A Man Vanishes [1967]

 Shōhei Imamura’s fascinating hybrid documentary A Man Vanishes was like a virtuosic jazz composition – freely improvisational, filled with syncopated rhythms, and subverting formal boundaries over a progressively experimental jamming session. His first foray into non-fiction cinema was made at the peak of his remarkable creative burst. Imamura, being who he was, radically pushed the envelope in his deadpan style and turned it into a teasing metatextual exercise on the overlaps between truth, reality, artifice and performativity, and thereby sardonically reinforced the ironic idea that “objectivity is [nothing but] one of the fifty-seven kinds of subjectivity.” It began in the veins of a matter-of-fact investigative account. Post-War Japan was plagued by “Jōhatsu” – or “evaporated people” – as numerous ordinary individuals were walking away and disappearing from their lives, families and jobs. The film zooms in on 32-year-old salesman Tadashi Oshima, who went missing 2 years back. With actor Shigeru Tsuyuguchi serving as the interviewer, and accompanied by the missing man’s enigmatic fiancée Yoshie Hayakawa who’s looking for closure, the director starts unearthing this supposedly timid man’s murky existence – he was caught upon committing financial embezzlement at his workplace, had a three-way torrid affair with an older woman, his samurai background was offended upon finding out Yoshie’s elder sister’s sexual relationships, and even supposedly demonstrated growing intimacy with the latter – and then did a volte face by shifting his focus to Yoshie instead and then on cinema itself. Strikingly shot in grainy, high-contrast B/W, sparingly laced with a deliciously idiosyncratic score, and the conversations and visuals often running out-of-sync, the DNA of this complex exercise was carried by such future Iranian masterworks as Kiarostami’s Close-Up and Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of this film can be found here.

Director: Shohei Imamura

Genre: Documentary/Mystery/Avant-Garde Film

Language: Japanese

Country: Japan

In Memoriam: Patricio Guzmán – Filming the Haunted Memories of a Nation

 Few filmmakers have chronicled their country’s story with such devastating brilliance, uncompromising commitment and unflagging defiance as Patricio Guzmán, who passed away on 15^th Sep 2026. His oeuvre formed an interconnected story of Chile – encompassing Allende’s revolutionary hope, the brutal military coup and Pinochet’s repressive dictatorship, heroic resistance and enforced disappearances of leftists, collective and personal memories, and finally the pulsating 2019 uprising that reconnected the thread with Allende’s presidency.

Filmmakers who readily come to mind, whose filmographies have similarly served as tireless and disobedient mirrors to their countries’ political histories, faultlines and memories, include such radical storytellers and documentarians as Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), Francesco Rosi (Italy), Andrzej Wajda (Poland), Carlos Saura (Spain), Mrinal Sen (India), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Jia Zhangke (China), Lav Diaz (Philippines), Wang Bing (China), and Anand Patwardhan (India), among others.

On a personal note, my knowledge of Chile during my school days had largely been linked to Ivan Zamorano and Marcelo Salas, stars of their fine football team during the 1990s. It was thanks to Guzmán, and my immense admiration for his unforgettable documentaries, that I came to really know and understand this Latin American country, and develop a rather deep connection with it – one that has only grown since then. Along with other masters of this exciting yet often-neglected form, he also helped establish my profound love for non-fiction cinema.

Presenting a collage of the 9 films by the Chilean maestro – or 11, if one considers The Battle of Chile trilogy as three separate films – that I’ve watched. Also list below the links to my reviews of these titles, in chronological order of their release:

• The First Year (1972)
• The Battle of Chile (1975, 1976, 1979)
• Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997)
• The Pinochet Case (2001)
• Salvador Allende (2004)
• Nostalgia for the Light (2010)
• The Pearl Button (2015)
• The Cordillera of Dreams (2019)
• My Imaginary Country (2022)