Il est mort après la guerre

Film, revolution, sex: art, equations of not just one Japanese art film of the late 60s and early 70s, especially from the legendary production workshop "Art Theater Guild", which is also behind this film, although here the equation is too balanced between the existential aesthetic pole on one side (à la Yoshida or the previous masterpiece Death by Hanging) and the sexually screaming repetitive storyline on the other side, which recalled the good and bad of Koji Wakamatsu. It's as if the split mind of the main character reflected a certain split in the author's ability to balance the urgency and valence of individual motifs: if Oshima wanted to double the incomprehensible exaggeration of the intra-diegetic film within the film in relation to its fictional audience by portraying this incomprehensibility by exaggerating the repetitive love scenes with deliriously repeating patterns of the same speeches, then he succeeded. On the other hand, I enjoyed precisely those existential flashes that seemed to shine through the film hidden beneath what was seen, the one that is contained in every film in the world, from capturing the foam of days to the conventional Hollywood art of forgetting and even the most real-political agitation: the "hidden" obvious film of the city, objects, lines, noises, silence, characters before they become social, diegetic, or political characters. The poetry of reality in its deeper surrealist-existential dimension before it becomes an identifiable self from me and its empty doppelgänger in which we live every day, and which always allows us to discover that incomprehensible "deeper" reality in retrospect: when it is always too late because the loop of the true film has already finished when we put it into the projector. There is nothing left but to repeat its circular movement - and to find out that we have wrapped that loop around our necks ourselves. (10/01/2024)