Hana chirinu

According to film theorist Noël Burch, this obscure prewar film is distinctive for three reasons: 1) the cast consists entirely of women: the only males in the world of the film exist only as offscreen voices; 2) the narrative is set entirely in a teahouse in the Gion quarter of Kyoto during two days in July 1864, just a few years before the fall of the shogunate, which ended the rule of the samurai class; and 3) with only a handful of exceptions, no two shots, in the over 350 total shots that comprise the film, are taken from an identical angle and distance. Thus each shot is a unique and unrepeated "set up," a procedure which, because of its difficulty, is unheard-of in Hollywood and elsewhere, even to the present day.