![]() In a thousand variations of penumbra and darkness, The Works and Days is at once a filmed diary, a topographical survey, and the memory work of a village in the process of shrinking. A comprehensive look at a vanishing way of life. The Works and Days is a salute to the possibilities provided by cinema, a celebration of life. The Film StageĪn utterly confident, magisterial effort that will stand the test of time. A monumental vision that earns its runtime. More than a film to watch, The Works and Days is an experience that engulfs. Its homey environs and lushly photographed natural world induce a heightening of the senses and an attention to lovely subtleties of light, color and fellow feeling. The film is a life event in and of itself. Those images do not want anything from us, they ask everything of us. In The Works and Days there is something wrong in almost every shot, something that makes us look more closely, more attentively, until we realize that it’s not the shot that is wrong but the way we normally look at things. Jacques Rivette once wrote that a good film begins with something being wrong. But, besides its length, it has little in common with “slow cinema,” mainly due to Winter’s extremely precise editing and the immersive approach and attention to detail and the constant attention to commonplace beauty. Time, indeed, is of the essence, lasting 480 minutes. The film also illustrates the death of a place and its way of life, a factor of population displacement, and the environmental destruction that’s irreversibly changing the relationship between the villagers and nature. ![]() Though it’s equally concerned with observations of nature and the simple way that life itself is lived, partway through the film a narrative gradually asserts itself, in the worsening sickness of Tayoko’s husband, Junji – though the presence of death is never far from the surface, whether seen through periodic visits to gravesites, fatal snakebite, the hunting of animals for food, or a fantastical story (told via subtitles) of a soldier’s return home from WWII to commune with the corpse of his deceased father. Winter and Anders Edström, a decade following THE ANCHORAGE, patiently accompanies Shiojiri Tayoko over five seasons in her small village of 47 predominantly elderly people. Set in the Shiotani Basin, a short train ride from Kyoto, the long- awaited return of C.W. A description, over five seasons, of a family, of a terrain, of a sound space, and of a passage of time. ![]() It is a geographic look at the work and non-work of a farmer. Winter & Anders Edström, is an eight-hour fiction shot for a total of twenty-seven weeks, over a period of fourteen months, in a village population forty-seven in the mountains of Kyoto Prefecture, Japan. The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin), the second dramatic feature from directors C.W.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |