1990s Experimental Film in Japan: Women鈥檚 Anarchic Visions of the Everyday
Sunday, Feb. 22nd
2:15-4:15 PM
ATLAS 100
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The Life of Ants (Ari no seikatsu) / Y奴ko Asano, Japan, 1994, 14 min
Benighted but Not Begun (Yukikuredo machiakazu) / Yukie Sait艒, Japan, 1994, 22 min
The Place Which Isn鈥檛 Necessarily Wrong (Anagachi machigatteru tomo ienai k奴) / Hiromi Saiki, Japan, 1996, 18 min
Night Park/White Roses (Yoruno k艒en / shiroi bara) / Mari Terashima, Japan, 1997, 11 min
A Dandelion, Rosaceae (Bara-ka tanpopo) / Utako Koguchi, Japan, 1990, 8 min
Curated by Wakae Nakane and Miryam Sas
Emerging from Japan鈥檚 independent film culture of the 1990s, these five works by women filmmakers mark a quiet but decisive shift within experimental cinema. Enabled by the growing accessibility of small-gauge film and alternative exhibition spaces, the filmmakers move away from strict formal abstraction toward the textures of everyday life, bodies, rituals, and intimacies.
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Across animation, performance, and experimental narrative forms, the films attend to gendered power relations, sexuality, and the fragile boundaries between private experience and social structure. Playful, unsettling, and resistant to easy classification, they articulate an anarchic language that renders the familiar strange, inviting viewers to linger in the ambiguities of intimacy and desire.