Shindo’s “Hymn” is one of many adaptions of Tanizaki’s classical novella ‘Shunkinsho’ (‘A Portrait of Shunkin’, 1933). The story tells of the adoration of Sasuke for his mistress, the blind samisen-teacher Shunkin, who treats him imperiously and subjects him to cruel beatings. After an unknown intruder probably one of her pupils, who seeks revenge for her cruel behaviour, pours boiling water on the sleeping Shunkin’s face, Sasuke blinds himself in order not to behold her disfigurement. Sasuke’s sacrifice, made in response to Shunkin’s tacit wish, seals their life-long relationship.
Category: Drama
In a mountain village, Heita, a translator’s son, is a gifted boy but is shunned by the villagers. He can imitate birds’ cry and befriends another boy who works in a brewery. Heita also finds solace in the village pastor Yasugi and his teacher Michiko, but they too have problems of their own.
Elle steps off the balcony of her Parisian apartment, plunging to her death. Why has she done it? As her pawnbroker husband, Luc, looks over her dead body, director Robert Bresson’s eerie, elegant picture traces their lives together in flashback. Elle is the “Gentle Creature” — meek, dreamy and thoughtful. She entrances Luc, who pursues her passionately. They marry, but the match never seems right, and things turn sour, grimly heading toward an inevitable end.
Clara works a back-breaking factory job in a Milan slum to support her disabled husband, three children and carping mother-in-law. But when Clara is diagnosed as tubercular, she’s sent to a sanatorium in the Alps that proves the greatest vacation of her life. There she meets other patients who treat her with kindness, civility and an intellectual respect that is alien to her. When she falls for a handsome fellow patient, she wonders if she can ever return.
A Russian ballet dancer defects from the USSR, emigrates to England, and joins a ballet company run by a powerful, wealthy lady.
One morning Jun gets into an angry argument with his father over his girlfriend whom his father disapproves of. In a fit of bloody rage, Jun kills his father. He decides to turn himself into the police, but his mother stops him. Eerily calm after the shock, she suggests that they dispose of the body, and then move to another place where no one will know them. When Jun moves the body out of the house, his mother suddenly changes moods again and points a knife at him, as tragedy begets tragedy.
An egocentric artillery captain and his venomous wife engage in savage unremitting battles in their isolated island fortress of the coast of Sweden at the turn of the century. Alice, a former actress who sacrificed her career for secluded military life with Edgar, reveals on the occasion of their 25th wedding anniversary, the veritable hell their marriage has been. Edgar, an aging schizoid who refuses to acknowledge his severe illness, struggles to sustain his ferocity and arrogance with an animal disregard for other people. Sensing that Alice together with her cousin and would-be lover, Kurt, may ally against him , retaliates with vicious force. Alice lures Kurt into the illusion of sharing a passionate assignation and recruits him in a plot to destroy Edgar.
In the summer of 1967, journalist Katharina is visited in Munich by her French friend, Anne. They take day trips and visit cafés, acquaintances and parties. In a series of conversations, they talk about the chances for female emancipation in a male-dominated society… This essay film puts five different types of women at the centre of the episodic narrative – an unmarried professional woman, a divorcee confused about her future, a career woman, a deceived wife and a “dream woman”