The Makioka Sisters
Saturday, August 10 at 7pm THE JANUS COLLETION The Makioka Sisters dir. Kon Ichikawa, Japan, 1983, 35mm, Japanese with English subtitles, 140 min.
This lyrical adaptation of the beloved novel by Junichiro Tanizaki was a late-career triumph for director Kon Ichikawa. Structured around the changing of the seasons, The Makioka Sisters( Sasameyuki) follows the lives of four siblings who have taken on their family’ s kimono manufacturing business, in the years leading up to the Pacific War. The two oldest have been married for some time, but according to tradition, the rebellious youngest sister cannot wed until the third, conservative and terribly shy, finds a husband. This graceful study of a family at a turning point in history is a poignant evocation of changing times and fading customs, shot in rich, vivid colors.
Nostalghia
Wednesday, August 14 at 7pm SERGEI PARAJANOV: SURREALIST POET OF SOVIET CINEMA
Nostalghia – New 35mm restored print! dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, Italy / Soviet Union, 1983, 35mm, Italian and Russian with English subtitles, 125 min.
“ As my teacher I consider an absoIuteIy young and amazing director, Tarkovsky, who even didn’ t reaIize himseIf what a genius he was in Ivan’ s ChiIdhood.”— Sergei Parajanov
We salute the friendship and cinematic kinship between Sergei Parajanov and Andrei Tarkovsky by beginning our series with a new 35mm restoration of one of Tarkovsky’ s lesser-seen classics.
Exiled from the USSR, consummate film poet Tarkovsky( Solaris, Stalker) poured his stirrings of homesickness into this spectrally beautiful, metaphysical exploration of spiritual isolation and Russian identity. While researching the turbulent life of a 17th-century composer in the perpetually mist-shrouded Tuscan countryside, a soul-sick Russian poet( Yankvosky) forms an unusual kinship with an apocalypse-obsessed local madman( Josephson). Tarkovsky evokes the textures of dreams and memories through ravishing monochrome and sepia-toned reveries and flashbacks, while conjuring the hushed and haunted tone of a trance in this latecareer masterwork.— BAM
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