A bit down and blue (this should be redundant), like deep blue almost deep purple today; it’s raining the whole day, gloomy and grey, gray and gloomy and the colors are shaking a bit in the black-white spectrum; I don’t know why but I have the tendency to associate picture stills with moods and languages and the rain today reminded me of that still from the beginning of the great, great & great (!!!) Shōhei Imamura’s (今村昌平) 1989 Black Rain (「黒い雨」), based on the eponymous novel by Masuji Ibuse (井伏鱒二). It’s one of these stills that only a great cinematographer can take I guess (in this case Takashi Kawamata, 川又昻). It’s taken in Ushimado (牛窓), a neighborhood of the city Setouchi (瀬戸内) in Okayama (岡山) prefecture, the temple is still in existence Honren-ji (本蓮寺).

What a gloomy still, perfect for the start of that incredible movie.