The forest in between

To film a film-maker seems a natural enough thing to do, as predictable as ‘one
good turn deserving another’. It is, however, very audacious, and short of slipping
into lazyness, a rather risky challenge. Antoine Barraud’s angle is to turn an exercise
of admiration into an exercise of strangeness Ô to film a film-maker like a rare, exotic
plant. He is literal here: Kohei Oguri, the famous Japanese image-maker, does not
stay behind the camera. He will be someone else, his own work, a tree amongst
trees. Just as there are climbing plants, Oguri is a talking plant. What he recounts
in a matter-of-fact, patient way, inevitably draws its wisdom from the slowness of
plant life. This is why, even in his home, something gently insists on pointing in the
direction of the decor around the house.
Of course, Oguri is an animist. Naturally, he has a long career behind him which
gives him the opportunity to indulge in increasingly sovereign reflections, of a truly
utopian nature, that deny all compromise. The 1990 Grand Prix du Jury in Cannes
for The Sting of Death made no compromises, particularly when it comes to the
poetry of the everyday. He has pursued this goal in film after film. Indeed what
Antoine Barraud invites us to do, while he is under Oguri’s spell and filled with awe,
is to share secrets. (JPR)