2/Duo y la importancia de Nobuhiro Suwa

Me encanta Nobuhiro Suwa. Es el director actual que mejor combina sensibilidad y militancia, suavidad y radicalismo. Su cine, como el de su admirado Ozu, se recrea en lo cotidiano, en lo banal, para llegar a lo trascendental, a un punto que podríamos llamar "iluminación" conseguido a partir de insistencia, manteniendo el plano, y que afecta al resto de la obra como si de una experiencia mística se tratase. Este "Momento Suwa", que se presenta como una variación del "Momento Ozu", también llega a los espectadores. Es algo difícil de describir, pero que al fin y al cabo es una experiencia sensorial dentro de la sala como puede serlo cualquier escena de la deplorable Avatar (y no por eso va a dejar de ser deplorable). Lo importante es que Suwa llega a tal punto de personalidad artística que ha creado un momento propio (más allá de las claras influencias del cine minimalista japonés) en una época de crisis estética.
Hoy he sabido de la existencia de 2/Duo, la supuesta ópera prima del director japonés, gracias a la nueva entrada de JonathanRosenbaum.com (página de la que nunca me cansaré). He visto algún fragmento y no tiene mala pinta.
Éste ste es el fantástico artículo de Rosenbaum, donde habla de los paralelismos con Rivette, el trabajo con los actores...
"The first feature of Nobuhiro Suwa, a director of TV documentaries in his mid-30s, 2/Duo (1996) is the penultimate work in the Doc Films series “Japanese Cinema After the Economic Miracle: Masaki Tamura, Cinematographer.” Having seen only one other film in the series — Shinsuke Ogawa’s remarkable two-and-a-half-hour documentary about the lives of farmers protesting the construction of Japan’s biggest airport, Narita: Heta Village (1973) — I can’t give a comprehensive account of Tamura’s work. But judging from these two very different features, I suspect I might recognize his shooting style without seeing his name in the credits. Though Narita: Heta Village is a documentary and 2/Duo a fictional narrative, the style of both displays a highly intuitive engagement with the characters, expressed most clearly in the way Tamura places and moves his camera in relation to them, neither anticipating their actions nor dogging them, but navigating the spaces they occupy with an intelligence that manages to project empathy as well as independence–a rare combination.

I owe this discovery to the programming initiative of Chika Kinoshita, the graduate student in film at the University of Chicago who organized the retrospective, because my enthusiasm for 2/Duo preceded any awareness of Tamura’s contribution to it. I first saw this 35-millimeter feature on video at the Rotterdam film festival in early 1997. About nine months later I saw it on film at the Viennale, a Vienna film festival that Suwa attended. I was the head of a jury there, and we wound up giving our main prize to it.

Now that I’ve seen 2/Duo a third time — on video, a far from ideal way to view a film that depends on visual nuance — the importance of Tamura’s personal camera style in this stirring and volatile experiment is fully evident to me. His way of shooting an informal political discussion in Narita: Heta Village sometimes involves panning away from the person speaking — displaying an attentiveness to group interaction that finds responses to talk as important as the talk itself. And the placements and displacements of his camera in 2/Duo are often extraordinary in elucidating the essence of a scene. What initially might seem a perverse choice of camera angle turns out to be a highly original and compelling definition of where documentary and dramatic truth might be found — a definition that resculpts conventional priorities regarding how a particular scene should be read, thereby encouraging us to reconceptualize its meaning.[...]" (continúa aquí )