Educational Media Reviews Online

Shohei Imamura’s A Man Vanishes was a film far ahead of its time when it came out. Even in the light of contemporary films today it stands out as innovative. It is a documentary film that is turned on its ear almost as soon as it starts, creating a new category for itself. It is not a “fake” documentary like David Holtzman’s Diary (1967), which came out the same year in the United States, it is more of a reflexive or meta documentary, that is to say, a documentary about the making of a documentary, but with another level of filmmaker’s influence on top.

Imamura and his crew set out to understand why a man would abandon his life and disappear without a trace. The man in question, Tadashi Oshima, was a real life missing person but almost everything else in the film is mediated through Imamura’s decisions about how to examine the real events through interpretations of discoveries and manipulations of the people around the missing man. The film begins as a procedural investigation and evolves into a type of what we might call “reality show” where the characters are real but placed in situations that have specific effects on their behavior. The vanished man’s fiancée Yoshie Hayakawa, is caught up in the production of the film and, in fact, essentially becomes a break-out reality star as the filming progresses. She cannot ostensibly deal with her new role and has difficulty answering questions during a press conference. She is unable to respond whether she agreed to appear in the film solely to find her fiancé and, by extension, whether she is doing it for the publicity. Being in the film takes away any anonymity she might have enjoyed and catapults her into a position of becoming a fictional character whose real interactions with an actor (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi) hired by Imamura to play the part of the investigator, are spied upon by the crew. Her growing feelings for him are possibly real but the premise of their relationship is scripted.

In a segment near the beginning of the film, a medium is employed to see whether she could figure out what happened to Oshima. Later in the film she accuses Yoshie’s sister of wrong doing. A question is asked in this early sequence: “Do you trust the medium”. It is in fact a good question about whether we trust the film and by extension the filmmaker’s motives.

There is a very interesting twenty minute section near the end of the film, in which a fishmonger who claims to have seen Oshima with Yoshie’s sister is questioned by the sister and Yoshie about the validity of his statements. Yoshie believes him, while her sister stringently denies any clandestine relationship with Oshima. This sequence is shot with several cameras and as it progresses the set-ups appear to be fabricated. Then, Imamura suddenly joins the discussion and pronounces that they are not in a room but on a sound stage and instructs the set to come down and the lights to go back up while a camera pulls away revealing the set. “Looks can be deceiving”, he says. “This is fiction. It evolved as we planned. The camera is trying to film you and you know it. Tomorrow another fabricated film drama will play out here. But, it’s not necessarily that fiction is false and non-fiction is true. That is a fiction also.” What then is illusion and what is reality? This thought-provoking film is highly recommended for film studies, cultural studies and media studies.

The film is part of a box set that also includes 5 additional Shohei Imamura documentaries made from 1967 to 1975: Karayuki-San, The Making of a Prostitute (75 min., 1975), Outlaw-Matsu Comes Home (48 min., 1973), The Pirates of Bubuan (46 min., 1972), In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Malaysia (45 min., 1971), and In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Thailand (50 min., 1971). These films similarly explore related themes of disappearance and return.