A Man Vanishes

The second film Imamura produced independently through his own production company (after The Pornographers), A Man Vanishes begins as a conventional investigative documentary into the mysterious disappearance of a Tokyo salesman named Ôshima. However as Imamura, actor Tsuyuguchi Shigeru, and Ôshima’s fiancé continue their search, they find their investigation outpaced at every turn by the complexity of their subject, the nature of their own respective characters, and the restless invention of the very film itself.

In its assemblage of an unfolding, and often overlapping, series of interviews that attempt to sketch an image of Ôshima’s character and a timeline and geography of his movements in the final days before his disappearance, Imamura crafts a collage of facts, opinions, and hearsay that becomes almost serpentine in its slipperiness.

A film about how we choose to present ourselves to the world, how our own desires and selfish motivations colour the way we both see and represent the lives of others, and ultimately how reality is constructed by each of us regardless of whether it's being observed by a camera. A Man Vanishes is perhaps the truest example of that old adage that “a film should be a documentary of its own creation”, whilst simultaneously creating a relationship to each of those terms that is so complex, that the adage subsequently fails to quantify the film's rarefied qualities, almost entirely.

A Man Vanishes (人間蒸発), dir. Shōhei Imamura, Japan 1967, Japanese with English subtitles, 130 min.