The Big Picture Magazine
A kitchen is one of the three settings in Masahiro Kobayashi’s Japan’s Tragedy (Nihon no higeki, 2012), and the table is the most prominent piece of furniture in this small room. An open sliding door offering a view into a small hallway and the adjacent bedroom creates some depth in the film’s opening eleven-minute scene, […]
Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House (Hausu, Japan, 1977) is a coming-of-age film that mixes horror and fantasy elements with humour and an undisguised penchant for the experimental. The title itself is programmatic – seven schoolgirls find themselves trapped in a haunted house. Shocked by the unexpected news that her widowed father has remarried while on a business […]
The Fossil (Kaseki, 1975), based on a novel by Yasushi Inoue, is about the elderly businessman Itsuki (Shin Saburi), who is diagnosed with cancer while on a trip to Europe. The film was initially a television miniseries consisting of eight one-hour episodes because for Kobayashi and for many other directors, including Akira Kurosawa, the decline […]
Seijun Suzuki’s Yumeji (Japan, 1991) is the concluding part of his “Taisho Trilogy”, the two other films being Zigeunerweisen (Tsigoineruwaizen, 1980) and Kagero-za (1981). All three are set in the Taisho era (1912-1926), a period in Japanese history marked by attempts to achieve more democracy – both political and cultural. The protagonists in Zigeunerweisen are […]
The anime film Tokyo Godfathers (Tokyo Goddofazazu, Japan, 2003) starts with children performing the nativity scene on Christmas eve and singing “Silent Night”. It is only after these comforting and delightful first shots that the whole setting is revealed – the interior of a church crowded with shabbily dressed men and women. The dark colours […]
On 25 November 1970, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) committed seppuku (ritual suicide by disembowelment; in the Western world better known as hara-kiri) after a failed coup d’état. Together with four young members of the Tatenokai (Shield Society), the private militia he had founded in 1968, Mishima had entered and occupied the headquarters of […]
Nobuo Nakagawa’s Jigoku (Japan, 1960) starts with shots of a coffin in a crematorium and of flames filling the whole screen while horrifying screams are heard from the off. The title in blood-red kanji is followed by the credits next to images of half-naked women in lascivious poses accompanied by a melodious jazz tune. This […]
White feathers falling from the ceiling like snowflakes, the camera revealing a heap of them on the furniture and, after a lateral movement, a woman who starts cutting her wrist with a small knife – this is the opening sequence of Harmful Insect (Gaichu, Japan, 2002). Filmed in total silence, the sequence combines lyricism and […]
In Keisuke Kinoshita’s Wedding Ring (Konyaku yubiwa, Japan, 1950), Noriko Kuki (Kinuyo Tanaka) finds herself on the threshold of adultery when she falls in love with the young medical intern Ema (Toshiro Mifune), who has been assigned to her husband Michio (Jukichi Uno), suffering from tuberculosis. The first encounter between Noriko and Ema takes place […]