Toshio Matsumoto Day

 

‘Toshio Matsumoto was a Japanese film director best known for his avant-garde and experimental style of filmmaking. His work is renowned for its innovative use of visual experimentation, non-linear narratives, and thematic exploration of identity, gender, and society. Matsumoto’s most celebrated film, Funeral Parade of Roses, stands as a landmark in Japanese cinema, blending documentary-style realism with surrealistic and experimental techniques to explore the countercultural aspects of 1960s Tokyo.

‘Matsumoto’s career began in the late 1950s, a period marked by rapid societal changes and cultural upheaval in Japan. He initially gained recognition for his short films and experimental works, which pushed the boundaries of traditional cinema. These early projects established Matsumoto as a leading figure in Japan’s avant-garde art scene, blending the influences of Western experimental cinema with the unique sensibilities of Japanese art and culture. By the 1960s, he had become a prominent voice in challenging conventional norms and exploring complex themes through his work. Funeral Parade of Roses was a defining moment in his career, garnering international attention for its bold narrative and visual style and cementing Matsumoto’s reputation as an innovative filmmaker.

‘Matsumoto’s films seek to challenge and dissect conventional storytelling and cinematography. His work frequently incorporates elements of Japanese traditional culture, juxtaposed with modern or futuristic themes, to craft stories that are both timeless and reflective of the societal shifts occurring during his active years. The director is not afraid to utilise shocking imagery or unconventional narrative devices to engage the audience, requiring viewers to immerse themselves deeply into the psyches of the characters and the films’ complex, multifaceted storylines.

‘His films often tackle themes of identity, sexuality, and the human psyche, revealing a deep and nuanced understanding of the human condition. These themes are not presented straightforwardly; instead, they are woven intricately into the fabric of his storytelling, requiring viewers to engage with the films on a more profound level to truly appreciate their depth and complexity. Furthermore, Matsumoto’s use of colour, framing, and editing is pioneering, contributing to a body of work that is as visually stunning as it is thought-provoking. Each film is a carefully crafted piece of art, demanding attention and respect for the subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, commentary on society and humanity contained within its frames.’ — Bronze Screen Dream

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Toshio Matsumoto @ IMBb
Remembering Matsumoto Toshio
Toshio Matsumoto Page @ Facebook
TM @ MUBI
TM @ Letterboxd
DVD: ‘FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES’ @ Re:Voir
TM @ ELECTRONIC ARTS INTERMIX
Screen as Psyche, or Intensities for Damaged Eyes: Selected Works by Toshio Matsumoto
FOR MY CRUSHED RIGHT EYE – THE VISIONARY FILMS OF TOSHIO MATSUMOTO
ARTIST INTERVIEW: TOSHIO MATSUMOTO
Book: ‘Toshio Matsumoto Collected Writings Vol.1 1953-1965’
TM @ { feuilleton }
FOR CRITERION CONSIDERATION: TOSHIO MATSUMOTO’S FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES
Everything Visible Is Empty: Toshio Matsumoto
TOSHIO MATSUMOTO DIGITAL ARCHIVE
A Week Beats A Year: In Tribute To Toshio Matsumoto and FUNERAL PARADE OF ROSES (1969)

 

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Extras

The Thing About…Art & Artists – Toshio Matsumoto

A DVD set “grail” acquisition: Toshio Matsumoto

Matsumoto Toshio – The Weavers of Nishijin (1961)

 

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For the Damaged Right Eye Graph Storyboard (1968)

 

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Interview

 

Gerow: While you eventually ended up a filmmaker, I heard that you originally wanted to be a painter. I wonder if you could talk about the relation between cinema and painting and why you decided on a career in film.

Matsumoto: Well, I loved painting. I had been painting since middle school, but Japan was very poor at the time I was about to enter college in the early 1950s. To do painting meant you weren’t going to eat. Even so, I wanted to paint, but my parents were bitterly opposed to me going to an art school and said they wouldn’t pay for art school examinations or tuition. In those days, there weren’t part-time jobs around like there are today, so there was no way I could have done it on my own. So I gave up on art school and entered the medical course at the University of Tokyo because I was interested in the brain and problems like schizophrenia.

