Kamikaze Girls was awarded Best Film, Best Director, Best Actress, and two other awards at the 26th Yokohama Film Festival.[8] It also won Best Film and Best Director at the 14th Japan Film Professional Awards.[15] For her performance in the film, Anna Tsuchiya was named Best New Actress at the Awards of the Japanese Academy, the Blue Ribbon Awards, and the Hochi Film Awards
Guen I.
Guen (this is how he signed his art) came to live in Honolulu in the mid 70’s after he suffered a stroke in NYC. He lived in Japan in the Summer and the Winter in Honolulu. Guen became a mentor to my sister Fung-Ching Kelling during his stays in Honolulu.
(My sister Fung Ching Kelling sitting in front. Fung Lin Hall (myself) on the right of Guen Inokuma)
.. Inokuma and Foujita shared a house when they escaped wartime Paris. He talked about how Foujita bought the train tickets at the train station (today Musee d`Orsay) and that he only took a Matisse painting and left everything else in Paris. They stayed in the countryside more than month living in the same house.
He showed us a special spot that Isamu Noguchi loved on the island of Oahu and showed us the beauty of natural rocks.
In NY Guen Inokuma (sensei) and his wife Fumiko took my sister and I to Mark Rothko’s apartment and told us what he knew of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Yoko Ono and Isamu Noguchi were his good friends.
Painting (via artnet)
Title : City Composition (3)
Medium : Oil on Canvas
Size : 30 x 40 in. / 76.2 x 101.6 cm.
Year : 1966 –
Contemporary Japanese Art from the Collection of B.H. Rockefeller
13-year-old Tomoko Tabata provides a great anchor for the film in her debut, as the narrative seems to follow her every whim. The plethora of feelings, behaviors, and psychological statues she depicts is the highlight of a naturalistic performance, which allowed her to begin a career in acting that continues until today.
(Hagiwara Kenichi or known as Sho-Ken and Jakucho Setouchi – from the Magazine Jakucho 2009) Hagiwara Kenichi and Jakucho Setouchi were very close, she was his surrogate mother. In this magazine their trips to Yokahama and Kyoto and their daily conversation were recorded. Hagiwara Kenichi passed away a few years ago.
Distant Rain records a conversation between the eloquent American poet Tess Gallagher and the renowned Japanese novelist and Buddhist nun Jakucho Setouchi that took place in 1990 at Jakuan, Setouchi’s home temple, in Sagano, Japan.
Gallagher had recently experienced the death of her husband, Raymond Carver, an internationally renowned short story writer. In a frank and at times humorous exchange, the two women trade observations about love and loss, and about the role of writing in coping with grief.
Their words, reproduced in both English and Japanese, unfold accordion-style across the rich colors and striking imagery of artist Keiko Hara’s wood-block and stencil prints. Complemented by the exquisite lettering of typographer Maki Yamashita and under the guidance of master bookbinder Atsuo Ikuta, Distant Rain is not only a moving tribute to the sustaining power of love but also a stunning example of the art of book design
(For Hagiwara Kenichi, the last time he visited Ten Ryu Mon in Kyoto was 25 years ago)
She employs this documentary-realism to focus on individuals of lesser cultural status, challenging prevailing representations of women within the male-dominated Japanese film industry.[1] This theme is also connected to her own personal reflections on contemporary issues in the current climate of economic depression such as the declining birthrate, alienation, and the collapse of traditional family structures
“I had a class with Joseph von Sternberg at UCLA, which changed my life, if not my attitude towards women, which has always been lustfully wonderfully beautiful, but in terms of style,” he says.
Between 1959 and 1963, Sternberg taught a course on film aesthetics at the University of California, Los Angeles, based on his own works. His students included undergraduate Jim Morrison and graduate student Ray Manzarek, who went on to form the rock group The Doors shortly after receiving their respective degrees in 1965. The group recorded songs referring to Sternberg, with Manzarek later characterizing Sternberg as “perhaps the greatest single influence on The Doors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_von_Sternberg
Hideko Takamine was a Japanese actress who began as a child actress and maintained her fame in a career that spanned 50 years. She is particularly known for her collaborations with directors Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshita, with Twenty-Four Eyes (1954) and Floating Clouds (1955) being among her most noted films
Takamine Hideko and Akutagawa Hiroshi in Mistress (film based on Ogai’s Wilde Geese)
Ōgai’s most popular novel, Gan (1911–13; part translation: The Wild Goose), is the story of the undeclared love of a moneylender’s mistress for a medical student who passes by her house each day.
Click to see large
Takamine Hideko in Naruse masterpiece..
(Wong Kar Wai was thinking of Naruse when he made In the Mood for Love.)
Toko Shinoda (篠田 桃紅, Shinoda Tōkō, 28 March 1913 – 1 March 2021) was a Japanese artist working with sumi ink paintings and prints. Her art merged traditional calligraphy with modern abstract expressionism. A 1983 interview in Time magazine asserted “her trail-blazing accomplishments are analogous to Picasso’s”.[1] Shinoda’s works have been exhibited at the Hague National Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, Cincinnati Art Museum, and other leading museums of the world.
13-year-old Tomoko Tabata provides a great anchor for the film in her debut, as the narrative seems to follow her every whim. The plethora of feelings, behaviors, and psychological statues she depicts is the highlight of a naturalistic performance, which allowed her to begin a career in acting that continues until today.
Director Koizumi was the assistant director to the late Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa on five of his final major films: Ran, Kagemusha, Dreams, Madadayo, and Rhapsody in August and was an uncredited assistant to the director on a sixth one Dersu Uzala. The Kurosawa connection to the Koizumi film continues. The cinematographer Shoji Ueda too was the cinematographer of five of those films, the actor Akira Terao (who plays the professor) was a lead actor in Ran and Madadayo, so too, actor Hisashi Ogawa (who plays the brief role of the housekeeper agent) is a stock Kurosawa actor. Even though Kurosawa had nothing to do with this film, his trusted collaborators were the principal contributors to The Professor and His Beloved Equation. Kurosawa would have been proud because the film apart from mathematics briefly introduces Japanese culture and the essentially Japanese Noh theatre to any uninitiated viewer as well.
Author of “The Housekeeper and the Professor” Yoko Ogawa (Previous Post)
Kishi Keiko is an actress, writer, UNESCO Ambassader and a recipient of legion d’honneur from the French gov’t. She was in “Early Spring” directed by Ozu with Ryo Ikebe. Masaki Kobayashi directed Kishi in 3 films, Inheritance,I will Buy You, Kwaidan, she co-starred again with Ryo Ikebe in “Snow Country.”
She made more than four films with Ichikawa Kon, including “Sasame Yuki – Makioka Sisters” “Younger Brother” … Sydney Pollack directed her in Yakuza with Robert Mitchum and Takakura Ken.
Ryo Ikebe and Keiko Kishi in “Snow Country”
Author of Snow Countray Kawabata Yasunari was at her wedding when she married Yves Ciampi in Paris.
Makioka Sisters
Sasame Yuki -(Makioka Sisters – adapted from a novel by Junichiro Tanizaki)
(Keiko Kishi with Jean Cocteau – 1960)
From Kishi’s autobiography “Ma Vie A La Carte”, Kishi wrote that as a teenager she saw Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” 5 times, never imagined that she would in 10 0r 12 years later be directed by Cocteau for his last play at the theater. (Shadow Picture – the Wife of Wet Coat).
(Unable to find any information about this production).
