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飼育 [Shiiku / The Catch] (Nagisa Ōshima, 1961)
Dec
26
offerings
An altar with two rotund, smiling stone statues – possibly Jizō, a bowl of rice with chopsticks stuck into it, and a Japanese soldier's photograph. The position of the chopsticks tells us that the soldier has died. DP: Yoshitsugu Tonegawa.
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飼育 [Shiiku / The Catch] (Nagisa Ōshima, 1961)
Feb
2
National Catchers Day
The nameless soldier (Hugh Hurd) in the barn. Another person is with him. The soldier looks away, at something offscreen. DP: Yoshitsugu Tonegawa.
In the summer of 1945, the people of a small Japanese village find a Black American helicopter pilot in one of their traps and lock him in the communal storeroom. While the war continues and the villagers wait for orders from above, the man – for the townspeople, his presence, this allegory – becomes something else.
“Your keeping this animal has meant all of us suffer!”
飼育 shares more than a few themes with Đorđe Kadijević's Празник from 1967. The war's the same, any war is, and the Chetniks too capture a Black American pilot. Again, the villagers seem to share a folie, a madness, rooted in an unshaken belief – call it tradition or shared illusions foolishness or hope.