But even though I didn’t necessarily grow to dislike that, I thought I had only one life to live and I wanted to pursue art. Without telling my parents, I changed my major half-way through to art and art history in the literature faculty. Tokyo, however, didn’t really have any classes teaching you how to paint, so I studied art theory and history in school and learned painting on my own. In my studies, I learned for the first time that there was an avant-garde cinema in Europe in the 1920s that visually was deeply related to contemporary art–a fact that struck me like a bolt out of the blue. Though I couldn’t see these films in Japan, I was strongly stimulated by foreign books and articles about them. I felt that this, an area where issues of art and cinema overlapped, was what I had been searching for.

Of course, I loved movies and went to see them a lot from the time I was in middle and high school. I was even treated like a juvenile delinquent and was arrested twice by the Shinjuku police because I skipped school. Well, I was that much in love with film, and I asked a friend of mine who had a stock holders pass–his father was in the theater business–to lend it to me, telling him I’d return it whenever he wanted to go. I’d go to school until noon and then go straight to Shinjuku where I’d see one movie after another, going into every first-run theater in Shinjuku from one end to another. To see all the first-run films in Shinjuku meant that I was seeing almost all the releases.

Gerow: Both Japanese and foreign ones?

Matsumoto: Yes, anything, including old films at repertory houses. I saw several hundred in a year–I liked movies that much. But I only came to want to make films myself when, as I said, I encountered the world of experimental film. Until then, I had liked cinema as a spectator–wanting to make it on my own came later. It was right at the end of high school and the beginning of college that Italian Neorealist films came to Japan and also influenced me. I was shocked in a way I had never been before. How can I say it? I felt I should really think more seriously about a kind of cinema that could completely unify reality and expression and delve its way into people’s minds.

So my starting point was Italian Neorealism and experimentalism–the avant-garde and the documentary. Both were extremely fascinating to me, but that’s where problems arose. Although I found the freedom of avant-garde’s uninhibited, imaginative world extremely attractive, it had the tendency to get stuck in a closed world. Documentaries, on the other hand, while intensely related to reality, would not really thoroughly address internal mental states and were so dependent upon their temporal contexts they would look old-fashioned if their temporal context changed. I wondered whether the point of collision between the limitations and strong points of the two forms could not pose a new set of topics for cinema. My starting point was thus to investigate, using Alain Resnais’s Guernica as a handhold, this kind of imagined cinema.

That said, however, the most basic thing is to firmly plant one’s feet in the essential characteristics of the cinematic medium: its documentary quality and its sense of reality. Maybe today there are lots of images you can produce without a camera, but basically as long as you are filming with a camera, there is a reality before you. The first problem when starting out is how to approach the tripartite relationship between that objective reality, the world of expression, and the filmmaker’s subjective manipulation.

At any rate, since I didn’t study production in college, I set a goal of trying to catch up with what people usually study in four years of film school in about a year on the job after getting out of college. To do that, I planned to join a mid-size film company without a precise division of labor, a place where I could take part in all aspects of filmmaking from beginning to end, and thereby master the basics of production. The company I entered with that in mind was called Shin Riken Cinema. There was nothing particularly attractive about the company, but it was just about the right size for me to acquire basic filmmaking technique. In fact, I was able to get involved in all aspects of film production, from the start of planning to the completion of the film. Outside work, I listened, read, and saw a lot: I borrowed films and analyzed them, studying how they had been made. In that way, I learned in about a year what you study in the directing course at Nihon University, and then started making films the next year.

Gerow: I was very impressed with For My Crushed Right Eye when I saw it at the YIDFF’93, especially the challenging aspects of its form. It seemed to depict less an object than an era. Just what did 1968 or the 1960s mean to you? And how did you try to express that in film?

