Blog #4
I found Kazuhiro Soda and his film Peace fascinating and refreshing. I have always focused on the visual aspects of filmmaking, and that has carried over to my view of the world around me. I have recently started filming small events I think deserve to be captured. This appears to be the basis for much of Soda’s work. In his film Peace, moments in the film play out like dramatic scenes, yet all are spontaneous moments from life. You never know what you might find if you simply point the camera at the world around you for, as Soda himself found out while working at NHK, real life does not follow a script.
In regards to his film Peace, the progression of the film’s narrative was a good introduction to Kazuhiro’s style of filmmaking. It starts out with him filming the cats his wife’s father is feeding, before focusing on the father’s transportation service for the disabled, before focusing on his wife’s hospice care for an old man who has lung cancer, but won’t quit smoking. All of these stories were discovered just by filming, yet paint a nuanced portrait of the world the subjects inhabit.
I am aware that Peace is among Kazuhiro’s shortest films, with the rest pushing or running longer than more than two hours. In fact, it was originally intended to be a short film. This made Peace, which ran only 75 minutes, a nice introductory film of his. The fact that it ran feature length also shows just how much can happen if you explore the world you inhabit—it was originally supposed to be a 15 minute film about cats who deal with an intimidating male cat who steals their food. It becomes so much more, but in the end, the cats ultimately accept the thief into their group—a natural happy ending.
In regards to his film Peace, the progression of the film’s narrative was a good introduction to Kazuhiro’s style of filmmaking. It starts out with him filming the cats his wife’s father is feeding, before focusing on the father’s transportation service for the disabled, before focusing on his wife’s hospice care for an old man who has lung cancer, but won’t quit smoking. All of these stories were discovered just by filming, yet paint a nuanced portrait of the world the subjects inhabit.
I am aware that Peace is among Kazuhiro’s shortest films, with the rest pushing or running longer than more than two hours. In fact, it was originally intended to be a short film. This made Peace, which ran only 75 minutes, a nice introductory film of his. The fact that it ran feature length also shows just how much can happen if you explore the world you inhabit—it was originally supposed to be a 15 minute film about cats who deal with an intimidating male cat who steals their food. It becomes so much more, but in the end, the cats ultimately accept the thief into their group—a natural happy ending.
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