Stir Cheat Sheet: 5 things to know about the marathon cinephile event The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)
The eight-hour opus about a small farm in Japan is the kind of all-day art-film affair that cinephiles live for
The Cinematheque screens The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) on August 22 at noon and September 6 at 10 am.
CLOCKING IN AT a cool 420 minutes, The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) is the kind of all-day art-film affair that cinephiles live for.
The monumental eight-hour opus, a poetic look at life in Japan’s rural Kyoto Prefecture, is a joint effort by American director C.W. Winter and his Tokyo-based Swedish counterpart Anders Edström—and it trails accolades on its visit to The Cinematheque.
Here are five things to know about the intimate epic before heading in from the sun to take it in.
The film is a fictional account of an elderly farmer, played by Tayoko Shiojiri, who portrays a version of herself. She passes the time as she usually might, checking in with friends, eating, sleeping, drinking tea, and doing an increasing amount of chores around the family farm due to her husband’s illness. But on another level, the movie is about the death of a way of life and the environmental destruction that threatens the tight relationship between the villagers and their natural surroundings.
The directors shot the meditative film over 27 weeks, during a period of 14 months and five different seasons. In all, The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin comprises four chapters (with a 15-minute intermission between Parts I and II, a one-hour break between Parts II and III, and a 15-minute intermission between Parts III and IV). But it’s also complemented by an even longer-running body of work, including 23 years’ worth of photographs taken of the village, its surroundings, and Tayoko and her family by Edström (who is her son-in-law).
The ravishing setting is a character in itself. It’s set in a village with a population just 47, set in the mountains of Kyoto Prefecture, the picturesque locale that’s part of the Kansai Region, on Honshu Island.
The two directors also made the 2010 film The Anchorage, evoking a similar world of reserve and routine, albeit set on the other side of the world. It stars Edström’s own mother, mostly alone, on her boat, fishing, cooking, and carrying out other daily rituals in Sweden.
The filmmakers simply describe The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) as “a geographic look at the work and non-work of a farmer.” Reviewers have called it “a marvel of cinematic immersion” (Film Comment) and “an utterly confident, magisterial effort that will stand the test of time” (Cinemascope).
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