Matsumoto: You’re right. Looking back on the 1960s as a whole, I think it was the most significant period of change in the 20th century alongside the 1920s. It was, more than anything else, a paradigm shift in ways of seeing and thinking, in sensibility and values. This was true of everything including art and documentary; all the old standards had become invalid. I think the fact many did not switch to a new framework produced a suffocating sense of oppression not only in Japan, but elsewhere in the world as well. That’s why campus protests sparked by the Nanterre branch of the University of Paris in 1968 spread throughout the world like wildfire. I think the fact that these interlocking kinds of phenomena radiated out internationally must have reflected some synchronic essence. In the end, then, within the framework of the wartime and postwar structure, a new, unconstricted state of things manifested itself in many areas and generated conflict. It was this age of structural diastrophism that was the 1960s. There were great social and political transformations, but the question of values was enormous as well, one which I believe extended to the fields of culture and the arts.

The greatest harvest amidst all this was that the fact that everything is part of an institutional system became extremely clear. That means, for instance, that the way of looking at things changes according to the point of view–that it isn’t determined from the start. For example, even the law of perspective in painting is a mode of perceiving space formulated by a way of looking at things established during a certain socio-historical turning point in the West; it becomes obvious that it, too, is an institutional system. In that way, even modes and forms of expression in art, including cinema, were in the end seen as being created institutionally . In fact, when the system loses momentum, these forms become naturalized; the process by which art begins to look natural when custom or inertia becomes a fixed norm is itself a system.

Anyway, that’s how I started to think. And also about how to devour this system. As a political problem, the system is not only the power that oppresses people in this or that a way or visible forms of political repression. Power is also what systematizes our thought, feelings, art, and culture in invisible ways. If we don’t become aware of this and shake its foundations, we cannot move the structure of power in a real sense. That’s why, after an immediate postwar period in which things were largely put into motion by the direct collision of the political dynamics of authority vs. anti-authority, we came to be controlled by more invisible things like human consciousness, feelings, points of view, or values. I thought that the most pressing issue facing art was how to become aware of this and work to undermine the system as a form of customary inertia. Films that startle and arouse self-awareness of that kind of internal distortion change the condition of cinema itself–this I think is art’s form of struggle against authority. In that sense, there is an immeasurable significance to the fact not just film, but the 1960s avant-garde art movement in general impelled the de-systemization of artistic expression, artists, viewers, and the visual culture system as a whole, including the condition of initially being completely unaware of responsibility for the war that I first problematized. Well, the disposition towards systemization is deeply rooted, so this issue has stayed with us until today without easy resolution.

Gerow: Afterwards you moved into fiction feature films beginning with Funeral of Roses, which I saw recently. At that time a lot of directors coming out of especially Iwanami Productions such as Kuroki Kazuo and Higashi Yoichi were entering the fiction film world. You also did, but what problems did you face when you started making feature films after your experience in documentary or experimental film?

Matsumoto: Yes, the first one was Funeral of Roses which was released in 1969, but it was not as if I was thinking at the time that I wanted to switch to fiction films or be able to work in commercial cinema. On the contrary, given that the general, commodified form of cinema was the one molded by the conventional world of custom and inertia, I never wanted to become a professional studio director. However, the sense in my case was that, because I wanted to make a kind of experimental, dramatic film that had not existed before, I was provocatively raiding the fiction film world as a guerrilla. Thus in this project, my creative intent was to disturb the perceptual schema of a dualistic world dividing fact from fiction, men from women, objective from subjective, mental from physical, candidness from masquerade, and tragedy from comedy. Of course the subjects I took up were gay life and the student movement–since it was made around the same time as For My Crushed Right Eye, the material is probably similar. But in terms of form, I dismantled the sequential, chronological narrative structure and arranged past and present, reality and fantasy on temporal axes as in a cubist painting, adopting a fragmented, collage-like form that quoted from literature, theater, painting, and music old and new from both East and West.

While I was not clearly conscious of it at the time, this effort connects with the concept of the postmodern that appeared later. In a sense, this kind of rejection of the ordered and arranged world of the dualistic law of perspective I am talking about is a way to start bringing modernity into question. Moving in that direction, the modern in my case breaks down on one level of the fiction at the point it is fully analyzed. More than criticizing the modern on the basis of the premodern, the concept in Funeral of Roses was to advance and rupture it by investigating it thoroughly.

Those were the days of furious political struggles over the US-Japan Security Treaty renewal in 1970, so I was criticized considerably for making this kind of film. I was denounced, but in my mind, I did not want to aim for a message about the 1970 Security Treaty, but rather throw forth my premonitions about much larger movements in the earth’s crust, in the values and modes of perception of the world that would undermine modernity itself.

