Dreams is, I believe, my favorite Kurosawa film, though I should note that on the whole I don't particularly like Kurosawa films. The more I think about it though, the more affectionate I become towards compilations of short films. About half of these films are great, half are rather plain, the few that are great are good enough to make up for all the rest.

The film is composed of a series of dreams that Kurosawa had in his life, progressing from several childhood dreams to dreams in his old age. The childhood dreams are quite amazing, especially the first. In this early dream, a young boy is told by his mother to leave his house because he saw the fox marriage which brought bad luck upon the house (foxes are a common demon in Japanese mythology), he goes in to the wood and sees a progression of people, he watches them move slowly, and then they all turn and face him with fox masks on.

Besides just being a stunning piece of camera work (no matter how much I find Kurosawa dull, I have to admit he knows how to use a camera), the film is positively eerie, and I think gets a much stronger point across than the overtly environmentalist pieces later in the film.

A point I try to make often in this blog (which comes from a rather outdated discussion in film theory), is that there are two modes of discourse in cinema, there is the allegorical and the ontological. The allegorical is where the filmmaker sets up a set, a story, a piece of editing, in order to say something, whether it be that Sally is going to kiss Joe, Sally loves Joe, or that we need to save the world from the destruction of the earth. In order ot make these points the filmmaker uses techniques slightly more sophisticated than a novelist, but the end goal is roughly the same.

The ontological level of discourse has to do with the disconnect between the intended meaning created through film language, and the physical presence of a human being on the camera.

The most interesting pieces of film use the allegorical level of discourse to denote the ontological level of discourse, but in doing play with the human experience of being. Godard is the ideal example of someone not narrativizing an experience but narrativizing experience in general (Wong Kar Wai does this as well), Tarkovsky and Sokurov turn being as such into narrative.

In this first piece in Dreams we are not being told a story, because there is no story as such to tell, there is no point to the story. We are being shown a dream, but it is not a dream, in the dream the foxes would most likely be either real foxes, humans, or both humans and foxes at the same time (dreams can do that), it is rather unlikely that the foxes would be people wearing a mask. The people are wearing a fox mask not because that is the content of the narrative (since the whole narrative is to tell us a dream), but because the dream has become theater... without a stage. The dream has become a real version of an unconscious moment (real in a way), without ever becoming real.

Reality and dreams are never as far apart as one would make them seem. That is all this piece is trying to say, and both can be so beautiful they are frightening. Or perhaps so frightening they are beautiful.

Worth watching, despite the fact that Scorcese should never ever try to pretend that he's Van Gogh.

There is a lot in Eros + Massacre that I think is ideal cinema, though it does not seem to be able to decide whether it is a slow art house movie, a crazy surreal art house movie, or soft core porn, I think that's absolutely charming. Perhaps I should explain the "plot."

The movie is centered on the the life story of an actual Japanese anarchist that lived around the turn of the century (19th to 20th). It is intercut with the "story" of 2 college age kids in late 60's Japan. The anarchist talks a lot about annoying social theory, which allows him to get away with having a wife and two girlfriends and telling them that everyone is "free." He also is dependent on one of the girlfriends for money, but they're all radical feminist/anarchists, so they only kinda mind. In the end though, he decides to run off with the girlfriend who doesn't pay for his living, the other girlfriend finds them, and then there's a long scene where he gets killed or not killed by different women several times. Earlier in the movie you see him getting assassinated by government goons, which is how the guy (and his girlfriend) died in real life.

This is cross-cut with a guy and a girl acting crazy. The 60's in Japan were generally a crazy time, and universities were always getting attacked by riot squads with gas bombs (my Japanese teacher was in the middle of one of these), and people kept on joining radical organization, and so on and so forth. These kids are caricatures of Japanese students at the time, the girl seems to prostitute herself from time to time (it was a general policy in Japanese film studios at this time to never make a movie without a lot of nudity in it), and the guy is always around her, even while she's having sex with other men, the other men don't seem to mind though. Most of the time though, the two of them are running and screaming, and discussing the life of this anarchist, and various things that sound like social theory but probably aren't.

