Flower Punk (Short)
A documentary is only good as its subject, and Azuma Makoto is a compelling subject. Formerly a punk rock musician, he has taken to bringing that attitude to his career as a floral arranger, and his work is on wonderful display in Alison Klayman’s short documentary for The New Yorker magazine. As much as Klayman’s camera is fixated on interviews with Makoto and some of his collaborators, it is also showing us his work, some of it in process, and some of it after the fact. Makoto’s work is uniquely beautiful- he has a natural eye for the way certain flowers and certain colors go together in arrangements, and some of the designs we see of his are striking to look at, as well as the way Klayman uses time lapse photography to watch them decay and deteriorate. Two of the most significant pieces he has done, however, involve photo shoots in space and in the ocean. We don’t get quite as much detail about the thought process involved in making those work logistically, but we do see the end results, and in both cases, they are amazing sights. This is the story of an artist taking his sensibilities from one field to another, and it is engaging and luminous to watch him do it.
