Not Recognizing the Boundary: A study of Shohei Imamura’s A Man Vanishes (1967)

Considering both the movie’s demonstration of the Oshima family’s approach to his disappearance and the accounts given by Mauger, it would appear that Imamura is satirizing the role of mass media in tackling the sensitive issue of the Johatsu. 5 The sequences showing the work of the medium and her c...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inOffscreen Vol. 23; no. 9-10
Main Author Parisa Hakim Javadi
Format Trade Publication Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Montreal Donald Totaro 01.09.2019
Subjects
Anthropology
Documentary films
Families & family life
Imamura, Shohei
Investigations
Mass media
Motion pictures
Noise
Production crews
Japan
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN1712-9559

Cover

More Information
Summary:Considering both the movie’s demonstration of the Oshima family’s approach to his disappearance and the accounts given by Mauger, it would appear that Imamura is satirizing the role of mass media in tackling the sensitive issue of the Johatsu. 5 The sequences showing the work of the medium and her conversations with Oshima’s family members and Yoshie (his fiancée), though seemingly related to his disappearance, are mostly occasions of anthropological study by displaying the traditional acts and religious beliefs of this section of Japanese society. Though all these details seem irrelevant to the main subject matter, Imamura appears to intentionally accumulate these fragmented pieces of verbal/visual data about the group of people he encounters as a consequence of searching for the reason of Oshima’s disappearance. An example of the artful combination of sound and visuals is the two occasions 6 when, with a very sharp noise 7 , the film suddenly cuts to seemingly irrelevant shots of a white-clad figure sitting in the only illuminated part of a dark room.
ISSN:1712-9559