Mandara

Jissoji developed - this time (mostly) in color - many themes from his earlier film This Passing Life, primarily the themes of desire, religion, death, individual nihilism, the impossibility (?) of community, and human dependence. In the film, even more emphatically, the situation of alienation of the modern individual is depicted - after all, the opening scenes of the film depicting dependence on sexual gratification are simply evidence of the modern individual's attempt to fill their void or squeeze out the trauma of impossibility (?), the difficulty of a real relationship with others, through sex and erotic desire. It is precisely this that gives a person anchoring and certainty - and it is precisely their mirrored reflection in religion, where the essence of an orgasm is manifested - in the suspension of time, the body opens up to eternity: the climax of God or the orgasm of the body. Then there is also a beautifully suggested transition between the situation of the individual and their attempt to replace a dysfunctional ordinary human community with a new one, based precisely on a nihilistic and alienated understanding of sex and religion in the form of a sect. /// Jissoji's film is characterized by a very distinctive aesthetic aspect, and although I acknowledge a certain self-purposefulness in the expressive language, especially of the camera (but not the change between color and black and white), we must appreciate the sense of composition and inventiveness in the construction of film images. (06/05/2015)