FIVE PHILOSOPHICAL FABLES
Japan, 1967
Director: Donald Richie
Donald Richie’s classic is, in the words of Yukio Mishima, an outrageous farce, and a pitiless indictment of all our false ‘human’ values. As an allegory of an ‘all-consuming’ Tokyo family cannibalizing each other in a Tokyo park, it attains the highest reaches of black humour.
Cinematography:
Makoto Yamaguchi
Music:
Felix Mendelssohn
Production: 16mm / b-w / 50 mins
Director's bio-note:
Donald Richie is well known as the foremost Western scholar of the Japanese cinema. Novelist, essayist, film critic, he has also written, directed and edited a number of films, and produced his own experimental shorts in the 1950s and 1960s.
Though relatively unknown in the rest of the world, these films have had a seminal influence in Japan. While his work attracted strong interest in that country, the audience, in Richie's words, "just vanished" as the 60s’ counter-culture returned to their day jobs.
Still, the films remain an important part of a seminal period in Japanese contemporary arts and are rightly gaining a new audience both in Japan and abroad.