Silence

Masashiro Shonida - 1971
Shinoda's frame employs agressive foregrounds, objects often close to the camera, realy pointing out at the audience. This is conveyed in his almost literally powerful, large face in his shot-reverse sequences. Full faces fill up the frame. His camera is more often than not (though not exclusively) a long lens one, with a lot of little zooms. Their is quite a bit of racking focus. For scenes of more excitement, just a couple, we have fast scanning, close in. When Shinoda is not close, his long shots are often quite high, with beams, trees or other paraphenalia closer to the camera obscuring a full view.
The colour, or rather the contrast, is distinctive here. This is because of how dull it is, a real lack of contrast. Their are just patches of very diffused light, little seems direct. We have this in the dark for the opening sequences, seemingly shot at 330 in the morning. Even when sunlight comes, the contrast remains very low, as though their is a haar. The tones are kept the same, across rocks, costumes, even the different ethnicities' skin tones. The colours can be different, but a kind of smudgy mauve predominates.
The narrative, though built around a central tale (with opening and closing authorial voiceover) which moves along, seems more like episodes, most obviously some kind of stations of the cross. We have phases, tests, sufferings, trials of different kinds. This is largely kept pretty low key.
Their are clear Conrad references here ('Heart of Darkness'), and a smart ambiguity is who is really the 'hero', certainly the story and the man we are meant to care about, also being the face of colonialism and imperialism, who some good and intellgient arguments are made against. Ultimately, the film does go back to him; but we're not sure if we really should respect his ideals, or simply his body. As these themes come out in the second half, the film certainly draws one in.