Kore-eda Hirokazu Research Articles

Liquidity and Stillness: The Sea and Shore and the Furo in Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Cinema

This paper focuses on two recurring cinematic spaces of water: the sea and shore and the furo (Japanese bathroom) in the films of the contemporary Japanese auteur Kore-eda Hirokazu. 1 To develop a somatechnical perspective to address the dynamics between water, bodies and technologies, I deploy the notion of ‘the domestication of water’ ( Macauley 2005 ), denoting the process of how humans make a constant effort to maintain water in a state between liquidity and stillness. This lived interaction between humans and water can illuminate the leitmotif of kinship through the two cinematic spaces. In so doing, I firstly focus on the final shots of the sea and shore from Maborosi (1995) and Our Little Sister (2015). The mise-en-scène of the sea and the shore can create a vision of stillness on the surface but also a sense of liquidity underneath, illustrating that kinship is an ongoing process which can never be shaped but is constantly being re-shaped. Following the flow of water, I then observe the space of the furo in Still Walking (2008) and Like Father, Like Son (2013). By examining two bath routines, co-bathing with children and bathing-in-turn, I argue that the water in furo is by no means in a still state but rather is always circulating between different bodies. The circulation can not only help nurture the parent-child intimacy through co-bathing, but it also enables a theatrical stage on which to convey conflicts of kinship via bathing-in-turn. In conclusion, by further linking the representation of water and kinship in Kore-eda’s cinema, I propose the idea of liquid kinship: a lived process of making rather than a static state of being. The domestication of water between stillness and liquidity epitomises this liquid form of kinship.

초월의 빛 혹은 일상의 위로: 고레에다 히로카즈의 〈환상의 빛〉을 원작 소설과 함께 읽기

In this essay, I examine Koreeda Hirokazu’s Maboroshi (Maboroshi no Hikari 1995) along with the original novel of the film with the same title, Miyamoto Teru’s Maboroshi no Hikari (1979). Maboroshi, Koreeda’s first feature film, is said to anticipate various characteristics of his later films: it thematizes Koreeda’s consistent concern with how people who lost their loving ones could survive the loss; it also features the contemplative and “Ozuesque” aesthetics which is usually attributed to his later films including Still Walking. Koreeda transforms the original novel in two directions, which affects the aesthetic tone as well as the thematic line of the film. First, the film changes the private confession of the first-person narrator in the epistolary novel into a third-person narrative with few point-of-view shots or close-ups. Instead of a sentimental melodrama that draws on the spectator’s identification with the protagonist, Koreeda experiments with a third-person viewpoint in a narrative film of loss and mourning, deviating from the ethical predicament of sympathy where a self could consume the pain of the other to aggrandize his/her narcissistic self. Secondly, Maboroshi the film underscores the transcendental nature of the phantasmal light (the literal meaning of “Maboroshi no Hikari”) in the process of Yumiko’s overcoming of her loss through the impressive and sublime images of the pivotal funeral procession sequence. It suggests that Yumiko finally accepts her former husband’s inexplicable suicide along with her understanding of the incomprehensibility and ubiquity of death, while Miyamoto’s novel hints that her healing from the loss largely depends on the comfort of everyday life that she is gradually creating with her new family.

The Concept of Permanence Inherent in Family Healing in the Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu

The Concept of Permanence Inherent in Family Healing in the Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu

From manga to film: gender, precarity and the textual transformation of Air Doll

This essay situates the Japanese film Kūki ningyō/Air Doll (Koreeda Hirokazu, 2009) and the manga upon which it was based, Gōda tetsugakudō: Kūki ningyō/Gōda Temple of Philosophy: Air Doll by Gōda Yoshiie, within the context of discourses on precarity in contemporary Japan. In Air Doll, a blow-up sex doll comes to life and tries to find love, but fails to connect with alienated Tokyoites. Whereas Gōda’s original manga focuses on dysfunctional masculinity and the artificial management of emotion in late-capitalist society, Koreeda’s film adaptation deals more broadly with miserable singles, broken families, and a pervasive sense of disconnection. In the film, the air doll’s acquisition of an identity through imitation is contrasted with the unhappy function that role-play, repetition and substitution play in real people’s lives. The movie begins as a lightly comic and largely affirmative depiction of mimesis as learning, transformation and aspiration. However, imitation soon becomes a trope for emptiness and failure. Gōda’s manga critiques the role that rigid gender roles play in late capitalism, but Koreeda’s emphasis on the air doll’s ‘emptiness’, her failure to find love, and the collapse of the family evince a melancholic attachment to heteronormative ideals that played a central part in Japan’s postwar high-growth economy. Close analysis of both texts reveals how Koreeda’s use of live action performance and other original contributions rework the manga’s themes.

