This Week’s Agenda
The films in this week’s selection explore the tension between past and present and reflect on the confrontation between tradition and modernity.
Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story ranks fourth in the recent Sight and Sound poll, but the filmmaker himself considers Late Spring, which “only” achieved 21st place, as one of his most “perfect” films. As in the other films from Ozu’s so-called “Noriko-trilogy”, Late Spring portrays a young, single woman’s ambiguous relationship to modernity. Caught between the Japanese tradition of arranged marriage and the modern ideal of a love marriage, Norika and her father end up in a position neither of them wants to be in. Ozu’s subtle exploration of the complex relationship between personal desires and social expectations was almost censored by the American occupier, who considered its views on marriage “feudalistic”.
The status of marriage under modernity is also one of the subjects treated by Pasolini in Love Meetings. Interviewing people from various social backgrounds across Italy about sex, marriage and homosexuality, the filmmaker lays bare how, despite the ongoing sexual revolution, a persistent conservatism still permeates all layers of Italian society. What is most striking is the ordinary Italian’s hesitance and even refusal to speak, which led Michel Foucault to note that “this document cannot be appreciated if one is more interested in what is said than in the mystery that isn’t told.”
Sarah Vanagt uses the medium of film to confront the present with the past. In Little Figures, First Elections and De Dragers [The Porters], which are shown together at De Cinema, Vanagt explores how the past is remembered and interpreted. De Dragers, her latest documentary, re-imagines colonial history through the eyes of youngsters from Brussels, uncovering how its dynamics continue to inform their life in the city. Her archaeological approach to the past makes the invisible visible. As Vanagt stated at Sabzian’s 2018 State of Cinema: “That is the wondrous and the powerful and the political side of cinema, once it has been made visible, it can never remain unseen.”
