Carlotta Little Books Collection RSS

FLOATING CLOUDS "Life and broken promises" About Mikio Naruse's film By Pascal-Alex Vincent Floating Clouds is one of the most famous melodramas in the history of world cinema. Produced in Japan in 1955 by the Tôhô company, it is the work of filmmaker Mikio Naruse. To mark the 70th anniversary of this classic from the golden age of Japanese studios and its restoration, we revisit a timeless film, starring Hideko Takamine and Masayuki Mori, and showcasing the artistry of one of Japan's greatest directors. It's also an opportunity to remember the novelist Fumiko Hayashi, a contemporary of Naruse and a giant of Asian literature, who initiated the project. Pascal-Alex Vincent teaches Japanese film history at Sorbonne Nouvelle University. He has...

SEIJUN SUZUKI A troublemaker within the Japanese studios By Romain Dabert About five films: The Flesh Trilogy: The Flesh Barrier – Story of a Prostitute – Kawachi's Carmen, Tokyo Drifter, Branded to Kill. Japanese director Seijun Suzuki represents an icon for a generation of film buffs, and is still considered a rebellious and nonconformist auteur today. A prominent figure at Nikkatsu studio, where he worked until his dismissal in 1967, he distinguished himself with a bold, sometimes experimental visual style and a transgressive tone that subverted certain established genre film conventions. The result was spectacular, surprising, and playful works. This book looks back on the last years of his career at the studio based on five films made between 1964...

CAFE FLESH The shady heart of American cinema By Lelo Jimmy Batista A cult classic born on the fringes of American cinema in the first half of the 1980s, Café Flesh isn't a film, it's a monster: grotesque, sublime, and visionary. Seventy-six minutes at the crossroads of science fiction, post-apocalyptic cinema, surrealist poetry, melodrama, and pornography, owing as much to John Waters, Ken Russell, or David Lynch as to MGM musicals. A groundbreaking film which, through its futuristic cabaret where "negatives" rendered impotent by atomic radiation come to watch "positives" with intact sexual capacities copulate on stage, announces in its strange way the nascent AIDS epidemic and fiercely exposes the mechanisms at the heart of pornographic cinema. Above all, it's...

3 TIMES EDWARD YANG By Jean-Michel Frodon 2 unreleased films: Confusion in Confucius Mahjong His latest masterpiece Yi Yi Revealed to the general public with Yi Yi (winner of the Best Director award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival), Edward Yang, a leading figure of the New Taiwanese Cinema, left a lasting mark on cinema between the two centuries with a body of work at the crossroads of Chinese, Japanese, American, and European New Wave influences. He, who knew so well how to film women and the big city, proved capable of seamlessly blending historical tragedy and intimate chronicle, slapstick comedy, emotion, and critical reflection. His untimely death in 2007 left behind a singular oeuvre, a radical departure from the...

Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) is today the most famous Japanese filmmaker in the world. Of the same generation as Kenji Mizoguchi and Mikio Naruse, he filmed from the 1920s to the 1960s, working to invent his own style and his own grammar.