Dir. Shôhei Imamura
Japan
Documentaries are a fickle genre
for me, divisive as I wonder whether they are actually “documents” that attempt
to be neutral with the material. Documentaries became popular in the 2000s but
many of them should have been called opinion films – especially from the Michael Moore school of reporting that
has been blasted for their presentations – and many films, from talking heads
to animated montages, look identical with a similar style that feels less like
a document than a television commercial. Only documentaries on films, like Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold
Story of Ozploitation! (2008), avoid this while still retaining this
flashier post-music video aesthetic, unlike the work of Frederick Wiseman or essay films, because they feel like film
resource books that have been made into multimedia film works, the areas that
are slight in them not effecting how much information they have already. The
genre is immediately affected by editing, a basic tenant to filmmaking unless
the material is uncensored, raw footage. Editing affects the reality shown and
what “truth” actually is which is why documentarian Michael Moore, for example, has been lambasted by the left wing as
well as the right. The subjective truth is viewed as the ultimate truth,
acceptable in an essay piece, which purports the creator(s) view of the world,
but not acceptable if it’s supposed to be subjective or proposes to pull the
curtain back on the Wizard of Oz and views it as a vital event to do so. Imamura, drifting away from fiction
cinema at this point in his career, realised the fallacy of this and admits it.
A Man Vanishes is fiction,
explicitly said by the director onscreen, even if it’s completely truth.
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| From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/a-man-vanishes/w856/a-man-vanishes.jpg?1331825936 |
Imamura wanted to tackle nearly thirty cases of disappearances but
instead, for the first film produced by the legendary Art Theatre Guild (ATG), concentrated on the case of Tadashi, an employee
of a plastics firm, who leaves in his absence a murky ordinariness, of petty
white collar crime and a fiancée who is both questionable in her behaviour but,
as the film goes on, is as much the subject of the resentments she and her
older sister have for each other and how it may have involved the to-be husband. A Man Vanishes is a difficult film even when I have made for myself
a diet of meta- and avant garde films that have a rawer aesthetic. My view, my
grade, on the film drastically fluctuated through its 130 minutes. It was as
much, as critic Tony Rayns comments
on the film on the UK DVD release extra, a creation from very limited
technological means. Hidden cameras were used at times, Imamura knowing the moral duplicity of this and covering the
peoples’ faces with black oblongs when they did not give permission, but even
when filming with people who did they were unable to record direct sound for a
lot of the footage. Instead it is interlaced together as a separate audio track
played over silent scenes of interviews and what the filmmakers are doing, eventually
becoming obvious that the lip synch is wrong and that, with conversations not
connecting with the images onscreen inherently, that we get a stream of
conscious thoughts melded with Cinéma vérité. This first viewing, as it will be
for viewers unexpecting of what they see, was for me attempting to grasp this
all, the individuals involved, the people connected to Tadashi and the filmmakers,
the moments where secret cameras were used and weren’t, and this rough, raw
aesthetic which eventually becomes an explicit critique on what subjective
truth is as well.
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| From http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2012/11/15/arts/15MAN/15MAN-articleLarge.jpg |
As the film goes on, and the
bitterness between the sisters becomes central, A Man Vanishes feels like one of Imamura’s fiction films from the ones I’ve seen. Note, this is not
because A Man Vanishes feels like
something like Pigs and Battleships
(1961), but because Imamura was
so good at capturing life in his films something like Pigs and Battleships feels realistic even to a non-Japanese viewer
in the 2010s. Like many works of this late sixties, early seventies period that
I have been bit-by-bit getting into, from films like this to the Osamu Tezuka manga Ayako (1972-1973), the real life individuals (or characters in a fictitious
work) are old enough to have lived through, or grew up in, the Second World
War, maybe having seen the Japan of before, and are living through a
technologically/culturally/politically turbulent era for the country. This spikes
the universal issues of human nature tackled in works like A Man Vanishes - of family tensions, one’s place in humanity and
society, sex and sexual relationships – and is confounded further by the
country’s strong spirituality and connection of it to normalcy, moments in the
film taking place where a female medium is hired to contact Tadashi and the
spirits of his family to locate him. This adds an ominous supernaturalism to
the events that charge head on into the lack of relevance to spirituality that
some of the individuals feel. These various conflicts are radiant in Japanese
cinema and Shohei Imamura would
tackle all of the ones mentioned in his follow up, the grand scale, nearly
three hour film Profound Desires of the
Gods (1968), let alone the films of his I’ve seen and yet to get to.
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| From http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/images/reviews/177/1359324492_7.png |
When the fiction of the film is
blatantly shown, its theatrics, as Imamura
steps in as the puppet master of A Man
Vanishes, it eventually stands up as a great creation. Even when the fictitious
is revealed, the reality beyond Imamura’s
control, and how people divide and clash with each other, stands unshaken and
above him, the film cameras, microphones and the man who waves a clapperboard a
crowded mass within the frame of another camera up above along with the
participants they’re filming. They are actual people stuck in the centre of
life along with their subjects, and while Imamura
had no real intention of investigating what had happened to Tadashi, his absence
and the people connected with him still control the film from Imamura with their repressed emotions
and their attitudes. Admitting a sadistic dream of mutilating cats to the
camera, us, the wife is an ordinary, plain old human being, but as Imamura’s work enforced, human beings
show as many complexities as an onion has many skins or an orange has chambers.
Documentaries of the most part now are stupid and pointless in their existence
for ignoring this complexity, which is why A
Man Vanishes is difficult to watch
but ultimately rewards more.
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| From http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6uob5dZOy1raezz2o1_500.png |
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