HIMATSURI Movie Review

Fire Festival

Mitsuo Yanagimachi's Himatsuri (Fire Festival) is a powerful, poetic, visionary work about one individual's increasing disillusionment with the world of man, and his growing, obsessive, and ultimately religious relationship with nature. The hero is a lumberjack in a small, magnificently scenic Japanese village, where the stately trees that the lumberjack veritably worships seem to take on a phallic suggestiveness without the director forcing the issue. If this all sounds hopelessly symbolic and pretentious on paper, I'd have to agree. Yanagimachi's art is in his ability to wrap this skeleton of an idea in a visual cloak that is so awe-inspiring that the underlying silliness of the film's conceit is replaced by an electrifying foreboding. The explosive climax that Himatsuri seems to be building toward is very real, and doesn't disappoint; the stormy, wind-whipped sound effects and towering, living, ominous living landscapes that suggest what is to come are evidence of an artist who is in total control of his medium. (Note: Himatsuri is a film that will particularly benefit from being seen on laserdisc or DVD, if available. To put it in sixties speak, it will blow your mind.)

NEXT STOP … The Ballad of Narayama, Nanook of the North, 2001:A Space Odyssey

1985 120m/C JP Kinya Kitaoji, Kwako Taichi, Ryota Nakamoto, Norihei Miki; D: Mitsuo Yanagimachi; W: Kenji Nakagami; C: Masaki Tamura; M: Toru Takemitsu. VHS ORI, WAR, AUD