Imamura

[Abe' Mark Nornes]

Kuroki and Fukuda certain do fit the bill, and I suppose you can even put
Higashi in there, too. Interesting that we're talking about a tight crowd,
all collaborators and friends...many with Iwanami connections. 

When you think about it, the old left has deep connections to the Rural as
well. You could at least go back as far as Prokino, which did Soviet style
idealizations of exploited farmers. We'd probably have to read the later
groups work against this earlier line. 

Your mention of butoh is interesting, considering what Ogawa was up to at
the end of his life. For one of the fictional sequences in "Magino
Monogatari---sennen kizami no hidokei" he cast Hijikata as a mentally
retarded villager from the Taisho (?) era (with my favorite Nikkatsu Roman
Porno star Miyashita Junko as his sister no less). The last film Ogawa was
working on was about a butoh dancer from deep in the mountains of Yamagata.
One of the ambivalent conversations I was referring to in the last message
was with Ogawa and this dancer at the Magino house---over some excellent
soba if I remember correctly. Ogawa was going on and on and on (as usual)
about how this dancing was "uniquely" Japanese, and tapping into something
very deep and very old. It was a puzzling, even disappointing,
conversation. 

Speaking of Ogawa, I just stumbled across the online version of an article
I wrote for the University of Michigan's International Institute Journal.
It is about Ogawa's "Theater of a Thousand Years." This was a theater the
collective built (mostly with the money and sweat of the editors, writers
and readers of Eiga Shinbun in Osaka, who were/are almost like an Ogawa Pro
fan club). They borrowed an empty construction site in Kyoto and built a
theater from scratch out of logs and mud and thatch. You see the article
at:

http://www.umich.edu/~iinet/journal/vol4no2/jpnfilm.html

amn