Monday, November 6, 2017 at 7:00PM

     Harvard Film Archive, 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138

Farewell to the Ark (Saraba hakobune)
Inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Terayama’s final and most elaborate feature film takes place on a remote Okinawan island ruled by a kind of mythical time that gives shifting shape to memory, fantasy and even death. Released shortly after his premature demise at the age of forty-seven and premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Farewell to the Ark seems to point towards a new direction in Terayama’s cinema, closer to the international art film with its casting of major stars and slightly more legible narrative structure, here the intergenerational struggles of a dynastic family. Nevertheless, the film brims over with classic Terayama tropes of surreal violence, frustrated sexuality and oneiric, ghostly imagery.

Directed by Shuji Terayama. With Tsutomu Yamazaki, Mayumi Ogawa, Yoshio Harada
Japan 1984, 35mm, color & b/w, 127 min. Japanese with English subtitles

Curated by Go Hirasawa and Julian Ross with Haden Guest.

Film descriptions by Haden Guest and Becca Voelcker.

Presented in partnership with Anthology Film Archives; National Film Center, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the George Eastman Museum, with the generous support of the Kinoshita Group. Special thanks: Theodore C. Bestor and Stacie Matsumoto—Reischauer Institute, Harvard; Hisashi Okajima, Akira Tochigi and Chizuru Usui—National Film Center, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Japan Foundation; Jed Rapfogel—Anthology Film Archives; Julian Ross; Go Hirasawa.

 
Tickets go on sale 45 minutes prior to show time. The HFA does not do advance ticket sales.