Inju: The Beast in the Shadow

"Japan is fascinating for an artist, because it is an extreme country, as is often the case with islands. Everything is style and abstraction. That goes perfectly with genre films. Every French film lover of my generation adores B movies and horror films because what is interesting is not the subject, but the mise en scène. The work by Edogawa Ranpo I based the film on is very "pulp fiction". It amused me to make something purely cinematographic out of it" (Barbet Schroeder). To become imbibed with the culture of the country and get closer to a documentary truth, Schroeder worked with a virtually all-Japanese crew. Emmanuel Burdeau said that "the plasticity with which he adapts to Hollywood, Columbian, or African environments, etc., goes hand in hand with the capacity to constantly reformulate the same challenge, in different places and with different codes".