recommendations

[Joseph Murphy]

Thanks to everyone for the recommendations on the theme of "sub/urban 
alienation."  We ended up going with A Scene at the Sea (Kitano, 
1991) and Giants and Toys (Masumura, 1958), but have all the others 
on slate for the future.  Jonathan recommended, in addition to Tsai 
Ming-Liang's The Hole, and the Korean film Peppermint Candy, this one:

>And especially since you've written on it, how about Yaguchi's 
>Hadashi no pikunikku [Down the Drain], which is also now available 
>on DVD with English subtitles.  If "Japan's most unhappy girl" isn't 
>alienated, then I don't know what to call her.

I wanted to ask about this because it would not have occurred to me. 
I know there is a certain context in which alienation and the unhappy 
consciousness necessarily go together (I won't say which, but his 
name begins with H), but is there really necessarily a direct 
relation between alienation and unhappiness?  I'm interested because 
part of the point of an exercise like this of course is to figure out 
what alienation is.  I know you were writing off the cuff here, but 
any thoughts on that?
By the way, I'm glad to hear you're working on Hashiguchi and Yaguchi 
in a context I've sort of resolutely bracketed.  They came out of the 
same generation of PFF grand prizewinners (Hashiguchi 1989, Yaguchi 
1990), and I've always associated them together.  It's an 8mm 
mid-length film, but Hashiguchi's prizewinner, Yûbe no himitsu is 
really worth a look. It's about a small group of high-school kids who 
sit around one evening and have a drinking party in one of their 
houses.  It's really desultory, and in the flow of drunken 
conversation, one of them confesses his feelings for the biggest, 
most athletic member of the group.  He's okay with it, but the other 
kids there, a boy and girl, you can just see them start icing over 
and lapsing into cruel ostracism.  He plays this theme out in Nagisa 
no sindobaddo, but it's kind of crystallized here, absent the story. 
It's very powerful, and gets stunning performances out of what appear 
to be amateur actors.
yours,
J. Murphy
-- 


0198235609813745091283570198345019238457012938
Univ. of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32601, USA
<http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/jmurphy>
1938475059132485760329847501392854670192437856
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.yale.edu/pipermail/kinejapan/attachments/20021103/37298381/attachment.html