi.

Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals, Joe D'Amato, 1977

Compared to the all-you-can-eat mondo approach of AMERICA and AROUND THE WORLD, this almost feels like classical cinema again, maybe because this time there's a rather clear delineation between the softcore scenes and the cannibal stuff. Especially since the sex is surprisingly sensuous. The scenes of Gemser and Tinti especially are the warmest, most intimate in the series so far. There's also the ultimative fuck in front of the NY skyline scene that they just had to include sooner or later.

Once they reach the jungle, things pretty much switches into action-adventure mode, which also means that Emanuelle herself loses a bit of control. She's no longer mistress of ceremonies, but just another piece of prey (that drony cannibal pov shots are extremely unnerving; D'Amato might not have been the best storyteller in the world, but his suspense/horror technique is always first-rate). Luckily, that wonderful water goddess scene as well as her woke closing monologue spoken directly into the camera (how shameless can you get) more than make up for it.

Of course, there's still enough relevant imagery in there to either satisfy or disgust pretty much anyone. As for myself, I can stand stuff like this only once in a while, but right now I'm completely in love with European exploitation cinema again.

A shame Emanuelle ditches her wonderful doll-camera after the first scene, though.

The Rainbow Man, Kiyohiko Ushihara, 1949

Killed by color! Inventive mystery set almost exclusively in a very gothic mansion populated by an upper-class family that cultivates a nice, space-specific set of neuroses. The rainbow stuff is pure gimmickry, to be sure, but effective enough at that and while the film clearly is modeled after Western patterns, there are some rather extreme mood changes that would feel very much out of place in American b-movies of the time. (In fact, the frenetic eccentricities of the Vohrer Wallace films might be a better comparison.)

Velluto nero, Brunello Rondi, 1976

A spiritual experience laying bare the dead souls of capitalist modernity or just a particularly annoying new-age-retreat? Hard to say, and the most terrifying thought might be that maybe both are one and the same thing anyway. You have to take in the stupid with the visionary here. All three men, for example, are caricatures of the worst kind, but that doesn't mean that Al Cliver as the world's phoniest guru won't hypnotize us too in the end.

Anyway, a very offbeat Emanuelle film, and I was mostly on board with it, thanks to the decidedly musical take on sex and a delightful sense of desert absurdity. As for Gemser, she doesn't necessarily have the most screentime, but she still dominates: no psychological entity like everyone else, but the beginning and the end of the gaze, when she gets hypnotized she melts into ritual, into cosmic space-time. As far as the plot is concerned, this time around she's not a reporter but a model who gets forced by Tinti into bizarre tableau non-vivant constellations. The best shot of the film, though, is just her bending backwards, with the camera shooting through the arch of her body. Made me think what ALIEN would've looked like with her as the alien (and, maybe, Annie Belle as Sigourney Weaver).

La spiaggia del desiderio, Enzo D’Ambrosio / Humberto Morales, 1976

Faux Emanuelle on faux Debussy island. As an exploitation film a complete bust (Kennedy especially is completely wasted), and even as a third-rate take on BLUE LAGOON at best barely tolerable. The sex scenes are very long and very soft. Still, Gemser seems relaxed throughout, maybe the lower energy level on display here was a welcome change of pace.

The Call of Blood, Seijun Suzuki, 1964

A wacky delight not only because of the more openly experimental imagery but also because of stuff like the sliding door stuck between Ryota's girlfriend and his mother. Generally the domestic scenes display a lot of care for detail, as if to balance out the anything goes approach once the boys step out of the house. The ending feels a bit like a war film with most of the war removed. Just two shell-shocked guys in a wasteland.

Papaya dei Caraibi, Joe D'Amato, 1978

D'Amato teases with cannibalism and cock fights, just to let you drown in the quicksands of a tropical slow-burn soft sex / uneasy hangout / moody postcolonial horror movie. Compared to the EMANUELLE-films, the plot feels rather well-rounded, but still doesn't really go anywhere. (Mostly because the cyclical time of myth is at odds with the linear time of politics; Papaya herself is positioned as a political actor by the script, but D'Amato's camera films her like an ancient goddess sent to earth in order to punish men by fucking them to death). Anyway, the journey is the reward.

Blade Violent - I violenti, Bruno Mattei, 1983

"I represent the captive audience watching this shit."

Belle of the Nineties, Leo McCarey, 1934

Between Mae West delivering (mostly; a few good ones slipped through) bland, desexed lines as if they really were witty and risque and a plot that's supposed to be a nostalgic celebration of classic Burlesque, but really just comes down to a number of petty people hustling each other this is a rather weird and not completely unengaging misfire. The only thing that really makes it memorable is the spiritual scene, though, not only because of the layered musical arrangement, but also in terms of Mise en scene. The whole sequence feels like a throwback to early cinema: The rules, hierarchies and control mechanisms of analytical montage fade away and the whole screen succumbs to the immediacy of spectacle.

The Wind-of-Youth Group crosses the Mountain Pass, Seijun Suzuki, 1961

A sentimental, colorful and musical showbiz film about transforming a traditional circus routine into a revue performance in line with the media age: it's no longer about exhibition of craft, but about flow of entertainment. Might even be interesting to watch this as a reaction to the introduction of color television in Japan one year earlier, with Suzuki crafting his film as a superior form of revue entertainment, too.

At the same time, of course, films like this, combining youth culture textures with older dramatic forms no longer really valid, where everywhere in the early 60s. I was reminded at times of the German Music House Schlagerfilme, and while Suzuki certainly is a better director than Ernst Hofbauer and even the sometimes very good Hans Billian, aside from a few beautiful color explosions he plays it rather safe here, especially when it comes to sex.

Emanuelle and the White Slave Trade, Joe D'Amato, 1978

This time it didn't take me long to confirm that I had seen this before: The scene with the mechanic servicing Ely Galleani was still burned into my brain. Later on everything flows along smooth as silk, even when things finally get a bit nasty in the last reel. Basically a rehash of AROUND THE WORLD, but the stakes are much lower and it's not exactly clear why. Anyway, let's follow Emanuelle one last time around the globe, witness her running with the animals and parading in front of skyscrapers, enjoy some of the series' most beautiful sex scenes (one of them doubled by way of a mirror image)... and marvel at her stylish cigarette lighter-camera, just another proof that in a better, or at least more exciting world D'Amato and Gemser would've taken over the Bond series at some point.

Smashing the O-Line, Seijun Suzuki, 1960

Nikkatsu Action film with a strong script and an excellent cast (Hiroyuki Nagao especially shines as the gloomy sleazeball reporter). Suzuki has great eye for downbeat location and plays things mostly straight, although the film takes some interesting turns after Nishina goes undercover.

