@“2501”#p86034 did the speaking engagement happen yet?
I feel like I'm not allowed to call myself an actual Hamaguchi fan, because _Drive My Car_ was the first movie I saw by him -- but I did take the bus all the way to Chicago from Madison WI (\~4 hours) to watch it the first night it was playing in theatres outside of NY and small pockets of California. I had seen reviews for _Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy_ earlier in the year and was disappointed enough that I couldn't watch it that I felt it was absolutely necessary to see _Drive My Car_. Also I secretly love Haruki Murakami, though it is my sworn duty to deny that and pretend I hate him whenever his name comes up.
The movie ended a few minutes before the last bus back to Madison departed, and the theatre was too far away to get there in time, so I had it all worked out that I would drink a big coffee right before the movie, try my best not to pee before it ended (which I succeeded at), then walk around Chicago for six hours in the cold and dark until the morning bus. This was an excellent way to experience the movie! The sense of emotional catharsis at the end of the movie was mirrored by the sense of physical catharsis my bladder experienced upon running to urinal right when I finished listening to the absolutely beautiful credits music ([which you can listen to here, but be warned there's spoilers for the end of the movie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDIHCytA8Jg) (the spoilers are on the level of opening a novel to the end and reading the last sentence before you started it)). I walked up and down each of the roads parallel to Michigan Ave for an hour and a half, crossing the Chicago river around 6 times. Then around 1am I took a bus deep into the South Side, walked to Midway airport, got there around 4:30 AM and took the Orange Line back to the loop so I could get onto my bus outside of Union Station. This all gave me plenty of time to think about the movie in that particular way you can only do when you're not consciously trying to think about anything. Of all the thoughts that passed through my brain, for some reason the likely-war-crime-committing great-grandfather that I'm named after was at the top of the list, and now I'll forever be unable to disassociate him from the movie.
I watched _Asako I&II_, _Happy Hour_ and _Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy_ shortly afterwards. _Happy Hour_ is my favorite. I also just noticed that some of the documentaries that he filmed earlier in his career are now available for easy streaming, so I'll probably watch those in the next few weeks. It's nice that _Drive My Car_ has led to more distribution in the West of his older stuff.
I think what affected me most in December and January was watching interviews with him talking about all sorts of stuff -- how the camera is more naturally a tool for documentary than fiction, that it's sort of weird and unnatural to try to tell fictional stories with film; how _Happy Hour_ was a product of a acting workshop, and the reason it was so long is that he felt it would be unfair if some of the participants only had insignificant roles, so he rewrote the screenplay so that every character had a magnificent importance; and of course I was fascinated by his descriptions of filming all the car scenes in _Drive My Car_.
I think being close to a year removed from diving into Hamaguchi's works, I can say it was a pretty critical break in how I thought about film and collaborative creation. I have come to suspect they did something to my brain that made me able to appreciate movies and literature so much more than I had before -- though besides the explicit lessons from his interviews that I enumerated above, I'm not really sure concretely what it is they could have done that changed my attitude. 2022 has been one of the most rewarding years in terms of movie watching and book reading for me. In January I watched a bunch of Zhang Lü's movies, a novelist-turned-director, whose movies can perhaps be thought of as anti-novels -- attempts at doing everything you can do with a movie that you can't do with a book. In March and April I did a deep dive (or at least deeper than I ever had previously) into Lu Xun's writing, and confirmed that not just is he really as important as I was told by the collective authorities of modern Chinese literature, but also he filled me with a thousand feelings I'd never felt before. This was completely different from my response to my first encounter with him in high school, where I was like "Yes I get it -- cannibalism is a metaphor for what you perceive as the brokenness of Chinese society." I had a similar reevaluation of Yu Dafu a few months later, whose novella _Sinking_ (沈淪) is beautifully written, but kind of terrifying and messed up. In July I read _Foreign Studies_ by Shusaku Endo, a collection of two short stories and one short novel that deal with the impossibility of understanding between the East and West, and then in August I read everything by Saiichi Maruya that's been translated into English -- _Grass for my Pillow_ especially has echoed in my brain over and over.
I guess what I'm saying is that over the past year it seems like I have developed this capacity for feeling that I didn't have before -- or maybe I have started interpreting certain books and movies more as attempts at communication (sometimes from people who may have died decades ago). I'm not sure if whatever ideas and thoughts and feelings that arise in me when I read/watch their works is what they really were trying to say -- and I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do with these ideas and thoughts and feelings that I receive -- but when a connection has been established, no matter how staticky and hard to discern, I now have this desire (or even a feeling of duty) to listen as best I can that I'm not sure was there before. Still, I constantly struggle with the question of what the value of engaging with literature and film actually is, and often feel like a parasite, only consuming other people's communications without trying with all my might to put out my own faint signal the way they did.
(To be clear, I didn't just turn into a guy who uncritically loves everything now. There's a lot more that I read and watched this year that I didn't really care for. It just feels like I've unlocked a new way to engage with stuff that I like, despite not really being able to put into words how it is different from how I engaged in stuff before.)
That being said, now that I've explictly talked about I'm sure all my capacity for enjoyment of art will immediately disappear starting today! Oh well.
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@“Coffinwarehouses”#p87028 i love that lady’s loser son in the third segment of fortune and fantasy.
also this 100%
