Still Walking 2020

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...

The first great cut of Hana-bi (1997, dir. Takeshi Kitano) occurs 10 minutes into the movie. I use “great” here not in assessment of the cut’s quality, but to mark its significance. By cutting from the ignition of a lighter to a paralyzing gunshot, Kitano (who also serves as co-editor of his film) affirms the modus operandi of his film – to rupture the surface beauty of mundane life with unflinching violence. Blink and you’ll miss it. Fire and flower. The immediately obvious effect is that the cut mirrors the violence in the plot. In the first shot, a medium lasting a good ten seconds, Nishi takes a long, measured beat before lighting a cigarette. The flicker of the flame barely registers in the viewer’s brain before Kitano shockingly cuts to an extreme close-up of a bullet departing a gun barrel. This ECU lasts for only less than a second. (Kitano then cuts to a medium long of Horibe writhing in pain, but that’s not the cut in question.) Immediately, we see two major feature...

Queer-coding, as the name suggests, is the practice of coding characters as queer. The most widely known example of this in cinema is Disney villains, who have been queer-coded to various degrees of subtlety, from the drag-inspired Ursula to the slightly effeminate Scar. Some problematic aspects that instantly emerge from this are assuming certain stereotypes of queerness, using those stereotypes to code queerness, frequently attributing them to villains, and remaining at this superficial depiction of queerness. In The Family Game  (1983, dir. Yoshimitsu Morita), the queer subject is quite obviously Yoshimoto the tutor, and the characterization of him fits most of the patterns I set up above. The very first question to ask is: is Yoshimoto queer? There are many possible answers to this question. He is initially presented as 1. gay. Near the beginning of the film, his acts of intimacy with the same sex are presented with neither fanfare nor obscuration, which can be a good thin...