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barry-beckett
Reviews
Ai no korîda (1976)
sensual sex as a microcosm of the state of Japan
Most reviews miss the point to me. This traditional couple in 30's Japan spirals into a sexual affair of more and more addiction to the Bliss that never arrives to satisfy their craving, set to a backdrop of the military buildup of the Japanese invasion of Korea and China in the mid thirties.
That the affair ends with the man's death, while attempting the ultimate orgasm as she pulls a cord tightly around his neck, is so obvious a comment on Japanese history that I wonder how anyone can call this an erotic film. True, there are crafted and beautiful scenes of uncensored sex, but these only draw us into their deeper world, ( by our own voyeurism and curiosity) before their demise and that of Japan are finally delivered in the final scenes.
Interestly the film was financed in France and not released in Japan in the seventies.
It was not given a certificate in England , and was shown at a cinema where, for legal reasons, the audience had to join a film club to see it. It was the most sexually explicit film commercially shown outside of the porn industry in 1977.
A landmark film
Europe After the Rain (1978)
Two hour documentary on the Dada and Surrealist art movement
I cut this movie for the Arts Council of Great Britain in Sept. to November 1978. It was my first full film as an editor. It attempts to put on film the history of Dada and Surrealism using stills, contemporary film footage, television interviews (Marcel Duchamp was particularly charming, erudite and sly with his young female interviewer). As a film it fails. It becomes a book on film, and not what I had hoped it would be; a cinematic opening out of a widely known but little understood influence on 20th century western culture. Like many editors, I fought with Mick Gold the director to bring this about. Mick had managed to extract the largest budget to date from the Arts Council of Great Britain, allowing trips to various capitals around the world to shoot his story. He was unmoved by my attempts to restructure his paper script into a movie, He was the director, and I was the editor. Looking and listening to it now, I have a copy on Cassette, it is slow, ponderous, (especially the acted bits) and pompous, which only the hilarious sound poems of Kurt Schwitters manages to cut through. But still worth a look .