Condensed Silence is a masterpiece of extraordinary creativity.
Film critic Zheng Chuan's brief comment on it is: "The insect eyes look at all the floating and varied, both reflecting on the past and looking at the world." Seemingly understated, it is actually the handiwork of a master who lifts heavy weights, leaving the most ambitious video footnotes for Japan's restless 1960s. "The American and Japanese film scholar Michael Wren has a page-and-a-half film review that has a lot of incisive explanations for the film.
The plot is unveiled around the caterpillar, and the film reflects the "metamorphosis" of Japanese social history.
In the summer in Hokkaido, a teenager caught a butterfly in a white net in the countryside after viewing butterfly specimens in a department store. His teacher explained to him that the butterfly was a species that grew in Nagasaki and could not have flown 1,600 kilometers north to be captured in Hokkaido. The university professors concluded the same as the teachers, not believing that butterflies were juvenile catches.
The boy meets a girl dressed in white and an old logger on the grassland, and tears the butterflies apart by the river and discards them. In Nagasaki in the south, a butterfly caterpillar of the same breed boarded a train to Tokyo, and was spotted by a passenger on the way, who threw it out of the window along with the fruit in panic.
The slow-crawling caterpillar transforms into a plaything in the palm of the white-clad girl, and also observes the confusion of the youth who killed her lover's husband. Caterpillar then traveled to Hiroshima, where the young lovers who had participated in the anti-security treaty were victims of radiation and were hospitalized. The caterpillar then arrives in Kyoto and witnesses middle-aged men in the war, laughing girls entangled in the military base, and so on.
Later, when Caterpillar arrived in Osaka, he saw a male white-collar worker drinking with a tired face after work, standing in front of a huge advertisement poster of beautiful women, waiting, and sharing a bed with a lover at night. The caterpillar was then taken to Hong Kong by plane in a briefcase, and became involved in the international trade of criminal gangs, which became a code name. After the briefcase was brought back to Yokohama by one of the members, it became a rival between the two factions in Tokyo.
The caterpillar then accidentally attaches to a man's shoulder, and the man is killed during the escape, and the caterpillar eventually dies. A plane landed in Hokkaido, and a woman dressed in black got off the plane in a car with the 1931 license plate, and the car was suddenly covered by the white butterfly net of the original teenager. The teenager discarded the captured dying butterfly on the road.
Caterpillar appears on the screen and seems to incarnate into the role of Mariko Kaga, juxtaposed with a series of failed love events, painful and unforgettable memories of war, chaotic criminal activities, and so on. Echoing the end and beginning of the film, the Hokkaido teenager captures another butterfly.
The merits of the film "Condensed Silence" are not conveyed by the storyline. The film mixes a variety of film genres, starting with experimental documentaries, becoming comedic road movies, newsreels, and an international mystery film, and constantly changing. Its focus and brilliance is not on the story, but on the satirical significance of the plot and the natural light photography that has never appeared in Japanese cinema.
Mariko Kaga plays several characters, including the avatar of a butterfly. The film's narrative uses a documentary approach to voiceover to explain different scenarios. Material images include close-ups of skin, sweat, fruit, and caterpillars, and images of trains speeding. Photographer Tatsuo Suzuki's lens is flexible and fluid, expressing the modern style of Japanese art films of the 1960s.
"Condensed Silence" is a drama film shot by documentary filmmakers Kuroki and Yu on behalf of Toho's subsidiary Hinei Shinsha, and after the filming was completed, Toho's senior management was extremely dissatisfied with it, and immediately canceled the national release arranged in the morning. The film was shelved for a year before it was released at ATG's theater. Renowned film theorist and director Toshio Matsumoto believes that the joy of "Condensed Silence" comes from the dialectic between the excessive abstraction of the script concept and the amazingly superb technique of the image.
The black-and-white cinematography of Condensed Silence is extraordinary, but it is the first feature film shot by Tatsuo Suzuki, and his first collaboration with Kazuo Kuroki. They continued to work as partners for forty years, completing several film productions.
A native of Shimoda City, Shizuoka Prefecture, Suzuki joined the Iwanami Painting Agency after graduating from high school in 1953, worked in the photography department in 1961, and after retiring from the company the following year, he filmed Norimachi Tomoto's documentary "On the Road". After completing Condensed Silence in 1965, he began working with a number of independent directors, and through the lens of Tatsuo Suzuki, the twenty-two-year-old Mariko Kaga charmed a large audience.
She played six roles in "Condensed Silence", namely Prairie Girl, Hagi's Daughter, Atomic Bomb Female Patient, Laughing Girl, Advertising Model and Black Beauty, etc., these roles are butterfly avatars, and she plays multiple roles with her brilliant and unforgettable performance.
Mariko Kaga was born in Tokyo on December 11, 1943, the son of a producer at Daiei Corporation. In 1960, when she was in high school, she had already acted in TV dramas, and she co-starred in Keisuke Kinoshita's "Legend of Deathmatch" with Shima Iwashita, who also belonged to Shochiku, and "Dried Flowers" with Yoshiyoshi Ikebe, who was now middle-aged. She then starred in Nippon director Nakahira Yasushi's "Yuka on Monday" and became popular for her cute image.
The filming of this film was also a very fortuitous opportunity, and the director Matsukawa Yasuo, who was from the University of Tokyo, did not like to shoot feature films, so he gave up the opportunity to make a long-length film with his self-written short film script "Lonely Butterfly" to Kuroki Kazuo, who was unemployed.
Director Kuroki expanded the script into a long story, and carefully shot a film that reflected the "metamorphosis" of Japanese social history and reached the point of breaking the cocoon into a butterfly, and the title of "Condensed Silence" comes from a poem by the great Spanish poet Lorca.
Kuroki opposed war and fascism, so the 1931 license plate in the film alluded to the "918 Incident" of the Japanese Kwantung Army's capture of Shenyang, and after the release of "Condensed Silence" in France, the famous French producer Pierre Buhunberger wrote a letter in 1967 inviting Kuroki kazuo to France to shoot a film. Because Kuroki did not know that the other party was the father of French New Wave cinema, and his friends also opposed him to rushing abroad, he did not even reply to the letter, and missed a good opportunity to work abroad in vain.