To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Okinawa's reverting from American to Japan, our friends at New York's Japan Society will host, from May 13 to June 3, V
Japan Society presents Part of the Okinawa in Focus series and the Globus Film Series, Visions of Okinawa: Cinematic Reflections. The screenings of these films are set for May 13th through June 3rd. In-theater screenings are set for May 13th through May 21st. Virtual screenings will run from May 14th through June 3rd. The films will be available to stream in North America or globally. For details, see the individual titles of the films below.
Marker’s experimental documentary,
Sunless, was heralded by critics and admirers as a return to personal filmmaking after a decade of radical, collectively produced films. Ostensibly a documentary about Japanese culture,
Sunless blasts apart the realist documentary tradition, continuing the radical aesthetic ideology of Vertovian cinema. Marker’s revival of Vertov’s montage techniques are used in this film to study the ontology of truth in documentary images and narrative films from the past.
Sunless features sequences from Tokyo, the Il de France, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, and outer space much in a way that resembles how Vertov combined images taken from opposite ends of the Soviet Union that compressed space-time in their montage. Vertov did it in the service of creating agitprop films that were meant to buttress the Leninist political program and Marker did it to explore connections between various practices, rituals, objects, nations, and cultures that were already co