Afterword

Abstract

Rodrigo Grota’s 2007 film Satori Uso presents itself as a documentary and an unfinished film by an American director about a mysterious Japanese haiku poet living in the interior of Paraná. A series of intertitles informs the viewer that Grota’s “documentary” includes segments of the film Isolation, which was shot in 1980 by Jim Kleist, a North American who committed suicide in 1992, having never completed a film. Inserted between the excerpts of Isolation are a series of compositions of the texts of Satori Uso’s poems (in English, with subtitles in Portuguese) against lingering shots of trees and fields. The segments of Kleist’s film are accompanied by a slow and drawling voice-over by the director in which he discusses his difficulties in making the film as well as the powerful fascination Satori’s poetry held for him. The film focuses on the Japanese poet’s ill-fated love affair with the beautiful Satine, who seduces him in a record store and then runs off with another man, leaving Satori heart-broken. Isolation, the film within the film, is shot in black and white in a way that is strongly reminiscent of the photography of Haruo Ohara (as is Grota’s subsequent film about Ohara’s life). However, there are clues here and there that Grota’s film might not be what it seems; including the fact that permission to use Kleist’s film was agreed to by a production house called “Imaginary Pictures.”