Violenza in un carcere femminile, Bruno Mattei, 1982

I guess I understand why many exploitation fans are fond of or at least sympathetic towards Mattei. He has an honest, naive, uncunning approach to his material - it's clearly a case of filming what one loves with him. Still, in the end I'm in it for the visual pleasure and his films just provide so damn little of it. Strangely enough, once in while he does manage to achieve a striking shot, or even a somewhat effective sequence - the beginning of WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE, or here, I guess, some of the moody nighttime terror scenes in the first half; but he is never able to sustain any tension and sooner or later the literality of his image-making goes on my nerves. There's really no filter. here. Every impulse has to be put on the screen immediately in the blandest way possible.

Compared to Mattei, the other Black Emanuelle directors (yes, even Albertini) are bona fide aesthetes. He's the ultimative "wouldn't it be awesome, if" kind of filmmaker. I mean, how can you make something like the Laura Gemser throwing a bucket of shit scene so damn dull?

Adorno: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, S. 97-122, "Aldous Huxley und die Utopie"

Huxleys Dystopie einer gescheiterten gesellschaftlichen Befreiung bringt Adorno dazu, viel deutlicher und ausführlicher als er das sonst zumeist tut, seine eigene Vorstellung einer dieser entgegen gesetzten gelungenen Befreiung zu formulieren. Ausgangspunkt ist ein längeres Horkheimer-Zitat über die Befriedigung der materiellen Bedürfnisse als Voraussetzung einer befreiten Gesellschaft (111f). Daran anschließend führt Adorno aus, wie sich mit dem Schritt in die befreite, nicht mehr kapitalistische Gesellschaft auch die Bedürfnisse selbst verändern könnten. So ganz werde ich nicht schlau aus der Passage. Es geht wohl darum, Bedürfnisse nicht mehr zwingend aus der Perspektive ihrer eventuellen Befriedigung denken zu müssen. Wenn man seinen Bedürfnissen nicht mehr ausgeliefert ist, wenn der praktische Geist, der sich an die Bedürfnisse heftet und sie fesselt, verschwindet, dann sind diese Bedürfnisse nicht mehr statisch, sondern... was genau? Es tauchen Formulierungen auf wie ein plötzlich "völlig anders" aussehendes Bedürfnis (112), ein "lustvoller (...) Verzicht" auf Lametta (113), am Ende der Passage redet er gar dem "eigentlichen, nicht entstellten Sinn" der Bedürfnisse (114) das Wort. Die Flucht in die Eigentlichkeit - das ist doch eine kleine Enttäuschung. aber vielleicht verweist es auch nur auf den notwendig anti-utopischen Charakter der kritischen Theorie.

Außerdem wendet Adorno, und das ist vielleicht ergiebiger, einige Passagen des Romans direkt ins Utopische; insbesondere betrifft das solche, die sich mit Sexualität befassen. Die "Verfügung aller über alle" in den Orgien (107) wie auch den "überaus verlockenden" Effekt der "künstliche[n] Anmut und zellophanhafte[n] Schönheit" Leninas (107f) sind für ihn inkompatibel mit der dystopischen Ausrichtung. Denn: "Durch die totale gesellschaftliche Vermittlung [von Sexualität] stellte gleichsam von außen nach innen zweite Unmittelbarkeit, Humanität sich her." (108) Hier ist die Utopie nicht mehr auf Verzicht und Eigentlichkeit angewiesen.

Ansonsten kritisiert Adorno unnachgiebig und luzide die idealistische Schlagseite des Romans, wobei ich mich manchmal gefragt habe, ob die Kritik nicht im Kern auf die Romanform selbst zielen müsste, auf den Akt des Dramatisierens und Fabulierens, etwa wenn er moniert, Huxleys Roman übertrage "die Schuld der Gegenwart gleichsam auf die Ungeborenen" (121). Das lässt sich nun einmal nur schwer vermeiden im Science-Fiction-Genre. Adornos Kritik bleibt durchweg auf der Ebene der Ideologie, der Ideenroman wird reduziert auf die Ideen.

last 2 weeks in letterboxd

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last week in letterboxd

Goddess of Mercy, Ann Hui, 2003

Zhao Wei carrying a baby in her arms while high kicking the bad guys hired by the infant's father is a nice female reappropriation of the male heroic bloodshed tropes of HARD BOILED et al, I guess. Her first encounter with Nicholas Tse also is wonderful and the back and forth between character study and pulp melodrama makes for some surprising twists.

In the end, the script might be a bit too preposterous for Hui to really make it work, and the mainland setting also doesn't feel completely natural, this time (what about those huge, military-style anti-drug maneuvers in what looks like a sleepy provincial town? Might very well be an interesting setting, but it isn't fleshed out enough). Still, always enough energy in here, even if some might be misplaced.

Raigyo, Takahisa Zeze, 1997

The textures are so drab and unwelcoming I thought for a while this might be shot on video. It's probably just a case of particularly aggressive, and quite inventive (photo-chemical) color grading transforming Japan into a zombie-industrial wasteland, though. A whole country turning into a dead zone, like a sea devoid of oxygen. There is a rather cohesive storyline but it feels random - the kind of film that could last 10 minutes just as easily as it could last 10 hours. Rather surprisingly, the sex isn't cold but desperate, bodies clinging to each other, and it leads towards death quite naturally.

Our Time Will Come, Ann Hui, 2017

Well-made historical drama, eschewing the modernist touches of THE GOLDEN ERA in favor of a more straightforward approach. Almost a bit too plot-heavy at times, although Hui manages to include a broad range of responses to history: there's Eddie Peng elegantly killing a whole patrol of Japanese soldiers, but there's also two women and a child huddling together in an abandoned building listening to the howl of the wind.

Takes a while until it finds its emotional center, though: Zhou Xun blaming herself, in a long shot, for involving her mother in her own political struggle and thereby realizing that she never really understood her / used to take her for granted; while slowly turning away from Eddie Peng and towards the camera. History doesn't mean anything if there isn't a private reckoning, too.

In allen Stellungen, Frits Fronz, 1971

The second-to-last Fronz film and maybe the most beautiful of them all ("lifeless in a horny way" - Silvia Szymanski). In color but only barely so, with flaccid, gentle light flooding the ever-same rooms of the hotel almost the whole film is set in. A self-contained world but also a world that contains everything, and a protagonist, a girl, who is ready to take in everything. She takes her time dressing up in front of the mirror and then it begins: Gigolos and lesbians, bank-robbers and bdsm, flamboyant gays and drunk hookers, acid trips and suicide.

All of it presented in long shots and driven by straight-faced deadpan delivery of highly artificial scripted dialogue. In a way IN ALLEN STELLUNGEN enfolds like a series of miniature morality plays. No impressionistic shortcuts, everybody gets to have his or her say. The scene with the bank-robber (cultivating the phoniest but also most beautiful Berlin accent possible) and his moll might just be the missing link between Fassbinder and Jürgen Enz.

