1977 ‘ハウス’ Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi
Hoping to find a sense of connection to her late mother, Gorgeous takes a trip to the country to visit her aunt at their ancestral house. She invites her six friends, Prof, Melody, Mac, Fantasy, Kung Fu, and Sweet, to join her. The girls soon discover that there is more to the old house than meets the eye.
Sixty in September: 10/60
There are so many things to be fascinated by in this beautiful, wild movie, but two things really stick out to me. Obayashi talks about them in the interview on the Criterion materials:
One is the war and the atomic bombings. Obayashi is originally from Hiroshima. He says, quietly and candidly, that most his friends didn't survive the bombings, as a child. The second is Obayashi's sense of how children view and experience the world. He talks about their easy attraction to the strange and mysterious. Where, he says, adults see Jaws and might think for the next movie, substituting bears for the monster, his daughter conjured a kaleidoscope of subconscious fears and fantasies that were…
my favorite part about this is that he saw jaws and said “I would like to make a movie like jaws” and then he made this movie
Not a single creative decision was questioned by anyone during the making of this movie, and that's exactly why it's so great.
(Also William told me I had to watch The Muppet Movie before watching this movie. Fuck you William I do what I want)
I tried to watch this seven years ago when I was thirteen or fourteen, and simply could not handle it. I stopped watching about fifteen minutes in, unsure of what I had just seen. I had heard that it was an awesome and brilliant film, but was merely too young, or maybe too unknowledgeable at the time, to understand its eccentricity or humor. Tonight I finally revisited this film, and I can safely say that I think it's brilliant. I have yet to read any analyses of Hausu, but to me, this is Nobuhiko Ôbayashi's attempt to re-create the madness and surreality of war (most likely WWII), and the effect that it had on his home country through the boundlessly…
For me, one of the most impressive things a movie can do is show me something I cannot possibly see in real life. This is not simply a matter of the supernatural; there are so many things I will never seen even in the natural universe. Instead, this is a matter of even simple things, like Tsai Ming Liang's ability to capture images from angles I wouldn't ever think to look at things from or Jess Franco's use of European locales that I probably won't ever visit. They're the reason to engage with fiction, to find new ways to see and understand the world, ideas, or people. Hausu makes use of the art of cinema to simply ignore all convention,…
