Snake Of June Views
June in Japan is the rainy month. The snake in Japan, as in many other cultures, is a symbol for the penis. 2002's A Snake of June, by Japanese director Shinya Tsukamoto (already famed for the Tetsuo films and Bullet Ballet) is an enthralling film about the awakening of desire and the explosive consequences of damming that desire.
The first thing to be said about A Snake of June is its look. Filmed in black and white, it was transferred to color stock for theatrical showing. Tsukamoto chose to use the possibilities of that stock to give his film a rich Arctic blue gloss that lends the film an otherworldly aura while still keeping the high contrast and heavy detail of black and white. (Beads of water and pores in the skin leap out in sharp relief.) The blue acts to cool the viewer even as events explode onscreen. It detaches us from events in a different way than straight-forward black and white would have. The choice of blue also ties in to the movie's extensive use of water as a metaphor.
A Snake of June (Rokugatsu no hebi) is a Japanese movie directed by Shinya Tsukamoto. The film is Shinya Tsukamoto's seventh film. The film is notable for its striking monochrome cinematography which has been blue tinted in post production. The film won the Kinematrix Film Award and the San Marco Special Jury Award at the Venice Film Festival.
Hallucinogenic and dreamlike, Shinya Tsukamoto's A Snake Of June continues the well-established sexual dysfunction and claustrophobic paranoia of his previous films such as Tetsuo and Bullet Ballet, but tones the visual explosion and chaos down a few notches, crafting a densely metaphorical cinematic experience of voyeurism and desires fueled by subtlety and speculation rather than destruction and violence.
Snake Of June Images
