１９９８年度作品（video／２９分） 舞台づくりと、小鳥や魚､昆虫など、脇役たちのパフォーマンスの瞬間を掴まえるのに長い歳月をかけた作品（この部分はまだまだ進化する）―― やがて、黄泉の国の住人たちがそこに舞い降りてきて、「我を見よや！」と競演を繰り広げるのだ！

The Stormy Times is a collection of three short films created as a series of visual poems (Dream Running, Grasshopper’s One-Game Match, andWe Can Hear Joe’s Poem). Katsu Kanai screened this films together, along with extra documentary footage, as a memorial to his friend Jônouchi Motoharu.

“The Kingdom” is the third film in Kanai Katsu’s avant-garde Smiling Milky Way Trilogy which began with two politically loaded films, 1968’s “The Deserted Archipelago”, a dream journey through the the post-ANPO Treaty 60’s, and 1971’s “Good-Bye”, an exploratrion of the plight of the zainichi, or Japanese of Korean heritage. “The Kingdom” doesn’t take on any loaded current event or momentary societal ill though. Instead it goes to the root of Japanese (and global) society’s engine - time - and in that way “The Kingdom” is probably the most radical film in Kanai’s trilogy of films. Katsu Kanai: My first film, The Deserted Archipelago, emerged out of the intersections between my own experiences and fantasies and Japan’s postwar history, and, as such, I might call it the “Human Chapter” of my trilogy. In contrast, Good-bye pursues the mystery of my distant DNA. Since it moves from blood to land, I might call it the “Earth Chapter.” Following these two narratives came The Kingdom. Even if we were to deny all gods, there is one god controlling us, one god whom we cannot refuse: the god of time. The Kingdom was my challenge to that god of time as well as the finale, “The Heavenly Chapter,” to my Smiling Milky Way Trilogy. The story is about a popular poet, Goku Katsumaru, who grows depressed when his editor jokingly implies that he is a “sell-out to his times.” Around Goku appear first a “Team of Pickpockets With Plans to Steal Time” and later the Bird Doctor who develops his research on migrating birds and, in particular, their internal clocks, “to liberate himself from the bonds of time.” Goku , who now dreams of becoming a poet for all time, employs the knowledge he has acquired from these men to travel from a field in the Hachioji suburbs of Tokyo all the way to the Galapagos Islands, where he attempts a total transcendence. The film is both an incredible adventure story as well as the kitsch formulation of a new “myth.” I had been challenged by the words of the young Ôshima Nagisa, who declared “I won’t accept something as cinema unless it is founded in an absolutely new story and an absolutely new methodology. We cannot be allowed to imitate ourselves.” While there are some points in common across each of the three films in this trilogy, I truly did my utmost to distinguish them at both the level of story and method—to maintain their distinct and unique qualities. In the last scene of The Kingdom, just as Goku’s face can be seen shining beneath the twinkling night sky, you see the face of Kanai Katsumaru, the protagonist from Good-bye, and then that of Hidekuni, the lead in The Deserted Archipelago, and finally, across the whole screen appear six faces without even eyes or noses. The latter were nods towards my films yet to come. The Kingdom was selected for second place in the Asahi Newspaper’s “Best Five from 1973.” The Japanese film journal, Eiga Hyôron (Film Review), listed the film in 9th place among its Best Ten of the Year. And Max Tessier wildly praised The Kingdom in the French film magazine, Ecran. I heard that Tessier even took the film to Cannes himself and screened it there, giving his own running translation of the dialogue. I’m still indebted to Tessier’s enthusiasm!

日本人の血の流れを求めて戒厳令下の韓国ロケ決行～～ そこに生じた鮮烈なドラマが、緊張感の中におかしさを滲み出させて、あなたの脳天を撃つ―― ！

The Deserted Archipelago was my first independently directed and produced film. The film won the Grand Prix at the Nyon International Film Festival and garnered considerable attention both overseas and in Japan. The film follows an extremely simple story of a plain boy who matures into manhood while constantly manipulated by nuns. But woven into this narrative are my own experiences and the history of postwar Japan as well as a series of fantasies. The result is a multifaceted and multilayered objet, the birth of a newly sur-realistic filmmaking. On August 15th, the day the war ended, I was in the third year of primary school. That day, when the reality that I had known turned completely upside down, I was saddled with the trauma of no longer being able to believe in anything. Searching here and there for some kind of spiritual salvation, I finally found the existentialism of Albert Camus. From there, I was able to build up my own kind of existentialism and this film is best understood as based in that “Kanai Katsu Existentialism.” The film was praised by European film scholars Max Tessier and Tony Rayns and was screened as part of “Eiga: 25 Years of Japanese Film,” a special program at the 1984 Edinburgh International Film Festival.