Chikei Hara | Director Sho Miyake Special Feature Commemorating the Release of 'Journey and Days'
Director Sho Miyake's new film, 'The Emissary and the Guard,' uses the period drama format but rejects dialogue and sword fights to depict absurd truths through landscape and hip-hop music.Summary
Director Sho Miyake's new work, 'The Emissary and the Guard' (密使と番人), is an experimental film set during the early 19th century's isolationist period, following a young Dutch studies scholar attempting to smuggle a map to the Dutch. While adhering to the period drama format, the film deviates by focusing on objective, material gazes of figures walking silently through remote mountains, underscored by hip-hop music. It deliberately excludes human-centric narratives like dialogue and sword fights, prioritizing visual expressions centered on the environment—the sound of snow crunching, sunlight on trees, and flowing water. Objects, including human bodies, are treated objectively; for instance, a scholar steals sandals from a corpse, and interactions with locals blur the lines between person and object, good and evil. This structure dissolves binary oppositions, suggesting that the conflict between pursuer and pursued ends ambiguously, and the placement of corpses alongside objects like radishes or sandals reflects a reality where human constructs like the nation-state are relativized by the universality of nature. The soundtrack, featuring hip-hop from OMSB and Hi’Spec of SIMI LAB, intentionally disrupts the period drama form, reinforcing the film's core theme: depicting living human figures within a description of a holistic, yet distinctly non-traditional, period landscape.
(Source：artscape)