CINEMA SCOPE—<a href="https://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-magazine/the-land-demands-your-effort-c-w-winter-and-anders-edstrom-on-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin/" target="blank"><i>The Land Demands Your Effort</i></a> by Mark Peranson “C.W. Winter & Anders Edström’s eight-hour *The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)* premiered in the initial Encounters competition at the Berlinale, where it was the deserved winner…[A] brief introduction does no justice to the experience of watching *The Works and Days*, an utterly confident, magisterial effort that will stand the test of time.” <a href="https://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-magazine/the-land-demands-your-effort-c-w-winter-and-anders-edstrom-on-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin/" target="blank">[Interview]</a> CON LOS OJOS ABIERTOS—<a href="http://www.conlosojosabiertos.com/la-internacional-cinefila-2020/" target="blank"><I>La Internacional Cinéfila</i></a> by Agnès Wildenstein “The best movie of the year. A tremendous cinematic pleasure. An unforgettable picture and sound screening experience. And a film that will remain in the history of cinema.” LE MONDE—<a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2022/06/22/les-travaux-et-les-jours-une-epopee-magique-aux-confins-de-l-image-et-du-son_6131553_3246.html" target="blank"><i>*Les Travaux et les Jours*: une épopée magique aux confins de l’image et du son</i></a> by Clarisse Fabré "The beauty of the film by the American C.W. Winter and the Swede Anders Edström, *The Works and the Days*, is offered to whomever wants to take the time to receive it. Over five seasons, interspersed with interludes, the directors map a mountain village north of Kyoto, collect a way of life in perdition, and paint a portrait of a family to which they are intimately linked. At once minimalist and teeming with details. Like any walk in the woods, the film offers a great game of hide and seek. We believe we are following the daily life of Tayoko, who reads excerpts from her diary in voiceover, while the camera delivers a continuous stream of innocuous events. But the device is more dense than it seems. Winter and Edström are driven by a desire for fiction, which takes the form of micro-narratives, spontaneous or prepared. There would be a lot to say about the elegance and delicacy of this approach. Sometimes, the field of view narrows or conceals a character. Though at night, while glasses are emptied, tongues loosen. The noise of the conversations takes over. The best stories then spring up. As we know from Ozu, sake opens the doors of the cinema. The opinion of *Le Monde*: masterpiece." JUGEND OHNE FILM—<a href="https://jugendohnefilm.com/the-thickness-of-things/" target="blank"><I>The Thickness of Things</i></a> by Patrick Holzapfel "Jacques Rivette once wrote that a good film begins with something being wrong. In *The Works and Days* there is something wrong in almost every shot, something that makes us look more closely, more attentively, until we realize that it’s not the shot that is wrong but the way we normally look at things. Those images do not want anything from us; they ask everything of us...In daily life, humanity has quite successfully and tragically domesticated the thickness of things, nature, and people. Cinema was quick to follow in this domestication. It’s a small miracle to discover a film that resists these modes of confined representation and reminds us of the roughness of things, their independence and inherent beauty: the dim light touching a somber window, the reflections of bodies in the water at dusk, the smell of tomatoes brought as gifts, a concert of frogs, a tired body leaning on a wall, a shadow moving behind a screen, a drunk story long forgotten and, always, the wind, the wind in the trees. *The Works and Days* proposes a way of perceiving that dares to become a way of living (and the other way round). To my mind, that is the most any film can be expected to do." CRITERION CAST—<a href="https://criterioncast.com/reviews/theatrical/joshua-reviews-c-w-winter-and-anders-edstroms-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin-theatrical-review" target="blank"><i>C.W. Winter and Anders Edström's The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)</i></a> by Joshua Brunsting "A once in a generation film...A work that thrives thanks to its profound intimacy...Concluding with one of the truly great final acts in recent memory. *The Works and Days* is a dense, layered, one of a kind masterpiece...A ground-shattering achievement." ARTFORUM—<I>Film: Best of 2020</i> by Erika Balsom “A day spent in darkness, a 480-minute wager that the long take is not the only path to duration. A sustained look at a family and the land that it works, at once intimate and expansive. More than a film to watch, *The Works and Days* is a film that engulfs you.” ARTFORUM—<a href="https://www.artforum.com/film/jordan-cronk-on-c-w-winter-and-anders-edstroem-s-the-works-and-days-2020-86207" target="blank"><I>*Time Regained*</i></a> by Jordan Cronk “Winter and Edström present a portrait of a female vegetable farmer, her dying husband, and an extended group of friends and family whose shared sense of integrity, tradition, and perseverance slowly reveals itself as something uncommonly poignant, even profound…No mere observational account, *The Works and Days* is a highly collaborative and deceptively constructed fiction. Longtime creative partners, Winter—a CalArts graduate who studied under Thom Andersen, James Benning, and Allan Sekula and now lectures at Oxford—and Edström—a Swedish photographer whose work has been widely published and exhibited internationally—have spent two decades exploring an unusual form of cinema that combines elements of narrative, documentary, and sound art…*The Works and Days* may point the way forward further still. Here, the ordinary achieves monumentality through dedication—on the part of the filmmakers, certainly, who spent fourteen months filming on location in Shiotani, but most especially on the part of Tayoko, one of many villagers (in Shiotani, if not across greater Japan) performing mundane tasks to keep