Gerow: Speaking of the postmodern, perhaps we can say that if the problem in the early 1960s was that left-wing films up until then focused on the external world without problematizing their own internal subjectivity, then in the postmodern era, especially in Japan, we see the opposite case with the rise of diary or personal films. It is as if the definition of the problem itself has changed. That is, and this is a criticism I sometimes hear, these personal films, instead of striving for the kind of integration of the external and internal worlds you theorized, are now excessively centered on interiority.

Matsumoto: I think that’s so. That’s why, even though I do accord importance to these kinds of private diary films as a form of subjective documentary, I don’t make them myself. One reason is the existence of the traditional “I-novel” or “watakushi shosetsu” in Japan and the danger that these films will connect with that kind of closed-off individuality. If they relate to it in a bad way, it will submerge them in a closed world lacking an Other similar to that of otaku.5 I wonder if this trend has not reached a limit. Certainly, individuality originally gained importance in the sense it opposed the “private” to the kind of coded and institutionalized “public” I just discussed. I support confronting this uniform public with individuality in order to destroy a homogenized public, but it disturbs me when this individuality becomes that of an otaku. That’s one reason. The other reason relates to the “I” found in Descartes’s “I think therefore I am,” the “I” in a modernist cogito establishing an independent self through opposition with the world. Well, there are problems with an “I” which doesn’t doubt its “self” and the so-called “I-films” (watakushi eiga) share those: they never put their “I” in question. Since they don’t attempt to relativize themselves through a relationship with the external world, they gradually become self-complete–a pre-established harmony. Fidelity to this self-identical self is connected to something like the modern myth of individuality. In that sense, they are extremely over-optimistic. This trend itself stabilized years ago and has become just another system.

Gerow: If you compare your works after the 1960s with those sixties films, what kind of transformations do you perceive? There is, for instance, the issue of technology with the introduction of new equipment like video.

Matsumoto: I already had my eyes on technology at the time very few people were using it because it was a part of what was external to the “self” I just talked about, something that had not been touched by human consciousness. I was fascinated by the dynamic possibility that this unknown externality, this interaction of man and machine, could rupture the modern world of the self. But cinema itself was that way from the beginning. With forms like the novel, you read each word and line of the manuscript over and over again, such that consciousness commands everything. But with film, especially with documentary, there’s more of a chance that information will accidentally appear from beyond consciousness and that a tension will be generated by the filmmaker instantly reacting to that. In that process, the framework of the self begins to waver and expand, which is something that technology also causes. However, in the last ten years or so, visual technology has so rapidly developed that everyone including the neighbor’s cat is absorbed in the “effect syndrome.” So I’ve now turned my back on this homogenizing phenomenon.

If you ask what I’ve been doing, if I can use the case of Dogra Magra (“Dogura magura,”1988), I’ve shifted my focus to experiments in context, experiments in deconstructing the contextual system through which people give meaning to or interpret the world. When people create an image of the world inside themselves, they do that through a story. They always narrativize the world. Perception is shaped in the form “X is Y,” and that descriptive form is, in the end, a narrative. That won’t change as along as human beings have language. But the problem is that this way of forming a context is conventionalized and easily confines the relationship between one’s self and the world to a stable law of perspective. For instance, when people are given more than one item of information, they associatively create a story out of the relationships between those items. There’s a part of a game show where they show an image bit by bit and you have to guess what it is, like a picture of Tokyo Tower or the L’Arc de Triomphe. In that case, people try to compare and interpret that partial information with narratives that they know. That method gets stuck in a mold and knowledge only begins to flow through inert conduits.

We have to do more to irritate and disturb modes of perception, thinking, or feeling that have become automatized in this way. I did several kinds of experiments from the 1970s to the 1980s that de-automatized the visual field. But when image technology progresses such that you can make any kind of image, people become visually used to that. That’s why there’s not much left today with a fresh impact. In this way, the problem is that the interpretive structure of narrating, giving meaning to, or interpreting the world has become so thoroughly systematized that one cannot conceive of anything else that is largely untouched. We have to de-systematize that.

