Umeko (Rie Yokoyama) believes to have caught Torio redhanded (Tadanori Yokoo, whose character has been renamed “Birdey” in the English translation), shoplifting from her bookstore. Torio however is a performance actor – and real-world Art Theatre Guild performer – and the act of stealing is part of his research. The young people's encounter sets something in motion. Together them embark on committing crimes in #Tokyo's labyrinthine #Shinjuku neighbourhood and find their mirror images in a #kabuki play.

 

新宿泥棒日記 is a playful, dangerous exploration of youth and rebellion in a rapidly shifting Japan.

Otsuya's (Ayako Wakao) is forced into #prostitution and marked with a large spider tattoo. As the figure slowly takes shape under horishi Seikichi's skilled hands, Otsuya too transforms.

Synchronous to the screening of a film that wasn't, Derek Jarman's Blue was broadcast on radio and television. Those who tuned into the radio could request a special card printed in that most spectral of colours, International Klein Blue, a blue that according to its creator Yves Klein, has “a quality close to pure space” and “immaterial values beyond what can be seen or touched”.

“You say to the boy 'Open your eyes'. When he opens his eyes and sees the light, you make him cry out, saying 'Oh, Blue, come forth! Oh, Blue, arise! Oh, Blue, ascend! Oh, Blue, come in!'.”

– Nigel Terry

Submerged in #blue, seeing through what was left of Jarman's eyes, we live through the artist's life, and love, and loss. When you leave the theatre, put down that card, you're temporarily blinded by the physiological afterimage of a devastating disease. What remains is the voice of a filmmaker who lost his sight.

Japanese author Yukio Mishima was, besides an aesthete, a fierce proponent of Japanese nationalism. In 憂國, based on his short 1960 story, Mishima plays palace guard Lt. Shinji Takeyama. Despite being one of the instigators of an ultra-nationalist coup, Takeyama decides he cannot overthrow the government as it would mean having to kill his friends and be disloyal to the Emperor. Returning home, he and his bride Reiko (Yoshiko Tsuruoka) perform #切腹 (#seppuku / #HaraKiri), as in line with Takeyama's #samurai heritage.

 

Yūkoku is a #SilentFilm that plays out like #Noh #theatre, with an extreme emphasis on the beauty and love of death and loyalty respectively.

 

After Mishima's own seppuku in 1970, his widow ordered all copies of Yūkoku to be destroyed. In 2005, in Mishima's house, a pristine copy was uncovered in a tea box.

“It sounded interesting, at least while I kept out of the rain. But if it's a sermon, I'd sooner listen to the rain.”

– commoner

Jōhatsu, literally “evaporation” is the Japanese term for people disappearing without a trace. Salesman Tadashi Oshima is one of them. Director Shōhei Imamura, together with Oshima's fiancé Yoshie Hayakawa and actor Shigeru Tsuyuguchi created an investigative documentary that looks into this man, his motives, his possible whereabouts, and the others that are gone.

 

人間蒸発 is a fascinating exploration of aspects of 1960s Japanese society that make jōhatsu distinct from similar phenomena elsewhere.

In the summer of 1945, the people of a small Japanese village find a Black American helicopter pilot in one of their traps and lock him in the communal storeroom. While the war continues and the villagers wait for orders from above, the man – for the townspeople, his presence, this allegory – becomes something else.

“Your keeping this animal has meant all of us suffer!”

飼育 shares more than a few themes with Đorđe Kadijević's Празник from 1967. The war's the same, any war is, and the Chetniks too capture a Black American pilot. Again, the villagers seem to share a folie, a madness, rooted in an unshaken belief – call it tradition or shared illusions foolishness or hope.

Coming of Age Day in Japan.

“What the hell are you doing?”