A Man Vanishes

Shohei Imamura's Japanse New Wave classic starts off with the search for Tadashi Oshima, a 32-year-old salesman who has mysteriously disappeared. Once intended as a series about the large number of disappearances in Japanese society, this meta-documentary initially masquerades as a TV report, with an interviewer painstakingly trying to reconstruct the life of a man. Along the way, however, the film turns into a reflection on the subjectivity of filmmaking and Japanese culture in general. The more witnesses tell us about the man who has disappeared, the more elusive he becomes: the narrative counterpart to Imamura’s typically (and consciously) "chaotic" visual style. Abrupt zooms and grainy close-ups imitate the realism of TV reports, but as the contours of the missing man blur among the ever-expanding and ever more contradictory witness statements, A Man Vanishes takes on an increasingly abstract form, with sudden cuts, out-of-sync audio and reactions from the crew to the making of the film. Imamura exposes the construction of reality and provides a sardonic commentary on the assumed realism of cinema verité. This deliberately derailed documentary is like a snake biting its own tail.