‘A Man Vanishes’ or — ‘Chronicle of a Summer’ meets ‘The Holy Mountain’?
If you’re familiar with Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s seminal ‘Chronicles of a Summer’ (1961) then you might have some idea of what to expect from Shōhei Imamura’s ‘A Man Vanishes’ (1967) as anthropology meets the deconstruction of the documentary format. However, if you’re familiar with Imamura then you’ll know never to assume anything.
‘A Man Vanishes’ starts in typical “documentary” fashion as we are presented information about plastic salesman, Tadashi Oshima, who went missing two years previously. Oshima is one of Japan’s “evaporated people”, one of many thousands who, at the time of the country’s economic miracle in the Sixties, simply vanished.
An investigative crew is attempting to piece together as much as they can about Oshima in order to deduce why he disappeared. This involves interviewing those who knew and worked with the guy, as well as pouring through his official documents and travel records.
Yet, around half an hour in, we discover one of the investigators, Yoshie, is his Oshima’s former lover and she is trying to track him down. This immediately puts all documentary objectivity into question and objectivity is thrown out completely when it is revealed that Yoshie has now fallen in love with one of the members of the investigation team, something which Imamura, appearing before camera himself, actively encourages because he feels it might lead to something “interesting”.
Hang on! This doesn’t feel terribly objective for a documentary at all!
That’s because this isn’t an objective documentary in the slightest with Imamura frequently appearing before camera to tell the actors, the public and the viewer that all of this is explicitly fiction. But why? To demonstrate “truth” in documentary form is an illusion? To state something about the relationship between society and the media? Or maybe this is Imamura covering his own ass? Watch ‘A Man Vanishes’ and find out!
Or maybe don’t because I gotta be honest and admit that this is the first, and so far only, Imamura film I’ve struggled with. Boy, this film is a slog! Yes, it’s interesting, audacious and provocative but it’s a seriously tough watch for the first half, not because of the content but how that content is served up to us which is by all manner of distancing, form-breaking, disorientating and complex cinematic devices.
Sound and image are almost constantly fractured and out of sync, forcing the viewer to extract not only meaning but also consistency. The footage is rough and caught on the fly, the sound even more so as an avalanche of detailed information regarding Oshima is present for us to shift through… if that’s even what we’re meant to be doing. It’s like trying to put together a jigsaw whilst all the pieces are moving, superimposing over each other, resisting coherent tessellation, and it is exhausting.
Then, about an hour in, the focus moves to Yoshie and her sister. This is where Imamura came under fire for seemingly exploiting the two sisters, frequently using hidden microphones to surreptitiously record their conversations. Yet is this Imamura engaging in unethical practices or forcing the viewer the question their relationship with the media? This becomes even more complex and knotty when we can’t quite be sure if the sisters are performing, “performing” or just being. Either way, questions of complicity have to be grappled with.
This culminates in an extended argument between Yoshie and her sister in a tea-house that’s striking in its veracity… only for Imamura to then insert himself into the scene and in reveal (gag?) that Jodorowsky must have lifted wholesale for the end of his ‘The Holy Mountain’ (1973), orders the entire tea-house to be immediately struck down. The entire environment has been a set and as it is dismantled Imamura tells his performers -
“When you think you’re telling the truth, everything looks real to you… For instance, this is a set. No ceiling, no roof. But we’ve been talking as if in a real room. You probably felt like it was a real room… Looks can be deceiving. This is fiction. This is drama developed because Oshima went missing. It didn’t occur spontaneously. It evolved as we planned… The camera is trying to film you, and you know it. Tomorrow, another fabricated film drama will play out here. But it’s not necessarily that fiction is false, and non-fiction is true. This is fiction, too.”
It’s an extreme and audacious cinematic jolt but whereas many other filmmakers would be content to leave this as the killer punch-line to end the movie, Imamura spends the next half an hour exploring and demonstrating this concept in depth. The entire scene moves out into the street where all pretense of “realism” is dropped, the public are explicitly informed everything they are seeing and engaging in as participants is all fake and, in another cinematic jolt, sound and vision (for the first time) link up, unite and finally coalesce. All the while Imamura stands back, observing and fully earning his reputation as an anthropological filmmaker.
‘A Man Vanishes’ is an extremely dry and academic work, and that’s interesting as dry and academic aren’t words I’d usually associate with this director. It’s a thorough investigation of Japanese society and Japanese media of the time, as well as a deconstruction of both the fictional and documentary approaches to cinema.
It is crammed with complex cinematic devices (this might be the only Imamura film that, for me, feels genuinely New Wave), often utilising freeze-frames that might suggest a trick or fudge to get round shooting limitations but when we suddenly witness Yoshie and her sister sitting frozen still but with everything else moving around them then we know another meaning must be considered.
If you’re interested in the films of Shōhei Imamura then don’t start with this one as it is challenging on so many levels, requires intense concentration and that dislocation of sound and image adds a visceral discomfort that can be tough to sit through. Yet stick with it and the shocks that hit you won’t leave your memory for a while; a man has vanished but this film’s memory has real permanence. The last half hour alone is worth it for an insight into Imamura’s working methods as well as demonstrating the power this director can capture on film.
And I love the fact he beat Jodorowsky to THAT particular punch.