Dogra Magra gives viewers the slip when they think they have it figured out, and when they change their perception and think they understand it, it again overturns that. It spins audiences around from one thing to another–it’s neither this nor that. People judge what something is based on their experience, knowledge, and memory. But since that film’s hero has lost his memory, he cannot establish his identity. The spectator also identifies with the flow of the lead character’s consciousness and is spun about with him. I hope that through that experience of being spun around, people will realize how they perceive things.

Gerow: Through this method, perhaps people then lose their conventional or rational forms of perceiving reality and perhaps confront what you described in Eizo no hakken as “naked reality.” Do you feel this kind of technique has at all been influenced by surrealism?

Matsumoto: The influence is probably great, since I was significantly influenced by surrealism in my youth.

Gerow: I wonder if another possible influence is that of early Russian Formalism. According to Shklovsky’s version, art is a means of overturning habitual perceptions of the world and revealing a reality we don’t normally see.

Matsumoto: That’s certainly the case. I learned from Russian Formalism the proposition that one can de-automatize the perception of things through the technique of defamiliarization. Afterwards, of course, all this synthesizes with theory from the last half of the 20th century as well as with various experiences, knowledges, and memories of art, but I think that the spirit of surrealism and Russian formalism which formed the starting point of my early self-formation still leave some deep traces.

 

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20 of Toshio Matsumoto’s 40 films

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For The Damaged Right Eye (1968)
‘A disturbing kaleidoscope of late 60s turmoil, psychedelia and creative expression in Japan.’ — MUBI

the entire film

 

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Funeral Parade of Roses (1969)
‘A 1969 Japanese drama directed and written by Toshio Matsumoto, as a loose adaptation of Oedipus Rex set in the gay underground of 1960’s Japan. Considered an exemplar of Japanese New Wave, the film combines arthouse, documentary, and experimental techniques, blending fact with fiction to portray the struggles of transgender women and gay men in post-occupation Japan. Starring Pîtâ as Eddie, Osamu Ogasawara as Leda, and Yoshio Tsuchiya as Gonda.’ — Internet Archive

Trailer

Excerpt

the entire film

 

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Ecstasis (1969)
‘Matsumoto repeatedly contrasts ambivalent images of the two lovers: Eddie’s (passive) ecstasy or suffering vs. Guevara (active) with arms outstretched, either approaching Eddie in blind desire or attempting to ward off horror. The Buddhist notion of desire as the root of suffering is embedded in this dual ambiguity. In the repeating shot of Guevara, at first the camera appears to be zooming in on a still photo. But then in certain shots you can see his eyes moving or opening. This unexpected transition from image of an image to image of a living person deepens the horror. Intercut are images of Medusa, a terrifying doll/mask, a face that appears to have been cut apart with a jigsaw and sewn back together, and so on.’ — voggggg

the entire film

 

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Demons (1971)
‘Gengobe Satsuma, an exiled samurai cast out as an Asano clan retainer is given a second chance to join his brothers in arms to become the 48th Ronin against the Shogunate. His faithful servant gathers the 100 ryo required for his acceptance. Gengobe is also in love with a greedy geisha named Koman. About to be sold to another man, Gengobe learns that for him to keep her, her debt is exactly 100 ryo.’ — Letterboxd

the entire film

 

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Expansion (1972)
‘Expansion remixes the images of Matsumoto’s Esctasis into a more colourful psychedelic short.’ — IMDb

the entire film

 

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Mona Lisa (1973)
‘Mona Lisa is a video art work produced on the basis of the painting masterpiece with the same title, using SCANIMATE for the first time in Japan. At the time of production I was interested in using a simple, still object out of which to spin a rich moving image. This work, produced by complex image synthesis on a frame basis for the visual representation of a surrealistic psychedelic world, was presented at the world’s first international video art symposium “Open Circuit” (1974) held in New York Museum of Modern Art, where it enjoyed a sensational reception.’ — idea-archives

the entire film

 

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Andy Warhol: Re-Reproduction (1974)
‘A suitably non-sensical presentation of documentary footage about Andy Warhol’s visit to Japan.’ — Experimental Film

the entire film

 