their households in order and provide for their families. In lesser hands, her life of hardship, including the death of her husband, Junji, could have been used as a device to elicit pity, or worse, to exploit. Instead, Winter and Edström utilize Tayoko’s circumstances as a framework through which to mount a loose retelling of their subject’s recent past that could act for her as a productive form of bereavement…In the film’s most devastating scene, Tayoko and Junji (played here as throughout by Kaoru Iwahana) visit a temple in Kyoto, where they lovingly reminisce about their courtship and marriage while seated in a rock garden. “It looks like the trees are speaking,” Tayoko observes as their conversation slowly grows quiet…It’s to its makers’ credit that none of these strategies disrupt the film’s elegiac tone, and instead add to its power and beauty as both an aesthetic object and a piece of dramatic storytelling…The film calibrates time though alternately intimate and expansive compositions that breathe in subtle syncopation with the natural world. In its very design, *The Works and Days* advocates not for a medium of convenience and disposability, but one of shared experience and lasting rewards.” FILM COMMENT—<a href="https://www.filmcomment.com/article/currents-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin/" target="blank"><i>Currents</i></a> by Jordan Cronk “Where such daunting length might suggest something tedious or one-note, *The Works and Days* is constantly shape-shifting, mixing ravishing landscape imagery and scenes of day-to-day labor with bustling dinner sequences and moments of alcohol-fueled camaraderie among an extended coterie of friends and fellow farmers. Across five chapters, Winter and Edström chart the community’s highs and lows, capturing instances of joy and sorrow, intimacy and death, the essence of the human spirit writ through time and the passing of the seasons. No mere feat of observation, this is a marvel of cinematic immersion…Now more than ever, *The Works and Days* speaks to the power, beauty, and necessity of the theatrical experience.” CAHIERS DU CINÉMA-<i>Un fragment d'éternité</i> by Olivia Cooper-Hadjian “A whole day at the cinema is a lot, or very little in terms of everything encompassed in the film of C.W. Winter and Anders Edström. A wildly ambitious project, and yet disarmingly modest, as the directors conjure a sense of respect before their material, and, in eight short hours, reconstitute the texture of ordinary existence. Anders Edström, also a photographer, brings a sensitivity that he has been refining for decades—a decentering capable of making the ordinary visible, of restoring the power of emotion. By their scale or by their angles, his frames always defy expectations in a way that refutes simplistic ideas of action or landscape. This defamiliarizing experience is reinforced by the editing of C.W. Winter, never standard, avoiding all familiar systematization—the timing of the shots never ceases to amaze. The quest for immanence contained in *The Works and Days* emerges so vividly. Four stars out of four.” SLATE FR—<a href="http://www.slate.fr/story/229436/cinema-bandits-orgosolo-vittorio-seta-travaux-jours-edstrom-winter-documentaire-epopee-fresque" target="blank"><i>L'improbable hospitalité de *Les Travaux et les Jours*</i></a> by Jean-Michel Frodon “A singular project, and therefore a rather uncommon experience, it is, for whomever will attempt it, an immense and extraordinary gift. However, nothing out of the ordinary will happen in *The Works and Days*. And from this, everything, absolutely everything, becomes extraordinary. What is it about? One could say (and this would make a connection with the neo-realism of De Sica's films) that this is a grand demonstration of the principle that everything, absolutely everything in the world we live in can be exciting, overwhelming, engaging, and mysterious provided one knows how to film it. Certainly this film’s two authors know how. Their approach involves an incalculable number of very precise choices—as to distance, duration, light, sounds, and sometimes to the disjunction of images and sounds. In voice-over, the woman, our protagonist, who we will take a long time to see well—she who is often filmed from afar, or at an angle, or in the dark—reads fragments of her diary, small daily facts which, by small touches, draw a cosmos. And therefore, the title taken from an ancient poem—which is both a modest treatise on agriculture and a great story defining the place of the gods and the destiny of men—is in no way out of place. Here, everything contributes to a kind of invitation to a space-time which, while being quite different from the experience of most of the film’s spectators, offers them a welcoming space, wonderfully populated. A little used, yet very significant criterion for a film would be its degree of hospitality. *The Works and Days* is an extraordinarily hospitable film.” LES INROCKUPTIBLES—<a href="https://www.lesinrocks.com/cinema/les-travaux-et-les-jours-une-ode-hypnotique-au-temps-qui-passe-469469-20-06-2022/" target="blank"><i>Les Travaux et les Jours, une ode hypnotique au temps qui passe</i></a> by Arnaud Hallet "An unforgettable immersive experience. *The Works and Days* is a great and humble film. It is a gigantic work but at human height, a sylvan fatigue rendered with superb clarity. In elegant and discreet panoramics, in wise static shots, this rurality, captured in its clearest form, is like a sketch drawn in the earth of the fields. It is a river film, but as if in a literal sense, one which irresolutely follows a water-like course, in an unlimited and undulating flow, entirely cradled by the heartbeats of nature. A peasant life captured in its feverishness, vibrating to the rhythm of the natural cycles of day and night. Everything seems to be there, raw and mineral, delivered to the four winds. Indeed, the film operates a meticulous surgery, via a succession of layers of memory, a surgery that flirts with alternative medicine, like a shamanism of everyday life, a hypnosis of labors and forests. Moving. Beautiful. Sovereign. Sublime. Miraculous." BCNVT—<a href="https://bcnvt.se/2023/05/25/verk-och-dagar/" target="blank"><i>Verk