Shohei Imamura offers numerous grim vignettes of human misery and animality -- most especially the hair-raising burial-alive of a potato thief and his entire family, photographed in so lengthy a single-take that our thoughts about human misery eventually give way to wonderment and worry about what sort of provisions were made for the buried actors to remain underground that long. The vision of Mother Nature, as distinct from Human, with lots of representation from snakes, frogs, fish, birds, insects, and not so much from mammals, who are seen either snatched up by a swooping bird or disappearing down the gullet of a snake, is full of awe, and even of envy. The apparent gulf between the flourishing natural order and the languishing human one is very wide indeed, and the imported truckloads of irony and pity do not begin to fill it. The storyline, from the very outset, points toward the enactment of an ancient Japanese custom, still current in this 19th-century mountain village, that calls for elders near the age of seventy to be carted up to the mountaintop boneyard (quite a sight, that) to make way for younger mouths to be fed. Getting to that point in the narrative is a long haul, and the mystical trip up the mountainside, with the spirit world asserting itself in slow-motion gusts and breezes, is a long haul in itself. Ken Ogata, Sumiko Sakamoto. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd