What I’m Seeing This Week: I am psyched to finally see La Chimera at Cinemapolis!
Also in Theaters: The best new film playing Ithaca this week that I’ve already seen is Aurora’s Sunrise, which screens for free at Cornell Cinema on Monday. I had the pleasure of catching this ingenious blend of original (partially rotoscoped) animation; interviews with Armenian genocide survivor Arshaluys Mardigian; and footage from Auction of Souls, a 1919 American silent film about her life in which she played herself, at last year’s Maine International Film Festival. I also recommend Dune: Part Two, which continues its run at Cinemapolis and the Regal Ithaca Mall. New movies I hope to get to before they close include Sasquatch Sunset, which is at Cinemapolis, and Civil War, which is there and at the Regal. Best International Feature Film Oscar nominee Io Capitano, which opens at Cinemapolis today, is supposed to be good as well, as are De Humani Corporis Fabrica and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, both of which play Cornell Cinema tonight. Your best bets for repertory fare are once again two films directed by Christopher Nolan: Interstellar, which is playing the Regal this afternoon, and Inception, which is there on Wednesday. Finally, there are free screenings at Cornell Cinema on Tuesday and Wednesday, of the movies Bad Press and In Search of My Sister respectively, and a showcase of short films presented by Bike Walk Tompkins is playing Cinemapolis on Sunday with tickets available on a sliding scale from $2-$10.
Home Video: I recently finished watching everything in the “Directed by Kinuyo Tanaka” collection on The Criterion Channel. The highlight for me is Forever a Woman, which I *thought* I saw nearly 25 years ago as a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh under the title The Eternal Breasts, but I must just have remembered that it was playing as part of a local film series because its best scenes are unforgettable. It stars Yumeji Tsukioka as a long-suffering wife and daughter based on Fumiko Nakajō who is trying to finally live for herself a little as a poet before she dies of cancer and is probably the most explicit treatment of what seems to me to be Tanaka’s main theme: contrasting feminine-coded artistic pursuits like poetry and flower arrangement as a way of finding meaning in life with masculine-coded vocations like politics and journalism that are obsessed with controlling people’s destinies.
This is complicated somewhat in her next-best film as a director, Girls of the Night, in that the reformatory that former prostitute Kuniko Sugimoto (Chisako Hara) graduates from is run by women. I strongly recommend watching this film back-to-back (maybe even as a double feature) with Tanaka’s impressively assured debut effort Love Letter because it feels like an explicit attempt by a now more established director to correct the latter’s distractingly censorious attitude toward women with the audacity to seek economic security and sexual pleasure in the arms of foreign soldiers. Love Letter also includes what may be Tanaka’s single best scene, an arresting finale which cuts back and forth between the two main characters (Yoshiko Kuga’s Michika and Masayuki Mori Reikichi) but ends before the two of them ever share the frame together again.
Tanaka’s first color film, the historical epic The Wandering Princess, has really started to grow on me. The middle portion is an inversion of Forever a Woman: instead of using poetry to make meaning out of an unhappy marriage, Machiko Kyô’s Hiro Saga channels her thwarted aspirations to become a painter into building a blissfully happy home even as the world goes up in flames around her. There are also a number of nice scenes involving flowers and trees. The remaining two entries in the series, The Moon Has Risen (which is based on a script by Yasujirô Ozu and Ryôsuke Saitô) and Love Under the Crucifix, have their moments as well. All of these movies deserve to be better known, so check them out!
Previous “Now Playing in Ithaca, NY” posts can be found here.
The Prodigal Cinephile 