So, if I explained this film well enough (which I probably didn't), you'll notice that its a rather surrealistic celebration of anarchy, included with lots of boring discussions about anarchy. A somewhat appropriate film for the time when the Japanese New Wave was interacting with pink films (my favorite other example of this is Branded to Kill), not to mention a wonderful title.

But was sex and nonsense a recipe for success? Quite simply, the film disrupts our understanding of how a "story" works. The plot is really centered around two individuals discussing how a real life story "should" have happened, and because of cinema it did happen, in a strange acted way. The death of all these anarchists happened half a dozen times, but they never actually happened in the movie. All of the characters can become disconnected from time, and all the characters can freely disconnect themselves from common social mechanisms. The characters are in themselves just "ideas," trying to present a vision of freedom in a "free" space (cinema). The freedom they are desiring is largely a sexual one, but in the widest possible sense, in the surrealist sense where desire is a logic that is above the logic of perception (think Dali). The only way they can do that is by living in the world of film, where secondary logical patterns are quite often substitutable for primary logical patterns.

Of course the 60's showed us that film and real life aren't necessarily that far apart.

I plan on writing a post this weekend about my secret affection for soft core porn, look forward to it.

Instead of this week's 'What is Cinema,' I posted an essay I wrote on the film Afterlife and its connection to atrocity photographs from the second World War. I wanted to post this right now because of the attention being given to Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, and the implications of atrocity photographs from our most recent spectacle of horror. Though I must say that I rather doubt most people will have the patience to read it, so I will do a quicker review of Afterlife here.

Afterlife is about people, who after they die, are given the choice of one memory which will be the only memory they live with in the afterlife. Though ostensibly about a possible place people go after they die, the film is fairly openly about documentary theory. The director, Koreeda Hirokazu, is primarily a documentarist, and he has said that he started this film as a project to see how people would depict their experience of themselves to themselves. The film on the whole is rather sweet and leaves you feeling rather warm in the end, but it deals with some rather intense issues.

To put it simply, most of the men who have to choose the memory that they take to the Afterlife, were involved in the second world war, and while only one is enthusiastic enough about the war that it seems he might have chosen a memory from the situation, many other characters were obviously effected by the conflict - Including the man who had to live with a tremendous burden of guilt, and the staff person who died too young to really have a memory worth choosing.

The memories that are chosen mostly have to do with the experience of another person, or more importantly, the experience of being for another person. More than one of the memories involve a simple interaction of images from the individual to the loved one, back to the individual, the chosen memories always accentuate the fact that the person exists without asking the question who he or she is, what his or her personality is, only that the individual existed for another individual, in an experience vaguely relating to the experience of love.

Putting background presence of the war next to the foreground presence of "being together with someone," rather successfully shows how film can have the ability to bring out the qualities of each individual which are irrevocably good. While Koreeda plays with a number of different types of images which he understands as "dishonest," (including films which are supposed to be mysteriously taken from the time of the event), he seems to be convinced that film has a fundamentally positive effect on the understanding of the experience of living, as long as it is in the right hands.

Of course, the experience of living is not always positive... but for that you will have to read the essay.

Buy Afterlife here

After Life:
Historical Knowledge and the After Life of the Photographic Image

“War, with its harvest of dead bodies, its immense destructiveness, its countless migrations, its concentration camps, and its atomic bombs, leaves far behind the creative art that aims at reconstituting it.”
-Andre Bazin “On Why We Fight: History, Documentation and the Newsreel”