Turning Away from the Fire: A New Look at Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu

Turning Away from the Fire: A New Look at Films of Kore-eda Hirokazu

A Contribuição narrativa dos elementos visuais na formação de espaços fílmicos em seguindo em frente (Aruitemo Aruitemo)

Na intersecção entre pintura e cinema, um dos pontos em comum é a composição visual. Ela é constituída por elementos como formas, texturas, linhas, volumes e outros itens que tornam os integrantes visíveis, seja num quadro ou filme. Além desses, estão disponíveis a perspectiva, ponto de fuga e profundidade de campo que, por vezes, podem ser verificados em obras artísticas. Nesse artigo, desejamos verificar até que ponto a organização dos elementos cênicos e escolhas estéticas em Seguindo em frente (2008), de Koreeda Hirokazu, trabalham para auxiliar no avanço narrativo. Para o embasamento teórico, as pesquisas de Jacques Aumont, na área de estudos da imagem e confluência entre artes visuais e cinema, terão destaque e servirão como principal fonte consultada.

Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom, and Female Subjectivity edited by Irene González-López and Michael Smith

Book Review| December 01 2018 Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom, and Female Subjectivity edited by Irene González-López and Michael Smith BOOK DATA González-López and Michael Smith, eds., Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom, and Female Subjectivity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. £75.00 cloth, £75.00 e-book. 232 pages. Linda Ehrlich Linda Ehrlich LINDA EHRLICH is the author of Cinematic Reveries, the coeditor of Cinematic Landscapes: Observations on the Cinemas and Visual Arts of China and Japan, and an independent scholar. Her commentary on the twenty-fifth-anniversary DVD of Kore-eda Hirokazu's Maborosi (1995) has just appeared through Milestone Film and Video. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (2018) 72 (2): 115–117. https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2018.72.2.115 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Linda Ehrlich; Tanaka Kinuyo: Nation, Stardom, and Female Subjectivity edited by Irene González-López and Michael Smith. Film Quarterly 1 December 2018; 72 (2): 115–117. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2018.72.2.115 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2018 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

A Natureza-Morta dos planos de “Tempos Mortos” em seguindo em frente, de Koreeda Hirokazu

O artigo tem como objetivo realizar uma análise do longa-metragem Seguindo em frente (2008), dirigido pelo cineasta Koreeda Hirokazu. O enfoque do texto é dirigido aos planos de “tempos mortos”, em que os espaços fílmicos das áreas internas onde os personagens habitam são registrados sem a presença de figuras humanas. Será levada em conta, a relação do mencionado enquadramento fílmico e a sua correspondência com o gênero natureza morta, pertencente às artes plásticas, cujos quadros ilustram objetos e animais inanimados encenados em situações integradas à vida doméstica. Os trabalhos de autoria de Jacques Aumont, David Besser, Nöel Burch e Gilles Deleuze estão entre os que fundamentam teoricamente o presente texto.