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Atman (1975)
‘A propulsive exercise in style over substance, Toshio Matsumoto’s Atman exposes the fundamentals of horror through elevating its disparate aspects. Shooting frame by frame at 480 different positions, the camera appears to gyrate around Hannya-masked ‘Atman’, a name belonging to an early Buddhist deity often connected with destruction. Therein formal simplicity is compromised by volatility; rapid movement unwilfully guides us to ulterior terrains, and our distance as audience is thwarted by malevolence.’ — Wasteland Arts

the entire film

 

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Siki soku ze ku (1975)
‘All things and phenomena that exist in this world are not entities, but nothing. “色” is all things and phenomena in this world. “空” means that there is no fixed entity and there is no sky.’ — アルス

the entire film

 

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Phantom (1975)
‘Any we or I who is is the phantom. Any body can be grounded into the earth to channel the energy which it is. Any eye can become disembodied or partially bodied to float above in the skies and gaze out upon. Any charged figure can be circled to raise energies and pull them to. Any phantom who is or who isn’t.’ — nathaxnne [hiatus <3]

the entire film

 

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The War of the 16 Year Olds (1976)
‘The strange lore of a small town may have some connection to local suicides. This phenomena brings together Jin, a young drifter in search of his past, and Mizue a precocious girl of sixteen. Slowly he is pulled into her world.’ — MUBI

Watch it here

 

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Enigma: Nazo (1978)
‘This is a beautiful light show done with some impressive specifical effects for the time and is fairly reminiscent of the stargate scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s completely abstract and one of the few post-1970 abstract film pieces that are actually interesting and not just rehashing something else.’ — evilbjork

the entire film

 

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White Hole (1979)
‘This movie is pretty super relaxing until you realize that you are being digested by an alien space deity which consumes whole solar systems at once, compressing them until they implode, burning up their material corpus in the process, and even after you realize that, it is still pretty super relaxing.’ — nathaxnne [hiatus <3]

the entire film

 

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Ki Or Breathing (1980)
‘‘Ki or Breathing is a spare concoction assembled from slow motion shots of nature and set to a score by the much-acclaimed Tohru Takemitsu.’ — Letterboxd

the entire film

 

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Relation (1982)
‘In Relation, the focus of the viewer’s attention is guided by pointers moving through the screen.’ — Letterboxd

the entire film

 

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Shift (1982)
‘In Shift, Matsumoto utilizes early digital video effects to transform architectural structures into cascading geometric waves and impossibly bubbling surfaces.’ — IMDb

the entire film

 

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Delay Exposure (1984)
‘“Set to a soundtrack of pulsing synth bleats, Delay Exposure rhythmically deploys a low-tech, in-camera tricks—including lens-flares, whip-pans, and rapid, strobing exposure shifts—to builds an affective sense of place and architecture.”’ — filmlinc.org

Watch it here

 

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1986 Summer (2018)
‘The images in 1986 Summer move in the limbo of what is cinema and what is real. There’s not much use to describe what particularly happens here, instead, we should abstract our own perception of what’s real, imagine a realm of the world in which the frame rate of the eye isn’t enough to capture the interstices where these phantom images inhabit. This was a constant preoccupation in the latter work of Matsumoto: try to inhabit a common ground beyond what we see and what escapes the eye, this insistence of the image of being ever present and yet elude our perception. We see trees, a building (a building that returns in Engram and whose presence eludes me), for very brief moments the image of a woman. Yet every single image of this belongs in limbo, it is permanently suspended in between iterations, maybe in different universes where the reality of these images is forever present.’ — José Sarmiento Hinojosa

the entire film

 

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Engram (1987)
‘We all know that Cinema is merely an illusion of motion through a rapid succession of still images. Toshio Matsumoto sees the edges of this illusion not as a barrier, but as an easily crossed threshold between reality and reality-adjacent. In other words, the minimum frame rate required to replicate a moving image of reality is not a requirement in itself for cinema to reside in. He makes the viewer painfully aware that a cinematographic image that moves across the eyes is, when taken apart, just a string of photos. His shorts live in a world of pictorial abstraction perpetrated by his remarkable and revolutionary editing, but, by the nature of photography, that world still exists in our universe of reality. Matsumoto thus balances his imagery between what is real, exterior, and what is imaginary, interior; in limbo, neither documentary nor fiction, and neither a motion picture nor a photographic slideshow.’ — Cedric B.

