Invisible People

Jaime Rebanal 🇵🇸4.5

Hot Docs 2024 #20: NightVisions (North American Premiere)This film feels like it's getting right into your senses, just by nature of pure atmosphere alone. But perhaps as we're also taken in by the art of Butoh dancing as Alisa Berger shows it to us in Invisible People, what also comes forth is a wholly ghostly experience at that - showing us how the performers of such dance routines feel about what they're bringing forth. It's an experience that feels ghostly, like experiencing a new life, all aided by the abstract imagery and the total atmosphere.For that alone, I think this might be one of the most beautiful films to come out of Hot Docs this year. Astonishing.

maxmoin

Ich habe vor diesem Film noch nie in meinem Leben von Butoh gehört, aber umso cooler war es, dass direkt vor dem Film jemand das live vor der Leinwand getanzt hat! Das fand ich wirklich toll und der Film direkt im Anschluss hat mir auch einigermaßen gefallen. Vielleicht aber auch nur hauptsächlich durch die entfachte Begeisterung für die Tanzform an sich und weniger für das Filmische. Ich hatte jedenfalls meinen Spaß und die Regisseurin war sehr sympathisch :)

martin4.0

Invisible People is an engrossing documentary about butoh because of the charisma and artistry of some of the dancers featured in it. It's a movie about an intense and difficult art form that never tries to explain it or its history to us. We see veneration-filled shots of Yoshino Ohno (Kazuo Ohno's son and a master dancer in his own right) and Seisaku (a dancer on a completely different level from anyone else in the movie save for Ohno). The focus is not on these masters, but on the people who study and work with them, most of them brilliant and expressive artists on their own right like Yuri Nagaoka and Norihito Ishii. We see them as people who have struggled and continue to do so they can create the works, fragments of which we see. This fragmentariness is both its biggest strength and weakness. It makes it feel disjointed and uncertain where it wants to go or be. Be that as it may, it rekindled my appreciation for butoh.