Pastoral: To Die in the Country / Pastoral Hide and Seek (1974)
Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974)
DVDRip | MKV | 704 x 470 | x264 @ 1234 Kbps | 100 min | 1,10 Gb
Audio: Japanese AC3 1.0 @ 224 Kbps | Subs: English (embedded)
Genre: Art-house, Drama, Fantasy
DVDRip | MKV | 704 x 470 | x264 @ 1234 Kbps | 100 min | 1,10 Gb
Audio: Japanese AC3 1.0 @ 224 Kbps | Subs: English (embedded)
Genre: Art-house, Drama, Fantasy
Pastoral: To Die in the Country is another great piece of surreal film-making from Shuji Terayama. The film is about a young Terayama who appears in whiteface along with his mother. The young Terayama deals with his sexual hang-ups due to the onset of puberty. He also slowly drifts away from his clinging mother.
The village which he lives in is the most delightful sight in the film. Their are strange denizens who populate the village. The one memorable group is the circus troupe which is shown in a spectral, prism filter tone to add life to their profession. Close to the middle of the film, Terayama has an actor playing himself interrupt the film saying that the rest hasn't been edited yet, he soon enters the film he is shooting and interacts with his former self.
Terayama's mastery of the image is inarguable. His compositions - kaleidoscopic, supersaturated, overpowering - are an integral part of his films' unique emotional landscape. He could almost be described as a director of Japanese kink, were his films not so deeply philosophical, cerebral and achingly emotional.
Here, Terayama paints his childhood in broad strokes, then proceeds to shake his head as if disappointed at the results; his images are an embellishment, he concedes, and the rest of the film delves more deeply into the metaphysical as he literally steps foot into his childhood to try to understand it and, if possible, change it, if only to find out what will happen if he does.
The film is charged with budding eroticism, a portrait of an adolescent's confusion juxtaposed with a man's midlife existentialism. Terayama was a fascinating man and he's putting his soul on display in this film, his own poetry woven through it as his memories ring with the surreal and come across more coherently as feelings than as literal moments. The figures of his childhood walk larger than life until, finally, the thin walls of memory come crashing down and the past is forsaken in favour of an urban present.
(click to enlarge)
Pastoral: To Die in the Country / Pastoral Hide and Seek (1974)
Pastoral: To Die in the Country / Pastoral Hide and Seek (1974)
Pastoral: To Die in the Country / Pastoral Hide and Seek (1974)
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