Katsu Kanai: The Deserted Archipelago
Katsu Kanai, The Deserted Archipelago, 1969
This September/October, we are delighted to present more Katsu Kanai for our members this fall — this time in the form of the seminal Deserted Archipelago (1969), an iconoclastic masterpiece revolving around a captive’s escape from an isolated nunnery and featuring performances from Zero Jigen.
“The Deserted Archipelago was my first independently directed and produced film. It 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 surrealistic 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.””
Katsu Kanai
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