Mandara

On the desire for and impossibility of escaping the ticking clock, with constantly disconcerting cinematography. "Utopia or secret society": in other words, Fourier or the society of the friends of crime (Sade) – Jissoji is already reading Klossowski here, reflecting on the self-defeating strategies that are agricultural-erotic reproduction and political terrorism. For this viewer, the meaning of the seemingly Buddhist ending is unclear. Halfway between a treatise and a pathological symptom.

Two (non-)paths Japanese revolutionaries took when Westernisation and capitalism became clearly irresistible in Japan in 1960s: an individualism that refuses to serve any symbol and therefore tries to eliminate the possibility of exchange, and a Buddhist-style utopian vision pursuing an exchange-free life through farming and eroticism oriented towards ecstatic nirvana (forgetting of time). Since their self-destruction, have we gone any further in creating a path out of all the non-paths we know?