Bizarre extracts from year twelve unit plan

1. In Millenium Actress Kon creates a film unit in micro, illustrating various periods of Japanese filmmaking by entering the memories of a retiring actress. Perfect Blue might be seen as the dark end of that history, with Kon describing a society enmeshed in celebrity worship and warping at the seams through the push of technological innovation. Viruses and ever-proliferating liquid life-forms come into play in later Kon films: societal forces given shape and tangible destructive power.

2. Shohei Imamura never liked the representation of Japanese society posed by Ozu, so he made his own. Kitano bleeds genre through a pretty wry form of ‘art film’. In The Eel, Imamura illustrates the downside to Ozu’s modes of familial respect and restraint, but eventually rests on his own version of a similar ideal.

This rectangle of canvas, pitched like a sail at sea

"Thousands of spectators, massed along the quay, experienced this unique spectacle. At the moment when Bonaparte confronts a terrifying storm, aboard the frail bark whose makeshift sail is fashioned from his tricolored flag, the wind whipped up over Antibes. Menacing clouds gathered densely in the sky above, and the abruptly louder sound of waves crashing along the shore accompanied the images. As in a Magritte painting, with one canvas framed by a real sea and genuine storm clouds, each spectator had the Sensurround-style sensation of knowing what Bonaparte felt as he crossed the Mediterranean."

-Glenn Myrent & Georges Langlois, Henri Langlois, first citizen of cinema (trans. Lisa Nesselson)