Radical Japanese films at AGNSW
When you break the traditional language of cinema, the cemented hierarchy of images goes with it. Art by Chloe Callow
February 23, 2021
Sometimes, the only way to repair the machine is to break it. The Art Gallery of NSW is screening two incendiary masterworks of radical cinema as part of the Japan Film Festival: Matsumoto Toshio’s feverish exploration into the LGBT underground of 1960s Tokyo,
Funeral Parade of Roses (1969) and Tsukamoto Shinya’s break-neck industrial fable of flesh being fused with metal,
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989).
The animosity towards ‘respectable’ style shared by these two films is well-founded. Unfortunately, the vast majority of commercial cinema is born from capitalist mega-conglomerates, creating an endless stream of disposable media. Popular films use a grammar that reduces signifiers of reality to a strict patriarchal and heterosexist hierarchy of images that saturate the visual
Updated / Tuesday, 9 Feb 2021
13:00
Kevin Coyne of the Irish Film Institute introduces
Japanese Story, the IFI s new season celebrating the finest cinema from Japan over the decades - classics from titans such as Ozu and Kurosawa are included, alongside some more outré examples of work from contemporary directors, as well as samples of uniquely Japanese takes on genre - watch now, via IFI@Home.
The Japanese film industry stands not only as one of the world s oldest and largest, but also one of the most historically significant of national cinemas.
In its infancy, the medium was quickly accepted, due to the influence of traditional theatre forms such as kabuki. As was common internationally, films screened with live musical accompaniment, but one uniquely Japanese development at this stage was the introduction of benshi, narrators who would provide commentary on the action, often performing their own dialogue for the characters. Having witnessed a benshi performance at t