The red flower
you always wanted to pick—
now this autumn wind
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Warm Current 1939
The love lives and maneuverings of a host of nurses and doctors sounds like the set-up for a contemporary soap opera, but Kōzaburō Yoshimura, clearly learning a lot from his time as an assistant director at Shochiku, weaves this slightly less than scandalous story together with the kind of highly developed analytical editing seen best in Naruse and Ozu for a film of much greater beauty than the bare outline of the story would suggest. Considering that this was only…
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Composition Class 1938
Japanese filmmakers have never been afraid to show poverty, but even with the left-leaning 'tendency film' of the late 20s and early 30s representations of the lower classes would often be dressed up in the veneer of melodrama, leaving one with the insuperable sense of manipulation that comes with overbearing plotting, never simply taking the time to live and breathe in the spaces of dire need and crushing tedium where real people are given shape and form. The family house…
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Can't Get You Out of My Head 2021
As with any project approximating this kind of approach to a politico-historical theme, there is a selection of material here that necessarily chooses certain things while leaving other things out. Obviously, there is thus a danger of misrepresentation in how this theme—only ever something partial—is represented as relating to the social totality. This series discusses the failures of revolutionary movements and the destruction of gains made by the labour movements in the West which led to the extension of the…
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Zeros and Ones 2021
In a time where Schmitt’s reduction of the political to a single conceptual distinction is professed as the horizon of all political thinking, war bends all men to its will, and love a thing of the past.
