Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Tokyo Story (Yasujirô Ozu, 1953)- full length
Those brought up on the energetic diet of American cinema may find it
hard to appreciate the quietist art of the great Japanese director
Yasujiro Ozu. He has been called the poet of family life, capable of
taking the seemingly trivial and making great drama of it. Nothing was
too small to be significant.
Ozu steadfastly peers into the
hearts and minds of his characters until we feel we know them
intimately. And the loyalty of those who love his work is as absolute as
his own conviction. The number of film-makers who have made pilgrimages
to his grave (marked simply by the Japanese word for nothing) runs into
dozens.
Ozu started making films in 1927 and was one of the
last to forsake the silent cinema. Much of this early work has been lost
or destroyed. But we know from examples that he wasn't always as calmly
contemplative as he was in his late work, which reached the west only
in the 60s. He could make boisterous comedies and earthy chronicles of
family life, containing outrageous sight gags. In the last stretch of
his life, however, he had refined his art so much that it hardly seemed
like art at all.
His most famous film, and certainly one of his
masterpieces, is Tokyo Story. In it an elderly couple are taken to visit
their grown-up children in Tokyo. Too busy to entertain them, the
children pack them off to a noisy resort. Returning to Tokyo, the old
woman visits the widow of another son, who treats her better, while the
old man gets drunk with some old companions. They seem to realise they
are a burden, and simply try to smooth things over as best they can.
By now the children have, albeit guiltily, given up on them; even when
their mother is taken ill and dies, they rush back to Tokyo after
attending the funeral. A simple proverb expresses their failure: "Be
kind to your parents while they are alive. Filial piety cannot reach
beyond the grave." The last sequence is of the old man alone in his
seaside home, followed by an outside shot of the rooftops of the town
and a boat passing by on the water. Life goes on.
The film
condemns no one and its sense of inevitability carries with it only a
certain resigned sadness. "Isn't life disappointing," someone says at
one point. Yet the simple observations are so acute that you feel that
no other film could express its subject matter much better.
Ozu
shoots his story with as little movement of the camera as possible. We
view scenes almost always from the floor, lower than the eye level of a
seated character. He insisted that no actor was to dominate a scene.
The balance of every scene had to be perfect. Chishu Ryu, who often
played the father in Ozu's films about family life, once had to complete
two dozen devoted to raising a tea cup.
Tokyo Story was
followed by eight other films, all of them as masterful, and a group
named after the seasons, including Early Spring and An Autumn Afternoon.
Each was about the problems of ordinary family life. While their
conservative nature made younger more polemical Japanese directors, such
as Imamura and Oshima, impatient, their universality has come to be
recognised the world over. Ozu was the most Japanese of film-makers, but
his work can still cross most cultural barriers.
Derek Malcolm
The Guardian,
Ainu, First People of Japan, The Original & First Japanese
The Ainu People
"Ainu" means "human". The Ainu people regard things
useful to them or beyond their control as "kamuy"(gods). In daily life,
they prayed to and performed various ceremonies for the gods. These
gods include : "nature" gods, such as of fire, water, wind and thunder ;
"animal" gods, such as of bears, foxes, spotted owls and gram-puses ;
"plant" gods, such as of aconite, mush-room and mugwort ; "object" gods,
such as of boats and pots ; and gods which protect houses, gods of
mountains and gods of lakes. The word "Ainu" refers to the opposite of
these gods.
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Expo de KATAGAMI (pochoirs japonais)
KATAGAMI Style - Paper stencils and Japonisme
About the Exhibition
In the late 19th century, a huge number of Japanese katagami, a traditional type of stencil used for dyeing cloth, were exported to the West along with ukiyo-e prints, leading to the rise of Japonisme. Katagami had fervently embraced a wide range of modernization efforts.
It is a well-established fact that Western artists and designers discovered the charm of ukiyo-e on their journeys to Japan and were greatly influenced by the innovative compositions and colors of the woodblock prints, but katagami
were similarly eye-catching, and also served as a source of
inspiration. This influence can be detected in a variety of genres
including Charles Rennie Mackintosh's furniture in the U.K., René
Lalique's jewelry in France, Koloman Moser's textiles in Austria, and
Louis Comfort Tiffany's glassworks in the U.S. Also, like ukiyo-e,
the paper stencils helped spawn the trend of Japonisme as evidenced in
the Art Nouveau and Jugendstil movements. And even today, katagami designs continue to appear in contemporary products.
Along with actual katagami, in the exhibition we present kimono that were dyed with the patterns and ukiyo-e
prints in which they are depicted as well as glass- and metalwork,
ceramics, posters, furniture, and textiles that were produced in the
West between the late 19th and early 20th century. In addition to items
from noteworthy Japanese collections, a number of the many katagami that were taken abroad in the 19th century will be returning to Japan for the first time in over a century.
Viewers will have a special opportunity to see just how enamored Western artists of the period were of the charming katagami through a diverse selection of works from both domestic and foreign museums.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Expo Otomo Katsuhiro (le papa d'AKIRA)
As Hollywood attempts to butcher his most famous work, Katsuhiro Otomo
is looking back at a career in manga that's spanned nearly four decades.
The Miyagi native is best known for Akira, the dystopian
sci-fi epic whose 1988 anime adaptation – also by Otomo – is one of the
all-time classics of the genre. But that's just a small part of his
oeuvre, which stretched from early masterpieces like Domu to later, less successful works like the 2004 Steamboy anime and live-action film Mushishi. Though his work rate has slowed in the past decade, Otomo returned to prominence at the start of 2012 with the release of Kaba 2,
a new collection of colour illustrations, some of which will be on
display in this large-scale retrospective exhibition. 'Genga' promises
to feature original artwork from throughout Otomo's career – and, true
to his Tohoku roots, the artist will be donating 30% of proceeds to
quake relief.
source: Time Out Tokyo
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