When asked what the film After Life was about, not many people would explicitly attach the film to World War II, and even less to the more traumatic events of the pacific war, such as the Nanjing massacre or the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagaski. The film, at first glance, is about self-biography, and our relationships with people and society. Major historical events conspicuously influence the memories of the characters in the film, but even then the war is one among many events and little explicit mention is made of it. If one were to pay attention to the play with the nature of the image, or notice the reference to major issues of documentary filmmaking that are being dealt with (such as if you were earlier aware that the filmmaker primarily made documentaries), one might begin to tie the film in to a web of discourses that all inevitably return to the experience of World War II, and the limits it presents to representation. It does not take too much effort of association to read the film as a response to Hiroshima Mon Amour’s reference to “the horror of forgetting,” and even a connection with Schindler’s List is not far removed when it is pointed out that Schindler’s List “participates in the contested discourse of fiftieth-year commemorations marking the eventual surrender of survivor- (or veteran-) based memory to the vicissitudes of public history.”1 These are a few of the many discourses about the claims photography and film can make about representing a particular event that After Life takes part in. These issues are not only a major problem for the documentary, but also raise fundamental issues for the genre of the War film and possibly the entire filmic medium. Nevertheless, After Life operates differently than most other films made on these topics, because it is concerned not with the event itself, but the way the event presents itself through the construction of its participating subjects, and how the subject relates to these “defining moments” in their life.

More specifically, the issue After Life deals with is a two-fold question about the nature of the image. One aspect deals with the limits of representation, to what level a film is physically capable of presenting an event; the other with the ethics of representation, how the event and its participants are influenced positively or negatively by the recording. I wish to elaborate on both of these issues through the analysis of a particularly difficult image from the Nanjing massacre, which I have included in the appendix of this paper. In this photograph a smiling Japanese man stands over the bodies of several dead Chinese men with a sword in one hand and a severed head in the other. On the level of signification this photograph is an amazing example of the failure of symbolic intention. It is elaborately posed, and the man is happy to have his picture taken holding the severed head of his enemy, but from the point of view of anyone seeing the image at a later date the intention is completely separated from the effect. It is impossible for us to see what the photographer or the person photographed wanted us to see when viewing this picture. This estrangement from the image leads to either a re-contextualization of the image, depending on our emotional involvement in the event, or an indexical reading of the picture concentrating on the facticity of the event, as opposed to its symbolic purpose.2

Given the possibility of a non-symbolic reading of the image, it would seem that the image would be more historiographically meaningful. Putting aside symbolic re-contextualization for now, what does this photograph actually say about the event it depicts? First of all, in the context of the larger collection of photos of the Nanjing massacre it says that the event actually happened, which we should remember, was for a while a major issue in Japan.3 The image also shows that members of the Japanese military were comfortable enough committing this massacre that they would be willing to have their pictures taken, smiling, while in the act of slaughter, but beyond these two points the image does not say much. Furthermore the second fact creates more problems then it does answers. As opposed to clarifying the reasons for the historical event, this point leads to an epistemological black hole as it puts for a series of questions that are not only completely unanswerable within the context of this image, but challenge any sociological, psychological, historical, or even literary narrative we can create of this event. The reason being that the image indexically unifies four things that none of these narratives are comfortable unifying: modernity, community, slaughter, and pleasure. The image exposes the lack of simple answers to questions such as why these men were killed and why the Japanese man is taking part in the killing, and instead makes these basic historical questions dependent on answering the one question that borders on unanswerable, why is this man smiling?

The black hole at the center of this photograph’s historical enunciation intensifies a second fact involving the interpretive after life of the image. Whenever Nanjing is taken as a jumping off point for issues of political action, the interpretation of the event never lives up to the frighteningly illegible record of the event. One Chinese historian interpreted the event as “nothing but a major display and act of Japanese militarist bushido spirit during the early stage of the war,” while the international controversy over Japanese textbook revisions were due to the massacre being explained by “the Japanese troops suffered heavy losses. Aroused by this the Japanese troops massacred large numbers of Chinese Soldiers and civilians when Nanjing was taken, and received international criticism.”4 The photograph we have been discussing seems to lend credence to the racist view put forth by the Chinese historian as opposed to the simplistic rationalization put forth in the Japanese textbook revision or any compromise we can make between the two. Since this is not a historiographically viable answer, we are left to ask whether the photographic and filmic mediums are inherently deficient when asking questions about the motivation of an action which go beyond blaming it on the ‘nature’ of the perpetrators. Does the filmic image expose anything about the event besides its facticity, and the particular way the fact is utilized in different contexts?

