is a 1967 Japanese
pseudo documentary
A pseudo-documentary or fake documentary is a film or video production that takes the form or style of a documentary film but does not portray real events. Rather, scripted and fictional elements are used to tell the story. The pseudo-documentary, ...
film by director
Shōhei Imamura
was a Japanese film director. His main interest as a filmmaker lay in the depiction of the lower strata of Japanese society. A key figure in the Japanese New Wave, who continued working into the 21st century, Imamura is the only director from J ...
about a film team's search for a man reported missing.
Plot
Tadashi Oshima, a 32-year-old salesman from Naoetsu,
Niigata prefecture
is a Prefectures of Japan, prefecture in the Chūbu region of Honshu of Japan. Niigata Prefecture has a population of 2,227,496 (1 July 2019) and is the List of Japanese prefectures by area, fifth-largest prefecture of Japan by geographic area ...
, is reported missing. Together with Oshima's fiancée Yoshie Hayakawa, Imamura and his film team, including interviewer
Shigeru Tsuyuguchi
is a Japanese actor.
Biography
Tsuyuguchi was born in Tokyo and raised in Ehime.Nihon Eiga Jinmei Jiten 2 190-191 He attended Ehime University, but withdrew before completing his degree and joined the Haiyuza Theatre Company in 1955. His c ...
, visit relatives and co-workers to find Oshima's whereabouts. During their travels, it is revealed that none of the persons are who they initially seemed to be: Oshima, repeatedly described as a weak and obedient character, embezzled money from his company, was seeing another woman named Kimiko, and was reluctant to marrying Yoshie because her older sister Sayo was living in an open relationship with another man. Sayo in turn suffered from repeated violent attacks by the ill-tempered Yoshie since childhood. Also, Yoshie suspects her sister of having had an affair with her fiancé, while the rest of the film team speculates if Yoshie is only acting out a plot. Yoshie, Sayo, Tsuyuguchi and Imamura meet in a restaurant, joined by a fishmonger who claims that he repeatedly saw Sayo and Oshima together, which Sayo denies. The scenery is revealed to be a
film set
A set is artificially constructed scenery used in theatre, film and TV. In the latter two cases there are many reasons to build or use a set instead of travelling to a real location, such as budget, time, the need to control the environment, or t ...
, and Imamura declares the settings and events to be fiction. In the last scene, the film team stages one of the meetings of Sayo and Oshima, which leads to an argument between Sayo, Yoshie and the fishmonger, each accusing the other of giving false testimony. Imamura wraps up the filming with the words, "the film is finished, but reality is not".
The film is interspersed with scenes of Oshima's relatives and Yoshie consulting different
shamanic mediums about Oshima, one of which accuses Sayo of having murdered him out of jealousy.
Cast
* Shigeru Tsuyuguchi as Interviewer
* Yoshie Hayakawa
* Shōhei Imamura
Production
Imamura had taken interest in the phenomenon of ongoing vanishings of people in Japan, which summed up to thousands every year. He chose what he called the "most ordinary" case and met with the missing man's fiancée Yoshie Hayakawa. Imamura, who had planned to make a film on her research, was startled by what he saw as the woman's self-centeredness and tendency to perform in front of the camera. Imamura concluded that she wasn't interested in finding her fiancé at all, but found himself accused of the same by her in return. He decided to shift the film's focus towards her persona, often filming her secretly.
Reception and themes
In a 1967 review, critic and filmmaker
Nagisa Ōshima
was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. One of the foremost directors within the Japanese New Wave, his films include ''In the Realm of the Senses'' (1976), a sexually explicit film set in 1930s Japan, and ''Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence' ...
criticised Imamura for using (and failing at) the technique of documentary filming due to the film's lacking a theme, and the notion that a theme could emerge halfway during filming.
Following a 2012 US release tour of ''A Man Vanishes'',
Ronnie Scheib of
Variety
Variety may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Entertainment formats
* Variety (radio)
* Variety show, in theater and television
Films
* ''Variety'' (1925 film), a German silent film directed by Ewald Andre Dupont
* ''Variety'' (1935 film), ...
saw an "explosively provocative film" which "progressively and aggressively blurs distinctions between documentary and fiction".
Manohla Dargis
Manohla June Dargis () is an American film critic. She is one of the chief film critics for ''The New York Times''. She is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Career
Before being a film critic for ''The New York Times'', ...
of
The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
called it "wildly startling in its execution" and an "increasingly complex look at a man, his culture and his country", haunted by "questions of cinematic realism and how the camera changes everything".
Film scholar Alexander Jacoby read the depiction of shamanism in the film as a recurring theme in Imamura's works, showing "that superstition endured despite the technological advances of modern Japan".
Awards
* Best Director award for Shōhei Imamura at the 1967
Mainichi Film Awards
The
are a series of annual film awards, sponsored by Mainichi Shinbun (毎日新聞), one of the largest newspaper companies in Japan, since 1946. It is the first film festival in Japan.
History
The origins of the contest date back to 1935, ...
Home media
A region free NTSC DVD release was issued in October 2011 in the
Masters of Cinema
Masters of Cinema is a line of DVD and Blu-ray releases published through Eureka Entertainment. Because of the uniformly branded and spine-numbered packaging and the standard inclusion of booklets and analysis by recurring film historians, the l ...
series.
A region 1 NTSC DVD was released in 2012 by Icarus Films.
References
External links
*
Further reading
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Man Vanishes, A
1967 films
Japanese black-and-white films
Films directed by Shohei Imamura
Nikkatsu films
1960s Japanese films