This article appeared in the December 1, 2022 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.
What’s Up Connection (Masashi Yamamoto, 1990)
The hop-skip nomadism of Masashi Yamamoto’s early narrative work can be said to be defined by three salient tendencies: the late-’70s jishu eiga, or “self-made films” movement, which countered the Japanese studio system with a rush of 8mm and 16mm vérités; home-seeking, an acute desire to build or find one’s place in the world; and political anarchism, with its passion for flagrant resistance. All three strands are plaited together in Yamamoto’s jishu contributions, Prelude to the Murder of a Prison Guard (1979), about a man magpieing objects in order to construct his own miniature city, and Carnival in the Night (1981), in which a fresh divorcée traipses around Tokyo’s punk underbelly, feverishly