Dogra Magra: Odyssey Of The Mind
Another film by Matsumoto Toshio that has left me simply shocked and opened my mind to show me how cinema is the ultimate boundless art form (and thanks to artists like Matsumoto, it became what it is).
At first glance, this film looks like a visually tame version of what we’re used to with Matsumoto. There aren’t many “flashy” and jarring camera and editing techniques used here.
Although not visually too similar to his past works, this one is no less wonderful and thoughtful. Here, every shot is well thought out and quite subtle. Many quick zooms are used to help us get into the state of mind of insane characters, and there are a lot of shots where the camera circles the room, which creates a feeling of geometrical familiarity. In the same shot, Matsumoto uses that to cleverly move seamlessly from memory to actuality and vice versa. A technique very reminiscent of Theo Angelopoulos.
The film opens with an underwater scene where we see a light coming from above and then we see a fetus as if floating in water. It’s like the “space child” in Kubrick’s masterpiece “2001: A Space Odyssey”. This imagery takes us back to the beginning, our beginning, the womb.
This sets up the premise of the film: a journey back in time to our roots, a journey of self-discovery, and to quote the film, “a detective story where the brain searches for itself.”
The film tackles some very heavy philosophical questions. Right from the get-go, we start questioning our existence and how the mind plays a role in it. Is our existence due to the mind ? Or is the mind the reason for our existence ? There’s a lot of Descartes in this.
And then we move to some Foucault territory, talking about how society views mental illness and why mentally ill patients are treated like outcasts. Indeed, what is normal and abnormal ? Aren’t we all abnormal in our own unique way ?
We’re all prisoners of our own minds.
In a brilliant scene where our main character is imagining that he’s lecturing a room full of “abnormal” students all dressed up as “lunatics,” the camera circles and the scene flips from him doing the lecture to him being the subject of the lecture with a room full of “normal” “intellectual” students with Dr. Masaki lecturing them.
And this is all inside the imagination of Ichiro, who’s in his room. This is a case of the brain examining itself, critiquing itself, and taking a step back to see the whole picture.
In the second part of the film, we have an examination of sexuality and sexual perversions with some very Freudian scenes (mother figures, finger sucking, fetuses…) There’s also a theme of Eros and Thanatos, love and death in the same scene, which adds to the recurring theme of a beginning meeting an end.
This film is a statement on the power of cinema to delve deep into the human psyche. We are shocked when we examine ourselves in the mirror of the cinema, when we see ourselves on video. This is the mind staring at itself through a lens through a screen.
The film ends as enigmatically as it is revealing; it presents a beginning where it ends because the real film starts when this one ends. If there was ever a cinematic masterpiece, then this is it.
They say in life that only death and taxes are certain, but if I may add, more people should definitely see this film.
The mind is the screen of memories, and cinema is the screen of the mind.
