Japón serves as the poetic, dreamlike yin to the yang of Mexican cinema's other recent hit, Amores Perros, with its flash and fury. Japón luxuriates in narcotic, sensualized images of emptied landscapes, where life and death, humans and nature encircle one another, each arising out of the other. A man wanders into a village, ostensibly to find a place to die; taken in by an old woman, he lives with her and her mysteries on a mountainside, his thoughts of death at times replaced by those of (pro)creation, while around him life is ebbing away, flowing on. Shot in the rarely used Super 16mm Cinemascope format, with a formalist rigor as concerned with nature's feel as with its vistas, Japón revels in images of such grandiose intensity that they threaten to bleed beyond sight towards other, unknown senses. It would seem to be culled from three decades of mystical cinema-Jodorowsky's mountaintop seers, Tarkovsky's windswept trees, Kiarostami's suicides-but it is the work of Werner Herzog, and its obsession with mad nature and madder humanity, that Japón truly resembles.

Japón is repeated on Sunday, October 12.