Unlike in his earlier work, Fronz isn't content with stripping and voyeurism, but approaches actual intercourse, without actually getting there, though: we get, again and again, bodies rubbing against each other, with the camera placed close to the skin, transfixed by what still doesn't really happen. At least all the relevant parts are there, and in the right place, too, we know that now. Art brut made in Austria.

Love in a Fallen City, Ann Hui, 1984

I remembered this being my favorite Ann Hui film while watching some of her films a few years back and I guess it still is. Incredibly precise melodramatic staging, like Wong Kar-Wai without the fetishistic overreach. A perfect trajectory from the enclosed spaces of tradition and patriarchy to the phony wonderland of colonial libertinage to the primal images of war: splintering glass raining down on Cora Miao, squatting at the bottom of the staircase.

Love's embrace might separate us, but history will tear us together.

Tiger, Löwe, Panther, Dominik Graf, 1989

Natja Brunckhorst is a force of nature, stubbornly asserting herself in the frame, enforcing her own temporality and energy level on every scene she's in. Everyone else is just a vessel, overeager to succumb to one of the worst scripts Graf has worked with (Sherry Hormann going for an overstuffed Sex in the City style romp). Graf himself seems to take his cues from french rather than italian and american cinema at this point in his career; in SPIELER this works quite well, here the whole thing just doesn't feel right, a clumsy attempt at mundane flippancy, like namedropping Proust, but then translating "madeleine" as "bread with sugar". Mostly, this is a one woman show, although some of Brunckhorst's scenes with the not-quite-Jean-Pierre-Leaud-but-nevertheless-charming Thomas Winkler work quite well, too.

It's still eminently watchable - even while most of the clutter really is clutter this time, Graf always finds ways to enrich his worlds, and given that this might be my least favorite among the 30+ Graf films I've seen, I guess I'm still very much in love with his work.

The Secret, Ann Hui, 1979

Watching this in the restored version is such a joy: this is indeed one of the great 70s thrillers, a slow-burn investigation grounded in social detail, while at the same time unfolding as a self-contained system of pure cinema. Sylvia Chang is frail and brave and rules the film.

Someone on here talks about the restoration being a hack job, but to my mind the new version looks wonderful (aside from the vhs-sourced title sequence). Sure, some detail is lost, as is completely normal when changing from one medium to another. The restoration has an excellent feel for the original material. So much better than all those glossy 4k restorations hell-bent on banishing history from film history.

Also watched: Bridge, Ann Hui, 1978

One of her contributions to BELOW THE LION ROCK. Very much in journalistic mode, with a good eye for the different social stata in Hong Kong, but also for quiet moments not strictly relevant for the narrative.

Sei donne per l'assassiono, Mario Bava, 1964

Beauty eating itself, turning style into style. Perfect film.

The Story of Woo Viet, Ann Hui, 1981

Emerging from a place of unspeakable violence, Chow Yun Fat navigates the world with a youthful innocence that only manages to sustain itself because in some ways he's already cut off from the world. The few anchors he's throwing out belong mostly to the realm of the imaginary: a future in America, Cora Miao as a platonic pen pal. A positively glowing Cherie Chung might be more tangible, but in the end she realizes that she, too, can't be his anchor (throwing herself on him, desperately kissing and clinging to him), and so she has to die.

This is, I believe, the paradox the film is founded on: The very fact that he is totally, irredeemably displaced grants him absolute agency - but only in a world that is already lost. So we're left with a melancholic travelogue through the spaces and textures of 70s exploitation films, punctured by short, rabid bursts of Ching Siu-Tung action.

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Also watched: Road, Ann Hui, 1978

A sad, female-centered tale of poverty and opium addiction. Probably the most accomplished among her three BELOW THE LION ROCK episodes I have seen so far.

The Blue Mountain, Tadashi Imai, 1948/49

Let Setsuko Hara teach sex ed and you never know what'll happen!

First film I've seen of Imai, Japan's leading leftist director of the post-war era. Not quite sold yet, but there's lots going on here, to be sure, ideologically as well as stylistically. Like most of the reeducation films of the time this is far from subtle but at least this time the democratic furor feels absolutely genuine, to the point of conceptual overreach: why not tear it all down and return to a state of nature? Some surprisingly poetic moments in there, too.

Part 2:

Not much plot in part 2, it's mostly about working through, both emotionally and discursively, the events of part one. More often than not, this brings out the film's strengths. For starters, Imai makes better use of Hara, her face is so radiant at times, he just has to cut directly to fireworks, afterwards. There's also an extremely sensual beach scene, like something out of a sun tribe film.

Somewhere in the middle the film grinds to a complete halt while everyone is summoned in school to discuss the state of juvenile morality. Almost half an hour of excessive, mugging social theater, and clearly the best part of BLUE MOUNTAINS.

Boat People, Ann Hui, 1982

In an interview after the film's release Hui talks about how in her view the communist horrors of BOAT PEOPLE and the capitalist horrors of THE STORY OF WOO VIET cancel each other out. I'm not sure if this is quite true; even if both films end with all options lost and an escape over water, BOAT PEOPLE is clearly the much darker film, a tale of arrested development ("she still has the body of a 14 year old") and annihilation and not much more. In the end the difference might have to do less with politics than with the bustling Philippine location shooting of WOO VIET vs the emptied out Chinese sets used as stand-in for Vietnam in BOAT PEOPLE; and also with a driven, manic Chow Yun-Fat vs an apathetic, emptied out George Lam, who really must be one of the flimsiest reporter heroes in film history. I almost suspect that Hui gave him two scenes with a "real" Japanese actor (or at least someone who actually speaks the language) just to make clear for everyone that even his Japaneseness is phony, without substance.

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Also watched: Where Are You Going, Ann Hui, 1992

A BELOW THE LION ROCK episode featuring Huo Dejian as himself restaging his treatment by Chinese authorities. Dense and clearheaded and a good supplement to the more paranoid takes on the imminent handover produced in Hong Kong.The Iron Rose, Jean Rollin, 1973


Love means disturbing the dead. Just wonderful how all those toppled crosses and gravestones feel completely natural after a while. This has nothing to do with blasphemy, either. It's a way of honoring the way of the world. The field of desire graves disorder. Again and again men with burning eyes in red and women without bras in yellow will enter, roam around a bit and finally get lost in it.

Sette note in nero, Lucio Fulci, 1977

The beauty of it is that at its heart, this really is a closed-off system: O'Neill isn't haunted, but cursed by images. They will come back, they will come for her, and it will be her own doing. She won't rest until they do. She's the beginning and the end of the image, their only audience, but also the camera and the darkroom (the tunnels right at the start, also somehow announcing the strange sexlessness of the film; this is a film about a face, not about a woman).

