where are the ideas?  mentalblock

Brothers

Chalk pastel, 3 ft. x 4 ft.

The film Himiko seemed very bizarre to me after researching the woman Himiko herself. I did not feel that the film focused enough on the myth that she led Japan as a ruler. The film greatly focused on the idea of her being a prophet for the sun god, which did not seem to be so much of a focus in my research. I also did not like the amount of sexual scenes in the film. I am not trying to be prude or anything, I just feel there could have been a deal less sexual encounters, while still getting the point across.

Cinematography wise, I found this film to be groundbreaking in its nature. The compositions of each seem were always beautiful. One can tell that a great deal of though went into the placement of characters in each scene in accordance with color choices, et cetera. The idea that most of the scenes could be viewed as being the Japanese flag both placement and color wise was fascinating as a concept. Another aspect of the film I found to be both beautiful and interesting were the costumes. They were all unique and you could tell thought went into them. I especially liked the characters on the mountains who were painted white and would walk and move in strange and fascinating ways. I still do not really understand who they were or why they were there, but I definitely liked to watch them move and interact with one another and with the other characters.

To sum up my thoughts, I did not like this film story wise, but I found it to be beautiful aesthetic wise. I cannot remember the last time I watched a film and thinking every other scene, ‘I would love to do a painting of that.’ These days films seem to focus a lot more on the story than on things such as symbolism and visual balance, just in my opinion. I very much enjoyed the film in the visual sense of it and would watch it again solely for that reason. I feel the story of the film did not go along too well with how I had envisioned Himiko as I did research on her. She really did not have an air of a woman hero to me in the movie as much as she did in my mind as I researched her.