A day in the life of Ako, a 16-year-old Japanese girl, and her friends and co-workers. An alarm clock wakes her in a dorm; she gets ready for work and travels to a large bakery. We see her with friends, chatting and laughing, as well as working. They go out, seven of them jammed in an old Pontiac: bowling, then to an amusement park, then driving around. Car trouble may put her at risk. Is she going to be okay?
Italy
Source: IMDB (Venice)
Italy
Japanuary 2022: Hiroshi Teshigahara
Ako is a film about being young and yearning for freedom.
To be young is to be insecure.
To be confused.
To be anxious.
To be lost.
To be young is to be doing your best to find your footing in a society that could not care less about you. Your friends are in no better of a position.
Wake up. Work. Hang out. Laugh a little. Get hurt. Sleep. Repeat. That is the routine.
Things do not change too much after youth either.
You either keep fighting to push past the powers driving against you or accept things for what they are.
This routine needs shaken up a bit, though. And one of the best…
“To be groggy by habit, to be lost, to struggle with the alienness of one’s own body and how it’s mangled and misinterpreted by men who seek to dominate: this is the state of automatic caprice that AKO captures with violent immediacy.”
My first essay with the Criterion Collection (a dream!) is now live. I talk about Hiroshi Teshigahara’s and Kobo Abe’s painfully unsung 30-minute masterpiece AKO: 16 ANS: JAPONAISE (1965), starring Miki Irie, music and sound design by the great Toru Takemitsu. Deserves to be far better known and loved. It’s streaming on the Criterion Channel in an excellent transfer. Thanks a million to Andrew Chan for his patience and care with this. ❤️Middle-school Carlos is verklempt. Link here:
www.criterion.com/current/posts/7312-the-sequel-to-her-dreams-hiroshi-teshigahara-and-kobo-abe-s-ako
☆"Morning dreams are prophetic. Night dreams are the opposite of the truth. I want to see the sequel to my dreams."☆
The last of the four short films by Hiroshi Teshigahara that come as extras on the Criterion release of Woman in the Dunes, Ako ["White Morning"] is an experimental piece by the Japanese auteur from 1965, the only one of the handful of films I'm watching this evening that is purely narrative and fictional, and easily the most complex.
Depicting a day in the life of the eponymous 16-year-old girl, it follows Ako (Miki Irie) as she wakes and readies for work at a large bakery. Sometimes she's on the clock, sometimes chatting, sometimes adrift. She rides -- bounds,…
A lucid dream, painted in shades of grey by the precise hand of Hiroshi Teshigahara at a time in the world where the youth were finding a path from their post-war constraints to a new type of freedom. Men and women working together in an industrialised bakery setting, pushing through the mundane routine of it all in an attempt to get to the other side of the day, where a new routine lies in wait.
Colleagues at work, friends outside. Or are they? Is this just a ruse to pass time, have fun and place each other in perilous situations. A way to get to the next day unharmed? Ready for the circle of the week to start over.
Toru Takemitsu's calming score carries the mostly silent imagery to create a peaceful film with moments of unease for 16-year-old Ako, as she desperately tries to find her place among the older crew.
I’m awake, but I feel like I’m dreaming.
I want this dream to go on...
because night dreams are the opposite of the truth.
A beautiful early short by Hiroshi Teshigahara. Like many of his films, it's based on a story by Kobo Abe. The narrative is pretty simple: the film depicts a day in the life of a 16 year old Japanese girl, and her friends and co-workers. But Teshigahara uses many experimental techniques to offer a much more fragmented and subjective experience, and a fascinating one at that. It reminded me of some of the free-spirited French New Wave shorts.
Watch here w/subs: YouTube
utilising so many experimental cinematic tricks in the book to heighten the mundane and the everyday into something deeper and profound. and exciting, even. all while remaining fairly grounded as well. it’s like some surreal koan about youth. a haunting, somber piano piece accompanies the scene where their car (their freedom) breaks down, basically equating it to a funeral. Ako overall evokes a familiar feeling for a past that should feel vastly dated. aesthetics aside, this past doesn’t feel like such, as most could identify with some of the aspects of youth presented here: feeling lost, unsure of yourself, what the future holds, if that special someone likes you, why can’t we just drive forever, etc. etc. endlessly fascinating, brilliant. think I’m starting to get what Teshigahara goes for with his style. idk how this one isn’t more loved.
Morning dreams come through... Evening dreams never come through.
I’m definitely witnessing one of my favorite directors of all-time unfold before me eyes. This short, Ako (also called White Morning), is the only fictional short Hiroshi Teshigahara made in his career (all his other shorts are documentaries), and what he paints us is a beautiful dream of a day in the life of a 16 year-old girl and her friends who work at a bakery and go out on the town.
Plot-wise you don’t get anything out of this piece, but forget plot. This is more like one of those films you throw up on the wall and see what emotions are evoked from you. Plus who needs any sort…
Japanuary 2021 №4 (10. 1 Hiroshi Teshigahara film)
Von der Zukunft träumen, die Gegenwart leben.
Wir begleiten die 16-Jährige Ako 24 Stunden. Vom Aufstehen, durch den Arbeitstag in einer Großbäckerei, bis zum anschließenden Treffen mit Freunden und Arbeitskolleginnen und Entfliehen mit dem eigenen Auto durch die Nacht bis zum Morgengrauen. Mit wilden Mitteln in Bild und Ton arbeitend, werden trotzdem das aufregende, freie, melancholische und verlorene Gefühl dieser Lebenszeit und Momente die wohl fast jeder kennt herübergebracht.
Avantgarde. Sixties. Jugendkultur. Zeitlos.
"I'm too scared to sleep."
Between Tokyo 1958 (1958) and the last short film on the Criterion Collection’s Supplements disc for Three Films by Hiroshi Teshigahara (2007), Teshigahara began making feature films and made Pitfall (1962) and Woman in the Dunes (1964). As a result, he came to this narrative short film (29 minutes) with his A-team on board: screenwriter Kobo Abe, cinematographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto, and composer Toru Takemitsu.
The film follows a day and a night in the life of a Tokyo 16 year old, Ako (Miki Irie) who works in a bakery and goes out in a car at night with a group of friends including her boyfriend (Teruko Hasegawa).
Shot in high contrast B&W, the first part of the film could have…
As rich in narrative content as Tehigahara's feeature-length films, and more alinear and "experimental" than I've seen him go in longer formats. Very nouvelle vague, very J-wave, very postwar youth-culture.
يروي الفيلم قصة يوم واحد في حياة فتاة تدعى آكو البالغة من العمر 16 عامًا، حيث تعمل في مخبز وتستمتع بوقتها مع أصدقائها. يعرض الفيلم لمحات من حياتها اليومية والصعوبات التي تواجهها بطريقة بسيطة وواقعية. ما يميز الفيلم هو استخدام موسيقى البيانو، التي تضيف لمسة من العاطفة والعمق إلى المشاهد، مما يعزز الشعور بالحياة العادية والتجارب التي تمر بها آكو.