In a way it's like Hitchcock in psychotic overdrive, like Vertigo, only that not only Judy and Madeleine, but also Scottie turn out to always have been the same person. Suspense unhinged, cut off from logic and the outside world. When she steps into the murder room for the first time, she's already lost, because she has entered her brain. The rest is a game between optical nerve and cortex. The images keep coming back, every time triggering the same zoom in on her eyes, the same bonkers Frizzi music.

Sure, there's still another, more traditional film running in the background, a procedural filled with cues and policemen and telephone conversations. A backup, a leftover from Fulci's early 70s work, but it's rather obvious he doesn't care about stuff like that anymore. I mean, most of it comes down to returning again and again to the same random magazine cover, turning it into an endless readable and rereadable urtext. If one looks close enough, the World Formula is probably in there somewhere, too.

(I'm reading on here somewhere that this plays like a PROFONDO ROSSO rehash, only more conventional; I don't think so. To me, this feels much more radical and pure, much more primal than the Argento, a film I admire but don't love.)

last week in letterboxd

Starry Is the Night, Ann Hui, 1988

Ambitious enough: Two unequal love affairs set about 20 years apart, both mirroring each other and mutually entangled... and also pitted against Hong Kong's pro democracy movement, ie the struggle against another kind of unequal relationship. The past is clear-cut and depressing (Brigitte Lin alone in the hay), the present messy and intense (Brigitte Lin getting tomboy hair and drinking from sneakers).

In the end Hui shies away from the final oedipal conclusion the romantic entanglements clearly imply - does this mean that all hope is not lost yet for an independent democratic Hong Kong? We have until 2047, someone says at one time. Felt like a long time, back then.

Same year as Varda's KUNG-FU MASTER. Strange coincidence.

Song of the Exile, Ann Hui, 1990

Ann Hui recreating her family's history, or at least a variation thereof, and especially her own relationship with her socially and culturally displaced mother. Good eye for affection clouded by pettiness. The curses and the blessings of time spent together and of time spent apart. Are we lonelier when we don't understand each other or when we do? Meaning nothing is simple, but when you get Maggie Cheung to play yourself in your own biopic you must have done something right in your life.

The true standout here is Lu Hsiao-Fen, though, the actress playing the mother: the way she lights up when returning to Japan, a child again when with her family, the prettiest (and, coincidentally, richest) girl of the village again when with her former peers.

Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Clifford Choi, 1983

A rather strange project, feels like Shaw Brothers trying for an arty Ann Hui / Allen Fong-style social drama but then deciding to both sexing it up and inserting a ROCKY rip-off-storyline. (In other words: turning it into a Hong Kong film.) Someone on here mentioned Lino Brocka and indeed those early scenes of Cherie Chung drifting through the gutter feel like INSIANG channeled through soft-core porn, although the result is both more artificial and even sleazier than that sounds. The later parts suffer from a miscast Alex Man and rather underdeveloped fighting scenes. In fact, nothing really fits, but Cherie Chung is very good, and there's always enough going on to keep the interest up.

The Way We Are, Ann Hui, 2008

How to condense the experience of the mundane? How many / few shots do you need to evoke the experience of a single day in which nothing of importance happens? How to represent everyday routine without taking recourse to cliché-ridden tropes like repetition, montage sequeces etc?

Ann Hui has good answers to all of these questions, but I'm still not completely sold on the film. This really is very low key, and probably either a bit too low key or not quite low key enough for my taste. I guess it might have helped to either boil things further down (maybe make all of it about the mother-son relationship: what does coming of age feel like when there's no conflict at all?), or to open things up a bit. The scenes with Cheung Ka-on's friends are mostly left hanging in the air, for example.

As it is, this seems to be a bit too much concerned with finding the right timing for all of those piano cues signaling all of those small epiphanies of lower middle-class urban life.

The Falcon Out West, William Clemens, 1944

I was looking forward to this since normally I'm very fond of Old Hollywood comedy western. There's really not much going on with this, though. A slow and convoluted story, no stand-out performances, and a serious lack of, well, horseplay. Seriously, that joke isn't much worse than most of the ones that made the cut, here.

Spieler, Dominik Graf, 1990

Strangely enough, while almost all of Graf's films display an offbeat sense of humor rare in German cinema, his comedies rather consistently turn out to be the least funny of all of his films. TREFFER is the exception that proves the rule, I guess, but it certainly holds true for DREI GEGEN DREI, for DOKTOR KNOCK, and, although not quite to the same degree, for SPIELER.

It's not that the jokes are bad in themselves (SPIELER, especially, is a well-written film), but rather that the films do not seem to be interested in letting them register. They're not ends in themselves, but part of the environment. "Comedy" is more related to a certain kind of deformation of the world than to the response this deformation might trigger in the viewer. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. (The idea that comedies should be judged, first and foremost, for their "funniness" is extremely dubious anyway.)

Like in DREI GEGEN DREI and DOKTOR KNOCK, there's a certain mismatch, though, between anarchistic plotting and the insistence on total directorial control. In this case we basically get a slacker-comedy with an almost Klaus-Lemke-style hook, but broken up into a series of intricately derailing set-pieces, and accompanied by scripted dialogue. Extremely scripted, in fact, and it almost never stops, too.

We also get: Pans along wallpapers with faces draped in front of them, several beautiful iris shots, the crumbling, colorful textures of old Munich, posts and beams breaking up the frame at odd angels, a trip to France with Checkhovian hand grenades in the trunk. A foot chase across a busy highway that might be one of Graf's best action scenes. Several retreats into the bedroom where sex is only one of many possible (and not necessarily the most invigorating) outcomes.

My American Grandson, Ann Hui, 1991

Another low-key Ann Hui film, and certainly not one of her best. The plot about a bratty American teenager visiting his grandfather in a traditional Shanghai neighborhood isn't all that exciting and largely develops along the usual lines (it also has nothing to add to Mabel Cheung's pitch-perfect EIGHT TAELS OF GOLD). A benign Wu Ma is wonderful as the grandfather, though, and somewhere hidden in here is a thoughtful and quietly ironic film about growing old alone in a society that defines itself through dense social connectivity. So, a first draft for Hui's far superior THE POSTMODERN LIFE OF MY AUNT, maybe.

München - Geheimnisse einer Stadt, Dominik Graf, Michael Althen, 2000

Touched by a city. Call it psychogeography, but not as a Patrick Keiller style academic exercise, more like a Chris Marker take on a boulevard expose titled "Hot Nights in Munich".

The limitations of its (dual) perspective are obvious, but I always think it's much more interesting to fully embrace them than to make phony amends by way of inserting distancing devises. This is, pure and simple, Graf at his most inventive, and Althen at his most poetic. A rare stroke of luck.

Notre-Dame du Nil, Atiq Rahimi, 2019

Personal memory and historical allegory sometimes working hand in hand, sometimes not. Maybe the film is more interesting when they don't: how can nostalgic longing for a community of girls and for a rural landscape filled with enticing mysteries coexist with murderous ethnic violence? In theory, and especially after the fact, the violence itself might be perfectly explainable, but every single act of violence still comes out of nowhere.

