PRODUCT INFORMATION
Winner of the Golden Leopard award at the 1970 Locarno Film Festival, This Transient Life is among the Art Theatre Guild's most successful - and most controversial - productions. The film concerns a brother and sister from a rich family who defy the expectations placed on them: he has little interest in further education or his father's business, instead obsessing over Buddhist statues; she continually refuses a string of suitors and the prospect of marriage. Their closeness, and isolation, gives way to an incestuous relationship which, in turn, breeds disaster. Mandara, Jissôji's first color feature, maintained the controversial subject matter, focusing on a cult who recruit through rape and hope to achieve true ecstasy through sexual release. Shot, as with all of Jissôji's Art Theatre Guild works, in a radically stylized manner, the film sits somewhere between the pinku genre and the fiercely experimental approach of his Japanese New Wave contemporaries.
The final entry in the trilogy, Poem, returns to black and white and is centred on the austere existence of a young houseboy who becomes helplessly embroiled in the schemes of two brothers. Written by Toshirô Ishidô (screenwriter of Nagisa Ôshima's The Sun's Burial and Shôhei Imamura's Black Rain), who also penned This Transient Life and Mandara, Poem continues the trilogy's exploration of faith in a post-industrial world.
FEATURES:
High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentations of This Transient Life, Mandara and Poem
Original uncompressed LPCM mono 1.0 audio on all three films
Newly translated optional English subtitles
Introductions to all three films by David Desser, author of Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave
Scene-select commentaries on all three films in the Trilogy by Desser
Theatrical trailers for Mandara, Poem and It Was A Faint Dream
Limited edition packaging, fully illustrated by maarko phntm
Illustrated 60-page perfect-bound collector's book featuring new writings on the films by Anton Bitel and Tom Mes
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