och dagar</i></a> by Erik Ogenstedt “C.W. Winter and Anders Edström's *The Works and Days* has as breathtaking an effect as Robbe-Grillet’s *La Maison de rendez-vous* in which landscapes and objects become a kind of metacommentary on the action. In its silence, the description of illness is at least as affecting as Pialat's *La gueule ouverte*. This human toil and fragility, the evaluation of life choices, the attempts at self-realization, and distinct considerations of cohesion are surrounded by scattered comments about a collapsing wilderness, of a decline of youth, and of a lack of hope for the future. Few times before have I seen such an impressive use of images. At times I sink into the work so deeply that I am convinced that its rain is also taking place outside the cinema despite knowing that outside there will be sun.” LIBÉRATION—<a href="https://www.liberation.fr/culture/cinema/les-travaux-et-les-jours-autant-en-emporte-le-temps-20220621_Q67BAIADLNENZDEQXHLIZ25HGY/?redirected=1" target="blank"><i>Les Travaux et les Jours, autant en emporte le temps</i></a> by Marius Chapuis “A moving experience. The film can be heard as much as it is observed. The two modes sometimes come into contradiction, or establish new links, when the image says one thing and the sound says another. Such as a family mythology shared in a car on a highway accompanied by the songs of swallows. It is a way of saying that everything is happening at the same time, all the time. That examining humans does not make the trees disappear. By looking and looking again, the film shows the permanence of things and their finitude. Intimacies, regrets, joys. A posthumous love letter, in which each reproach, each sweet word uttered by her takes on another scope. Beautiful.” LE POLYESTER—<a href="http://www.lepolyester.com/critique-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin/" target="blank"><i>La traversée du temps</i></a> by Nicolas Bardot “This is not the story of a picturesque country setting; it is instead about how Edström and Winter squeeze out the experience of a place: by a litany of ​​images but also by an absence of images, by a richness of sound but also of silence…The film abolishes all relevance of a border between fiction and documentary and makes us live a rare and overwhelming immersion in a particular place, a secret world — but in this world hide a thousand worlds closer than we think. Crowned at the Berlinale in the excellent Encounters section, *The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)* is a small masterpiece that one imagines as quite unforgettable.” L'HUMANITÉ—<a href="https://www.humanite.fr/culture-et-savoirs/cinema/une-symphonie-visuelle-dans-les-montagnes-de-kyoto-756771" target="blank"><i>Une symphonie visuelle dans les montagnes de Kyoto</i></a> by Mati Ndiaye “‘Infinity seems full in a foliage gently astir,’ said Victor Hugo. An illustration of the essence of Anders Edström and C.W. Winter's film, *The Works and the Days*. If it is based on real stories, the work remains a fiction where the limits between documentary and staging remain blurred. Real characters play their own roles. But some actors, such as Ryo Kase—who played for Abbas Kiarostami, Hong Sang-soo, and Martin Scorsese—are a reminder of the fictional nature of the film. Jisei, poems written by authors on their deathbeds, punctuate the different chapters with ‘discretion, simplicity, insignificance. Things most ordinary. And then, nothing more.’ Nature becomes a character in its own right. The virtuoso staging echoes Epstein's photogenics. A plastic power that strikes, touches, and impresses. It is the idea of ​​a life proper to the image, of an animist conception of plasticity which stems from magical thought. The film is an almost mystical experience. In this precise visual gem, the directors’ common interest in photography, but also in the everyday and in patience, allows them to discover the material of an ode to metaphysical nature that leaves a lasting impression.” LE MONDE—<a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2020/11/23/eloge-du-temps-long-au-festival-entrevues-de-belfort_6060770_3246.html" target="blank"><i>Eloge du temps long au festival Entrevues de Belfort</i></a> by Clarisse Fabré “In a thousand variations of penumbra and darkness, *The Works and Days* is at once a filmed diary, a topographical survey, and the memory work of a village in the process of shrinking. Though all this says little of the hypnotic experience and poetry provided by this work, a film that is as much sonic as visual. Through a tight edit, never contemplative, this film, without programmed responses, sows in our minds a multitude of questions: how do we gaze at a landscape, what do we retain, what makes a story? The answer may lie in a tree whose leaves, filmed against the light of the sky, end up drawing a resting face. Only the imagination counts. And in front of *The Works and the Days*, we can dream.” SLANT MAGAZINE—<a href="https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-50-best-films-of-2021/4/" target="blank"><i>The Works and Days</i></a> by Carson Lund "Anders Edström and C.W. Winter clearly couldn’t be bothered by the insidious notion in contemporary discourse that films must 'earn' their runtime by some arbitrary commercial rubric, as their eight-hour *The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)* is an obstinate rebuttal to the idea that a hierarchy of representational importance even exists in cinema. Running alongside its leisurely evocation of 14 months in the life of its eponymous farmer, who’s caring for her progressively ill husband, is a comprehensive visual and sonic itinerary of the Kyoto Prefecture region in which she resides. The implication is that this rich and rhythmic study of a setting in all its seasonal permutations is as critical to understanding its central subject—her toils, her joys, and her grief—as any more traditionally dramaturgical situation, and in witnessing this strategy unfold, we come to realize how stingy most narrative films are in inhabiting the experiential qualities of a place, and how much stands to be gained from doing so. For those open to recalibrating their relationship