Beautiful, painterly visuals, like in Rahimi's THE PATIENCE STONE. Those not all that slow slow-motion shots are a bit irritating, though, don't quite know what to make of them yet.

The Spooky Bunch, Ann Hui, 1980

A shame this still isn't available in a decent version, especially since there's a newly restored version out there (paid for by Josephine Siao herself, apparently). Also makes one wish Ann Hui would've indulged in her obvious love and knack for quirky b-movies a bit more often throughout her career.

Ordinary Heroes, Ann Hui, 1999

A messy and wonderful take on Hong Kong's leftist legacy that doesn't feel like a period film at all. The stocktaking of all of those ideological tribulations, factorial in-fights and very important names is outsourced to the performance of a manic street preacher who shows up a few times, mainly to announce a new chapter in the story. The bulk of the film is very immediate, just a bunch of people trying to connect to the world surrounding them while also fighting their inner loneliness. Then there's the cast: One of the best Anthony Wong performances, showing once again why he is so unique in HK cinema, Loletta Lee's quirky sadness and the sense of displacement surrounding Lee Kang-Sheng who'll probably always seem lost when not inside a Tsai frame.

Night and Fog, Ann Hui, 2009

The dark twin of THE WAY WE ARE, set in the same high rise settlement at the outskirts of Hong Kong. Only that this time, nothing is all right behind closed doors. Driven by a deep sense of despair, harrowing and surprisingly high-pitched, especially compared to the predecessor, but also to most other Hui films. Simon Yam's manic performance seems to take over the whole film, splintering the narrative, stretching it out over several povs and time frames. In the end nothing helps, there really is nowhere to hide.

Heartbreaking stuff, especially because of details like the sign language of the two sisters. Abuse encroaching on every single human interaction, even the benign ones.

Female Teacher Hunting, Junichi Suzuki, 1982

Gets over the rape-obsession often enough to arrive at some interesting moments, but all in all it's very plain, barely stylized. By this time a lot of these films long to be hardcore and no longer have many ideas about what to do with the restrictions. Yuki Kazamatsuri, who apparently was in the KILL BILL films, makes for a glamorous lead, though.

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Dragnet Girl, Yasujiro Ozu, 1933

Starts out playful, almost giddy, Ozu in movie brat mode, having fun not only with gangster film tropes but also with the "His Master's Voice" dog. Later on, though, the film mostly retreats into a single room, acting out a full-blown identity crisis that isn't limited to character psychology but takes over film form, like a hidden Ozu film revolting against the genre film surface. Still, in the end everything hinges on Tanaka's performance - at first she's the number one gangster movie cosplayer, but later on, she's the one denouncing the game, calling bullshit not only on Joji, but also on herself. In the end, the film switches gear once again and goes for a deliberately non-suspenseful chase scene featuring the world's two least agile cops. They must nevertheless catch us, says Tanaka, otherwise everything would be wrong. She's right, of course.

Call of Heroes, Benny Chan, 2016

Starts a bit slow and might've profited from not quite as straight-forward storytelling and maybe even, dare I say it, from less Louis Koo, but Chan, cleverly updating classic swordplay tropes for modern sensibilities, sure knows how to open up the canvas once the mayhem starts. The last half hour delivers on the wish-fulfillment aspect of blockbuster action cinema in full force. The "sea of jars" scene, while maybe not realized to its full potential, still is one of the more successful attempts toward the digital sublime (made me think of the sandman in SPIDER-MAN 3).

Dancing Girl of Izu, Heinosuke Gosho, 1933

Accumulating detail on the open road. The weight of the world is felt only at the end, when the body of least resistance is finally identified and being closed in on. Then, everything comes crashing down on you. "Happiness? What do you mean by happiness?"

Midnight Fairy, Noboru Tanaka, 1973

The world as seen through soot-smeared glasses. No one takes pinku as revolutionary cinema more serious than Tanaka. This is all about sticking it to the bourgeoisie by way of wild mood swings and direct action. Gutter sleaze making way for anarchist-romantic flights of fancy, and I guess the key is that Tanaka fully commits to both, to destruction, but also to utopia. A bride can be many things at once.

Yuri Yamashina's character is one of the most unusual protagonists of erotic cinema I can think of.

Girls of the Night, Kinuyo Tanaka, 1961

Even more unusual than I remembered. A film that completely refuses not only to condemn, but also to pin down sex work. Follow up on a lifeline without any prejudices and you never know where things might end.

To the Fore, Dante Lam, 2015

All clean and chaste, fully in line with mainland market aesthetics, but Lam manages to find his own form of craziness: hermetically sealing in his world and his protagonists. Cycling is everything and everything is cycling. Any emotion that can't be translated into aerodynamic, space-bending chase sequences isn't worth expressing.

Sehnsucht 202, Max Neufeld, 1932

The eternal story of love and / as capital, charming as hell, most of the checks aren't covered, but everyone's high on Luise Rainer's perfume anyway. One of those one last good time before the assholes take over films that are a true treasure of German-Austrian film history.

A Hen in the Wind, Yasujiro Ozu, 1948

This was my favorite Ozu at one time, and while by now I'd probably reserve that spot for something with Setsuko Hara in it, I still see what I particularly adored here: It's not so much about the downbeat setting or the unusually dramatic storyline, but about Ozu applying his formal rigor to moods, desires and states of minds he normally shies away from. Especially the claustrophobia, the feeling of being holed up, in one's own life, and also, more directly, in a dismal shack, next to someone you're not sure you know and love anymore. Neither Sano nor Tanaka can cope with this, and so the darkness closes in on both of them, wrapping itself around them. It's not only the people losing their serenity, but also space: the single lightbulb defining the borders of their prison, the cursed staircase...

Now You See Me 2, Jon M. Chu, 2016

Chu might not quite as out of his depth as Leterrier when it comes to quirky action mayhem - once in a long while, when he manages to boil a situation down to rhythm and choreography (as in the hiding the stick scene), he arrives at something halfway pleasant. Still, the first one was at least fueled by a - misplaced, but somewhat touching - sense of wonder. This time around, everyone involved seems to be in on the crushing dullness of the whole thing from the start.

General rule: a film that can't make good use of Harrelson ain't worth shit.

The Lady of Musashino, Kenji Mizoguchi, 1951

Early in the film (a scene that somehow didn't fully register with me at first viewing), Michiko brings home cynide capsules handed out by the army. Won't it be more practical, she asks, just to take them? A casual question that makes it clear that she's living on borrowed time from the start. Later on, this turns out to be the lesson she learns over and over again: The clean slate of death is more practical than life and its unruly, aching geometrics of desire.

