The Harvard Film Archive welcomes back acclaimed Japanese filmmaker Hamaguchi Ryusuke (b.1978) for a unique program of screenings, conversations and the area premiere of GIFT, a live performance collaboration with composer-musician Ishibashi Eiko. Since his last visit, Hamaguchi has achieved international acclaim for recent films that have garnered top prizes from the world’s most prestigious film festivals and ceremonial bodies, including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Today Hamaguchi is regularly heralded as one of the essential figures of contemporary world cinema and embraced as a guiding star by younger filmmakers around the world. Yet, despite this steadily growing adulation, Hamaguchi has resisted the temptation to seek out an even brighter spotlight and has instead remained steadfastly focused on his particular mode of resolutely independent auteurist filmmaking grounded in his abiding fascination with performance and dialogue as the alpha and omega of narrative cinema. If anything, his latest films only deepen his vision of a cinema shaped by a careful restraint, and even stripping down, of visual style, structure and performance.
For this extended visit, Hamaguchi Ryusuke will be in person to present and discuss two recent films, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car, as well as a new restoration of a key work by Somai Shinji, a Japanese filmmaker who has exerted a deep influence on Hamaguchi’s cinema. The series also includes a live performance by Ishibashi Eiko for whose music Hamaguchi was invited to create a silent film that he would later expand, with sound, into his prizewinning most recent film, the ecological cautionary tale Evil Does Not Exist. – Haden Guest
Film descriptions by Haden Guest.
Special thanks: Kuriyama Shigehisa, Director; Gavin Whitelaw, Executive Director; Stacie Matsumoto, Associate Director—Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies, Harvard; and Regina Greene—Front Porch Productions.
16 September 2024
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Guzen to sozo)
DIRECTOR HAMAGUCHI RYUSUKE IN PERSON
Directed by Hamaguchi Ryusuke.
With Furukawa Kotone, Nakajima Ayumu, Hyunri.
Japan, 2021, DCP, color, 121 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
DCP source: Film Movement.
Three separate yet thematically intertwined stories each explore the quicksilver force of amorous relationships played out as a game of control of one partner over another. The trio of moral tales, all written by Hamaguchi, together echo Eric Rohmer in the unexpected life lessons that impart each with a poetic sense of an ending. Hamaguchi’s exploration of the performative possibilities of the written and spoken word is deepened by the intense and often awkward encounters enacted between the couples, each setting in motion a tension that is ultimately released in the moving climax marked by the final story of two old friends who reunite only to discover that perhaps they have never met before.
(Image: courtesy Film Movement)
Details on HFA website20 September 2024
Moving (Ohikkoshi)
INTRODUCTION BY HAMAGUCHI RYUSUKE
Directed by Somai Shinji.
With Nakai Kiichi, Sakurada Junko, Tabata Tomoko.
Japan, 1993, DCP, color, 125 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
DCP source: Cinema Guild.
Among the most emotionally charged of Somai Shinji’s films about youth is this tender portrait of a young only child trying to find her bearings in the wake of her parents’ divorce. Tabata Tomoko anchors the film and drives it breathlessly forward as a precocious young woman trying to be in many places at once, running against all odds from here to there as an emblem of the inevitable yet poignant distance between generations, despite the best of intentions. Recently discovered in the US through a series of new restorations and retrospectives, the films of Somai are recognized today as some of the touchstone works of Eighties and Nineties Japanese cinema, revered especially by Hamaguchi Ryusuke, who has often spoken of Somai’s influence upon his own filmmaking.
(Image: courtesy Cinema Guild)
Details on HFA website
21 September 2024
Drive My Car (Doraibu mai ka)
DIRECTOR HAMAGUCHI RYUSUKE IN PERSON
Directed by Hamaguchi Ryusuke.
With Nishijima Hidetoshi, Miura Toko, Kirishima Reika.
Japan, 2021, DCP, color, 179 min.
Japanese, English, Korean Sign Language, German, Mandarin,Tagalog,
Korean, Indonesian, Malay, Swiss German with English subtitles.
DCP source: Janus Films.
Hamaguchi’s career-long fascination with the transformational potential of language, for both cinema and self, finds its fullest expression to date in his celebrated fable of a grief-stricken theatrical director seeking solace and new direction by accepting an invitation to cast and direct a performance of Uncle Vanya with a multilingual troupe. Through the intense rehearsal sessions he invents and demands of his actors, asking them to tirelessly memorize Chekhov’s play, the director makes clear the larger design of Hamaguchi’s film: revealing language as a means to achieve a kind of pure performative selfhood. Each actor is thus allowed to perform their lines in their own native language—be it Japanese, Tagalog, Mandarin, Korean or, almost improbably, Korean sign-language—while remaining still understood by their fellow thespians thanks to the collectively memorized script. Here rehearsal and performance thus become a means to transcend the limits of language and relationships so painfully felt by the director still processing his wife’s sudden death (and discovered infidelity) while also searching for human connection and community through his work and craft.
(Image: courtesy Janus Films)
Details on HFA Website23 September 2024
GIFT: A Live Score by Ishibashi Eiko x Film by Hamaguchi Ryusuke
DIRECTOR HAMAGUCHI RYUSUKE IN PERSON
Live Musical Accompaniment.
Directed by Hamaguchi Ryusuke.
Japan, 2023, DCP, color, silent, 74 min.
Hamaguchi Ryusuke embraced an unusual turn in his ascendant career by accepting an invitation from his Drive My Car collaborator—Japanese musician and composer of that film’s moody score, Ishibashi Eiko—to invert their working relationship, with his composing images for her music, performed live. The result is a melancholic ecological tone poem that places music before word, and that at times recalls Stan Brakhage in its invocation of daily life in rural, snowy woodlands. Using carefully measured intertitles instead of spoken dialogue, GIFT also draws openly from the silent cinema of Hamaguchi’s avowed idols—Murnau, von Sternberg—whose stark, expressive imagery he also channels. Like the great dramatists of the silent era Hamaguchi builds drama with calibrated efficiency that builds to a remarkable climax. Hamaguchi chose to follow GIFT with a longer sound version and expansion of the same story that would become his award-winning Evil Does Not Exist.
(Image: courtesy Front Porch Productions)
Details on HFA website