The Camera as a Ghost in Pulse

The heartbeat of Pulse (2001, dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa) must be a crawlingly, brutally slow 50> bpm. It has no interest in being the typical American cinema, in which a plot event leads to another and momentum clearly escalates. Yet it’s not exactly the common brand of international arthouse slow cinema either, as it doesn’t share slow cinema’s biggest trait, the fixed long take. Kurosawa’s camera is indeed clinical and long (in both time and space), but not to the point of ostentation; he healthily employs movement, and doesn’t indulge in duration. As David Bordwell puts it, “[Kurosawa’s] visual technique displays a dry, precise elegance ... the compositions are painstakingly exact, though they’re not as rigidly geometrical as Kitano’s planimetric images and they don’t self-consciously evoke Ozu...” I can’t find a word to describe his camera, except for the pun very much intended “ghostly.”

In my .gif is an example of Kurosawa’s ghostly camera. We’re in a medium to medium long size, static for a few seconds as Kawashima stares into the distance. When the man in the red shirt enters the frame, the camera picks up and tracks his movement. There’s no desperate or absolute need to move the camera here, as even without camera movement, the redshirted man would surely still remain in the frame. But Kurosawa tracks him, with extreme yet subtle precision, not obvious to the viewer engrossed in the scene. The effect is a subconscious one, without the immersion break of a “look at me!” acrobatic movement. It’s as if someone’s observing the characters, and it’s not just any voyeur, but an omnipresent, supreme being, capable of mirroring one’s path with perfect exactness.

The feeling that we’re observing from afar is enhanced by the tight focal length, which is indicated by two features: the shallow depth of field and compression of space. Notice the blurring of the lamp closest to us, which is an effect usually exaggerated by tight focal lengths. Yet the blurring isn’t great enough to obfuscate the lady in the background, who graces the frame with her scarily robotic walk. She appears close to our main characters, along with the bookshelves; all of them seem to exist on the same plane. This flattening of the z-axis is a clear sign of a long lens. Again, these things aren’t obvious unless you’re really looking for it. Instead, they quietly affect our mind, giving us the feeling of observance without screaming at us. I call this gaze “ghostly,” because the film is indeed about ghosts; with the story as context, is this shot anything but a reverse from the perspective of a ghost, potentially lurking in the air?

The .gif is one of the less noticeable examples of the ghostly camera, and flashier instances abound in the film, even within this very scene. But the more kinetic ones are still well within the realm of understatement. Though Bordwell couldn’t think of a contemporary American counterpart, that slight, precise tracking reminds me of the films by David Fincher, who usually achieves the technique with substantial help from digital tools. It’s impressive that Kurosawa seems to have executed this all in camera, without clamoring for our applause. It’s a style that seeks to haunt, not to dazzle, and it shows a filmmaker with confidence and humility, control and restraint, like the ghosts which inhabit his very own film.

Works Cited

Bordwell, David. “The Other Kurosawa: SHOKUZAI.” Observations on Film Art, 21 July 2013, www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2013/07/21/the-other-kurosawa-shokuzai/. Accessed 7 May 2020.

Pulse. Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Toho, 2001.