Review of Ako

Ako (1964)
10/10
No Plot, But An Amazing Piece of Art
30 May 2020
Morning dreams come through... Evening dreams never come through.

I'm definitely witnessing one of my favorite directors of all-time unfold before me eyes. This short, Ako (also called White Morning), is the only fictional short Hiroshi Teshigahara made in his career (all his other shorts are documentaries), and what he paints us is a beautiful dream of a day in the life of a 16 year-old girl and her friends who work at a bakery and go out on the town.

Plot-wise you don't get anything out of this piece, and that's ok. This is more like one of those films you treat like a piece of art where you throw it up on the wall and let it evoke emotions out from you.

Teshigahara gives us some beautiful black and white camera work plus some incredibly artsy sequences of filtering images on top of other images. The use of sound is the true highlight of this piece for me though, that in ways evokes the spirit of David Lynch before Lynch was even a household name.
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