Stills, screencaps & shots from The Reading Machine
13 of 13 frames — the full set is searchable by lighting, lens, shot size, color and mood with a free account.
What is The Reading Machine about?
In this Borgesian satire on knowledge and technology, bibliophilic desire leads to the construction of a pedal-powered reading machine. Resembling a combination of gymnastic contraption, printing press and early cinematic apparatus, the machine’s purpose remains ambiguous. And like this machine, Terayama’s film connects his work in poetry, motion picture and graphic design by weaving together printed and projected, still and moving images.
Who stars in The Reading Machine?
Who made The Reading Machine?
What does the cinematography of The Reading Machine look like?
Sampled across 13 frames, the coverage of The Reading Machine leans on wide compositions and close-ups. The lighting keeps a large share of it in silhouette light. This is largely a daylight film — most of the frames play in daylight. Vintage glass shapes the frame.
What is the color palette of The Reading Machine?
The dominant colors across the sampled frames of The Reading Machine (1977) are #060605, #fdfbf6, #d9d0b2, #a69979, #e9e2cb, #363227 — measured from the per-frame color data FrameThrower extracts for every film.
#060605#fdfbf6#d9d0b2#a69979#e9e2cb#363227
See the full The Reading Machine colour palette — every hex with its share, plus warmth, saturation and luminance.
A reference database for filmmakers
FrameThrower is a fully machine-searchable film database and visual reference library — all 13 frames of The Reading Machine (1977), and 5,000+ films besides, indexed frame by frame and readable by AI. Search it in plain language, from a reference image, or by colour; call it from an API, an MCP server or an SDK. It's the reference layer for making the next movie.
Techniques in this film
More films by Shūji Terayama
- A Tale of Smallpox (1975)
- An Attempt to Describe the Measure of a Man (1977)
- Butterfly (1974)
- Emperor Tomato Ketchup
- Labyrinth Tale (1975)
- Laura (1974)
- Les Chants de Maldoror (1977)
- Pastoral To Die In The Country (1974)
- The Cage (1964)
- The Eraser (1977)
- The War of Jan-Ken-Pon (1971)
- The Woman with Two Heads (1977)
Cast, trailer and streaming data from TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.