the entire film

 

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Dogra Magra (1988)
‘A man wakes in an asylum with no memory. Dr Wakabayashi helps him to recall his past in which he killed his bride on their wedding day. Part of his memory becomes linked to another doctor, Dr Masaki, and a manuscript, Dogra Magra. As the two doctors treat him, reality and fantasy become blurred and the patient becomes unsure of his identity or his doctors’ experiments. The final feature film by Toshio Matsumoto is an adaptation of the celebrated novel by Kyusaku Yumeno, a period set gothic tale with a sense of dreamy dread that recalls Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure and the locked room mystery of Shutter Island. A stunningly shot phantasmagoria by Tatsuo Suzuki (Pastoral: To Die in the Country).’ — Radiance Films

Trailer

the entire film

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi, jay! I wonder, if they ever invent cameras that capture odors, whether that will help or hinder. I guess it would depend. What does head to toe latex feel like? It’s such a popular want these days, unfortunately often only when printed with Spiderman body graphics, but still … Thanks for the link to your writing. I’ll read it ASAP. (I’m pretty slow, but I’ll try not to be.) Great, thank you! Everyone, Why in the world not go read a short new piece of writing by your cyber-friend and mine, jay? Seems like a total lucky ‘in’ to me. It’s called ‘Morning Person’, and it’s here. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey. I had that Martin Creed piece in a post here once, I think under the rubric Inflatables. Very cool piece. As usual, I’m still edging towards PV, hopefully today. ** David Ehrenstein, How strange that that curious song was such a huge hit. Can’t imagine it happening today. ** Jack Skelley, Jack Jump (as in Van Halen) — Thanks. Enjoy the vacay. Where you going? Yeah, I’m so-so on popcorn too. I like its particular physicality however. Enjoy the chills, man. xo I’ll-be-back Dennis. ** Mark, Hi. I came so close to including that Burden piece, but I’d just done a Burden post recently, so I erred on the been-there-done-that side for better or worse. Thanks about ‘Flunker’. Dostoyevsky, whoa, the big time! ** Steve, I’ll start with that single then. Yes, sure, of course, you can email me about that. Enjoy the podcast. Glad to see you turn a bit on ‘Elephant’. I always had serious problems with it. Curious to hear your revised assessment. Egoyan too, definitely, it is strange. Ridley Scott, Wim Wenders, Herzog’s fiction films, … a lot. ** Darby🫠, Hey, hey. Oh, gosh, I hope and trust that everyone treated you like royalty. Wanting everyone to be smooth is boring and fascist. Anyway, how did everything go, pal? ** Lucas, Good, whew. Cool people. Yeah, I guess just try to  see your new surroundings and world tomorrow as a bunch of fresh possibilities because, yeah, they are. Wait it’s your birthday? Happy happy b’day! 16 is kind of a good age, I think, as I remember, but it’s no big monument or anything. The b’days I remember being sort of monumental were 18 (‘cos in the US, that’s when you start doing fun things legally), 21 (because, oh god, adulthood!), and 60 (because, holy fuck, how did this happen?!). It does seem like you’ve had a most excellent and productive year, my friend. Zac comes back on Wednesday night, and then we buckle down. Yes, be really patient. I mean, I’m an extreme example because I decided to write what would be the GM Cycle when I was fifteen, and I didn’t get good enough to start until until I was in my 30s. But I started literally from scratch, and you’re already killing it. ** ellie, Hi, ellie! How lovely to see you How are you? What’s going on? Did you finish the zine? xoxo, Dennis. ** Uday, Hey. I haven’t found the courage to hear whoever read my thing yet. Maybe today. Ah, you found my old balloons post. I hope I didn’t repeat myself. I think the plan is that the graphic novel would be published in English in the US and in French in France, but we’ll see. ‘God Jr.’ is totally me just with no lust and sex and that sort of thing, I think. Everything I can think of to suggest to make yourself more off-putting just makes you a target for fetishists of the intended downsides. Uh, fake moustache? ** Diesel Clementine, Howdy. I remember that advert. Wow. Memorex is kind of a good word. Kind of. Doable. No, but thank