Twelve years after Shinsuke Ogawa's death, the international documentary world still praises his wry, soulful studies of the Japanese agricultural villages that survive by selling pastoral beauty and produce to urbanites. Ogawa's films double as examinations of vanishing tradition, but they aren't dour lectures: His style shuffles steady landscape photography with handheld shots of people in action, as well as fast-paced montages of crop processing and his signature drifting shots, which move gently from speakers toward whatever they're speaking about.
Red Persimmons was begun by Ogawa in 1985 and completed more than a decade later (after his death in 1992) by one of his devotees, Chinese feminist filmmaker Peng Xiaolian. The film follows the slow process of manufacturing dried persimmons—picking, peeling, drying, dusting with fructose, wrapping in cellophane—and haggling with brokers. It's partly a documentary about how hard work meets with increasingly diminished returns, but it's mostly a record of how people organize their lives.
Ogawa also covers the history of persimmon peelers, from handheld knives to simple machines adapted from bicycles to handmade electric vacuum peelers. (In the footage Peng shot, she discovers that the villagers have moved to a peeler that's a modified power drill.) The chain-smoking inventor of the first bicycle peeler confesses that he could have made his original design faster, but that his customers didn't think faster would be better. Red Persimmons raises the question of whether any of the efficiencies brought to the persimmon trade—smaller strings, plastic boxes, and so on—have improved a culture still so tied to tradition that they leave fruit on the trees for the birds, as a way of thanking nature.
Whether viewers will get much out of Red Persimmons depends largely on whether they share Ogawa's fascination with the details of work. It helps to have Peng on board, framing the film as a meditation on Ogawa's own painstaking aesthetics, and it helps that Ogawa was so adept at expressing his point of view in each moment of integrated sound and movement. His persimmon-peeling subjects tell their life stories as their hands absently carry out the rituals of fruit preparation, while in the background, the machines that may one day replace them whir away.