Film - Nanami: The Inferno of First Love (Hatsukoi: Jigoku-hen)

When
25 Mar 2019
7:00 PM
Location
Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Film - Nanami: The Inferno of First Love (Hatsukoi: Jigoku-hen)

Monday, March 25, 2019 from 7:00 PM

Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy Street ,
Cambridge, MA 02138

One of the signature masterworks of the Japanese New Wave, Hani's intense and brilliantly unpredictable portrait of youth engulfed in amorous flames is a showcase for Hani's innovative documentary approach to cinema and his rare sensitivity to the fluttering dream of adolescence. The story of a shy young man drawn into the spell of an attractive, outgoing model with a secret life, Nanami: The Inferno of First Love grows increasingly darker and stranger as the girl leads him deeper in the Tokyo underworld and into the troubled recesses of his repressed traumas and fears. While the film's crypto-sexual dreamscape must be partially credited to its co-writer, the legendary enfant terrible of the Japanese avant-garde, Shuji Terayama, Nanami's intimacy with its young actors and postwar youth culture clearly draws from Hani's earlier work. Shot in grainy 16mm black-and-white, Nanami is also a fascinating document of Sixties Tokyo, pulling back the seedy folds of the same urban underbelly being discovered by photographers such as Daido Moriyama and by Hani's contemporary, the avant-garde documentarian Toshio Matsumoto.

To learn more, please visit the Harvard Film Archive Website.

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