In a documentary, Kazuhiro Soda films the so special links established between a psychoanalyst about to retire and his patients.
by Maroussia Dubreuil
How to say goodbye to his psychotherapist when he is about to leave you? A patient from the small Okayama clinic hardly accepts the retirement of Professor Yamamoto, all the same 82 years old. He recorded his last session to listen to the one he considers as his savior for life: “Reducing his desire to zero” would be the key to happiness. From these farewells, nothing remains as long as the memory of a great emotional proximity, almost family, mixed with mutual respect between the two men. Other patients, in a situation of strong mental handicap, will express their last wishes to the one who accompanied them for many years …
Beyond the feverishness of the patients, mostly coming accompanied by one of their own, the first thing that strikes held in the conviviality of these last meetings. While Western culture links the flow of the unconscious to the secret of the cabinet, where the filmmakers who venture there are the smallest possible, Kazuhiro Soda is invited to stay alive, in his most anatomical sense of the term. Free to breathe, cough, walk, turn. We guess his presence at the mobility of his camera.
“observation cinema”
This approach gives the extent of Professor Yamamoto’s work, a pioneer in psychiatry in Japan, who fought for the patients to leave hospitals to benefit, within the civil community, of emotional care, that He calls “human medicine”. Her mantra, undoubtedly inspired by Buddhism and Shintoism – “reduce her desires to zero” – finds her application in the Kazuhiro Soda method. Embarrassed by projects formatted for television, the filmmaker has set himself “Ten commandments of observation cinema”, among which: do no research on the subject of the film, do not write a screenplay, do not decide the theme before The assembly, do not use narration, surtitic or music, rotate the camera yourself…
This form of obligatory passivity reaches its climax when it rubs the doctor from the doctor now withdrawn from active life. Folded in his living room with his wife, Yoshiko, whose persistence of her silence is understood by the persistence of Alzheimer’s disease, Yamamoto invites Soda at her table and encourages him to drink to make the moment last. Any filmer would have been a little embarrassed of this step much, pending some sushi, sliding his camera in the silent face-to-face of the spouses, stopping vaguely on a small electric radiator … , he would have been qualified as a smoker.
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