A Man Vanishes (Ningen Johatsu)

[Mathieu Capel]

Happy new year indeed,

About Ningen no johatsu, the movie is rather eloquent regarding the
nature (fiction/facts, or something else that would be deceptive
anyway) of its narrative elements. Imamura himself tells us what it's
all about, when Yoshie and her sister argue in a movie set that falls
apart : everything is fiction, even the search for Oshima has
developed itself that way because I (i.e. Imamura) developed it that
way - or so.

As a matter of fact, if you read Imamura statements about his project,
it looks like it was plainly a documentary one from the beginning.
Oshima was indeed a missing person, and Imamura met Yoshie by chance,
at the time he got interested in this "johatsu" phenomenon. Anyway,
Ningen johatsu ends in something that is much stimulating that this
simple opposition between fact and fiction.
But, regarding what the project was at the beginning, one can find
interesting how Imamura, who did not know how to give an end to his
project, finally "goes back" to "fiction" (something like a pretext,
or an excuse, for he could not achieve his aim), and how the course of
documentary finally got "perverted".

(I am still astonished in a way by Imamura's ingenuousness when he
talks about the difference between documentary and fiction. At the
time, many people (just look at Matsumoto and Kuroki,and everyone from
the Iwanami studio) just had thrown this kind of old debate away : it
was shutaiteki or not, "documentary or fiction" was not interesting no
more. Anyway, his movies are so stimulating that I sometimes wonder if
this ingenuousness was not fake...)

Mathieu Capel
Paris