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Director, Photography, Editing, Sound: Utagawa Keiko Source: Utagawa Keiko JAPAN / 1997 / Japanese / Color / 8mm / 28 min |
| Utagawa Keiko is one of several young women filmmakers to emerge
in recent years from the Tama University of Art's film program.
Neither political nor feminist, they have made waves by using
8mm cameras to boldly record their personal lives, sexuality,
and bodies. Utagawa's work, however, especially Water in My Ears and Super Lovers (both 1994), has been lighter in tone, often taking a fictional
pretext to humorously explore anxieties about the body and interpersonal
relationships. In A Hundred Sweethearts, these worries spread to include the people and things around
the filmmaker, as she presents herself as a slightly spoiled but
unconceited youth who is used to having others care for her. It
is both the comfort of this emotional security and the realization,
as she becomes an adult, that it will not last which prompt Utagawa
to record these events, seek out past ones in old home movies,
and even re-enact them in the present. More than an affirmation
of identity, film becomes for her a celluloid blanket, a warm
set of images to which she must sweetly but sadly say goodbye
as time marches inevitably on. --Aaron Gerow |