to attention—as its myriad cicada-backed contemplations encourage—*The Works and Days* is a generous gift, and one to which surrender eventually yields astonishing emotional rewards." LONG VOYAGE HOME—<a href="https://longvoyage.substack.com/p/worksanddays" target="blank"><i>Antifragility</i></a> by Adam Cook “It is a film that evades durational conventions within both the cultural mainstream and the contemporary art cinema of which it may initially seem part and parcel. In fact, it avoids easy placement into any contemporary categories…The interest is in how co-directors C.W. Winter and Anders Edstöm render their anti-epic of minimalism, discreet construction, and de-privileging of moments—which, as with many great works of art, makes the poetic and the political inextricable. At odds with the clichés of slow cinema, *The Works and Days* operates in a durational mode that restores power to the cut, to the art of sequencing, to the fundamental building blocks of filmic language. In this way, it is intensely modern and deceptively classical.” RAY FILMMAGAZIN—<a href="https://ray-magazin.at/the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin/" target="blank"><i>Ein Tag im Kino, ein Jahr in Japan. Und noch viel mehr...</i></a> by Alexandra Seitz “C.W. Winter and Anders Edström have courageously and confidently given a marvel to cinema. So that one's grip loosens; the view widens; the senses open. And in the end, with a feeling of sadness, we leave a world that has become a home and return to our own lives changed.” KINOSCOPE—<a href="https://read.kinoscope.org/2020/09/18/indielisboa-time-warp/" target="blank"><i>Time Warp</i></a> by Patrick Gamble “A verdant epic of agrarian labor and intimate moments, the film’s intimidating runtime is wholly justified, with the slow passage of time generating a form of detached immersion, allowing for a deeper connection with Tayoko and her surrounding environment…Certain films, like certain landscapes, stay with you long after you leave them, and *The Works and Days* is one such film — a tender and unforgettable portrait of a community on the brink of extinction.” PERLENTAUCHER—<a href="https://www.perlentaucher.de/berlinale-blog/2020/02/29/filmkritik-zu-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin-von-c-w-winter-und-anders-edstroem-encounter-berlinale-2020.html" target="blank"><i>Miteinder, met der Natur</i></a> by Jochen Werner “The most format-busting contribution to the already format-busting (and brilliantly curated) new Encounters section…The pictures arranged by Edström are modest, each not pushing itself to the fore. Though over the course of the eight hours we spend in and with the film, these images accrete into cinematic environs where one increasingly likes to be…Then there is the sound that is not only extremely present over the entire eight hours, but that continually gathers into a foregrounding over the images…In individual sequences, this foregrounding shifts so much that the film literally transforms itself into a sound art work, and these moments radiate beyond themselves…In this wonderful film, Winter and Edström invite us to spend a day with these people, experiencing how they live, how they work, tell stories, do nothing, and are simply with each other and with nature.” MOVIEBREAK—<a href="https://www.moviebreak.de/film/the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin" target="blank"><I>*The Works and Days* (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)</i></a> by Jakob Jurisch “It is a film not about waiting for something, but about the condition of waiting itself, which the film captures immersively and masterfully…*The Works and Days* meets and negates the Slow Cinema movement with a dynamic editing speed…It almost seems paradoxical that it is precisely the film’s narrative distance that makes the life of Tayoko and Junji so tangible…A life in full attention to both the cosmos and to eternal hustle and bustle. The mountain village stands in for this conscious life and feels more like a piece of home with every advancing film minute…*The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)* is perhaps the most conceptually daring of the extra-long films. With an enveloping staging and a meditative narrative structure, the directors allow a piece of life to unfold on the screen through their meticulous observation.” THE FILM STAGE—<a href="https://thefilmstage.com/the-works-and-days-review-a-monumental-vision-that-earns-its-runtime/" target="blank"><i>A Monumental Vision that Earns Its Runtime</i></a> by Glenn Heath, Jr. "An experimental study in duration and devotion that intricately overlaps voiceover and ambient sound design to create a symphonic cinematic space in the quietest of locations. Masterful. Unforgettable. With great vulnerability and honesty...*The Works and Days* brings you closer to understanding what it might mean to finally be at peace." PANORAMA-CINÉMA—<a href="http://www.panorama-cinema.com/V2/critique.php?id=1549" target="blank"><i>De l’arbre d’une vie et d’un champ de radis</i></a> by Ariel Esteban Cayer “There will be no more monumental film this year than *The Works and Days*…Its risk-taking, its ingenuity of means, its variety of methods, and its multiplicity of references separate *The Works and Days* from other duration exercises in cinema…It is undoubtedly one of those rare films to contain, humbly, just about everything of a lifetime.” THE NEW YORK TIMES—<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/movies/the-works-and-days-review.html" target="blank"><i>The Time of Our Lives</i></a> by Nicolas Rapold "Its homey environs and lushly photographed natural world induce a heightening of the senses and an attention to lovely subtleties of light, color and fellow feeling...This isn’t durational cinema that’s dead-set on making you feel the heft of labor. The directors’ camera eye fosters more of a muscle memory for these places through sonic overtures and finely wrought images of lattices (brambles or wires), opaque screens and windows, and careworn pots. *The Works and Days* also plumbs the depths of night and twilight like few films do, harnessing a theater’s darkness...As someone in the film says, what one wishes