FILM SCREENINGS

The Man Who Left His Will on Film

1970. Japan. Directed by Nagisa Oshima. Screenplay by Masato Hara, Mamoru Sasaki. With Kazuo Goto, Emiko Iwasaki, Sugio Fukuoka. Following activist demonstrations, a student filmmaker discovers a last will and testament recorded on film by a man who may or may not have existed. Much like Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), the footage seems to be innocuous and visually uneventful, yet its very banality suggests a tantalizing mystery that invites imaginative speculation. The student concludes that the only way to understand the ghostly man’s last will is to re-shoot the landscape locations himself. The tension between subjective experience and historical fact lies at the heart of fukeiron, a landscape theory that gained currency in Japan in the 1960s. Print lent by Harvard Film Archive; courtesy Janus Films. In Japanese; English subtitles. 94 min.