Sarai Newsletter Film at Sarai: Asian Film Cultures

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Film at Sarai : Asian Film Cultures
A Series on Japanese Cinema

Sarai inaugurates a series of weekly screenings devoted to the film
cultures of Asia. The series will seek to develop reflections on film
industries, auteurs, genres, film styles, national concerns. While we would
like to keep discussions informal (our café re-opens with the university),
we hope to address some of the thematic focuses that particularly animate
the Sarai programme: urban social experience,  the mediatized experience of
time, space and speed, the culture of technology, the materiality of media
practice, the relationship between media representations and social and
political history. 

We begin with a series of Japanese films that move between the work of the
classic auteurs Kurosawa and Ozu and contemporary film-makers such as
Itami. We are particularly pleased to present two animes or animated films
that are central to the visionary and often apocalyptic dimensions of
contemporary Japanese perceptions about technology and the city. 

Amongst the other screenings planned for the Asian film cultures series are
The Herd (Yilmez Guney, Turkey), City of Sadness (Hou Tsiao Sen, Taiwan)
and Farewell, My Concubine (Chen Kaige). 
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Akira, 1987, (animation),  124 min.
Director: Kutushiro Otomo
Friday, June 22nd 2001, 4:30 pm

Akira is a brilliantly drawn tale of impending apocalypse set in 2050
Tokyo. A brilliant flash envelops the city 31 years after world war III.
Teenage gangs, psychic children with devastating powers, government agents
and underground resistance groups course through a ravaged and visceral
cityscape. Compared by critics to classic masterpieces such as Bladerunner,
Clockwork Orange and Mad Max, this anime or animated film derives from
comic artist Otomo's six volume cartoon strip epic or manga, a widely
translated work which won many awards, spawned video games and merchandise
ranging from t-shirts to lunch boxes and toys. Otomo's current work is the
six part The Legend of Mother Sarah ( with Nagayasu Takumi ) and Hunchback
( with Alexandro Jodorowsky ) for comics and Roujin Z and Memories as film
director. 

I Live in Fear, 1955,  113 min.
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Friday, June 29th 2001, 4:30 pm

Toshiro Mifune, almost unrecognizable under layers of make-up, stars as a
graying patriarch whose fear of nuclear annihilation leads him to make
plans to move his large family from Tokyo to a farm in Brazil. Thinking his
fears irrational, and expressing grave concern over the dispensation of his
estate, they take him to court and, like a good judge, Kurosawa lets both
sides exhaust themselves without drawing a premature judgement. Fear offers
a hugely compelling glimpse at the post-war Japanese mindset, and at the
Cold War mindset in general.

A Taxing Woman, 1988, 127 min.
Director: Juzo Itami
Friday, July 6th 2001, 4:30pm

Many of Itami's films are exhaustive but entertaining looks at various
professions or businesses. Restaurants, hospitals, the geisha trade, and
even supermarkets have been placed under Itami's cinematic microscope. A
Taxing Woman follows the activities of a crack tax investigator, played
with a characteristically offbeat charm by Itami regular (and wife)
Miyamoto Nobuko. Even tiny intricacies of Japanese tax law become
interesting as they are used to construct an intriguing plot involving a
crooked love hotel king.


Good Morning, 1959, 93 min.
Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Friday, July 13th 2001, 4:30 pm

The film is set in a tidy Tokyo neighborhood of close-quartered homes where
everyone runs in and out of each other's houses and pries into each other's
business. Salesmen creep in and out of doorways with an array of American
convenience products. Minoru and Isamu are schoolboy brothers obsessed with
sumo wrestling, which they watch religiously on a neighbor's TV. Eventually
they want a set of their own and when their parents refuse, they take a vow
of silence not only at home but in school. Besides sumo wrestling, Isamu
and Minoru's other interest is farting contests. Ozu contrasts this
"childish" activity with the banal conversation and foolish concerns of the
adults. Good Morning is an eccentric, satirical portrait of family life
strewn with gags about social formality, romance, gossip, and the
consumerism of modern Japan.


Patlabor (animation), 1989, 100 min.
Director: Oshi Mamoru
Friday, 20/7/01, 4:30 pm

In the late 20th century, highly advanced robots, known as Labors, were
developed for construction work, in the military, for under sea exploration
and even recreational . The suicide of a mysterious man on the massive
Babylon Project construction site sets off a cascade of events that may
signal the destruction of Tokyo. What is the connection between the
suicide, the new Mobile Police AV-XO Zero Labor, and a berserk prototype
tank? When Patlabor (mobile police) cops investigate an unexplained wave of
rogue Labors' rampaging across the city, they uncover a sinister revenge
plot to infect Tokyo's eight thousand Labor population with the deadly
BABEL virus. The first in a highly acclaimed series, PATLABOR 1 Mobile
Police is a science-fiction police drama set against a tale of danger and
high-tech revenge.