you for the nudge about reading your transcript. I need nudges badly. I’m super slow with everything to do with email and what it encloses. I’ll go front it. Sorry. Film and prose work extremely differently. The internal mechanisms are not dissimilar, but film being so sequential and sealed up by the concreteness of visual images make trying to layer the film’s intent is really a frontier if you’re used to language’s porousness. With books, the reader creates everything themselves, and the prose is just a suggestion, so it’s logical to think the memory aspect of reading is much stronger than with a watched film because the book only exists in the reader’s head, it’s fused into the brain, as opposed to be being an external reference point that one can quibble with or reject or only remember judiciously. Or something. ** nat, Hey. Does anyone call you nathaniel? Assuming nat derives from there, it seems like you must have various levels of familiarity. Okay, I’ll start with FF4. It’s a deal. ‘Viva Erotica’ … no, not that I remember anyway. Do people actually have epiphanies upon awakening? I guess they must given the frequent representation of that occurrence. Maybe I would if I didn’t need coffee to even begin to think. ** Harper, Hi. Yeah, ‘Against the Day’ and ‘M&D’ are my favorite Pynchon’s. But reading ‘GR’ in high school was a major brain wallop, so it’s hard to back-pedal that one. Very cool re: the evidence and its approximateness. Not a real word, I know. ** Nicholas., Thank you. I loved everything about making our film other than working with our sociopathic, lying, incompetent producer and the related funding problems. But casting it was great, shooting it was great, and editing it was the greatest of all. No, as soon as the film is totally finished, the poster and the trailer come next. You have a new site! Great, I look forward to devouring it. Everyone, nat has a new artist website, and it looks pretty spectacular at my first glance, so do go dig into it and his work, why don’t you? Easily done here. Nausea-causing foods that I actually might eat? ‘Cos the sight and smell all animal and fish derived foods make me nauseous to some degree. Hm, I can’t think of anything. Wait, sometimes eggs. Your mix will no doubt percolate me heavily, but it still awaits me. But it will, and you’ll know. ** Justin D, Thanks, J. Yeah, I try to do the same thing with artists and their real world stuff. Usually the jerks don’t make things I’m interested in in the first place. And if they’re actors, well, they’re actors. It’s all about forgetting who’s actually sneaking around inside their characters. I don’t know, strange. I am quite excited about the graphic novel. We’ll see if the artist manages to get publishers into it and stuff, but, yeah, it’s cool. Monday was lovely because it seemed to be the day that told me that summer is finally over. I hope your Tuesday imparts similarly good news to you. ** Bill, I think the air bears were here before in some other context, yes. No, I don’t think my friends got the cassoulet. Curious, indeed. It’s on my bucket list. I do like Dean Roberts, yes, and his Autistic Daughters in particular, and I was saddened by his death too. The Wire had a nice obit on him. Anyway, death, grr. Thanks, yes, me too big time about the graphic novel. Here are his first two books. ** Oscar 🌀, Oh, well, let me help you with your infusion of the Dutch language, shall I? Expect to hear this many times, and be fully prepared: ‘Dag, Oscar. Hoe is het met je? Ik ben toevallig ziek, dus kom niet te dichtbij, maar geniet wel van dit prachtige land dat ik het geluk heb mijn thuis te mogen noemen. Maar vertrouw geen van ons Nederlanders. Wij zijn heel raar.’ You’ll thank me later. I just watched a little video excerpt from AC/DC’s recent concert in Dublin, and Angus was wearing a special all-green school uniform to mark the occasion, and I was charmed. I saw a trailer for ‘Longlegs’, and I thought, ‘Hmmm … I wonder’. So should I pursue that wonder into an actual seat in an actual theater? I still haven’t watched ‘…TV Glow’. It’s ridiculous. Maybe today. I have an open slot in which it would fit neatly. Bestest Tuesday! ** Okay. Today you get to spend some time with the fantastic Japanese filmmaker Toshio Matsumoto, director of the enviously i.m.o. entitled ‘For The Damaged Right Eye’ and many other highly worthy films. Check him/them/it out. See you tomorrow.