Pastoral: To Die in the Country

A director is making a film about his own childhood. The narrative takes place in a mountain village in northern Japan: a boy living with his mother, a young bride in the house next door, a circus that comes to the village, and a mountain where the dead are believed to be spoken to. The boy wants to escape. Then the film turns on itself: the director watches the footage in an editing room and says that what he has described is not true. He goes back into his own past and intervenes in his childhood. Shūji Terayama writes and directs. Terayama was a poet, playwright and founder of a theatre company; cinema was one branch of his work and this is his best known film. The design is entirely artificial: painted faces, coloured spaces, sets that are openly stages. Realism is nowhere intended. The idea is that memory can be constructed. The director reshoots his own past and changes it, and what he changes produces no result. Osorezan is a real mountain in Japan where the spirits of the dead are believed to be reachable, and the film uses that belief directly. It is among the best known examples of Japanese experimental cinema and screened at the Cannes film festival in 1974. Who it is for: viewers who follow experimental cinema and formally radical work. Who it is not for: the narrative cannot be followed, the imagery is dense, and the film explains nothing.