[les-fleur]

Critique of Separation (1961, dir. Guy Debord)

[quotespile]

“The general public has long been divided into two parts; those who think that science can do anything and those who are afraid it will.”

— Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon

[weltenwellen]

Chen Chen, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

[nemfrog]

Cat fishing. Primule : presillabario, sillabario, compimento. 1929.

Internet Archive

[gregorygalloway]

Ran premiered in Tokyo, Japan on 25 May 1985 before wider release on 1 June (it was first shown in the US in September at the New York Film Festival).

Akira Kurosawa began working on the film in the early 1970s when he read about the 16th century feudal warlord Mōri Motonari who had 3 dutiful sons. Kurosawa took that story and combined it with William Shakespeare's King Lear. Kurosawa completed the script in 1975 and then put it away.

After securing funding (Ran would be the most expensive Japanese films ever made to that point), Kurosawa began filming in 1983 and Kurosawa's recording engineer, Fumio Yanoguchi (who had worked with Kurosawa on 12 feature films dating back to 1949) died late in production, as well as Kurosawa's wife of 39 years, Yôko Yaguchi (1 February 1985).

Ran was a modest box office success in Japan on its initial release, but received almost universal acclaim. It was nominated for 4 Academy Awards, including Best Director, Best Art Direction, and Best Cinematography. It received the Oscar for Best Costume Design (Emi Wada).

Ran is not only considered to be one of Kurosawa's best films, but it has been ranked as one of the best films of all time

[thecinamonroe]

Marilyn Monroe photographed by Richard Avedon, 1957.

[weltenwellen]

Goatsong Leila Chatti

[carvalhais]

On the internet, this space of rustling digital leaves, the dream bird cannot build a nest. The information seekers drive him away. In today’s state of hyperactivity, where boredom is not allowed to emerge, we never reach the state of deep mental relaxation. The information society is an age of heightened mental tension, because the essence of information is surprise and the stimulus it provides. The tsunami of information means that our perceptual apparatus is permanently stimulated. It can no longer enter into contemplation. The tsunami of information fragments our attention. It prevents the contemplative lingering that is essential to narrating and careful listening. Byung-Chul Han. 2024. The Crisis of Narration. Cambridge: Polity Press.

[freeartzombie]

Flame of My Love (1949)

dir. Kenji Mizoguchi

[quotespile]

“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”

— Gore Vidal, Julian

[toiich]

Paul Newman in New York

by Sanford Roth, 1956

[last-picture-show]

Andrei Tarkovsky, Polaroid from the Book Instant Light

[xserialkiller]

Yukihiro Takahashi of the Yellow Magic Orchestra fishing for an editorial, 1984

[ruinedholograms]

TOKYO MELODY

[grrlmusic]

Miu Sakamoto

[hornworts]

Yellow Magic Orchestra in スタジオ・ボイス Vol.90 5月号 1983

[laserdiscuser]

“Rainer Werner Fassbinder dedicated his 1978 film Despair “to Antonio Artaud, Vincent Van Gogh, and Unica Zurn,” and rightly so. Despair, though based on Nabokov’s novel, was in Fassbinder’s eyes about the recognition that, after a certain moment in life, the future will only offer more of what has already been, or the options of madness, misery, suicide. For many sensitive souls, the possibilities of self-reinvention are exhausted long before any sort of natural death…”

GI, ‘09