Issue:
March 2025
Join the Film Committee …
Join us on Wednesday, March 12 at 6 pm for a sneak preview of British director Mark Gill’s Ravens, a strikingly beautiful, unconventional biopic about famed photographer Masahisa Fukase. Golden Globe-winning actor Tadanobu Asano stars in the central role, which he invests with his trademark manic energy and melancholy grandeur, earning our empathy for a man who is at odds with his success and plagued by contradictory impulses. The tortured artist that we get to know in Ravens is no bland simulacrum; when we first meet him, he is a young man in the 1940s, trying to escape the emotional abuse of a tyrant father (Kanji Furutachi), and to avoid his inevitable fate: taking over the family’s Hokkaido photography studio. He just manages to escape. Later, in Tokyo, we see the first sparks of fame and the moment Fukase, now a successful commercial photographer, meets and falls for the smart, vibrant Yoko Wanibe (Kumi Takiuchi, brilliant). She becomes his muse, collaborator, wife and helpmate for the rest of his tragic life. The film’s title is drawn from Fukase’s decade-long obsession with Japan’s karasu crows, whose intelligence and solitude drew him. Gill has taken this a step further: in Ravens, a chain-smoking, man-size raven conducts conversations with Fukase from an early age, alternately encouraging and castigating him. The bird is a bold choice, but one that elevates Ravens to art. Mark Gill will join us for the Q&A session. (Ravens, France/Japan/Spain/Belgium 2024, 116 minutes, in Japanese and English with English, Japanese subtitles).
Karen Severns is chair of the FCCJ Film Committee
