Tetsuo Nagata, cinematographer

Japanese cinematographer Tetsuo Nagata (永田 鉄男) has garnered a high profile recently due to the international success of Olivier Dahan’s biopic of Edith Piaf (La vie en rose/ La môme, 2007) starring Oscar award winning actress Marion Cotillard. Nagata won his second César (the French equivalent of the Oscars) for best director of photography for La môme. His first César had been for La chambre des...

Walking in my Mind

The Hayward Gallery in central London is currently hosting an exhibition of artists whose work “explores the inner working of the artist's imagination through dramatic, large-scale installation art.”Walking in My Mind features the work of ten international artists. It uses both indoor and outdoor spaces, with each sculptured space representing the individual mindscape of a different artist. One important...

Japanese women behind the scenes

At Nippon Connection in April a podium discussion was held about the current status of women in Japanese cinema. The reason for this was the sudden jump in numbers of films being presented at the festival with women at the helm as directors. Guests at the festival included Yuki Tanada with her film Ain’t No Tomorrows (俺たちに明日はないッス, 2008), animator Naomi Nagata (Animation Soup), Musabi students Ayako...

Tricky Women 2010: Call for Film Submissions

The Tricky Women Animation Festival has just announced that the 2010 festival will take place in Vienna 4th - 8th March, 2010. Many Japanese animators have screened films at this festival. Most notably, Maya Yonesho, who has worked as an artist-in-residence at Tricky Women. At this year's festival, the director of the Hiroshima International Animation Festival, Sayoko Kinoshita, put together a...

My Favourite Japanese Art Animators

For those of you who don’t know already, since discovering an art exhibit by Tomoyasu Murata in on Hongo Dori in 2006 (the photo above is of my kids watching the installation in the front display window) I have developed a huge passion for Japanese Art Animation. My love of avant-garde and experimental animation in general dates back to my discovery of Norman McLaren’s work at the central library...

My Favourite Animators (Mainstream)

Isao Takahata (高畑勲, b. 1935)Takahata’s films have the power to move audiences in unexpected ways. Grave of the Fireflies (1988) is, along with Imamura’s Black Rain (1989) and the Kinoshitas’ film Pica-don (1979), one of the most powerful anti-war films that I have ever seen. On the other end of the spectrum, I have rarely laughed as much during a feature length animated film as I did while watching...

My Favourite Japanese Directors

Following on Nippon Cinema's and Wildgrounds' contributions to the Japanese Cinema Blogathon (June 15th – 21st), I thought I’d also make a list of some of my favourite directors. I say ‘some’ because I like a wide range of directors and making lists is not so easy for me. This list will comprise non-animators and I will do a list of my favourite animators in a separate entry.So here it goes, in...

Chris Marker's AK: Akira Kurosawa (A.K. ドキュメント黒澤明, 1985)

Like the film Ran itself, Chris Marker’s documentary, which he shot during the on location production of Kurosawa’s 1985 epic, is a kind of an intellectual exercise. In the process of looking up information about the making of this documentary, I discovered that fans of Kurosawa had blasted Chris Marker’s directorial efforts on the comments pages of imdb. One person suggests that it’s an example...