of the people you love is that you could spend even more time with them—and the same could be said of the images in this film." SINEGANG—<a href="https://www.sinegang.ph/filmreviews/the-works-and-days-rc" target="blank"><i>The Works and Days</i></a> by Ryan Capili "It is monumental. Those eager to offer their time will be more than gratified. Poignant and profound in its manner. The structure of the film is so meticulous and conscientious. Sumptuous. Delicate. Blissful. Melancholic. Winter and Edström created an astonishing film." HYPERALLERGIC—<a href="https://hyperallergic.com/662482/the-work-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin/" target="blank"><i>An Eight-Hour Film Captures the Rhythms of Farming Life in Rural Japan</i></a> by Forrest Cardamenis "A quiet epic. Winter and Edström’s commitment is reflected in the eight-hour runtime, which captures both the rhythm and feel of daily life and rural Japan’s continued environmental desecration better than any conventional movie could." CON LOS OJOS ABIERTOS—<a href="http://www.conlosojosabiertos.com/la-internacional-cinefila-2021/" target="blank"><I>La Internacional Cinéfila</i></a> by Bernd Schoch “By far the best cinematic experience this year for me. It is everything and its opposite.” IN REVIEW ONLINE—<a href="https://inreviewonline.com/2021/12/29/top-25-films-of-2021-15-11/" target="blank"><i>The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)</i></a> by Joshua Minsoo Kim "The reality is that life cannot be fully represented through any medium, and so *The Works and Days* honors such impossibility through an approach to filmmaking that doubles as an avant-garde treatise. Of course, to represent 'life' is a slippery ordeal, because it never exists as an isolated person or event. Winter and Edström understand that, so they create—in their lived-in filmmaking process—a work that isn’t exactly the mannered community portrait. *The Works and Days’* greatest feat, then, is in bringing us closer to understanding nothing less than life—both in the micro of what’s actually depicted, and in the macro of existence writ large—through an instructive embrace of unknowability." THE GAUNTLET MOVIE PODCAST—<a href="https://soundcloud.com/gauntletmovies/30-long" target="blank"><i>30: The Long Cinema Club</i></a> by Eric Marsh & Ryan Saunders "A film with an exceptional amount of emotional weight. They handle it all so delicately in a way I haven’t really seen in any other film. It’s like what Kiarostami says: the great films can make you fall asleep in the theater. It has that warmth throughout, but the power to make your mind go in so many directions and create a web of your own life, of the film’s life, of everything. It's such an achievement. To me that’s the poetic quality of the film and the poetic quality of life. Then there's the soundscape; it's a masterclass. And it feels like each image is a new thing, a new experience, a new way of looking at the space around you. Everything is beautifully composed and shot and thoughtful. It’s very carefully calibrated, this film. It’s incredibly impressive. Overwhelmingly beautiful and sad. After having experienced it and thinking about many of the details, there are so many retroactive pleasures. It really does live on in the head when it’s over. Of the many images and scenes in this film that will never leave my mind, it was the scene where she tells her husband how she feels about their relationship; that’s something I’ll never be able to shake." EDWARD MCCARRY—*A Note on The Works and Days* by Edward McCarry "*The Works and Days*: present and earthbound, like an old woodpile, alive with termites. The length is necessary, natural, and is the least of what’s registered in viewing. The pleasures are immediate and moment-to-moment: the rhythms that emerge, dissolve, mutate, re-emerge; the plain company of people and the texture of the world, made strange; the film’s rigor and ease both, the freedom of transgressing rules established. The full weight of the experience is latent, blossoming late and with force; as is the narrative, taking shape out of the dirt and, diffusely, following it back down again. The deep, disarming sense of mystery is central, and it’s the reason Winter and Edström hold tight to the fiction (or reenactment) on a roiling canvas of reality. The form exists to bottle lived experience, to make it legible, and transmissible, and to set it roaming inside its parameters. Hence the default orientation of the camera is eye-level, looking down. It’s a transparent viewpoint that grounds vision, making no great secret of the apparatus, instead yielding to what’s being looked at." MATT LLOYD TURNER—<a href="https://mattlloydturner.com/blog/2021/12/3/2021" target="blank"><i>2021: Year in Review</i></a> by Matt Lloyd Turner "The film is incredibly well constructed, a real marvel of small observances and careful considerations that favour the incidental and everyday over anything more dramatic or forced, still always finding pockets of intense beauty within the routine or mundane. Watching this film after having not watched anything like it in the cinema for a long while felt like being retrained in how to see. The viewing experience was transfixing, and I think I will remember that day for a long time to come." KXCI 91.3 TUSCON—<a href="https://kxci.org/podcast/a-film-snobs-favorites-of-2021/" target="blank"><i>Favorites of 2021</i></a> by Chris Dashiell "Here is a film in a category by itself. There’s a famous wisecrack that some film students may have heard: “If I wanted realism, I’d look out the window.” Well, this is the film that looks out the window, and it’s beautiful. In every frame, we see the everyday, and it’s all real in a sense that’s more pure than I can describe. I was enraptured." KEIJI HAINO “It’s a great film. Even though I had my glasses off, it made me feel like I had my glasses on.” CINEMA COCKTAIL—<a href="https://cinemacocktail.com/the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin-2020-directed-by-c-w-winter-and-anders-edstrom/" target="blank"><i>The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)</i></a> by Josh Hornbeck "*The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)* is an