Haze + Thunder + The Moon
Thunder
Takashi Itô
- 1982
- Japan
- Experimental
- 5mn
- Color
Novelty
The Moon
Takashi Itô
- 1994
- Japan
- Experimental
- 5mn
- Color
Novelty
Two superb avant-garde short films that deconstruct daily life to better reconstruct it using surrealist collages, interlocked with one another, that manage to enchant reality by pushing it into another dreamlike dimension.
“Cinema is capable of presenting an unreal world as a living reality and of creating a strange space, unique to this means of expression. My main intention was to change the ordinary scenes of daily life and to draw the audience and myself into a whirlwind of supernatural illusions by using the magic of films.” (Takashi Itô, in Image Forum magazine, October 1984).
Credits
- Screenplay : Takashi Itô
- Sound design : Takashi Inagaki
Haze
Shinya Tsukamoto
- 2005
- Japan
- Horror
- 49mn
- Original version with French subtitles
- Color
Novelty
A man awakens injured, in a confined and labyrinthine place, from which he will try to escape.
For his first use of digital cameras, Tsukamoto returns to his visual and thematic roots, exploring the body, torturing it as he had done in Tetsuo: the claustrophobic nightmare becomes a reflection on the human condition. While in Tetsuo, flesh was attacked by matter and fused with it, here it becomes what incorporates the human being to its organism, a metaphor for a contemporary era and city that absorbs and shreds individuals. The fact that Tsukamoto himself plays the hero in search of a way out, makes this stylistic exercise all the more troubling.
Credits
- With : Shinya Tsukamoto, Kahori Fujii, Takahiro Murase, Takariho Mandaka...
- Screenplay : Shinya Tsukamoto
- Photography : Shinya Tsukamoto
- Editing : Shinya Tsukamoto
- Music by : Chū Ishikawa
- Production : Shinichi Kawahara, Shinya Tsukamoto
Flying Lotus
Haze is Shinya Tsukamoto’s supertrippy claustrophobic short feature, it’s a film that I find very inspiring because it was super terrifying and very hyper vivid and scary and a smaller film than what he’s done, and I think it’s also a very effective way to manipulate isolation and confined spaces. I feel this is the best confined space piece I’ve ever seen, and it’s very visceral, and I’ve always wanted to try to create a sequence that would be a rival to this film but so far I have not been able to crack it, and I hope maybe I never do because I find there was some kind of magic in making this one.
Flying Lotus