Notes #10 - De Rerum Natura

(Muno no Hito, 1991)

Nowhereman (or The Man with no talent, Muno no Hito) is the quintessential portrait of, what we should call, a horizontal cinematic perspective. It is curious that 1991 is the same year Kitano's A Scene at the Sea (Ano natsu ichiban shizukana umi) or Oshii's Stray Dogs: Kerberos Panzer Cops (Jigoku no banken: kerubersu) were made. There is something similar aesthetically about the early nineties and we could emphasize that these three odd movies represent a subconscious common ground between three distinct auteurs: there is no climax, expression and feelings are left in the darkness and silence is the key to a quiescent dissolution of the characters and their psychology. In fact, only a quiet bleakness remains, as if filmed existence was equal to a shy river, flowing in the same direction without knowing it. Maybe the nature of things is the absence of their meaning. Maybe life has no words to describe its horizontal regularity. Maybe regularity is the absence of a meaning.