Yakuza Apocalypse, Takashi Miike, 2015

Didn't expect it to be this thrilling. Miike just throwing at you every deranged impulse shooting through his mind is always a good way to spend two hours, and this time, the mayhem is dense with images of quiet loneliness, like water dripping only in your head. It also looks much better than most of his recent work, more texture, better eye for location, a dusty, grimy vision from a place beyond sanity and topography.

The White Storm 2: Drug Lords, Herman Yau, 2019

Heading for the Philippines to catch a serious case of tough on crime fascism and then letting it play out until the bitter end: two dead guys shooting each other, like something out of a Romero film.

In between Yau opens up the image, lots of moving parts, widescreen shots filled with tough guy, strippers, drugs and weapons, a car chase down the subway station, dead women's heads falling into men's laps, a grand, vulgar vision somewhere halfway between Benny Chan's uber-pulpy first film and Johnny To's much more analytical and detached DRUG WAR.

The Munekata Sisters, Yasujiro Ozu, 1950

A very alcoholic Ozu. Maybe Takamine never really sobered up, and the film is all the better for it. If you don't fall for her at least a little bit while watching this, I don't now you. Mimura must be one of the darkest characters in any of his films.

One of the great cat movies, too.

Tesla, Michael Almereyda, 2020

Pleasant enough on a pure sound+images level, but Hawke works overtime to suck as much life out of it as he possibly can. Favorite moment: Kyle MacLachlan's puzzled look at a light bulb.

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The Fencing Master, Shunkai Mizuho, 1962

"Danpei and realism. He doesn't understand what realism is, but is trying to capture what it is..." "With all of his life."

A sword fighting film in which the only cause worth fighting for is the correct depiction of sword fighting. The question of "graphical realism" in swordplay performances leads to a breakdown of self, and then to a sentimental confessional scene, and then to a street brawl.

Either the most macmahonist film ever or the best film about macmahonism (I don't think it can be both at the same time, because macmahonism is built on the rejection of modernist reflexivity): Here's someone who's really willing to die for mise-en-scene.

Actress, Kon Ichikawa, 1987

On becoming Oharu. The whole second half is devoted to Tanaka's relationship with Mizoguchi. Before that, we get a panoramic and multi-faceted, if not terribly original introduction not only into Tanaka's life, but also into the state of Japanese filmmaking in the late 20s and early 30s (with a fair amount of Shimizu-bashing); but once she meets Mizo, basically everything else doesn't matter anymore. Even the war hardly gets a mention, let alone Tanaka's roles in propaganda films. The script is co-written by Shindo Kaneto, who pressed Tanaka pretty hard on the same topic in his Mizoguchi documentary. So I guess it's not quite clear whether we're dealing with Mizo's fixation on Tanaka or with Kaneto's fixation on Mizo and Tanaka.

All in all not a complete success but interesting enough. A lot of it is set in rather mundane interiors, unobtrusively evoking Nicely classic Shochiku family films without ever turning into full-blown pastiche. The ending is effective on its own terms, but to not even mention Tanaka's own directorial work (a quite important aspect of life after Oharu) is just rude.

Männer in den besten Jahren erzählen Sexgeschichte, Frits Fronz, 1968

The most tender and in a way also the most optimistic Fronz film I've seen so far. Maybe this is because of the rather strict gender separation. A group of men and a group of women in the countryside, but the two groups never meet and while the men can see the women, the women somehow (movie magic!) can't see the men.

The genders only come together in the men's sex stories, and even then they treat each other like members of a friendly, but strange and ultimately unknowable alien race. Like in SEXKARUSSELL, it's important that the stories contain punchlines (if they don't, the audience will revolt). One of those punchlines leads to a girl stepping in front of a car and dancing topless, slow and trance-like, in the headlights. A moment of pure poetic bliss that seems to come out of nowhere, completely detached from both the film and the world around me.

The Scent of Incense, Keisuke Kinoshita, 1964

Shows again why Kinoshita is so underrated: he might be the only one of the Japanese classic masters interested in form first and in humanism if at all second, and therefore his films sometimes feel crass and heavy-handed, but he also gets to ask questions neither Mizoguchi nor Naruse (two obvious comparisons here) would even consider.

This one is a magnificent, dark epic at the tail end of his best period, the sprawling scope offset by the intimate framings: At its core, it's just a long series of mother-daughter conversations. More precisely, it's about a mother unilaterally rescinding the social contract, leading to the question of what's worse: corruption of family or corruption by family? What if both might mean one and the same thing?

A Song to Remember, Charles Vidor, 1945

Still not a particularly well-rounded movie, but I still like it. The Marischka script continually negotiates between Hollywood prestige picture impulses and the more sentimental sensitivities of German-style musician films (like the Schubert series). Strangely enough, Paul Muni is the most teutonic element with his Weimar era mugging. Once George Sand shows up, everything changes. She's the bearer of light, mise en scene personified, she opens up the image but breaks down the movie. Basically nothing makes sense from this point on. Both Wilde and Marischka are completely helpless when confronted with ice-cold female rationality.

The Falcon in Danger, William Clemens, 1943

Rather wacky, convoluted entry, a fever-dreamish plot that might technically make sense but plays out like a series of non sequiturs. Every single scene with the fiance is irritating.

11 x 14, James Benning, 1977

Those two Dylan shots alone would bring me through some of my darker days.

Sandakan No. 8, Kei Kumai, 1974

Undeniably powerful stuff, though for me, only the scenes with Tanaka and Kurihara really worked. The flow of energy between the two women, a smile for food and shelter, memories answered by tears. The old woman (beating things into shape with her feet) and her shack invigorated, the young woman reduced to stasis and affect.

The flashback, by contrast, are crass and blunt, shot through with expressionistic furor, all men are pigs, the sailors are coming, marching in step into the brothel. Fair enough, given the subject, and still, those are automatic images, closed-off from the start, ready-made for the ever-growing, open-ended archive of 20th century cruelties.

Le Franc, Djibril Diop Mambety, 1994

The promise of happiness becoming a burden and turning you into a clown: just another day in capitalism.

Laissons Lucie faire, Emmanuel Mouret, 2000

Giggling in your sleep until you wake up. Drop the uniform and "enjoy life", but that might be just a code word.

Female systematics and male flights of fancy. When both come together, a "sensual affair" might easily turn into slapstick. After nine years, every relationship's formula of love probably needs some refreshing, though. If nothing else helps, maybe drinking ourselves into a stupor will.

Mouret's first long film, still a bit clumsy at times, not every idea works, but that only emphasizes his marvelous eye for acting and especially for the small stage plays people constantly invent and perform for each other.

Plus, casting Chaplin's granddaughter in your feature debut is, of course, a king move.