astonishing meditation on aging, mortality, grief, and the simple things that can help us as we move on and begin to heal. The film is suffused with incredible images. Compelling. Captivating. It’s a monumental work of cinematic empathy that will have you eager to revisit this quiet village, to peel back the film’s layers, and to sit with its reflections on our place in this world." FILMSTREET—<a href="https://filmstreetblog.blogspot.com/2022/04/a-dialogue-with-cw-winter-works-and-days.html" target="blank"><i>A Dialogue with C.W. Winter</i></a> by Dannzel Escobar "Among the, if not *the*, most monumentally accomplished films of the 21st century thus far. Of the films to be released in the previous year, this ended up ranking above all else for me. It is a film about time, sculpted in time. About durational observation, the sensational act of labor, and lives lived. A multi-plane portraiture of an individual, of geography, of the auditory realm, and even the nature of dramatic construction in itself." DIE PRESSE—<a href="https://www.diepresse.com/6078728/filme-geben-antworten-auf-die-entglittene-zeit" target="blank"><i>Filme geben Antworten auf die entglittene Zeit</i></a> by Patrick Holzapfel "At best, the way a film looks at the world changes the viewer's view of reality. A way of life can even develop from this perception. Then the cinema would remain a school of vision. There are few films that are as capable as teachers at this school as *The Works and Days*. An outstanding film." TAIPEI MANSIONS—<a href="https://taipeimansions.com/2021/07/29/daughter-of-the-good-earth-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin/" target="blank"><i>Daughter of the Good Earth</i></a> by Ryan Swen "A mammoth work of intimacy. Astonishing. Rewarding. Enveloping. Entrancing. And Tayoko is remarkable, in large part because of how willing she is, even under such emotional circumstances, to be part of the ensemble, which ranges from the quiet to the rowdy in a way that feels utterly true. Some of her most emotional moments come when she reads some of the diary entries she had actually written during the prior year. Her reading is off-the-cuff, as if she is coming up with it in the moment. It is in the pauses, just before the stream of thoughts resumes, that *The Works and Days* finds its focus, its reason for being, and it is glorious." FILM PARLATO—<a href="http://filmparlato.com/index.php/numeri/14/item/298-the-last-things-before-the-last-4-the-works-and-days-of-tayoko-shiojiri-in-the-shiotani-basin-c-w-winter-anders-edstroem" target="blank"><I>*La Magnifica Omissione*</i></a> by Edipo Massi & Erik Negro “The natural and the cyclical. Destiny as the corporeality of myth. Looks and acts. What endures. And a potential future. In this torrential film by C.W. Winter and Anders Edström, all this takes shape slowly, as in a burly and dense novel that delves into the depths and in which, from the particular, blossoms a vision of the universal. We should first start with the title, as it always should be with great films. Works and days, a declination of daily life that finds its essence in the minimal and nearly imperceptible movement of objects and affects. Like a (micro) family cosmology that slowly reveals itself, peacefully, minimally…An anthropological and metaphysical ritual on the flow of things…An act of magical realism where the sounds themselves become a space for evocation and continuous perspectival change…Here then is a formal approach in which existential drama, be it even death, appears only as a necessary and transitory moment, almost absorbed by the surrounding nature…The strength of all this fresco remains a certain suspension, not giving a precise shape to those who live in the novel, a turbid swarm of life that escapes being overly-ordered by thought and writing. It is a unique, poetic phrasing…evoking both a presence of the past and an absence of certain aspects of the present…The visual and associative grammar of this mass of images, which goes beyond the simple meditative experience, essentially starts from a space and allows the stories it contains to flow into existence…Here is the ghost of Ozu as an evocation of generations and identities, in every timid, ostensible, and elegiac hint of a past in false starts. Tayoko reads off-screen, as if by chance, from minimal diaries, so similar in their power to the famous ones of Ozu, with that light and crystalline touch tracing aspects of life almost unseen…Here is the blossoming of life, making relevant what is marginal, with the expression of the smallest moment, even the most casual and inadvertent, and the pure revelation of it all…The manifestation of something that comes from within, the expression of duration, tangible, visual, and practicable in its soundscape. There are confessions and stories in the film that have the fragility of memory and the provocation of epiphany…And it is precisely the editing, which in this film seems the doing of a sublime worker camouflaged in the landscape, creating an amazement of the unexpected, a rewriting that brings us into the temporary presents to which we are constantly called. And finally let's go back to the extreme, yet very simple, conceptualization of that title. To Hesiod (*Ἔργα καὶ Ἡμέραι, Erga kài Hemérai, The Works and Days*) and perhaps to Rossellini, to his *The Iron Age*, to the inevitability of the condition of man forced to work in order to survive, but at the same time an ode to virtue and to open space, to an existence from which is revealed the essence of dignity…In this, every spatial form shows itself in its definitively temporal aspect; a great game that only cinema, and perhaps some great novels, can access.” ACOR—<a href="https://soutiens.lacor.info/film/les_travaux_et_les_jours/" target="blank"><i>Voyage à bord d’un vaisseau psychopompe</i></a> by Cindy Rabouan "A godsend. At the controls of the ship, two travellers. By what gestures did they inspire the favor of the cinema gods to be handed the keys to the kingdom with this merfolk film, *The Works and Days*? It recalls Georges Dussaud and Madeleine de Sinéty. And how can we not also think of Georges Rouquier and his diptych *Farrebique/Biquefarre* or even of Raymond Depardon