To Sleep so as to Dream (Hayashi, 1986): ICA Cinema, 6.30pm
This 16mm presentation is part of the Celluloid Sunday strand at ICA Cinema.
Time Out review:
A red herring-strewn mystery, shot in black-and-white and almost silent, Hayashi's debut is something like a Japanese Tintin
adventure made by Alain Resnais. It concerns a silent swashbuckler film
that combusts before its finale, a trio of magicians, and the venerable
Madame Cherry-Blossom, whose daughter has been abducted by the shady
consortium 'M Pathé and Co'. To Sleep, So As to Dream prospects
the borders between film and reality, dream and wakefulness, but it's
also a larky pastiche of the '20s sleuth genre, with detective heroes
Uotsuka (Shiro) and Kobayashi (Koji) as intrepid stout-hearts in the
Sexton Blake and Tinker tradition. Hayashi lays on surreal humour with
flair, but the movie is above all a disquisition on film conventions,
Japanese and Western, antique and modern. Most audaciously, Hayashi
punctures the silence with ringing phones and the spoken interventions
of a benshi, the traditional commentator of silent cinema. Although it doesn't quite approach the magic of Circus Boys, it's a wonderfully inventive, genuinely eerie narrative experiment.
Jonathan Romney
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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