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DEPARTURES (OKURIBITO )(3)(原文)

THEATRE AND MEANING

Most valuable of these three counterbalancing aspects is, from my point of view, the change of attitude in the families watching their loved ones prepared for the coffin. Every ritual performed on any of the dead is a short drama in itself, a drama composed more in a Western than in a Japanese way; the Aristotelian three acts can be easily distinguished. Take, for example, the case of the stern man complaining harshly to the nokanshi for arriving late, this could be our first act; this man is obviously angry for the loss of his wife, and as we witness the transformation of a dead body into an actual portrait of love and inner wisdom, the second act takes place; the third would be the ‘catharsis’ of the whole family, especially of the father and husband letting go his anger and openly expressing his pain and therefore being able to show his gratitude to the Daigo and his boss.
The director clearly assumes the theatrical aspect of these rituals putting the camera in the position of the spectator, sometimes abstracting in black the surroundings of the nokanshi to make both the audience and the family concentrate on the ritual as well as experiencing the sensation of a theatre.
Certainly, the ceremony as a whole, the precision of the movements, the expectancy of whereto these will lead, imposes theatre as technique as wel as metaphor, but here the metaphor is a serious one: in order to let go the beloved person, we have to see he or she come back to life and then depart us with the smile of someone who has found the key of an enigma; and this is such a play were the dead body becomes the main character, the nokanshi the director, a sort of bunraku master animating the puppet (ningyo), or as in the case of Daigo, the instrument the artist is playing.

和文はコチラ

by xavier_astro | 2009-05-05 00:00 | 映画  

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