filming his *The Farm at Le Garet* over the decades? To photograph, you have to believe in a melancholy linked to the feeling of inexorable loss that presides over the origin of any photographic gesture, this fundamental anxiety that constitutes the phantom heart of the film *The Works and Days*, crossing it like an underground river. Anders Edström seized it by making the gesture his own. *The Works and the Days*. They take up the poem, without showing off, as an element as constitutive as breathing itself. But the unequal struggle between men and gods, common people and kings, inscribed in the marble of a mythical genealogy by the ancient poet, is replaced by that of human beings faced with the perpetual cycle of seasons, from the days and from the nights, to the kingdoms of plants and minerals caught in the perpetual flow of water—a mirror of infinite time in Japanese thought, which immerses the Shiotani Valley like the film itself. ‘This is what seems to me the most important in cinema: the right of things to be noticed.’ *The Works and Days* makes an eminent entry into the history of cinema; it realizes new audio/visual potentialities whose editing work, after a process of plural creation, draws up a manifesto throughout its eight hours. Let us therefore open this singular family album, this genealogical account taking up the gesture in the manner of Hesiod; let us observe its weaving, weft, patterns, margins and seams, and how it passes from microcosm to macrocosm in a uniform plane, realizing the crazy gamble of reconciling making cinema, the art of storytelling, with a Japanese sensibility inextricably mixed with the senses, with the pre-science of the expanse and an overpowering nature. *The Works and the Days* is in a way an antechamber, a passage to the underworld for one, a prayer for another, a paradoxical place in which, as in a film by Lubitsch, one enters, and we go out. That is perhaps why the film begins on a winter's night; not at the twilight of the gods but of that of a generation of Japanese whose existence the film consecrates as a testimony to their value. It is the people of the land, the workers, those who, with abnegation, spared no pains to ensure their subsistence. But there again, the film surprises. What has been spoken does not tell all of destiny in a film looking for something immaterial, beyond and below the evidence, from life or else through death itself, to seize yet another piece of infinity. A work-river which carries with it the alluvium of a long-term project giving a little more thickness by its duration to a film made of deposited strata. How to tell what takes millennia, centuries, decades to sediment; how to ask what forms a society, a culture, a family, an individual, stratum after stratum? The poet who, in the Greek tradition, possessed the divinatory art of invoking immemorial times, the golden age, and the genealogy of races, is replaced by a tandem of directors who, through the lens and the microphone, compose with four hands this book of hours, the long chant woven on the spot from a collection of facts and gestures of a community of documentary elements, in order to make something else, a heterogeneous work, a fiction forged in the inspiration and in the imperative need to stem oblivion and death. Its profound truth lies in this work of inscription, of remembering the lives of non-illustrious beings, these ‘tiny lives.’ It radiates in its opacity, contrary to the pompous style of an art in the service of the court; it highlights human beings caught in the middle of an infernal nature, that is to say without beginning or end, irreconcilable unless inhabited, treated in a sacred, Shintoist mode, whose directors extend the gesture, an ecology of the gaze, humble and masterful, whose artistic mediation is the credo of a reconstruction of a scattered reality. It is a mode of operation of cinema based on mystery. This too can accommodate drama and humor, love stories and war stories. But always according to this implicit starting point—that the complexity of the world exceeds the powers of explanation with which a person making a film can be endowed, and it is a question of trying to understand rather than illustrating an explanation. Along the way, neither the stories nor the secrets have disappeared. But they live there, at the heart of the film or on its margins, not to be resolved, that is to say abolished, but on the contrary remain as traces, symptoms, and effects of the complexity of the world. A film that knows that there is something invisible in the visible, that there is something unperceived every time we show, something hidden every time we explain. This does not dispense with facing the world, facing it, physically and intellectually. This does not exclude that a truth can be encountered in passing. But the strength of this film lies in the way of making contingent, according to a thousand procedures, the play of this mechanism of revelation. Ultimately, only mystery indicates the presence of an important work of cinema, and only the depth of the mystery, and the echoes it arouses, makes it possible to assess the artistic quality of a cinematic work. This film at the crossroads of artistic gestures is seen as it was written, like a path forming as one walks, without pre-established destination. A constellation of infinities. This film is an absolute probity not unlike the path opened by Straub/Huillet, rather than a pop gesture à la early Godard. It is a knowledge enterprise on the borders of art and human sciences at the stage of discoveries in the field. It is up to the artist to give form to his intuitions by means of simulacra, of a "micro-rendering of the rumor of the world, which puts the film at the extreme present of the indicative, declines it to the extreme-concrete,” to use the words of Michel Chion. This was one of the great concerns of C.W. Winter—to immerse himself in the sound material before extracting its sap through a long and patient work of effective realization. We emerge dazzled by the fact that the film so effectively falsifies the assertions made by false prophets regarding the death of the cinematograph. Cut to measure in the rock of time, *The Works and the