Haiku #1

A collection of three short 'haiku videos' by Chris Marker. The first haiku, 'Yanka / Tchaika', shows the river Seine passing under a bridge. A bird in flight stays motionless in the air. The second haiku, 'Owl Gets in Your Eyes', shows Catherine Belkhodja smoking a cigarette while a superimposed shot of an owl in flight fades in and out over her face. The third haiku is a tribute to the Lumière brothers. In an homage to their style, Marker documents an event of daily life in only a minute, choosing to film work on the Petite Centure (a Parisian railway) in May 1994. Due to the work, no train actually passes and we are simply shown desolate train tracks, making the haiku a dry parody of 'L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat'.

Dealing heavily with perceptions of time, Aeon documents the urban cityscape as Wellington transforms through a zen-influenced eternal cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth within a 24-hour period.

On the threshold of her old age, Dolores faces a wall full of memories.

A fictionalised documentary about the great Japanese poet Bashô (1644–1694), the spiritual father of haiku poetry. A monk, portraying the poet, journeys through Japan, following Bashô's journal and writing many of his haikus. A ruminant, poetic, Zen Buddhist observation of nature – a return to the lost paradise of unspoilt nature.

A cinematic haiku by Chris Marker.

A still, highly overexposed shot of a car bridge and the river below. A cinematic haiku by Chris Marker.

A cinematic haiku by Chris Marker.

After meeting one day, a shy boy who expresses himself through haiku and a bubbly but self-conscious girl share a brief, magical summer.

The Yamadas are a typical middle class Japanese family in urban Tokyo and this film shows us a variety of episodes of their lives. With tales that range from the humorous to the heartbreaking, we see this family cope with life's little conflicts, problems, and joys in their own way.

A haiku about a window and a woman.

A haiku club comprised of five unlikely students aim to win the national high school haiku tournament.

Twelve shots, four sequences. Each of them will try to evoke a feeling, a sensation, an idea, a landscape… just like the iconic and transcendental Japanese poems known as “Haiku”.

Winter Days is a 2003 animated film, directed by Kihachirō Kawamoto. It is based on one of the renku (collaborative linked poems) in the 1684 collection of the same name by the 17th-century Japanese poet Bashō. The creation of the film followed the traditional collaborative nature of the source material – the visuals for each of the 36 stanzas were independently created by 35 different animators. As well as many Japanese animators, Kawamoto assembled leading names of animation from across the world. Each animator was asked to contribute at least 30 seconds to illustrate their stanza, and most of the sequences are under a minute (Yuriy Norshteyn's, though, is nearly two minutes long).

Kimiko, a Tokyo white-collar working girl, lives with her serious, intellectual, haiku-writing mother. Kimiko seeks to marry her boyfriend but needs her absent father to act as the go-between and negotiate the marriage. Kimiko travels and finds her father living with a second family.

A poet and a spirit have an ongoing deal: Haiku for life.

FALL

a haiku films, a poem by Nha Thuyen

A haiku film poem. the early morning waiting for the monks. the voices. the fire. the wat drum.

Black Power is Green Power

Based on Akutagawa Ryunosuke's short story The Devil and Tobacco (1916), the film introduces a curious account of the devil's introduction to Japan with St. Xavier in 1549, and how the devil transformed himself into an octopus (or devil fish) to eventually oppress Japanese Christians in the 17th century.