Hara by Ozu

by Cláudio Alves

100 years ago in 1920, Setsuko Hara was born in the city of Yokohama, Japan. Thanks to the powers of nepotism and the influence of her brother-in-law, she got a job at the Nikkatsu Studios at the age of 15. In the next few years, she rose to prominence. By the 1940s, Hara became somewhat of a symbol of new Japanese womanhood. Curiously enough, that's not how she's best remembered today, in part thanks to her most famous directors being ones that cast her in roles typifying the conservative values of a traditional Japan. Despite multiple collaborations with such legendary filmmakers as the master of melodrama Mikio Naruse and Japan's superstar director Akira Kurosawa, it's her work in the films of Yasujiro Ozu that now most define her legacy… 

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Links: Spike Lee, Denise Cronenberg, Amanda Seyfried, etc...

Must Read
The Guardian has a really fun Spike Lee interview in which he answers questions from famous actors and directors. Spike always brings joy and we couldn't be more pleased about the career resurgence. People, I personally saw Girl 6 and Bamboozled and Chi-Raq in movie theaters. They all flopped but my ticket $ was in there! So naturally it's been thrilling to watch this recent return to prominence / audience goodwill. Though I admit I was surprised when raves started pouring in for Da 5 Bloods since his last (and only other) war picture (Miracle at St Anna) did not go over well at all.

More links after the jump including a tragic Cronenberg loss, a Bollywood suicide, Dick Tracy budget overrages, Little Women in Japan, and more...

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Smackdown '02: Meryl, Julianne, CZJ, Queen Latifah "and" Kathy Bates

The Supporting Actress Smackdown series picks an Oscar vintage and explores.

THE NOMINEES Today's topic: 2002 which featured the movies Adaptation, The Hours, About Schmidt, and Best Picture champ Chicago.  This very starry field of much-beloved actresses (all but one are now Oscar winners) deliver a juicy collection of characters: a horny mother-of-the-groom, a suicidal 50s housewife, an opportunistic prison warden, a fictionalized non-fiction writer, and a jazzbaby murderess.

THE PANEL  Here to talk about these 2002 divas and their movies are comedian/writer Joel Kim Booster, comedian/writer Matt Rogers, Variety's Artisan's editor Jazz Tangcay, Vox's critic-at-large Emily VanDerWerff, and lip sync assassin Ben Yahr. And, as ever, your host at The Film Experience, Nathaniel R. Let's begin...

2002
SUPPORTING ACTRESS SMACKDOWN + PODCAST  
The companion podcast can be downloaded at the bottom of this article or by visiting the iTunes page...

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Pride Month Doc Corner: 'Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen'

Doc Corner is celebrating Pride Month with a focus on documentaries that tackle LGBTIQ themes. This week a new documentary about transgender representation on screen, streaming on Netflix.

By Glenn Dunks

The Celluloid Closet casts a long shadow over queer cinema in the 25 years since its release when it became an arthouse box office and Emmy-nominated sensation. That film by Rob Epstein (a two-time Oscar winner) and Jeffrey Friedman opened the world of film to new textural readings that many LGBTIQ viewers had known and talked about for years but remained largely quiet in the mainstream while traversing through to the then budding space that queer filmmakers and stories had carved by 1995. And for those young enough to come to the film as a budding LGBTIQ cinephile, it made for a hell of an introduction to movies.

There are always going to be gaps in a film like The Celluloid Closet and the new Netflix documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen from director Sam Feder attempts to fill them. All that and add a quarter of a century of cultural and societal changes on top... 

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The Furniture: Architecture of Anxiety in The Golem

"The Furniture" is our series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

 by Daniel Walber

The story goes that Paul Wegener first heard of the Golem while shooting The Student of Prague (1913). Though he was clearly caught by the story, Wegener may also have been entranced by a glimpse of the old Josefov, Prague’s Jewish ghetto. Dating back to the Middle Ages, the neighborhood was almost entirely demolished between 1893 and 1913 to make room for Paris-style boulevards. Inspired, Wegener made two (now-lost) Golem movies during World War One - though not in Prague.

By the time he started on The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920), the world had changed. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was gone. Prague was the capital of brand-new Czechoslovakia, a Czechoslovak-speaking nation - which would be complicated for its mostly German-speaking Jews. Frankly, Wegener could have set his Golem movie in 1920 if he wanted...

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