Kazuo Ohno was a Japanese dancer who became a guru and inspirational figure in the dance form known as Butoh, of which he was the co-founder. In 1969, he also starred in his first film, “A portrait of Mr O”, during a period in which he had retired from public performance, and just before he began touring the world as a solo dancer with his celebrated work “Admiring La Argentina”.
” Portrait of Mr O” is screening at Japanese Avant-Garde and Experimental Film Festival
Ohno's effort was to “resist fixity”, a pursuit that is quite evident in the film, with the grotesqueness and an overall absurdity in terms of characters and movements being the rule here. In that fashion, the movie begins with a ragtag, deformed individual, moving in a setting that could be described as dystopian, towards a well, from which he helps another similar individual get out from. A bit later, after amassing some vegetables, he enters the well himself. The movie continues with a series of vignettes in the same style, essentially with no dialogues, since the characters only occasionally make a sound that is much similar to that of whales or dolphins, but never actually speak. The sound in general also follows an experimental approach, essentially consisting of noises from guitar chords and bells, among others. A woman with two children, who are not deformed, a number of people who seem to lurk rather than actually exist, a man who seems to make small statues from the pieces that fall from his face skin and a factory worker are also among the many different vignettes present here. A recurring segment includes a rather big fish one of the people carries, which he proceeds to gut in order to eat.
Chiaki Nagano directs this rather experimental film, which seems to aim to entice by appalling, with the grotesqueness of the figures and the absurdness of the movements being the main mediums of his goal. The sense the film gave me was that it takes place in some sort of quarantine area, for people that seem to suffer from something that looks similar to leprosy, in an approach that could be perceived as a comment regarding marginalization or seclusion. At the same time the iconoclast elements are also intense, with the Japanese and other nations' flags being repeatedly present, with the same applying to the presence of masks, whose meaning though, is more elusive.
Great job has been done in the costumes and make-up, with the various individuals looking horrific but also like caricatures most of the time, while the choreography is impressive in its absurdity.
Being shot in black-and-white, having no particular narrative, and featuring no dialogue, “ A Portrait of Mr O” is, evidently, a film quite difficult to watch, particularly since it stretches to over an hour. At the same time, however, there is power in the movements of the various individuals, while the fact that what Nagano wanted to exhibit remains an enigma, at least as a whole, can work quite well, particularly for the viewer who is willing to think about what it is he/she is watching. Lastly, the movie works quite well as an introduction to the concept of Butoh and Ohno's performance abilities.
