Chronicles of Inferno: Japan’s Art Theater Guild film program

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Thursday, February 7, 2013
7:00 p.m. Silence Has No Wings
(Tobenai chinmoku). Kazuo Kuroki (Japan, 1966). Introduced by Roland Domenig. This dazzling blend of documentary realism and poetic abstraction recreates a “butterfly’s journey” (embodied by Mariko Kaga) across postwar Japan. “A film of sympathetic irrationality . . . fascinating in its strangeness”(Positif). (100 mins)

Friday, February 8, 2013
7:00 p.m. Ecstasy of the Angels
(Tenshi no kōkotsu). Koji Wakamatsu (Japan, 1972). Introduced by Go Hirasawa. An extreme-left militant group finds itself consumed by paranoia in Koji Wakamatsu’s notorious cocktail of politics, porn, and protest, one of the most infamous films of the Japanese (or any) New Wave. Written by Masao Adachi. (89 mins)

Saturday, February 9, 2013
8:00 p.m. She and He
(Kanojo to kare). Susumu Hani (Japan, 1963). Susumu Hani in person. Introduced by Roland Domenig. A housewife slowly becomes alienated from the world around her in Hani’s elliptical masterpiece, compared on release to the best of Antonioni. Starring Sachiko Hidari and Eiji Okada (Hiroshima, Mon Amour). (111 mins)

Sunday, February 10, 2013
3:00 p.m. Children Who Draw
(E o kaku kodomotachi). Susumu Hani (Japan, 1956). Susumu Hani in person. Introduced by Julian Ross. Hani’s innovative documentary looks at children who draw, and one boy in particular, who doesn’t draw well at all. The film observes the minutiae of a child’s daily world, where every moment encompasses a lifetime of emotion. With the companion film Children in a Classroom (1955). (68 mins)

Sunday, February 10, 2013
5:00 p.m. The Inferno of First Love
(Hatsukoi jigokuhen). Susumu Hani (Japan, 1968). Susumu Hani and Kimiko Nukamura in person. Introduced by Miryam Sas. A girl and a boy weave through Tokyo’s nightclub/counterculture district in this portrait of a Japan on the crux of worlds old and new. Boasting Hani’s documentary film techniques and an experimental, wildly kinky script by underground provocateur Shuji Terayama. (107 mins)

Thursday, February 14, 2013
7:00 p.m. Pastoral: Hide and Seek
(Den’en ni shisu). Shuji Terayama (Japan, 1974). Introduced by Miryam Sas. Welcome to the color-filtered, cross-dressing, orgiastic, surrealist realms of Pastoral, which reimagines a director’s childhood through a screen of pastel colors, group sex, and looming adults. One of the key underground films of the 1970s, from the same planet of Kuchar, Jodorowsky, and early John Waters. (102 mins)

Friday, February 15, 2013
7:00 p.m. Double Suicide
(Shinju ten no Amijima). Masahiro Shinoda (Japan, 1969). Shinoda’s “remix” of a classic Japanese bunraku puppet play finds live actors, puppets, and their handlers all part of the action, heightened by a Brechtian divide between “story” and “telling” and a jarring score by Toru Takemitsu. Starring Kichiemon Nakamura and Shima Iwashita. (100 mins)

Saturday, February 16, 2013
6:00 p.m. The Ceremony
(Gishiki). Nagisa Oshima (Japan, 1971). Oshima’s audacious family saga is nothing less than the history of the postwar Japanese state. “Makes contemporary cinema look puny by comparison, so dense and complex its achievement”(TIFF Cinematheque). (122 mins)

Saturday, February 23, 2013
8:30 p.m. Human Bullet
(Nikudan). Kihachi Okamoto (Japan, 1968). A reluctant kamikaze at the tail end of WWII enjoys his last day on earth—or tries to—in this disorienting, savage antiwar satire, reminiscent of Sam Fuller by way of Hunter S. Thompson. From the director of Sword of Doom. (116 mins)

Sunday, February 24, 2013
2:00 p.m. Shura
Toshio Matsumoto (Japan, 1971). Experimental filmmaker Toshio Matsumoto (Funeral Parade of Roses) destabilizes the samurai film with this stately, pitch-black tale of a ronin distracted from duty by a scheming courtesan, and his later vengeance. A Borgesian satire in the guise of samurai horror. (134 mins)

Wednesday, February 27, 2013
7:00 p.m. A Man Vanishes
(Ningen jōhatsu). Shohei Imamura (Japan, 1967). What began as a documentary on johatsu, the phenomenon of people going missing in overcrowded Japan, became a brilliant film years ahead of its time in its blurring of fact and fiction, “a coup de cinéma equaled only by Kiarostami’s Close-Up”(TIFF Cinematheque). (125 mins)

More Info

Link

http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries/ATG

Call

(510) 642-1412

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