|
|
 |
|
Increasingly seen as Imamura's most complex and important work - Donald Richie has pronounced it “in many ways Imamura's most brilliant film” - this ground-breaking documentary was decades ahead of the recent fad for the blurring of fact and fiction. (Imamura calls the film “semi-fiction.” ) A MAN VANISHES begins as an “objective” documentary about Johatsu, the phenomenon in which hundreds of people go missing every year in Japan. Imamura sets out to document the case of Tadashi Oshima, who disappeared without a trace almost two years before. His interviewer questions Oshima's family, colleagues, and his fiancée, who is told by a shaman that her sister murdered him. But the fiancée suddenly loses interest in her missing man, having fallen in love with the interviewer. In a coup de cinéma that has been equalled only by Kiarostami's CLOSE-UP, Imamura transforms fact into artifice, being into acting, personal identity into a tenuous fabrication. Long a legend, endlessly analyzed but little seen, A MAN VANISHES is “unprecedented in world cinema” (Toichi Nakata).
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|