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He may not a household name in the United Kingdom, but the controversial Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki lays claim to being the most published photographer in the world, and is a man who boasts to have slept with every woman he's ever shot. Directed by American filmmaker Travis Klose, and including interviews with admirers such as Bjork and Takeshi Kitano, Arakimentari is a lively if flawed digital video portrait of the impish, sixtysomething Araki at work and at play in his beloved Tokyo.
Araki's favourite subject is the naked female body that's arranged in a sexually suggestive position. To his supporters, the snapper's nude collections such as Erotic Housewives have helped break down Japanese taboos around the depiction of nudity. To his detractors however, his explicit bondage imagery fuels misogynistic fantasies of torture and domination. (Female guards at an Austrian museum actually went out on strike in protest at one of his exhibitions.) Klose frustratingly side-steps these charges, by having the cartoonish-looking figure of Araki beamingly declare his love of women and insist on their innate superiority to men.
"MORE THAN AN ARTISTIC PROVOCATEUR"
Driven along by DJ Krush's pounding score, Arakimentari incorporates rapid montage sequences to give the audience a sense of the compulsive, fast-paced nature of Araki's output. And in the second half it becomes clear that he is more than an artistic provocateur. His book A Sentimental Journey movingly traces his whole marriage, from his wedding day and honeymoon to his wife's death from cancer. Certainly the photographer's redoubtable cheerfulness remains intact, for as a deadpan Kitano observes, "He seems to enjoy his work much more than I do."
In English and Japanese (with English subtitles)
Arakimentari is released in UK cinemas on Friday 5th August 2005.
