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 lon...