Subtitles:

English (SDH), none

Extras:

• Introduction by Tony Rayns (11:37 in HD!)

• Japanese Trailer with English subtites (5:28 in HD!)

One should note that Imamura's camerawork both raises the sense of watching through a window and also conveys a sense of the animals -- actually legendary gods through the film's identification of divinity with nature -- as the ones doing the watching. What the film's title, content, and structure emphatically exclude is the possibility of equating the film's "gods" with the film's audience. It would be smug and arrogant to assume that the film's viewers are meant to be gods. Because Imamura's camera often switches focus from the human characters to the animals and back again, it is clear that the camera's field of view does not singlemindedly represent any one particular perspective. And even if it were Imamura's intention to make viewers into gods, so to speak, the viewer-gods would be necessarily impotent and ineffective, since the viewer is at the mercy of Imamura's cinematic and narrative judgment.

To the other hand, one could conclude that the film is little more than an indulgent effort to equate the real god back to Imamura himself. While Imamura has played similar tricks in his other films -- most notably in his 1967 film NINGEN JOHATSU (A MAN VANISHES) where Imamura surreptitiously photographed a woman who is searching for her missing fiance and who falls in love with the fake interviewer-investigator Imamura paid to accompany her -- there is no such sense of egotism in KAMIGAMI NO FUKAKI YOKUBO because Imamura never calls undue attention to his camera tricks. He also does not carry anything to gratuitous extremes. Imamura is certainly fascinated by the dirty laundry of humankind, and it is therefore only natural that he would be attracted to the themes of incest and lecherous gods that Kuragejima has to offer. But in this film at least, Imamura wants to examine and learn from those themes, not exploit or revel in them.

The abrupt epilogue of the film somewhat disrupts the flow of the film, but it does effectively address how these concerns have changed the community five years after the main events of the film. Kariya, the engineer, returns with his family to visit, as does Kametaro, who has become disillusioned with life in Tokyo. Although western influences have transformed the island (Coca-Cola signs are everywhere), new indigenous legends are also emerging. Imamura implies that such folklore will always find resources to survive in the face of encroaching realities. What is most striking, though, is how strange and foreign the visitors seem on the island. Not having witnessed the events that led to the creation of the new myths, the visitors will never consider the rock named after the now-deceased Toriko to be anything more than a curiosity. Kametaro is best qualified among the visitors to realize the full import of the changes, and it is therefore appropriate that he is the only one who sees a vision of Toriko dancing on the train tracks ahead of the locomotive pulling Kariya's train. This is a rather clumsy method, but Imamura makes his point: Kametaro (and the audience) are well on their way to realizing that the story of Toriko has now become intimately anchored within the village's traditions and collective mythology -- just as a large rock hurled onto the island became a part of the local lore twenty years earlier.

Gary Tooze

May 25th, 2010