Onscreen Text in All About Lily Chou-Chou
In All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001, dir. Shunji Iwai), many conflicting modes of filmmaking are on display, from pristine, saturated 35-lookalike digital cinematography to overexposed night vision and DV home video, from planimetric wides of stunning vistas to jump cut, tight handheld. But the most transgressive of all these various choices is the film’s liberal use of onscreen text. Onscreen text is one of the big no-nos of filmmaking, as we all know the mantra “show, don’t tell,” and text is a direct violation of that. But Iwai uses movement to make his text cinematically compelling, and uses text to embrace the thematic contemporaneity of his film’s universe. The biggest obstacle onscreen text faces is stasis. For the audience, suddenly having to read text while watching moving images has the considerable effect of halting momentum. Filmmakers have devised myriad ways of working around this problem – animated text bubbles are a common one in the digital age – but I’ve never see...