JAPANESE FILMS

Seven Seas (1931, 1932)

Until recently, Hiroshi Shimizu was not a familiar name even among Japanese cinema aficionados. Though he had been well-regarded in Japanese movie industry during 1930’s and 40’s, and his works had been extremely popular among domestic movie-going public, Hiroshi Shimizu was eclipsed by his contemporaries after the war: Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi. How many movies did he direct in his lifetime? Ever-exhaustive IMDb lists 57 titles as of today. More complete database for Japanese movies, jmdb, lists 166 tiles as his directorial works, large part of which are from 20’s and 30’s. As typical of Japanese films …

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HOLLYWOOD FILMS

Memory is A Requiem for the Dead Neurons (Part 2)

BLADERUNNER (1982) The Replicants in BLADERUNNER tried to fabricate the past by collecting photographs of some distant past. They did not have actual memories of those moments captured in photographs. Then, why do they need to have these external artifacts? If I have a photograph taken 20 years ago, and if I have no recollection of having that particular moment depicted in it, then what does that prove? Did I lose the memory of the event? Or did someone fabricate the photograph using Photoshop? If you can believe what you see in a photograph rather than you remember, then are …

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HOLLYWOOD FILMS / JAPANESE FILMS

Memory is A Requiem for the Dead Neurons (Part 1)

  You are talking about memories. Rick Deckard, Bladerunner.   William Gibson’s most controversial work to date, “Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)“, was supposed to exist only in the memories of those who experienced it. The work would not be physically accessible after its initial encounter with a reader. I mean, you cannot read it twice. And this needs a little bit of explaining.   This work was originally released in two forms; a floppy disk and a physical book. On the floppy disk, there is an executable program, which, upon execution, scrolls the poetry titled “Agrippa” on the …

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