Days* sets the material ablaze, ennobles it, increases it." AUTOUR DU FILM *LES TRAVAUX ET LES JOURS (DE TAYOKO SHIOJIRI DANS LE BASSIN DE SHIOTANI)*—<i>*Divisions et Continuités*</i> by Chris Fujiwara "At what point does life become narrative? One answer is: after death. When a life is over, it can be thematized and pronounced on in ways that can claim to be definitive. In *The Works and Days*, this answer is revealed as insufficient. The film presents a set of shifting frameworks that call into question the definitiveness of narrative…Stories of regrets, of the unrealized possibilities that still haunt people, drift through *The Works and Days*, carrying a strong affective charge…It becomes a film (like one of Mankiewicz’s) of rooms that open onto one another in infinite ways…Even though death necessarily assumes great importance in the film, it can be said that *The Works and Days* is not a film ‘about’ death. One could say the same about certain Ozu films in which a character dies. In *There Was a Father*, *Tokyo Story*, and *The End of Summer*, the viewer follows a character through a narrative, in which the character relates to other characters and exists as one participant, if a prominent one, in the world of the film; the concerns of this character belong to a fabric of the varying, sometimes competing, concerns that animate the group. Suddenly the character dies, and now the fact of this death dominates the film, as an event that must be dealt with in the narrative, through a series of more or less formal acts of mourning and remembrance. *The Works and Days* follows a similar pattern…The film then becomes a film ‘about’ acting and ‘about’ cinema. The moment of this thematization even appears in the film—in a shot so meticulously framed, lit, and staged and so sharply cut it might have been in a Nicholas Ray film. Tayoko stands before the kitchen doorway, a pile of laundry folded over her arms, as Junji, returning home from drinking with friends, enters a darkened room in the foreground of the shot, his back to the camera. She announces by her reserve, her calm, and the economy of her expression that acting is just this facing-up-to the presence of the camera and to the illusion of a fiction to which she has only to assent, without adopting any external technique and without surrendering her being and identity…On the other hand, the performance of Iwahana as Junji, effaced in his sick bed in the dimmest corner of a semi-darkened room, he seems to be trying to escape from the requirement to appear, while also fulfilling it. His quasi-invisibility is a sign of death and of the mystery of death, as if, by avoiding light, Junji were trying to avoid or postpone the decision between nothingness and being, between complete impossiblity and the still-possible. Winter and Edström acknowledge, through their strategy of placing and photographing Junji, that, as Levinas writes, physical suffering has a structure that prolongs itself ‘up to an unknown that it is impossible to translate in terms of light.’ Starting with this not-quite-acting actor, acting spreads throughout *The Works and Days*, to be undercut constantly—not through any pretense that acting is not acting and that the people in the film are being filmed ‘in their real life,’ as they would be in a documentary, but by drawing on the inexhaustible reserves of ambiguity that the mere presence of an actor is sufficient to donate to a film. Winter and Edström play on this ambiguity by their use of Kase Ryo. A familiar face in Japanese films and TV dramas, Kase is known to cinephiles outside Japan for appearances in films by Clint Eastwood (*Letters from Iwo Jima*), Kitano Takeshi (*Outrage*, *Outrage Beyond*), Abbas Kiarostami (*Like Someone in Love*), Kurosawa Kiyoshi (*Penance*), Hong Sangsoo (*Hill of Freedom*), and Martin Scorsese (*Silence*)…Just as the position of the actors within the film wavers, so does the status of the script. The time of writing does not determine the film; instead, the film reopens that time, reactivating its internal possibilities. The use of the diary complicates our awareness of the way the film itself, its production, serves as an impetus for narrativization. The long account Hiroharu gives of the trials of his student days is addressed to the on-screen figure of co-director C.W. Winter. Viewers of the film who have never seen Winter in person or in photographs are likely to fail to realize that the person addressed as ‘Curtis’ is the same person who credits himself on his film as ‘C.W.’ But it is in fact Curtis’s presence, not primarily as actor but as director, that summons Hiroharu’s recollection. That viewers may not understand Curtis to be the director of the film merely reveals something about the nature of direction. Winter directs not by instructing, and not even by being present in the scene for Hiroharu to talk to; the direction has already taken place before the shot, in its setting-up. This is not essentially different from the way other actor-directors have directed; e.g., Jerry Lewis, whom Winter mentions in an interview as an inspiration for the shooting of the film. During a later scene, it is reported that Curtis can be heard snoring, in a further indication both of the particular temporality of direction and of the possibility for a director to influence a film in ways that are remote and unconscious (Raoul Walsh was said to have sometimes turned his back to the actors during the filming of scenes)—Winter underlines his absence from his own film, the better to highlight absence as a mode of presence…Winter and Edström notice things that would escape the attention of a Japanese person, to whom they are simply normal, but this is a capacity that any good filmmakers ought to bring to their material whether they are documenting the other side of the world or their own apartment—a fact that heightens the capacity of the film, as a social portrait, to encompass an uncustomarily wide range of Japanese social and linguistic practices…The uncertain future is not a limit for the film and not—one can even be amazed by this—a source of anxiety, but is part of its continuity…*The Works and Days* is moving. With emotional force. Remarkable. Extraordinary."