Economies of Love. Part 4: Before the Storm

Economies of Love. Part 4: Before the Storm

Shinji Sōmai, Typhoon Club (still), 1985.

Economies of Love. Part 4: Before the Storm

Admission:
General $10
Student $7

Date
June 26, 2025, 7pm
172 Classon Avenue
Brooklyn 11205
USA

Join us on Thursday, June 26 at 7pm at e-flux Screening Room for “Before the Storm,” the fourth installment of Economies of Love, presenting Shinji Sōmai’s Typhoon Club (1985) and Jordan Strafer’s No Spank (2024).

How do young people endure the structures designed to contain them? Within spaces where time is regimented, desire is policed, and emotion is disciplined, adolescent defiance takes shape under pressure, morphing into a spontaneous refusal.

Set against the backdrop of Japan’s economic boom in the 1980s, Typhoon Club captures a young generation’s quiet unrest through moments of disorientation, fragile emotion, and suspension of time. In parallel, No Spank unfolds as a choreography of discipline and withholding, turning a girls’ boarding school into a space of constraint where meaning circulates through postures and gestures of disobedience. Together, the films examine how bodily proximity under regimes of control does not create relation, but sets the stage for its possible eruption.

Economies of Love is a series that examines how love is shaped by labor, technology, and power—structured by economies of care and exchange, mediated through digital and urban infrastructures, and regulated by shifting social and political contexts—while also being a force for subversion and transformation within these very structures. You can find more information and view the archive of the previous screenings here.

Films

Shinji Sōmai, Typhoon Club (1985, 115 minutes)
Winner of the Grand Prix at the first Tokyo International Film Festival in 1985, Typhoon Club is widely regarded as the seminal film of director Shinji Sōmai’s career. A work of raw, elemental power, it follows an ensemble of junior high students in a provincial town, beset by summery malaise as a typhoon looms. When the storm makes landfall, the teens find themselves holed up in their school unsupervised, while another classmate disappears alone on a harrowing trek to the big city. Set adrift in a world suddenly unmoored, the students let loose their pent-up angst and burgeoning passions in a series of propulsive, phantasmic scenes—part apocalypse, part utopia—as the deluge rages on into the night. Observed in daring long takes, director Sōmai gives material form to the students’ turbulent inner lives. When day breaks and the rains let up, the youngsters open their eyes to a world in ruins—or a world renewed. 

Jordan Strafer, No Spank (2024, 10 minutes)
A dark coming-of-age tale on a remote Greek island that doubles as a strictly regimented girls’ school, capturing the frustrations, rebellions, and body horror of adolescence through the artist’s trademark mise-en-scène and taciturn performances.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program[​at​]e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

Category
Film, Education
Subject
Experimental Film, Childhood & Youth
Return to

Economies of Love

Shinji Sōmai (1948–2001) gave up his studies in literature at Chuo University in 1972 to become an assistant director working with filmmakers such as Hasgawa Kazuhiko and Terayama Shuji. He directed his first film, Tonda Couple in 1980. His second feature, Sailor Suit and Machine Gun (1981), was a huge success, hailed as one of the greatest Japanese films of the year. In what followed, Sōmai directed some of the era’s most original and enduring works, five of which comprise Kinema Junpo’s critics list for the best Japanese films of all time. He forged a unique identity characterized by his demanding work ethic and innovative use of long takes, working predominantly within the seishun eiga (youth film) genre. Sōmai’s oeuvre encompasses an eclectic mix of generic and stylistic conventions from Kadokawa pop idol vehicles to Nikkatsu’s Roman Porno to independent art dramas, frequently using bodies of water—including torrential downpours and typhoons—to parallel the turbulence of youth and externalize the impact of growing up in an increasingly chaotic world. Sōmai’s potent evocation of adolescence has influenced filmmakers from Shunji Iwai and Shinji Aoyama to Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Ryusuke Hamaguchi.

Jordan Strafer is an American artist and filmmaker. Through her multidisciplinary work, Strafer uncovers apparatuses of power and societal dysfunction. Her work has been exhibited at the Renaissance Society, Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Secession, Vienna; Index, Stockholm; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; PARTICIPANT INC, New York; the New Museum, New York; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and SculptureCenter, New York. Her films have screened at the New York Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. In 2025, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She earned her MFA from Bard College and her BFA from The New School.

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