Though I have been focusing on this one extreme case, the burgeoning Japanese documentary movement has been dealing with a number of issues involving the possibly problematic interactions between an individual and society and how one can justify oneself as an individual agent in a context where ones identity is constructed by an event. Some of these documentaries use subjects similarly on the outskirts of historical interpretability, such as Minoru Matsui’s Japanese Devils (Riben Guizi), and Kazuo Hara’s (in)famous documentary The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (Yuki Yukite Shingun) both dealing with Japanese war atrocities, as well Tatsuya Mori’s A and A2, dealing with the Aum Shinrikyo cult. Hirokazu Koreeda, the director of After Life, directed a number of documentaries on the loss of memory and our handling of the past, a subject less horrific than the ones mentioned above (in the common sense of the word at least), but no less subject to problems of representation. He made two films about dead husbands, one a documentary, and one a fiction film, and then directly prior to making After Life he made a film about an amnesiac. While After Life is a fiction film, Koreeda has stated more or less explicitly at points that the film is a statement on his concept of documentary ethics.5 In giving us these proscriptions though he is also laying the groundwork for understanding how the documentary can be used as historical documentation, and what the medium can provide that other historiographic forms cannot.

The premise of the film is quite simple: after people die, they spend a week with counselors, also dead, who help them pick a single memory which will stay with them eternally. That memory is then filmed, screened, and the person moves to an eternity that only consists of that one memory. The film follows eleven of the newly deceased, but also comes to involve the back-stories of a number of the councilors, who we learn are in that job because they never were able to choose a memory to take with them. The film was based on interviews with five hundred people, and the eleven newly deceased in the film are made up of a combination of actors reading prepared lines, actors ad-libbing, and non-actors telling their own stories. The stories were obviously chosen/written for a thematic purpose, because they inter-relate among themselves, and they relate as well to larger issues of the documentary that Koreeda specifies as an explicit concern. Two of the characters talk about Westernization, but they are separated by two generations and provide two different images of Westernization. The older depicts westernization in the context of her feeling of adventure, and the bonds this feeling made with her older brother, whereas the younger talks about Disneyland. The younger girl’s memory is depicted as mass produced when one of the councilors informs her that many girls have chosen the same event. The girl then changes her mind and chooses an event more personal. World War II is discussed in two contexts, one is a soldier who talks about how great being captured by the Americans was, the other is one of the councilors who died during the war. A man talks about his adventures in the red light district, a woman talks about being mistreated by men. Another woman’s favorite memory is in the sense of community directly following the Kanto Earthquake. In these stories we get multiple sides of the same event, World War II is either the main event of ones life, or the end of ones life, Westernization is either full of promise or meaningless, relationships are all multi-faceted (the man eventually chooses a memory with his family), the devastation of the earthquake ends up being happily remembered. At the same time community is vividly a part of every memory, though in one case by negation, a man who wants to forget the horrors of his life, and chooses a place he used to hide when he was a kid.

There are a number of peculiar facts about the representations of memory in this film. First of all, all the memories are surprisingly filmic, though they do not confine themselves to visual sensations. The Director mentions that when researching this film he found people’s most vivid memories were attached to sound, but he explained the attachment of other senses to the image by the example:

In After Life, the middle-aged guy who chose the city tram as his favorite memory recalls a wealth of experiences after he gets on the tram and listens to a tape of its sound. I think people recall images that are evoked by sounds, and recall sounds that are evoked by images.

