The only movie theater on the Onomichi seafront is about to close its doors. Its last night of screenings will be an all-night marathon of Japanese war films. When lightning strikes the theater, three young men in the audience find themselves thrown back in time into the world inside the screen.
Takuro Atsuki Takahito Hosoyamada Yoshihiko Hosoda Rei Yoshida Riko Narumi Hirona Yamazaki Takako Tokiwa Yukihiro Takahashi Nenji Kobayashi Tetsuya Takeda Takehiro Murata Goro Inagaki Tadanobu Asano Hiroyuki Watanabe Tsurutaro Kataoka Kiyotaka Nanbara Tōru Shinagawa Wakaba Irie Ayumi Ito Saki Terashima Toshinori Omi Tokio Emoto Yoshikazu Ebisu Toshie Negishi Eri Watanabe Mickey Curtis Makoto Tezuka Isshin Inudo Hoshi Goki Show All…
Umibe no eigakan – Kinema no tamatebako, 래버린스 오브 시네마, 라비린스 오브 시네마, Лабиринты кинематографа, 海边电影院, Sinema Labirenti, Labirinto de Cinema, 해변의 영화관 - 키네마 보물상자, Labyrinth Of Cinema
Japan
Tokyo International Film Festival
JapanPG12
UK
USA
Japan
UK
USA
Nobuhiko Ōbayashi saw the world differently. His senses were heightened, more receptive and bright, he had the eyes of a child and the mind of an old, wise man. His movies are acid trips into a marvelous mind, an experience that, in a good or bad way, will surely impact the viewer. Labyrinth of Cinema, his grand final work, cements Ōbayashi as one of the most creative minds in cinema; defying every rule constructed in the brief history of the medium, he turns into Art what any other person would define as an incomprehensible mess.
Labyrinth of Cinema shouldn't exist, Ōbayashi, diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2016, had already established the end of his career to be Hanagatami (2017), but…
Journeys in Space and Time: Nobuhiko Ōbayashi
Tokyo International Film Festival 2019
Umibe no eigakan - kinema no tamatebako (Labyrinth of Cinema)
Screening with director Nobuhiko Ōbayashi & cast members
"A movie can change the future if not the past!"
I should have known not to expect anything, but I did and Ōbayashi destroyed everything during the very first minutes.
3 years ago, Nobuhiko Ōbayashi was diagnosed with cancer. Given only three months left to live, Ōbayashi wouldn't die... and couldn't. He had a promise to keep - to Akira Kurosawa.
"The beauty and power of film can save the world from war and lead it toward peace. If you can't do it, your children can. If not, your…
possibly the first (and last) great work of art that could be called "a love letter to movies." plays something like the epilogue to obayashi's war trilogy, combining the period sweep of hanagatami with the tragicomedy of seven weeks and the essay film affectations of casting blossoms to the sky. but it's also a culmination of his entire career, with themes of memory and nostalgia now fused directly with the medium which enables them. it's also much more consciously a final statement than hanagatami was, that film being a long-gestating project and this one being a final burst of late-era creative energy, like a sun going supernova. i'm struggling to come up with words that convey my feelings here to be honest. i'm just so glad i got to see this in a theater. suffice to say it's yet another masterpiece.
a hypnotic, operatic, madcap ode to cinema that is more startlingly grounded in reality than its fantastical visual flourishes—visuals that are unmistakably obayashi (his mind!). a strange hope for the future...
RIP <3
Japan Cuts 2020
Endless Journeys in Space and Time: We Will Always Love You, Nobuhiko Ōbayashi!