Lullaby of the Earth, Yasuzo Masumura, 1976

The world used to be the outside while she was secure in the dark, womb-like inside, something remote like a glimpse she caught once in a while through the hatch of Grandmother's shack. Now Grandmother is gone, the world comes rushing in and she cannot help but take everything personally. Every desire, every insult aims for her body and she reciprocates in full, lashing out against both herself and everyone around her. She has no access to the safeguarding and distancing mechanisms all the others around her use almost constantly. She's only happy while rowing, turning herself into a machine, but this won't make the people go away. There's no other solution but to face them, to expose herself and to beat, claw and fuck her way into nirvana.

That soundtrack!

Army, Keinosuke Kinoshita, 1944

That long, silent close-up of Tanaka's silent breakdown really is amazing: basically every single scene preceding it is built on the absolute primacy of sacrifice for the emperor, and then, without a single word of dialogue, just through the power of one single face, everything is turned around and we are left registering the cost of this very sacrifice.

Of course, this doesn't turn ARMY into a full-blown anti-war movie, but it still feels like a deliberate intervention - purely on the level of form (I don't know much about the mechanisms of censorship in fascist Japan; was it mostly script-based?). Not only Tanaka's expressivity, but also the shift of focus from a family tale centered around Chishū Ryū to the plight of an isolated, helpless woman, while all the men around her keep drifting away...

Four Riders, Chang Cheh, 1972

Prime 70s pulp nihilism. Starts with leaves rustling in the wind, ends in the eternal snow. In between, men affirm each other's right to cry, and also some people die. Chang Cheh going for slow-burn acid rock instead of high-octane thrash-metal. Compared with his period films, there's hardly any plot at all, just a bunch of men who used to have a proper outlet for violence and now they don't. Dispensable bodies, drifting. It takes a full hour until the Four Riders finally meet, and afterwards there's nothing left to do but to prepare and execute a showdown so great I just had to watch it twice.

Woman of Tokyo, Yasujiro Ozu, 1933

Sad little film centered around a tea kettle. Beautiful tracking shots and kind of mysterious ending.

ABBA: The Movie, Lasse Hallström, 1978

I don't think I care for a single ABBA song (and I like lots of sing-along pop), but I can easily forget that for 95 strange, naive and obscene minutes. I am the tiger!

Woods Are Wet, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1973

Entering through dark corridors, guided by candlelight, hell is promised and hell is gained. Sex is flesh on flesh slavery and everyone is slave to the ritual. Impressive in its commitment to the source, in its clear-cut, unrelenting A-B structure, and also in its matter-of-fact depiction of the husband who in the end is just a random fool (it's about doing evil, not about being evil), though I'm not sure whether Kumashiro's aestheticism really fits this project.

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Love Under the Cruzifix, Kinuyo Tanaka, 1962

Not Tanaka's best film (the period picture parts feel once again a bit forced), but her most thorough and most controlled treatise on love as a spiritual, de facto antisocial force. A film that believes in the absolute and places it in a woman's heart. Looks astonishing throughout, too.

The Falcon's Brother, Stanley Logan, 1942

In theory an interesting wartime mystery. The script has a few nice ideas (the best one: secret messages delivered by silly fashion magazine covers) and the anti-fascist rhetorics introduce an urgency strangely at odds with the well-worn plot mechanics. The direction is dull, though, and the "double falcon" concept is completely wasted.

Burden of Life, Heinosuke Gosho, 1935

About looking at oneself as if from the outside: you always come up short that way. A surprisingly complex film, because it's not just about "coming to terms with fatherhood", but about family dynamics: a single, unjust and a bit arbitrary impulse ripples through different subjectivities until no one feels at home anymore. The resolution in the end is too abrupt and too complete.

Always marvelous how rich the worlds of these films are, even with a running time of just over an hour. Kinuyo Tanaka especially is extremely charming as the modern girl with the painter husband. Those two easily could've had their own film.

The Week of, Robert Smigel, 2018

Cramming it all in. Neorealismo rosa all'americana and sometimes no style at all is the best style.

Buscemi and Happy Madison are a match made in heaven.

The King of Staten Island, Judd Apatow, 2020

"What's that, a 'life event'?"

The boring cool kids won't like it, but this is Apatow's best film since FUNNY PEOPLE. By now, he's so relaxed, he might just join Happy Madison soon.

The New Road: Akermi, Heinosuke Gosho, 1936

Marriage shenanigans featuring wayward painters, obstinate modern girls (Kinuyo Tanaka!), grumpy fathers, dull safe-choice suitors etc. Plots like this seem to have been a dime a dozen in 30s Japan, though this seems to be willing to test the limits when it comes to licentiousness. The production design also looks marvelous at times, but in the current transfer it's mostly wasted. Gosho's direction is once again sensitive, focussing on gestures and gazes.

The magnificent last five minutes mainly consist of Tanaka running, for life and love.

The New Road: Ryota, Heinosuke Gosho, 1936

Almost exclusively deals with the fallout from the first part: love is lost, but there's a baby on the way! Youthful exuberance replaced by quite and introspective domesticity. The scenes with Tanaka and Uehara are beautiful.

The Tree of Love, Hiromasa Nomura, 1938

Abridged rerelease of a multi-hour blockbuster, supposed to be a founding work in the genre of romantic extremism (=romantic love unbound by space, time and sanity). The surviving version doesn't really point towards an epic of the scale of Oba's KIMI NO NA WA, though, everything is rather small-scale and also a bit clumsy. Uehara especially is extremely wooden. The community of nurses Tanaka is a part of is the only interesting element here.

The Reluctant Dragon, Alfred L. Werker, 1941

Finding prime STUC-material in (ok, not really all that) unexpected places. Benchley wouldn't be out of place in a particularly stale german 70s sex farce.

Chikamatsu's Love in Osaka, Tomu Uchida, 1959

The red-light district is all movement, the fluid camera tracing flows of energy, a constant exchange between inside and outside, lack and fulfillment. Our hero Chunmei, though, is the only static part. Totally reluctant, he's being bullied into a brothel by his pal and then pressured into sex by a prostitute. Afterwards he cannot, like everyone around him, reenter normalcy. He has been activated, set on a track towards theatrical self destruction. No one can stop him now - not even, as it turns out, the author of the story. He, Chikamatsu, is cursed, too: All he can do is provide aesthtic relief.

Actress, Kon Ichikawa, 1987

On becoming Oharu. The whole second half is devoted to Tanaka's relationship with Mizoguchi. Before that, we get a panoramic and multi-faceted, if not terribly original introduction not only into Tanaka's life, but also into the state of Japanese filmmaking in the late 20s and early 30s (with a fair amount of Shimizu-bashing); but once she meets Mizo, basically everything else doesn't matter anymore. Even the war hardly gets a mention, let alone Tanaka's roles in propaganda films. The script is co-written by Shindo Kaneto, who pressed Tanaka pretty hard on the same topic in his Mizoguchi documentary. So I guess it's not quite clear whether we're dealing with Mizo's fixation on Tanaka or with Kaneto's fixation on Mizo and Tanaka.