Still, none of the memories in the film involved thoughts, there was no “he said he loved me” (this type of expression is in fact consciously avoided), instead there is a concentration on the fact of existence, and the proof of existence. About half the memories chosen concentrated on the sensual feeling of being alive, the man who chooses a memory from when he was a baby, the girl who chooses laying on her mother’s mothers lap and feeling the breeze, the old woman among the flowers, and more poignantly the man who talks about eating after he thought he was going to die.6 The other group of memories involved existing in relation to another. The two stories that this film ends up focusing on involve this type of memory. The man who makes a point about wanting proof of his existence and eventually chooses a memory of an inconspicuous day with his wife most clearly articulates this aspect of the memories, but this is also an part of the memories of the woman who discusses her relationship with her brother, the man who only talks about sex but eventually chooses his daughter’s marriage, and the girl who’s choice of memory is a lie about a rendezvous with a married man. This type of memory is involved in a different way in the sense of community the old woman remembers in the bamboo garden after the earthquake. Both the fact of existence, and the proof of existence in these two forms are concepts expressed best through the photographic medium’s concentration on ontology as opposed to epistimology. In After Life the ability to mummify time that has long been associated with the photographic medium, is a way for the dead to take pride in the past fact of physicality.

Another peculiarity is that there are three different types of image that lay claims on the object of memory, the memory itself, video footage of the actual event, and the event recreated as a film. Since the eventual goal of the characters in After Life is to recreate their most important memory on film, the implication is that the filmmaker is trying to say that these “recreations” hold a higher value than footage of the event or narrations from memory. This is one of the more difficult aspects of the film; it sets up two different way of depicting the event, through actuality footage and through memory narratives, and posits that neither of these two forms of depiction are as suitable for depicting the event as self-directed, filmed, re-enactments – and rather cheap ones at that. Koreeda gives some clue towards his reasoning for assessing this superiority, in regards to the superiority of the re-enactments over the actuality footage, he said:

The images from the video player are the opposite of that: they were images of real events, but you can't tell from whose perspective they are taken; images in which the subjects don't know they are being filmed. I included them in an attempt to show, "This is what I think a documentary is not." I wanted to include in that film a bold statement of my personal beliefs about documentary, that in order to become a documentary those kind of emotions and human relationships are necessary.

On the superiority of the re-enactments over the memory narratives:

I made those unrealistic fictions collide with the narratives, bringing out emotions that did not appear in the narratives, and details of memories that couldn't be talked about. That's what I personally wanted to get at. I also thought the facial expressions, the comments about memory, and the actions that came about after being filtered through those fictions made up a kind of documentary.

The first point is a basic media literacy point, since the memory re-enactments are made by the people they are about, the dignity of the subject is built into the image. The image of the person is within that person’s control, and a person cannot exploit him or herself. The second point is more counter-intuitive – he assesses the value of the re-made memories by saying that we understand more about the interior of the person through the remaking of the memory into film, than we do from his personal narrative. He does not bother to point out the paradox that his assertion is about a fundamentally exterior medium.

Here the film runs afoul of our previous interpretation of the photograph from the Nanjing massacre. The memory-films of After Life and this photograph, though different in many ways still have a number of similarities. While there is the significant difference of recording context, especially the fact that the characters in After Life knew the stakes of the images, and a difference in the narrative ability of film and photography, there are still similarities in the source of authorship, they are both self presented, the emotions of the depicted, all of whom seem pleased, and the indexical quality of the image, its source in reality. Merleau-Ponty implied in his essay “The Film and the New Psychology,” that an indexically depicted event

inherently depicted interiority of the subject:
If I try to study love or hate purely from inner observation, I will find very little to describe… (except physical feelings) which do not reveal the essence of love or hate. Each time I find something worth saying, it is because I have succeeded in studying it as a way of behaving… Anger, shame, hate, and love are not psychic facts hidden at the bottom of another’s consciousness: they are types of behavior or styles of conduct which are visible from the outside.7

If self-presented indexical images fundamentally reveal something of the interiority of the subject, it should do so in all cases, and in the Nanjing photo we are told nothing of the subjects interiority. How then can we unify this with the historiographic and aesthetic concepts of the film After Life? Or to keep a full sense of the stakes, if After Life is a film that is conceptually built on a notion of human dignity, how does it apply in a situation where human dignity is so aggressively and violently denied.

