A BURNING STAR
(焼星)
Dir. Kenji Onishi, 1995.
Japan. 95 min.
16mm.
SUNDAY, JUNE 21 – 7:30 PM
Through the act of filming I recorded the distance between my father and myself. It is a primitive, simple and absolute film. In short, it is the possibility of my own self.
This Father’s Day at Spectacle, join us in memorializing the father figure with a special 16mm screening. In A BURNING STAR, Onishi confronts his father’s death through the camera, documenting the funeral rites, preparation of the body, and subsequent cremation through a window into the incinerator, presenting some of the most profoundly affecting and unearthly images ever put to film. Made when Onishi was only 22 years old, yet already radical in its Brakhage-ian filmmaking and undeniable emotionality, A BURNING STAR is a work of startling intimacy. Of the film, Onishi writes, “my inner conflicts find a cruel form.”