Based on the homonymous collection of poems by Shuji Terayama, “Pastoral: To Die in the Country” is an autobiographical movie that, once more in a work of both the director and Atg, stretches the medium of cinema to its extremes, through an approach that is abstract, surrealistic, avant-garde, theatrical and meta, to name just a few of the elements that consist its narrative.
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Shin-chan is a 15-years-old boy who lives with his mother in Aomori Prefecture, at the foot of the Scary Mountain, where his father is buried. The young man lusts for the woman next door, to the anger of her husband and the annoyance of his mother, whom Shin-chan has no issue talking about even his most inner sexual thoughts. One day, he witnesses a woman in the village giving birth to a baby, but soon learns...
on Amazon by clicking on the image below
Shin-chan is a 15-years-old boy who lives with his mother in Aomori Prefecture, at the foot of the Scary Mountain, where his father is buried. The young man lusts for the woman next door, to the anger of her husband and the annoyance of his mother, whom Shin-chan has no issue talking about even his most inner sexual thoughts. One day, he witnesses a woman in the village giving birth to a baby, but soon learns...
- 9/4/2023
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
Nominated for the Palme d'Or in 1974, “Himiko” is one of the most renowned titles of both Atg and Masahiro Shinoda, perhaps for the way it manages to channel both “Horrors of Malformed Men” and Kurosawa's colored works, although the latter actually succeeded the film.
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The story follows the myth of the Sun Goddess, Himiko, who is the earliest Japanese historical figure documented in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean history, although her existence, identity, and location have been the source of endless debate. Nevertheless, the consensus talks about a queen-shaman who was ruling Yamatai, the Kingdom of the Sun before Japan became a specific, separate entity. In the film, she is a shaman who speaks for the Sun God, being revered in the society she lives in but also constrained by the will of her people for her to be a sacred entity.
Follow our coverage of Art Theatre Guild by clicking on the image below
The story follows the myth of the Sun Goddess, Himiko, who is the earliest Japanese historical figure documented in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean history, although her existence, identity, and location have been the source of endless debate. Nevertheless, the consensus talks about a queen-shaman who was ruling Yamatai, the Kingdom of the Sun before Japan became a specific, separate entity. In the film, she is a shaman who speaks for the Sun God, being revered in the society she lives in but also constrained by the will of her people for her to be a sacred entity.
- 8/26/2023
- by Panos Kotzathanasis
- AsianMoviePulse
“We must confront vague ideas with clear images” (“Il faut confronter les idées vagues avec des images claires”), reads a graffito on the wall of the bourgeois apartment that is the setting for La chinoise. Jean-Luc Godard’s explosive 14th feature film (one of no less than three Godard masterpieces that were released in 1967), which Pauline Kael called “ a speed-freak’s anticipatory vision of the political horrors to come,” is getting a 50th anniversary re-release at the Quad Cinema in New York.Is there any clearer image than that of Juliet Berto in red war paint, against a red wall, surrounded by a fort of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Books, pointing a machine gun at the camera? In 1964 Godard had famously said, quoting D.W. Griffith, that all filmgoers want is a girl and a gun. And that is what René Ferracci (1927-1982), the house designer of the Nouvelle Vague,...
- 7/21/2017
- MUBI
Above: Fan art poster for Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, USA, 2013); designer: Peter Stults.
In this latest run-down of the most popular posters on my Movie Poster of the Day Tumblr—covering the last four months of daily posts—I’m not leading off with the number one most liked and reblogged poster (the Hitch-centric Rear Window, below) because that was the main poster in my loquacious posters post a couple of months ago. So I’m starting with the second most popular: a superb retro take on Gravity by artist Peter Stults which was one of a number of alternative takes on the film commissioned by the UK magazine ShortList back in October.
The rest of the top 20, shown in descending order, are a pleasingly eclectic grab bag, with posters from nine different countries and seven different decades. Three of my very favorite recent discoveries appear all in a row: that French La notte,...
In this latest run-down of the most popular posters on my Movie Poster of the Day Tumblr—covering the last four months of daily posts—I’m not leading off with the number one most liked and reblogged poster (the Hitch-centric Rear Window, below) because that was the main poster in my loquacious posters post a couple of months ago. So I’m starting with the second most popular: a superb retro take on Gravity by artist Peter Stults which was one of a number of alternative takes on the film commissioned by the UK magazine ShortList back in October.
The rest of the top 20, shown in descending order, are a pleasingly eclectic grab bag, with posters from nine different countries and seven different decades. Three of my very favorite recent discoveries appear all in a row: that French La notte,...