In Siegfried Kracauer’s early essay “Photography,” he discusses two different types of images of the deceased, the memory image, and the actuality image. The memory image is the image of the person that one links forever to their memory, recalling only “what has been perceived as true,” as opposed to the aspects of the person changed by time. He calls this type of image “the persons actual history,” and associates the memory image with an icon, or a painting where all the wrinkles have been removed. The actuality image is what we have been talking about thus far, images of a particular point in time that lose meaning as they age until they only depict their actuality and their historicity. Kracauer describes an interaction with a photograph of ‘grandmother’ that is disorienting because it is a photo of a woman that you have never seen before, who is wearing the strange clothes typically worn sixty years ago. He makes the point though, that our reaction to a photographic image as it becomes historical, can either be a dismissal of meaning of the facticity of history, or the disorienting of our memory image of the object. The ability to disrupt the ‘icon’ of a figure makes the historical realm a place of possibility not only in the realm of event meaning, but in the very realm of identity. The memory-films of After Life are an opportunity for the character to write his own memory image that in the after life will be his self-identity, or more explicitly, his only existence. Within these images we see the impact of the community on this individual, but the presentation of his self-memory image in the final screening room sends that image back out into the community, allowing him to justify himself not through explaining his actions, but through presenting his ideal-existence as actuality, presenting his self worth.8 Whether the memories are true or not – as one of them quite definitely isn’t – the films show how the maker relates himself to himself, or what he considers the fundamental character of his being, how he existed, or how he existed for someone. The fact that this is actuality footage, and in fact footage that exposes itself as an actuality due to its poor quality and the time distance between the event and the age of the actors, brings about an instability of the image that narration could never achieve. The character is in fact relating himself to the memory in the image, as opposed to performing the memory or seeing the actuality. What the above Merleau-Ponty quote implies is that the making of a relationship with oneself is inherently a performative act, thus cinematically visible.9

This analysis, while it does not give us any clue about what is psychologically going on in the photograph from the Nanjing massacre, it exposes a number of facets of the event itself. The man is posturing for the camera, and in doing so he is performing both for the people at the scene, the potential later viewers of the image, and also for himself. The performance for the first group is successful, the performance for the second group is a failure, and we do not know the conclusion of the self-performance. Whether or not this particular subject gave it a second thought (in those conditions it was surely a possibility that he died before he had the chance to give it a thought) this was a mass phenomenon, and thus extendable to any number of people on the Japanese front lines. After Life gives a hint at how such a figure would fit into the film’s conceptual schema with the man who “did such horrible things” that he can never mention them. Those horrible things constitute a defect on his conception of self that is so great he considers the ability to erase those memories “heaven.” The memories constitute a figurative erasure of (ideal) self, which he wishes he could turn into a literal erasure. Eventually he is done one better by being given a chance to restore ideal self. The man in the Nanjing photograph had no such opportunity, and will be forever known to history only through the inscrutable black hole of his smile. In Kracauer’s terms, the man’s history is the Nanjing massacre. The abolition of ideal self that we see vividly depicted in this image denies any simple psychology or sociology, and by relation any simple assigning of guilt. The fact that his pleasure in killing is an effect of a major historical event that takes part in an elaborate chain of historical cause and effect makes questions of guilt and innocence become either absurd, as in the racist assertion I earlier mentioned this photograph supported, or meaningless in that it supposes mass guilt, or mass innocence.10 The reading of this event in the way proscribed by After Life can only lead to a very concrete expression of the horror of annihilation. The photograph contains a subject that refuses not only a concept of ideal self, but a self at all, it is an ontological representation of hell that sucks us all into it.

