Tobenai chinmoku

A crawling caterpillar as a traveling metaphor, splitting the story into many flashes of life changes and traumas, and most importantly: splitting and unifying the concrete and general, the personal and historical. Once again, the greatness of the 1960s is confirmed, a decade that managed to connect a unique life fate with its external conditions, and society's traumas with the protagonists' inner world. A seemingly external and foreign caterpillar, just like the external and "objective" documentaries on Hiroshima after the bomb, etc., becomes its interior, and intimacy becomes the backdrop from which it grows, without losing anything of its human urgency. Whether we realize it or not, this narrative style denies the still prevailing ideological liberal/bourgeois/Hollywood concept of a separate world of inner self-establishing individuals (fiction) and external objective reality (documentary) and shows that one can create a truly human testimony without closing ourselves off to "classical" oppositions such as interior vs. exterior, spirit vs. matter, the individual vs. society, and other metaphysics. /// I wish I knew more about Japanese culture because it seems I've only caught glimpses, but even that was more than enough. /// The Japanese cameramen of that time were also top-notch - oh, those shots, with one great composition following another... (03.02.2016)