A high school science teacher builds an atomic bomb and uses it to extort the nation, but cannot decide what he wants. Meanwhile, a determined cop is catching up to him, as is radiation poisoning.
rarefilmm | The Cave of Forgotten Films Posts
Kagatani Shizuo, an employee at home electronics manufacturer Victor Company of Japan (JVC) is transferred to the home video division of the company’s Yokohama factory, and told to cut the division’s staff by 20%. But Kagatani doesn’t want to fire anyone so he decides to increase sales instead by developing a home video player. Inspired by Kagatani’s impassioned phrase, “We have to defend our jobs ourselves,” the employees pour their efforts into product development, and perfect a trial model, VHS.
A seminary student, Giacomo Vigetti, is convicted by the Papal State of seducing a young girl. He is forced to flee and takes refuge with an excommunicated priest. Unfortunately, the priest was excommunicated for experimenting with the black arts. And soon Giacomo wishes they’d never met.
Set in a dreamlike rural Japan, the story starts out to be about an adolescent boy’s attempt to escape his overprotective mother and then surprisingly becomes a filmmaker’s desire to confront his own elaborated creation. There is also an effort to reconcile the individual with the collective or old and new Japan through this parade of emblematic images. Gossiping women wear sinister eye patches. An outcast simple-minded woman drowns her own baby and later returns as a sophisticated prostitute. A circus fat lady yearns to have her fake body inflated by a dwarf. Curious and astounding scenes abound, all contributing to an overwhelming experience of a creative mind interrogating itself.
Eva has just gotten married to an older gentleman, but discovers that he is obsessed with order in his life and doesn’t have much room for passion. She becomes despondent and leaves him, returning to her father’s house. One day while bathing in the lake she meets a young man and they fall in love. The husband has become grief stricken at the loss of his young bride, and fate brings him together with the young lover that has taken Eva from him.
A young teacher, Eva Nygaard, arrives in Greenland from Denmark to surprise her fiance, the Doctor Erik Halsøe, but is crushed to find he has not waited for her and he is about to be married to his assisting nurse. Eva travels to a small fishing village to await the next ship back to Denmark. There she enters into a tense and often confrontational relationship with Jens, a quiet moody Dane who manages a trading company outpost. Meanwhile, Jens is trying to persuade a Greenlander named Pavia to become a company fisherman, despite Pavia’s fear of alienating his fellow villagers and upsetting the spirit, Qivitoq.
Three Japanese pilgrims arrive in India. Miss Naruse is looking for Otsu, a Catholic priest, her lover ten years before; after time in France and Israel, he has come to Benares where he carries the bodies of the poor to the crematorium. Her life is empty and, although Otsu was her lover only as a joke, she is now drawn to his spiritual nature. Mr. Isobe searches for a village child who may be the reincarnation of his dead wife. Mr. Yagusi comes to pray for the man who saved his life in World War II, a man haunted for 50 years by the means he used to save his comrade. Pantheism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Christianity meet on the shores of the Ganges in these characters.