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Production Company: Ogawa Productions Producer: Fuseya Hiroo Dirctor: Ogawa Shinsuke Music: Togashi Masahiko Photography: Tamura Masaki Lighting: Sato Yuzuru Sound: Kubota Yukio, Kikuchi Nobuyuki Art Director: Tatsumi Shiro, Mikado Sadatoshi Cast: Hijikata Tatsumi, Miyashita Junko, Tamura Takahiro, Kawarazaki Choichiro, Ishibashi Renji, Shimada Shogo. 1986 / Color / 16mm / 222 min / English subtitles |
| This important film compiles "Magino Story" footage taken by Ogawa for a period of more than ten years after he moved to Magino village. Unique to this film are fictional reenactments of the history of the village in the sections titled "The Tale of Horikiri Goddess" and "The Origins of Itsutsudomoe Shrine". Ogawa combines all the techniques that were developed in his previous films to simultaneously express multiple layers of time--the temporality of rice growing and of human life, personal life histories, the history of the village, the time of the Gods, and new time created through theatrical reenactment--bring them into a unified whole. The faces of the Magino villagers appear in numerous roles--sometimes as individuals, sometimes as people who carry the history of the village in their memories, sometimes as storytellers reciting myths, and even as members of the crowd in the fictional sequences--transcending time and space. In the end, Ogawa's time coincides with that of the village, and it becomes clear that a new form of time has been created. Sadly, this was Ogawa Shinsuke's last long work. Now, in the 1990s, when most documentary filmmakers have turned toward the "personal," this film stands as an important example of the opposite pole of filmmaking. |