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.

Dr. Tube (Séverin-Mars) invents a powder that distorts reality and promptly tests it out on some oblivious test subjects, who quickly can no longer recognise the world around them. The brilliance of La folie du Docteur Tube is its use of practical in-camera effects that makes us, the viewer, experience the hallucinogen.

 

This little folly by the great Abel Gance features Albert Dieudonné in a small part, who later would again work with Gance in his Napoleon (1927), as Napoléon Bonaparte.

 

This is one of the few (French) comedies from the time that I'm aware of with a Black character who is not a horrible racist stereotype or a white person in blackface. If you have any idea of who the professor's assistant is, please reach out on Mastodon.

Stressed?‽ Who's got time to be stressed when there's a business to be run!!? Tom Palazzolo's Jerry’s Deli is a great character study of not only a character, but a whole time period inhabited by characters. The titular Jerry is Jerry Meyer, owner and proprietor of a Chicagoan deli that happened to be right next to Palazzolo's film lab. You wanna eat? Now, eat! Wanna order? Whaddaya waiting for?? Order!! Roast beef on rye please.

“On RYE!?!”

– Jerry Meyer

All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl. Or a girl with a glue gun. Or skip the girl, get yourself a piece of cardboard, some foam latex, and a six pack of beer. Frank Grow's Red & Rosy is the embodiment of a special staple of #DIY culture that appears to be long-lost. Really kids, you don't need much of a budget. Or tomorrows latest equipment. The hottest Hollywood hotshot? Forget about it, ask your drunk uncle to yell at the camera for 10 minutes. You want authenticity? Tape some random medical footage straight from your teevee. Need a shot of adrenal juice?

 

Well, just watch this.

Science fiction may be one of those genres that's forever linked to the future and, depending on which side of 2000 you are at, either in a dystopian of utopian fashion.

 

An #Eiffel Tower watchman wakes up to find the world around him asleep. The few ones still awake – the bright, pretty, carefree things – explore, live and loot.

There's a handful of notable amateur films in the National Film Registry. One of them is the Zapruder film, another Sid Laverents' Multiple SIDosis.

“In terms of sheer entertainment value, I think that it demonstrated that one eccentric genius alone in his garage can rival the best of the Hollywood studios””

– Ross Lipman, UCLA Film & Television Archive restorationist

Sid Laverents was an airplane engineer and former one-man band vaudevillian who in his fifties joined the #SanDiego Amateur Moviemakers Club. One of his best-known outputs, Multiple SIDosis, took him and his 16 mm #Bolex four years and 1,900 feet of celluloid to make. In it, Sid – and a musical troupe made up of many overdubbed versions of himself – performs the popular and insanely catchy tune Nola.

 

Catch it here.

Someone wears purple on Purple Day (International Epilepsy Day).

 

Both in The Wormwood Star (Curtis Harrington, 1956) and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954), Marjorie Cameron wears shades of purple. Professionally known as Cameron, she was a follower of #Thelema, the philosophical movement founded by occultist Aleister Crowley.

“Purple beyond purple: it is the light higher than eyesight”

– Aleister Crowley, Liber AL vel Legis sub figura CCXX (1904)

Meanwhile in 1946, rocket scientist #JackParsons and (pre-Scientology) sci-fi author #LRonHubbard worked on a series of Crowley-related Magick ceremonies named Babalon Working. After Parsons declared the rituals a success, he encountered Cameron in his own house. She became the element required to continue the ceremonies, this resulting in her being declared Babalon, the Scarlet Woman.

In a small train station's waiting room, people #sleep. #Trains in the distance rumble along. #Snow covers footprints crossing nearby tracks and the wooden shed where travellers, strangers, huddle together in their shared fate. Pavel Kostomarov's cinematography and Sergey Loznitsa's direction capture the silence.

Owen Land explores meaning, wit, and #WordPlay, and manages to unite the #marketing of #umeboshi #plums in a wide variety of vessels, the brokering of #brides, and pandas discussing #Freud in all of the above contexts.

“My film is going to be introduced by a fake panda and it’s going to be about Japanese salted plums among other things.”

– FIRST PANDA