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The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) (Anders Edström and C.W. Winter, 2020)
🕑 Added 2020-10-05 19:11:25 +0000 UTC
There is an essential monumentality that is sealed into the very making of this film, fired like clay, such that it seems designed to flout the typical standards with which we evaluate cinematic objects. It is not just the daunting length of The Works and Days, although at eight hours, it is a film that asks its viewer to rearrange his or her daily routine in order to accommodate it. And unlike other such specimens -- Mariano Llinás's La Flor, or Miguel Gomes's Arabian Nights -- Edström and Winter's grand opus does not offer hairpin turns or unexpected flights of fancy as a way to vary the long journey. Instead, The Works and Days asks us to attune ourselves to the more gradual rhythms of the seasons, and of growing old.
One of the things a viewer soon observes about the overall shape and movement of The Works and Days is that, in its astonishing expansiveness, it includes a great many cinematic forms. They don't function as obviously as the genre shifts in La Flor, but they are nevertheless there. At the beginning of each chapter of the film, for example, Edström and Winter ease us into the new section with an extended prelude that consists only of sound, slowly fading in. We see no image, so in a theatrical setting, we would be asked to listen to the sounds of the landscape in complete darkness. This is a gesture to which moviegoers are quite unaccustomed, but that might not seem so out of place in a museum or gallery.
This is but one of the types of material that is presented under the eight-hour umbrella of The Works and Days. A lot of it is a landscape film. We see many shots of the Shiotani area in Kyoto Prefecture, a small valley town populated mostly by elderly citizens. We see distant shots of the mountains, and close-up shots of the grassy shoulder of the highway. And we see the parcel of land that surrounds the home of the film's main subject, Tayoko ("Tayo-chan"), as she methodically mows, tills, harvests, and maintains it.
So in this regard, the film is also a portrait of labor, the cycles of daily activity. We see Tayoko working outside, but also cooking, cleaning, accepting visitors, and -- more and more as the film goes on -- caring for her terminally ill husband Junji (played by Kaoru Iwahana). There are extended sequences of dialogue and conversation, such as an early moment when, after several drinks, a man describes his relief at passing the civil service exam on the third and final try, or in the seventh hour, when an elderly grump comes by to hold forth on why today's youth are soft because they don't slaughter their own meat.
So within its broad expanse, as a single work of art, Edström and Winter's film encompasses avant-garde installation, landscape cinema, family portraiture, diary film, observational / sociological cinema, as well as a time capsule of this small corner of Kyoto Prefecture itself. From beginning to end, we see physical changes. Not only does Tayoko's home become less tidy and more cluttered, signifying the increased attention she must pay to Junji's health. We also observe the developments around her home. The highway gets busier. We see more electrical lines crisscrossing the mountains. The landscape is gradually accumulating various markers of technological development.
There are other parts of the film that are harder to parse. We see occasional still life images of objects wrapped in plastic, for example, and occasional piles of grass or other formalist inserts. In a film of this length, it's difficult to keep the appearance of such moments in mind to an extent that one could perceive a pattern in terms of their appearance. There are other moments in The Works and Days, mostly landscape montages, whose construction seems at odds with the sort of protracted film Winter and Edström are in fact making.
But this is really a minor concern. My primary qualm with The Works and Days is far more fundamental to the conception of the project. In the final hour, we see Junji's funeral, and the immediate aftermath of this death. It seems that this material was the first footage the directors shot. After this, they went back and created a fiction film based on the last year-plus of Tayoko's life with Junji, having Tayoko and all her friends and family members playing themselves.
An attentive viewer will discern certain discrepancies in the course of the film, things that will signal that we cannot be watching a documentary. For example, we see Tayoko walking down a hospital corridor, then get the perfect reverse-shot of her exiting the building. And quite a bit of footage in cars and on trains is too professionally managed to have been shot on the fly.
But what I don't understand is why Edström and Winter have chosen to construct their fiction film according to many of the genre principles of documentary -- distant observation, unbroken shots, natural lighting, etc. -- while declining to make this decision overt. The fact that Shiojiri is reenacting the process of losing her husband (purportedly because she felt she was not sensitive enough to his needs in real life) is incredibly moving, and does not depend on audience deception for its emotive power. So I am left to conclude -- I don't really want to, but I am sort of at a lack for another explanation -- that the filmmakers suspected that only a belief in the essential reality of The Works and Days would elicit from viewers the investment necessary to engage with it. And this would suggest a broader social problematic that I'm not prepared to broach at this time.