I don’t mean by this essay to imply that a group psychology study of the Nanjing Massacre is doomed to failure, I have actually found a few examples of similar researches on the abolition of personality that were strikingly successful.11 I meant instead to show that this particular historical method, which has become a major focus of the Japanese documentary movement, makes strikingly clear the impossibility of positivist assertions of guilt to particular agents within communal actions. What this method draws out is the stakes of a particular historical decision. This photograph is far from singular, such images come out of almost any war which a camera takes part in. And while the situations are largely different, the fact that the semantic qualities of certain images from Abu Gharib are exactly the same as the one I have been discussing should give anyone pause. This method does not concern itself with the reasons one does or does not go to war, simply with the fact that the stakes are higher than anything that can possibly be explained in words.


















1 Miriam Hansen, “Schindler’s List is not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory,” Critical Inquiry 22:2, Chicago: University of Chicago, Winter 1996. Schindler’s List was made in 1993, After Life in 1997.
2 A photograph with a completely opposite effect of signification is Barthes example in Mythologies of the photograph of the Black soldier saluting the French flag. While one can agree or disagree with the symbolism it is presenting, indexically it is meaningless because the event it portrays is the capturing of the photograph.
3 For a discussion of this see: Daqing Yang, “The Malleable and the Contested: The Nanjing Massacre in Postwar China and Japan,” Perilous Memories, Ed. E. Fujitani, Geoffrey White, Lisa Yoneyama, Durham: Duke University, 2001.
4 Yang 73, 63.
5 See for example his interview in Documentary Box, #13, Yamagata: Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Apr. 1999. (all quotes from Koreeda in this paper are taken from this interview)
6 Though it is not clear whether this is the memory he chooses.
7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” Sense and Nonsense, Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus & Patricia Aleen Dreyfus, Evanston: Northwestern, 1964. Merleau-Ponty of course is differentiating film and photography, because of films narrative capabilities. Still the point has implications for photography.
8 One might read this aspect of an ideal community as the primary reason for the councilor’s final choice of memory.
9 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” The Mass Ornament, Trans./Ed. Thomas Levin, Cambridge: Harvard, 1995.
10 I am not speaking of the massacre itself, where notions of guilt are complex but need to be dealt with. I am speaking of the soldier’s enthusiastic participation in the massacre, which must be dealt with on a very different level from questions of guilt and innocence.
11 The previously mentioned A and A2 documentaries are good examples, but more striking is Patricia Steinhoff’s essay “Death by Defeatism and Other Fables: The Social Dynamics of the Rengo Sekigun Purge,” Japanese Social Organization, Ed. Takie Sugiyama Lebra, Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1992.

This is a movie that I enjoy talking about, but no one really enjoys listening about. Hopefully though, my readers are the type who enjoy reading about pornographic films made by a notorious Japanese New Wave director (Oshima Nagisa). In the Realm of the Senses is really a very beautiful movie, and conceptually it complicates an issue that most people would rather remain simple.

The film is based on the true story of Abe Sada, a Japanese woman, who in 1936 developed an obsessive love affair with Ishida Kichizo, which ended with her asphyxiating him and cutting off his genitals. She carried his genitals in a little bag around her neck until she was picked up by the police 3 days after the crime.

What is so interesting about the story, and the film only alludes to, is that Abe Sada garnered a large amount of sympathy in Japan, while the country was in the process of invading China. In many ways, the actions of Sada and Ishida were seen as a reaction to the militarization of society. While the Japanese were speaking of sacrifice of life for the country, and strict dicipline, Sada and Ishida were escaping society to sacrifice their lives purely for the sake of passion.

