Zigeunerweisen
Alternate title(s):
Foreign Title:
Date: January 01, 1980 to February 01, 1981
Dates Note: 1980
Country of Origin:
Japan
Place of Origin: Japan
Languages:
Japanese
Color: Color
Silent: No
Based On:
Additional Info:
Curator Notes
Film Series/Exhibition Title:
The Films of Seijun SuzukiDescription:
Named the best film of the 1980s in a poll of Japanese film critics, Zigeunerweisen takes its title from a recording of violin music by Pablo de Sarasate. The piece haunts the film’s two main characters: Aochi, an uptight professor at a military academy, and his erstwhile colleague Nakasago, who is now a wild-haired wanderer and possible murderer. The movie’s plot is a metaphysical ghost story involving love triangles, doppelgangers, and a blurred line between the worlds of the living and the dead.
Film Series/Exhibition Title:
Cinema Japan: A Wreath for Madame KawakitaDescription:
Seijun Suzuki’s hypnotic and extraordinarily beautiful film evokes the late 1920s as a period of changing mores in Japan akin to Weimar Germany. Suzuki weds French Surrealism to Japanese ghost story (with a bit of German Expressionism thrown in to make it a ménage à trois) for a story that actually involves a ménage à cinq. A Japanese professor of German on vacation in a seaside resort is drawn, through an old university acquaintance, into a bizarre sexual pentangle involving a geisha and a woman who resembles her exactly (both are played by Naoko Otani), as well as his own wife. Denizens of the supernatural appear to roam comfortably in the free-spirited universe in which the professor finds himself. The title refers to Sarasate’s violin composition, a piece that haunts this film both as an element of its story and in the score.
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