OSôSHIKI

If you pay more attention to such details as the dark shadow falling on the funeral operator, or sunshine filtering through foliage reflected on a young womans neckline, maybe that «something» reveals itself unexpectedly. But while you are busy enjoying, the story develops quickly before you know it. Its a wicked film, indeed. This wickedness resembles Spielberg. At the end of <i>Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i>, the descending huge mothership abruptly starts rotating and reverses the sky and the earth. Similarly, <i>Osôshiki</i> does have such a strong surprise to make one doubt ones eyes, and the very moving scene is giving an extraordinary aura to the film. Needless to say, it is the scene in what appears an empty lot in the grove where all the attendees gather and listen to the speeches of the relatives. No one dares to move. No actor or actress exposes his/her character on display. Only the camera keeps panning slowly, and in the unfolding 360-degree field of vision, you feel the air flowing out of nowhere and clinging to every single one of the attendees. We cannot actually see it nor say it is on the screen somewhere, but it apparently exists. It is something people cannot do anything about, except for standing still in the presence of it. It seems to me that the most suitable word to describe it is «secret». I would say it is the secret of a film.
(Kurosawa Kiyoshi, in «Kinema Junpô», No. 898, 1984/11II)