All in all not a complete success but interesting enough. A lot of it is set in rather mundane interiors, unobtrusively evoking Nicely classic Shochiku family films without ever turning into full-blown pastiche. The ending is effective on its own terms, but to not even mention Tanaka's own directorial work (a quite important aspect of life after Oharu) is just rude.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians, diverse, 1961

Queen Cruella, making every frame she walks in her own, the most glamourous of all Disney villains dwarfing the plainest of all Disney heroes. Why smoke at all if you can't smoke like Cruella smokes, enchanting the world with green veneer. The puppies must live, of course, if only to stumble over the frozen stream in one of the most beautiful scenes of animation history, but let's be honest: if anyone deserves a coat like that it's Cruella de Vil.

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The Shiinomi School, Hiroshi Shimizu, 1955

Cinema can, in fact, ease the pain.

Stranger By Night, Gregory Dark, 1994

Gregory Dark simulating a 80s/90s hollywood run-of-the-mill programmer on a budget and doing a pretty good job at it. Normally he isn't a very smooth storyteller, but here, everything flows along nicely, at least before the somewhat rushed third act. Funny that this could very well be another of his softcore efforts, all the setups are right there, it's just that everyone decides to keep the clothes on for a change (at least most of the time). Good eye for location and at times almost Argento'esque use of music.

Pokkuveyil, Govindan Aravindan, 1982

The hypnotic score keeps rippling through my mind like the waves over the surface of the sea. Landscape is in cahoots with music and I'm not sure they always mean well. Anyway, resistance is completely impossible. A song, or a basketball game, or a woman's sobbing might break the spell for a few precious minutes, but soon after, we are back with the slow descent into insanity. The political furor leads nowhere, the father dies, the girl vanishes, nature takes back the basketball court. If anything remains, after the music stops it may be a mother's face.

Little Fish, Strange Pond, Gregory Dark, 2009

Starts with two not exactly sympathetic guys drifting through LA, reminiscing about the changing mediascape of their days (oh, the golden, silver and bronze ages of porn!) while barely registering the social decay around them. Their banter is not half as witty as Dark unfortunately seems to thinks it is. With a better cast - Modine is adequate, but Bloom is a non-entity throughout - the hangout movie part might still somehow have worked out. The completely unsurprising "dark turn" later on is an utter trainwreck, though - nothing to safe here.

All in all it's a terrible film, but terrible in a rather unique way, and if this really turns out to be G.D.'s swan song, he leaves on an unpleasant, jarring note not completely unfitting his strange career: his first shot at something similar to auteur filmmaking, he completely blew it and well, goodbye.

A Visage to Remember, Heinosuke Gosho, 1948

Open windows, open hearts. A house on the cliff, not at all a secure hiding place, but a stage for a theater of desire, doubled in a theater of light, wind and water constantly illuminating the the walls and floors. Exposed not really to the elements but rather to the forces of cinema itself. The walls between exterior and interior keep crumbling down, with unruly, ecstatic superimposition almost like in a Ferrara film, the screen taken over, again and again, by waves and close-ups of faces lost in affect. A constant longing for the sea, a piano triggering memories and memories triggering piano music, a staircase of pure expressivity...

I always liked Gosho, but this is something else, a post-war sturm und drang eruption equal only to Kinoshita's ONNA, but at the same time all gentle and forgiving. Hearts are beating, clocks are ticking, feelings get crushed, this is the way of the world, and still, some of us might love again.

Sylvie, Klaus Lemke, 1973

Still Lemke's finest hour. The Youtube transfer makes Sylvie's eyes shoot out green rays and turns her into the alien queen she always deserved to be.

In Search of… the Perfect ‘10’, Gregory Dark, 1986

After two masterpieces back to back an almost welcome reminder that sometimes films are just the worst.

The Moon Has Risen, Kinuyo Tanaka, 1953

Kinuyo Tanaka filming an Ozu script, even borrowing Chishu Ryu and staying rather close to most of his formal and emotional parameters throughout. Still, it's her film through and through - somehow the familiar surface makes her slight, tender interventions register all the stronger, especially the focus on Mie Kitahara, her gestures, her unruly gaze. The shomingeki equilibrium slightly decentered by a young woman's subjectivity.

Also, like in LOVE LETTERS, there's again a beautiful scene set in a public park. The green space inside of the city strips away the outer barriers between us, thereby rendering visible the inner ones.

Night of the Living Babes, Gregory Dark, 1987

Not quite as depressing as PERFECT 10, thanks mainly to somewhat committed performances by Bauer and Louie Bonanno. The combination of Dark's anti-humor and vhs-flatness nevertheless makes me want to move to a galaxy I don't have to share with films like this.

Girl Crazy, William A. Seiter, 1932

Another unassuming, laid back Seiter comedy. More a constellation of gags than a fully formed feature, and (mostly) all the better for it, as the screen is constantly filled with characters called Jimmy, Patsy, Danny, Tessie, Molly and Mary and everyone's clearly heaving a good time. Highlights include a musical number (Berkeley, I guess) illuminated by swirling spotlights rapidly escalating into full-blown surrealism; Mitzi Green's needy imitation scene that seems to go on forever until she's fobbed of with a helpless "You're sweet"; a scene with Wheeler and Woolsey as mock indians that makes fun of Wheeler and Woolsey instead of indians; Lita Chevret's dress; and a wonderful Mack-Sennett-style finale involving hypnotism. The romance side plot is just as annoying and tacked-on as in some of the MGM Marx Brothers films, but here it takes up less of the running time. My first Wheeler and Woolsey and certainly not my last.

Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig, 2017

Can't distance myself from this, just as the film can't, or won't differentiate between its confessional impulses and the pressures of narrative structure.

The Eternal Breasts, Kinuyo Tanaka, 1955

A life derailed, and thereby gradually becoming pure expression... a wonderful shapeshifter of a film, it takes only a single line in a newspaper article to turn a full-blown family melodrama into an intimate love story, that almost plays out like a particularly dark screwball comedy.

The Wandering Princess, Kinuyo Tanaka, 1960

It feels a bit strange that a film from 1960 about events which happened just 15-20 years earlier feels like a stuffy costume drama, but this might just be the price Tanaka had to pay in order to tackle a quite opelny revisionist project like this at all.

Starts promising, when the Manchurian prince Ryuko is supposed to marry turns out to be a sensitive, bespectacled dreamer instead of the rough barbarian her family expected. The scenes of the both of them making house in colonized China are quite nice. There's also a welcome touch of studio surrealism: Ryuko painting a picture of a particularly kitschy sunset - doubled in the background by the "original", an equally kitschy matte painting.

The rest (ie everything after "history happens") is well-meant and competent, but dull.

Lovers Are Wet, Tatsumi Kumashiro, 1973

Sex as a theater of love, hate and death.

A strip of celluloid film dragged over several meters of concrete: you might be able to superficially clean it, but something will stick.