Past event!
This event has already taken place.
Find all current events for this promoter here.
Alan Cummings (talk)
Presented by: Cafe OTO| 0 | LONDON: Cafe Oto |
|---|---|
| P | Tuesday 8th March, 2011 |
| N | 8:00pm |
Premiere screening of Vincent Moon's portrait of the legendary underground Japanese folk artist Kazuki Tomokawa, with a special introductory talk by Alan Cummings.
"The screaming philosopher.
It was in the middle of the summer 2008, I received a long email from a Japanese ‘fan’. Looked like it was just some lovely words, advising me to film a Japanese musician, a certain rare folk artist named Tomokawa something. It took me 4 more months to re-read the email until the end – and discover that this fan was actually inviting me to Japan to make a movie about his idol.
We went there for 2 weeks, in March 2009, and this filming experience was by far the most important of my life. Kazuki Tomokawa, that’s his name, 59 years old man, at first the exact idea you could get of a cinema character straight from a yakuza movie, a guitar in his hand and a scream in his mouth. But then the camera allows you to explore more and makes you discover the multiple layers of his existence and belief in life, his past as an actor for Oshima or Miike, his passion for bike race gambling, his unstoppable addiction to alcohol, his amazing skills as a painter, and his troubled past with his son, you soon got the feeling there’s only one Kazuki Tomokawa. As there was only one Rimbaud.
The other day, while working on the edit of ‘La Faute des Fleurs’, a friend of mine was helping to translate certain sequences. At some point, she would suddenly burst into tears. At the question what happened, she turned to me and said, “it’s the way he speaks… he is like a poem”.
Tomokawa, the screaming philosopher."
October 2009, Vincent Moon
Musicians of Our Times, Episode 2
La Faute des Fleurs - a portrait of Kazuki Tomokawa
A film by Vincent Moon
With Kazuki Tomokawa
Eito Nozoki (Son), Naoki Ohzeki (Manager), Hideo Ikeezumi (Producer, PSF Records),
Masato Kato (Writer), Yasuki Fukushima (Poet),
Toshiaki Ishizuka (Musician, Zuno-keisatsu), Masato Nagahata (Musician, Pascals)
Story by Teresa Eggers and Vincent Moon
Sounds by Gaspar Claus and Teresa Eggers
Mix by Gaspar Claus
Edited by Vincent Moon and Lucas Archambault
Produced by Temporary Areas and Modest Launch
Japanese with English subtitle / 2009 / Japan / Color / 70min.
Sound and Vision Award 2009 Winner at Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH: DOX 2009)
VINCENT MOON
In 2006, overwhelmed by the beauty of Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel's Step Across the Border, on the English guitarist Fred Frith, Vincent Moon created the Take Away Shows project with Chryde - a series of video podcasts for La Blogotheque. This series of outdoor/wild documentaries consists in improvised video sessions with musicians, set in unexpected locations and broadcast freely on the web. In 3 years, he managed to shoot over a hundred clips with bands like REM, Arcade Fire, Sufjan Stevens, Beirut, Grizzly Bear and many more. He perfected a style immediately recognizable of intimate, fragile, dancing and shadowing long shots, and at the same time changed the whole idea of what should be a music video.
In addition to the Take Away Shows, Moon has explored other formats, experimenting with the relationship between images and sounds. He directed a movie-essay on New York band The National titled A skin, A night, released in May 2008 and was the main creator of the cult Miroir Noir, a 76min movie on The Arcade Fire. He has also worked closely with Michael Stipe and REM on several video and web projects related to their most recent album and again with La Blogotheque founder Chryde he produced a unique, fake one-take film experiment with Beirut where all 12 songs from his new album were filmed in the streets of Brooklyn.
In his attempt to find new ways to film music, distancing himself from mainstream and commercial formats, he filmed in Sketches from a nightmare (2006) a gonzo film on the ATP Festival and the first in a series on this festival. He also actively participated in the 90min film All Tomorrow’s Parties, released in 2009 to critical acclaim. In October 2007, Warp Films signed him up as a music video director.
La Flaure des Fleurs is his second in a series if long portraits on cult and rare musicians. It follows Little Blue Nothing on the Havels, a mythical couple from Prague.
