Return of Radio Manga?

[Roger Macy]

Had a rather cerebral and wordy evening last night.

 

First to a talk by Peter Greenaway at the National Gallery.  Greenaway's major theme was the need to draw away from the tyranny of the text in cinema.  But, boy, did he talk - for an hour and a half without notes and without hesitation (but a couple of clips).  The urbane, and packed, audience was too numb for any questions, other than to point out the paradox of his own wordiness.

Then onto the Raindance festival, to catch Oshii mamoru's 'The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters'.  This covered some of the same ground as Imamura's 'History of postwar Japan as told by a Bar Hostess'.  But, although there were small voice-over parts in the vernacular, the dominant content was a deliberately wordy faux-academic history, of a sociological bent, that went on - for an hour and a half.  The translators (Kevin McCeune?  & ??) took to the spirit of the wordiness and threw out all the norms of readability of subtitles and gave us the complete cerebral text, ? la Ninagawa.

Was the introduction part of the performance?  We had a brief maesetsu, about how 'heavy' the cans of film stock were to bring over.  But surely no one would actually go to the performance of putting all that onto 35mm stock?  It was a radio show ('radio manga'?) with lantern-slides, complete with 'voice-colourers' ('kowairoya').  But it wasn't a movie - although it certainly had its funny moments.

Roger Macy
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