About

Walden will screen on a loop in Cinema B between 10.30am – 4.30pm Saturdays and Sundays, from 29 Mar to 11 May 2025.

Commissioned as one of six trailers for the 2022 Viennale, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s short film Walden consists of a single shot of a pond rippling gently and reflecting the tree branches hanging above. The ambient buzz of nature is interrupted by an audio excerpt from the Douglas Sirk melodrama All That Heaven Allows 1955, a film that Hamaguchi has cited as one of his personal favourites. In the clip, the character Cary Scott (played by Jane Wyman) reads aloud a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ 1854, a treatise on the author’s experience living self-sufficiently near Walden Pond in Massachusetts. The vérité quality of the digital cinematography is contrasted against this excerpt from one of Hollywood’s iconic Technicolor melodramas. Hamaguchi has noted the interplay of his own filmmaking with the genre, stating in a 2021 interview with MUBI: “For me, the foolishness of melodrama becomes its actual seriousness because it enables the filmmaker to grasp the essence of the time. And this is precisely how I perceive the reality of ours; how I feel it. We live seriously, but then again, we do foolish things. This is how we live our lives. That’s the reason why I link my films with the notion of melodrama—because, as simple as it is, I consider life as melodramatic.”