Reality and cinema are more connected than you might think, and fate often has a cruel sense of humor. One week ago, on the 10th of April 2020, Japan was meant to witness the theatrical release of Nobuhiko Ōbayashi's Labyrinth of Cinema. Ultimately delayed by COVID-19, that date would instead mark the passing of cinema's greatest maestro and magician, after four long years of fighting against cancer. Last year I had the immense honor of being able to meet Ōbayashi-sensei himself with his wife Kyôko and see the world premiere of the director's final masterpiece. Even though it all seemed to happen so fast it was a…
One of the greatest cinematic swan songs of the past twenty five years - if there's anything else that best captures the sort of film that Labyrinth of Cinema is, it feels like a culmination of everything that we'd only known that Nobuhiko Obayashi has accomplished over the years through the eccentric style which he'd already been characterized as over the years by many film lovers. It's a film with many meanings, but never to the point it seems so overwhelming.
It's a testament to what Nobuhiko Obayashi has dedicated himself to over the years, a statement of what he had witnessed, sought to create over his long career, because you feel he loved doing it till the end of time. There aren't many filmmakers out there quite like Obayashi and they're something of a rare kind even now, but it's that dedication to the art form that makes every second of Labyrinth of Cinema resonate so beautifully.
Nobody makes films like Nobuhiko Ôbayashi does, and with his tragic death in 2020, we are never going to have films like them again. Luckily, we have Labyrinth of Cinema; after giving us a final filmic statement in 2017 with the wonderful Hanagatami, Ôbayashi lived long enough to make one more final film. This film is a more concrete and beautiful swansong, a cousin to Hanagatami for sure but also very much its own thing – in so many ways.
To describe Labyrinth of Cinema is to do it a disservice – it is something you just have to experience. It is three hours of persistent imagination and experimentation that manages to skate between absurdity and profundity while never diminishing…
A dizzying deathbed creation, the obvious preponderance of green screen a reflection of a man who could only have made this if he could have crafted much of it at his own pace, alone. Yet in its refracting, looping treatment of Japan's war history from the end of the shogunate to Hiroshima, its overwhelming first hour of image barrage and tonal leaps gradually slows to something still postmodern and freewheeling but more measured as its initial rush gives way to a rueful assessment of war and cinema's complicity in perpetuating its dangerous mindset. As many have noted, the obvious point of comparison as a work of poeticized, free-associative film and national history is Godard's Histoire(s) du cinéma, and where Godard…
Two days ago, I walked across the stage to celebrate graduation.
My journey to obtain a Master of Science in Urban Studies began on January 13, 2020, and ended on December 12, 2021. Earning this degree was not easy. Most of my graduate school experience was virtual due to the pandemic, and I found that learning in this manner is particularly tough for me. Furthermore, the Master's Degree program at the Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University is ranked 3rd nationally. The challenging circumstances and coursework stressed me out, but they have also been incredibly humbling and rewarding.
I never believed that I could get into such a good program, let alone do well in…
The ultimate love letter to cinema. The most scathing indictment of Japan's war-filled history. Labyrinth of Cinema is an unabashedly sentimental, colourful yet brutal work of unadulterated genius. Nobuhiko Ōbayashi went out by creating perhaps the most avant-garde work of his career. The main characters - a monk/wannabe Yakuza, a cinephile, and a critic - are sucked into a marathon of Japanese war films on the last day of a movie theatre, and so it begins.
The history of Japanese war films juxtaposed with the brutal, vile, appalling history of Imperial Japan - one filled to the brim with murder, rape, betrayal. Japan of that time was sitting on a throne of blood and tears. And these kids went through…
Ôbayashi #9
It has been approximately one week since I laid eyes on this endearing homage to the ever-giving fountain of cinema we all love and share. Obayashi, if somehow he had not made it perfectly clear already, wanted to leave us with one last message before going on to the next world. This message lay directly in the words of one of his eclectic characters when he says we are to learn from cinema, but this is not a message to learn how to make cinema. It is a message of understanding our relative human nature in regards to history. “Learn from cinema” because it holds context to the constantly changing parameter that is time, and how also, philosophies…
Histoire(s) du cinéma, but from someone who actually likes movies.
or
Cinéma(s) du histoire
Wrote briefly about Obayashi's final film at Frame.land.
