15 Days

Forcing himself to confront his own 16mm camera each day for over two weeks, Suzuki Shiroyasu initially seems to regret his own idea and indulges in very recalcitrant behaviour. Not until halfway through the project does he address the camera more candidly and start to question his own identity, as well as his relationships with his own milieu and other social structures.

The result is a paradoxical combination of an intimate portrait and a seriously disciplined investigation into the properties of the medium itself. As a result, 15 Days illustrates two tendencies typical of 1970s Japanese experimental film: structuralist investigation and the cinema of privacy. On the one hand, the ambition is to reflect on the extraordinary spatio-temporal sensation that only the cinema viewing experience can produce. On the other hand, the film allows us to peek into his personal life as a poet, critic, filmmaker and husband who systematically works late at night.