Landscapes in Memory (The Invisible Connections Between Multiple Films)

Landscapes I have never seen, lands I have never visited.
And yet, they feel nostalgic.

They resonate with landscapes in my memory, stirring up buried emotions.
Inside a movie theater, I feel the air filled with the projected landscape.
I sometimes feel as if I go to the cinema just for that moment.

Until the 90s, Nagaharu Yodogawa was familiar to a certain generation as the old man who appeared on TV movie programs. I had the opportunity to read his books and learned about his life, which was full of ups and downs and dedicated to the love of film. When he talked about his memories, he would sometimes differ slightly from the actual films, but he was a master of storytelling.

I believe it was he who recommended Abbas Kiarostami's 'Taste of Cherry' in his later years.

What did Nagaharu Yodogawa think about as he gazed at the moon with a hand mirror at night in his hospital room?

'Taste of Cherry' is a film that depicts a day in the life of a middle-aged man with suicidal tendencies. He wanders around the suburbs of Tehran in his car, making an unusual request to the people he meets. He has dug a hole under a tree on a certain mountain. He asks them to check on him the next day to see if he is alive or dead after he lies there for the night.

Although the plot is very simple, this film has stayed with me forever. For some reason, I felt a strange, nostalgic sensation toward the desolate landscape of Iran and the night sky the protagonist gazed at, and I thought it was unbearably beautiful.

Something similar happened when I watched the works of Haruka Komori.

There is a collection of works she filmed of the people of Rikuzentakata, which was devastated by the Great East Japan Earthquake, and the charm of the people she captures is beyond words.

In addition, while her footage is continuous with reality, it is filled with a clear poetic sentiment, and between various episodes, breathtakingly beautiful landscapes emerge. I feel a strange nostalgia every time I see that beauty, perhaps because she never forgets an important sense—the sense of staring at what is there like a child—and connects the past with the present.

Personally, I thought Komori's work was like no one else's, but I feel that the desolate Iranian landscape of 'Taste of Cherry' and the landscape of Rikuzentakata, where land elevation is progressing in her works, are connected somewhere by an underground vein.

The contrast between the vast nature and the helplessly small humans who are nevertheless living modestly in that land.

And when I first watched Makoto Sato's 'Living on the River Agano' at a small inn in Niigata, the lost, beautiful landscape captured in this work was incredibly nostalgic, and the people depicted were somehow humorous even with their life stories carved into their faces, which was also heartbreaking, and I felt like crying the whole time.

I felt I understood what Komori meant when she said she was influenced by this work. She must have walked while carrying what 'Living on the River Agano' posed somewhere in her heart, and created her own work. In a way that only Komori could.

That is why I will continue to watch her work. Her work is like a precious amulet for me, one that I take out and look at from time to time.

Even now, I occasionally remember the landscapes these films offered me. I feel that when death was approaching, Nagaharu Yodogawa was truly opening his eyes to the beauty of this world.

Being weary of living was an everyday occurrence for me. I have resented the fact that my sensitivity is too troublesome more than once or twice.

Even so, I think.

The famous line from the movie 'Seven' is this,

'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for. I agree with the second part.'

The landscape speaks to me with a wry smile: there are moments when you can think the world is beautiful. It can't be helped, you forget, don't you, when you're living.

I think this world is hell, but those landscapes in my memory certainly speak to me.

I will probably go on living while remembering things like this.

While feeling for the amulet in my pocket and occasionally going for a walk.