This screening will be preceded by an introduction by Nozomi Naoi, Associate Professor of Art History at Yale-NUS College. To learn more about the artist Takehisa Yumeji, do click here.
Director: Seijun Suzuki
Runtime: 128 min
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Rating: M18
Synopsis
The life of renowned painter and poet Takehisa Yumeji is fantastically interpreted in this final entry in Seijun Suzuki’s Taisho trilogy—made ten years after his last film. Played by rock star Kenji Sawada, Yumeji’s iconoclastic life and art are distilled through a fictitious premise, wherein he falls for an alluring widow, whose murdered husband returns from the dead.
“Yumeji’s Theme” most fondly remembered as the iconic track featured in Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love was written for this film by composer Shigeru Umebayashi.
About the Writer
Nozomi Naoi is Associate Professor of Art History at Yale-NUS College with joint appointment at the Department of Japanese Studies at the National University of Singapore. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2014. She specializes in modern Japanese art and visual culture and is the author of Yumeji Modern: Designing the Everyday in Twentieth-Century Japan (University of Washington Press, 2020; awarded the Honorable Mention for the John Whitney Hall Prize 2022). She is preparing her second book, Modern Design and the Japanese Department Store (under advance contract with MIT Press) and is also co-curator of “Made in Japan: 20th-Century Poster Art” (Poster House Museum, New York, 2023).
For the full Retrospective: Seijun Suzuki programme, please click here.
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