- 1/7/2014
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
To accompany the exhaustive retrospective of the films of Jean-Luc Godard (49 programs in 21 days) that started as part of the New York Film Festival and runs through the end of October, I had planned to select my ten all-time favorite posters for Godard’s films. But when I sat down to the task and laid out the ten I’d chosen in front of me, the result was a selection of posters so overly familiar as to be banal. It looked like the postcard rack of any film bookstore in Paris. Much as I had hoped to choose less obvious designs, when it came down to it the posters created for Godard’s films in the 60s are hands down among the greatest film posters ever made: Clément Hurel’s Breathless, Chica’s Une femme est une femme, Jacques Vaissier’s Vivre sa vie, Georges Kerfyser’s Band à part and Une femme mariée,...
- 10/18/2013
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
Above: Poster signed “coo” for Nikudan [The Human Bullet] (Kihachi Okamoto, Japan, 1968).
For the past two months, and concluding this weekend, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been screening the films of Japan’s Art Theater Guild. Programmed in conjunction with the gallery exhibition Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, the series Art Theater Guild and Japanese Underground Cinema 1960-1986 was “the most comprehensive U.S. retrospective ever devoted to...the independent film company that radically transformed Japanese cinema by producing and distributing experimental, transgressive, and genre-shattering films from the early 1960s until the mid-1980s.”
Posters for the Atg were harder to find than I expected, at least in good high-quality scans, so I have concentrated on a handful of masterful designs from the late 60s, all of which use a combination of photo montage and illustration (a couple of which I have featured in this column before.)
According...
For the past two months, and concluding this weekend, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been screening the films of Japan’s Art Theater Guild. Programmed in conjunction with the gallery exhibition Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, the series Art Theater Guild and Japanese Underground Cinema 1960-1986 was “the most comprehensive U.S. retrospective ever devoted to...the independent film company that radically transformed Japanese cinema by producing and distributing experimental, transgressive, and genre-shattering films from the early 1960s until the mid-1980s.”
Posters for the Atg were harder to find than I expected, at least in good high-quality scans, so I have concentrated on a handful of masterful designs from the late 60s, all of which use a combination of photo montage and illustration (a couple of which I have featured in this column before.)
According...
- 2/8/2013
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
Back in November, after having written Movie Poster of the Week for almost three years, I decided to start a Tumblr as a place to display all those orphan posters I loved: the ones I couldn’t find all that much to say about, that didn’t fit any current trend or personal train of thought but which needed to be seen. It seemed natural to call it Movie Poster of the Day and so I decided I would try to post just one single poster a day, ideally something unfamiliar yet worthy of attention. In February, Flavorpill declared Movie Poster of the Day one of the “Essential Tumblrs for film fans” which persuaded me it was worth continuing and over the past eight months I have somehow managed to post something every single day. In the process I seem to have amassed over 15,000 followers on Tumblr.
I have a...
I have a...
- 7/6/2012
- MUBI
As a sidebar to the New York Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is currently running a retrospective of the great and underappreciated Japanese New Wave director Masahiro Shinoda. As an addendum to last week’s collection of posters from the festival (which I have since updated) I thought I’d collect the best Shinoda posters I could find. For some time I’ve been meaning to write about the superb Japanese designer Kiyoshi Awazu, who died last year at the age of 80. His poster, above, for Shinoda’s Himiko (1974) is a stunner, and one I would love to see full size (the better to see those tiny figures at the bottom). Awazu also designed the poster for Shinoda’s Double Suicide (1969) below, another favorite of mine (and the film itself is unmissable). Next to that is a terrific Polish poster for Shinoda’s Gonza the Spearman (1986) which...
- 10/1/2010
- MUBI
I recently came across a page on the website of the Cinématheque Française devoted to their eye-popping collection of Japanese posters, many of which I had never seen before. Though there are some striking examples of the highly dramatic painterly style of the 1950s (like this Throne of Blood), what really caught my eye were the collage designs of the ’60s perfected by the great Tadanori Yokoo and Kiyoshi Awazu (both subjects for a future column).
I thought I had a pretty good grasp on Nagisa Oshima but I had never even heard of Band of Ninja (1967) until I saw this rule-busting poster (designer unknown). I never would have thought that putting a photo of the director in the middle of a poster was a good idea until I saw this, but somehow it works amid the myriad illustrated, photographic and typographic elements.
Band of Ninja, it turns out, is a most unusual film itself.
I thought I had a pretty good grasp on Nagisa Oshima but I had never even heard of Band of Ninja (1967) until I saw this rule-busting poster (designer unknown). I never would have thought that putting a photo of the director in the middle of a poster was a good idea until I saw this, but somehow it works amid the myriad illustrated, photographic and typographic elements.
Band of Ninja, it turns out, is a most unusual film itself.
- 4/23/2010
- MUBI
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