For Kayako

Kohei Oguri was born in Gunma prefecture, northern Japan, in 1945, and worked as a freelance assistant director to Kirio Urayama and Masahiro Shibata. He made his directing debut in 1981 with “Doro no Kawa”, which was voted number one in KINEMA JUNPO’s best ten list, as well as receiving the Blue Ribbon Prize and the Mainichi Competition for Best Director. The film was also nominated for the Moscow Film Festival Silver Prize and the American Academy Prize (Foreign Films Section).

In 1984 came “Kayako no Tame-ni” (For Kayako) written by Lee Hwe-Song, which won the George Sadule Prize, a first for a Japanese director. In 1990, “Shi no Toge” won both the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize of the Jury and the FIPRESCI. All three of these films were set in the 1950s, and dealt with the themes of post war life and “the Japanese and I”.

In 1996 “Nemuru Otoko” became the first film to be both written and directed by Oguri, and it drew much attention from being produced and set in his native Gunma prefecture. Now, nine years on, 2005 sees Oguri’s latest endeavor, “Umoregi”.

In what seems like an active form of resistance to the feverish pace of film production in Japan, Oguri has directed only five feature films in a 25-year career. The impact each of them has made, on the other hand, has been formidable. His 1981 debut Muddy River (Doro no Kawa) got him an Oscar nomination, a slew of festival prizes and a top spot in many Japanese film critics’ top ten lists. Every film he has made since has gone on to similar acclaim, peaking with a Jury Grand Prize and a FIPRESCI award at Cannes in 1990 for The Sting of Death (Shi no Toge).

With each subsequent production, the balance between images and dialogue in Oguri’s films has continued to tip over in favour of the former. His previous film Sleeping Man (1996, one of the movies that established Koji Yakusho as the premier actor of the decade) was so overwhelming in its use of landscape, that even Oguri’s former student Katsuhito Ishii was inspired to abandon the love of rapid cutting and comic book characterisations he displayed in Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl and Party 7, and make his own attempt at Ogurian cinema with The Taste of Tea.

The Buried Forest (2005), (Umoregi) like Oguri’s previous films, is an attempt to reawaken our capacity to interact with images. The casual viewer might complain that there is no story, but they would be wrong. There is no plot, perhaps, but there are stories aplenty. There are little stories everywhere in the rich, radiant images of The Buried Forest, and Oguri gives us the time to find and read them all. He holds his shots and makes minimal use of the moving camera. The state-of-the-art HD material the film was shot on, whose detection of light is as close to that of the human eye as any lens or camera has ever gotten, gives the images a life-like luminosity, whether shot by day or by night. Oguri’s landscapes are breathtaking in their richness and detail, but they are not the self-consciously imposing vistas of white elephant filmmaking or the dullness of pictorialism – The Buried Forest was not shot in Cinemascope and is only 93 minutes long. Instead the film is an attempt to create truly rich visions in which the viewer can almost lose himself.

That same richness is applied to Oguri’s human characters, who form part of those landscapes instead of being overwhelmed by them: three teenage girls passing the time by telling stories of camels and whales, a layabout youth whose goal is to keep a giraffe-shaped balloon afloat, an old lady whose obstinate refusal to be sent to a retirement home becomes the talk of the town, and the discovery of the petrified forest that gives the film its title and which reminds the townsfolk of the things that exist beyond their day-to-day worries and frustrations. Oguri tells all their stories with an imagination so fertile it regularly overtakes reality. —goldview.co.