Half Empty or Half Full

A female film maker visits an old man in hospital whose body is paralysed down the left side. His name is Tatsuji Yamagishi. His wife has died and he has no children. It becomes apparent that he was once an important film maker: the director of the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964 and of the famous Japan Expo in 1970. After the film maker has talked with him for some time, she says that she wants to make a documentary about him. She sets off and films with her digital camera the places and people that are important in his life. She also discovers an enormous stock of books about film that provide evidence that he is a man of wide reading and several teaching books he has written. She shows a series of video images to Tatsuji, giving him great pleasure. She then suggests making a feature about the man – a fiction film in which a young man symbolises the life of Tatsuji. At the end of this film-in-the-film, the young man finds himself naked and lonely on a sand dune in the wind. Has he discovered true freedom or is it only a fantasy?
It’s not entirely clear whether this exposé about memory, oblivion and film making has any true historic basis. But the form that has been chosen makes Tatsuji’s life a warm blooded example for the life of everyone who grows old with infirmities, after a rich and hard-working life. (EH)