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The gag is from Keaton's The Cameraman by way of Godard's La Chinoise, the phantom paraphernalia of a revolution that's gone by. The witnessing eye of a handheld Bolex, quaked by the activist's leap off a building, confiscated by the police as evidence, puzzled over by the victim's leftist collective. Expecting a blazing schwanengesang, the comrades find themselves yawning at nondescript Tokyo views: "Maybe he was figuring that, by linking meaningless shots, he could create meaning by paradox." While the other members name-drop New Wave auteurs they hope to get for their cause, the young protagonist (Kazuo Goto) obsessively scans the scrambled footage alongside the dead man's girlfriend (Emiko Iwasaki). "A street of broken down signs," the abstruse cinematic testament as well as Nagisa Oshima's metaphysical study of those around it, both an elegy for the student movement and a renewed call to arms. University protests ca. '69, "it seems like history is moving outside of our lives, but the camera makes it seem familiar, personal." Projections in a blanched chamber, the onanistic torso makes for a handy screen. Interpretation of reality means interpretation of identity, the seeker and his ghost. Mailboxes, cigarette stands, pay phones—one can passively recreate spaces or enter and transform them. Against cinephilia, cp. Rossellini's "Illibatezza" (RoGoPaG), all contemplation and no action. "Read him a Trotskyist bedtime story, it might help." A map pieced together only to be discarded, a cityscape flipped upside-down from the violated heroine's vantage point in the backseat of a car. The cycle is repeated up on the rooftop and down in the pavement, hope is the furtive hand that snatches the bloody instrument. Antonioni returns the compliment to Blowup in The Passenger. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |