"Gelatin Silver, Love" director Kazumi Kurigami's head trip of a website

by Chris MaGee

Here's the deal: I was going to include the trailer for the upcoming Masatoshi Nagase, Rie Miyazawa and Koji Yakusho film "Gelatin Silver, Love" as one of the weekly trailers. It's the story of a photographer (Nagase) who becomes obsessed with a mysterious woman (Miyazawa) who lives in the apartment opposite his. You can still check the trailer out here at Nippon Cinema. It looks absolutely gorgeous. The things is that while I was doing a bit of digging around online about its director, Kazumi Kurigami, I came across something really fascinating: his official website.

You see this marks Kurigami's directorial debut. Before this the 73-year-old from Furano, Hokkaido has had a successful career as a world renowned photographer. Going freelance four years after graduating from the Tokyo College of Photography in 1961 he went on to shoot advertisements, portraits of celebrities (including Takesgi Kitano, Toru Takemitsu, Ryuhei Matsuda and Chishu Ryu), album covers and has compiled these into 18 books. His photographs are also included in the permanent collections of the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Shinagawa, Tokyo and the Polaroid GMBH in Offenbach, Germany.

Of course I knew none of this before putting together the weekly trailers feature, but after having gone down the rabbit hole on Kuirgami's official webite, Kurigami.net, I want to learn and see more about him. To see a sampling of his work, and to see why I'm so enamored with the weirdness of his site click here and start exploring. Enjoy!