This is never explicitly said in the film, but the war is constantly an undertone. The most explicit moment when the escape from militarization is depicted is when Ishida is seen on the sidewalk of street filled with soldiers marching to the war, Ishida is trying to make his way through the crowds watching them in order to get back to his lover. This theme is also ever present in the desire of Ishida to give up his life for a greater cause, the cause though is only the woman he loves, and not the abstract idea of a country.

Japanese citizens in 1936 were racing towards death, post-war literature in Japan always describes the overwhelming feeling of the inevitability of death during this time, not an eventual death, but death within a few years, many Japanese had resigned themselves to the fact that they would never grow old. The two characters in this film embody that attitude, they just choose to sacrifice their life for passion, and not country. Their society has well prepared them for death.

The film is pornographic, and is also known for being at the center of one of the most famous censorship trials in Japanese history. Details of the trial are in a book of Nagisa's collected essays, and I suggest reading the book for more details, some of the other essays collected in it are quite nice. The film also has beautiful cinematography at points.

Buy in the Realm of the Senses

Buy Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima

The film Bright Future originally had the catchy titled "Warning! Jellyfish alert!" Somewhere during the development of the film, someone decided that the title wouldn't attract the kind of audience that this film was aimed towards, and gave the film a more standard name. The original title does describe the plot better though.

The story centers on a young man, who is a bit slow, but in a cute sort of way - like a shy puppy. Him and his best friend live together, dress funny, and work in the same factory, and his friend keeps a poisonous jellyfish in the apartment.

For fairly complex reasons, his best friend ends up murdering their boss, going to jail, and committing suicide while in jail, but before committing suicide he gives his best friends elaborate instructions on how to train his jellyfish to get used to fresh water. The main character destroys the jellyfish's tank in a fit, and the jellyfish gets in to the Tokyo water system.

After the death of friend, the boy makes friends with his friend's father, who kind of adopts him. He also discovers that the jellyfish is alive, and begins to make food for it and dump it in the Tokyo river, when the father figures out that this was his son's last wish he begins to help the boy, until the Jellyfish breeds in to hundreds and thousands of... poisonous... jellyfish (miraculously given that there was just one of them). Tokyo authorities begin exterminating them, but the father wants to save one... he grabs it out of the water and it stings him. He either goes to the hospital, or we see his ghost in the end saying that kids these days are no good (we see the ghost of his son several times in the film).

The two best things about this film is the acting and the way you are drawn into the world of the characters. Both of these things are related. The main character at one point remembers that his boss borrowed his favorite CD, and thus he decides to kill the boss (the boss is already dead when he gets there). Not only does this action seem cute when the main character does it (and his acting is perfectly timed), but in the context of the character one does not understand how he could have done any different. Trying to adapt a jellyfish to fresh water is what these characters would do if they were in jail for murder. And the interaction when the boss is at their house, looking at the jellyfish, is priceless.

The other great thing about this movie is the ambivilence that comes from both the content of the movie, and the film's sketch format. A film director in Japan that I talked to said that the Japanese film industry regularly uses partially developed concepts, because speed of production is often more valuable than a well thought out "idea". What this means is that the places where the symbolic repetoire in this film doesn't really make sense (it often doesn't), it is probably not that you just aren't getting it, it probably just doesn't make sense. On the other hand, as I mentioned above, all the symbolism kind of makes emotive sense. I mean, the friend does not release the poisonous jellyfish on the unsuspecting Tokyo because he wants to kill more people, he does it because that is what one should do in such a situation. Though I could not tell you why, in the context of the film you perfectly understand (there are a few good reasons why one can argue that the story is not simply about how "youth these days are no good"). I think this little disconnect is what really makes the film most enjoyable to watch, because the film deals with symbolism not as though it were a thing one should interpret to reach some deeper truth about the world, but that it is a thing unto itself. To use a big word, the symbolism has its own ontological truth to it. Or to put it more simply, the things in this film, strange, beautiful and horrible, are always escaping their world and coming into ours.

Still, I think the film should have been called "Warning, Jellyfish Alert!"

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