Between Documentary and Fiction: The Films of Kore-Eda Hirokazu

Between Documentary and Fiction: The Films of Kore-Eda Hirokazu

Ec-Static Air: The Unseeable Sounds of Being Beside Oneself

Kore-eda Hirokazu's Air Doll (Kuki ningyo, 2009) begins by following the character Hideo as he travels by train toward his home. After arriving, he speaks to someone offscreen before the film cuts to a scene at the dinner table where an over-the-shoulder shot from Hideo's point of view reveals that he was and continues speaking to a blow-up sex doll he has named Nozomi. Spectators see the plastic surface of Nozomi's body, and despite how Hideo personifies her, she remains the silent recipient of his statements. The scene transitions to Hideo's bedroom, where he will use Nozomi as a sexual object. During this sexual encounter, sound begins to orientate spectators toward the surface of Nozomi's plastic exterior more explicitly than its visibility. Each thrust or movement Hideo makes is accompanied by the sound of air-filled plastic under pressure. These sounds reiterate and exaggerate Nozomi's properties as an object by throwing plasticity toward the spectator to exaggerate its frailty; these sounds situate her plasticity within what Steven Connor calls the rhetoric of the inflatable, which aims to perpetuate perceptions about the frailty of air-filled objects by foregrounding their potential for abject eruption and collapse.1 In these contexts, the sound of strained plastic provides spectators with a sense of the weight any air doll must support and lures us toward the looming possibility of plastic ready to pop at the seams were the force of these thrusts to become too great.While this opening sequence in Air Doll positions Nozomi as an object, foreshadowing how several characters will perceive her purpose during other sexual encounters in the film,2 the narrative quickly departs from this explicitly anthropocentric perspective. Nozomi is initially confined by audiovisual cues aiming to reiterate her status as a plastic object, but after the opening sequence, the audible properties of the film begin to undermine our reliance on humans as the interlocutors who make objects meaningful. Sounds of breathing accompany the film's transition to daytime, and we return to Hideo's home after brief scenic shots of his neighborhood in Tokyo. We watch Hideo dress and prepare to leave for work while Nozomi remains unclothed in bed. The sounds of breathing persist in the bedroom but, after Hideo is out of the frame, become attributed to Nozomi by the movement of a wind chime thatjingles above her head. Spectators soon hear sounds of strained, stretching plastic return but, unlike the previous night, witness a visible shift from her state as an inanimate air doll: we see her legs begin to move before watching her translucent shadow on the wall while she walks from the bed toward the window (Figure 1).This transformation situates spectators to grapple with normative orientations toward objects when they cannot or do not remain confined in an all-too-typical binary opposition to (human) subjects. Contemporary speculative realist philosophies provide various definitions for objects, and I remain intrigued by those with an orientation toward better understanding about the ontological configurations of objects, things, and entities (human or otherwise).3 The aims of these writings have prompted me to pause and consider what circumstances might prompt anyone other than object-oriented philosophers to consider the lives of objects or reconsider and expand an anthropocentric ontology.4In what follows, I examine how Air Doll positions spectators to follow the life of a thing by upsetting normative orientations toward inanimate objects or tools. To accomplish this, I interrogate how the film reframes subject-object relations and, in turn, reveals the autonomy of things. I continue this inquiry by addressing why spectators are not only encouraged to look at the life of things but also, more importantly, why the film encourages engagement with things beyond (visible) present-at-hand surfaces. Finally, I address why the framing of relationships, between things and humans as well as things with other things, encourages and requires us to expand our conceptualization of ontology to include ec-static forms of being. …

사실적인 감정의 미학 : 고레에다 히로카즈의 >걸어도 걸어도<를 중심으로

An innovative narrative film-making always came out of conflict and negotiation between reality and film form. A lesson we learn from their film-making is a certain reality is no more possible to be dealt with by conventional narrative. A dialectic between a real life and a representation drives a certain film-makers to make films. Kore-eda Hirokazu is internationally known as developing his own method of meshing of so-called real life and the artifice of film. As He began his career as a documentary film-maker, made several documentaries for TV and then turned to his feature film-making, documentary film-making defines the basic stance in all of his film-making. He in particular emphasized that he considered the fundamental ethical standpoint of documentary to be filming from the standpoint that one does not - or cannot - know the person one is filming. And therefore even in his fiction films he avoids subjective cinematic structures that offer easy access to the internal states of his characters. He makes his audience observe the internal states of his characters from the outside with his narrative strategy. This article will analyse two documentary films of Koreeda Hirokazu in such a way that his documentaries meshes a real life and the artifice of film and then explores such a fiction film like that changes its documentary methods into narrative strategy for the same effect on the audience.

Vesoul 2012

18th INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF THE CINEMAS OF ASIA (FICA) - VESOUL The only Asian film festival in France that stretches the boundaries from the Middle East to the Far East and from Central Asia to China and India, FICA-Vesoul (14-21 February 2012), opened the curtain this year with the most recent film of renowned Japanese filmmaker, Koreeda Hirokazu, Kiseki (I Wish, 2011) about two brothers separated after the divorce of their parents- one living with his unemployed mother and the other, with his bohemian musician father. Played with charm by two real life brothers, who are often more sensible than the adults around them, the film tenderly reflected the emotions of children, who are happiest when the family is together. The festival honoured KoreEda with the Golden Cycle, screening all his films including his documentaries such as Kare no ina hachigatsu ga (August Without Him, 1994) about the first...

Brief Notices

Brief Notices Reviewed by Richard Macksey Appearance among these brief descriptions of recent publications that have arrived too late to find an appropriate reviewer in this issue does not preclude more detailed review in a later issue of MLN. Susan Bernofsky. Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2006. xii + 239 pages. After a brief but informed look at the history of translation in Germany over two centuries, the first half of which was encumbered by unremarkable, slip-shod examples and an impoverished theory largely based on the principle of Nachdicten, retelling or paraphrase, Prof. Bernofsky focuses on a period of dramatic change in both theory and practice, the Age of Goethe. These changes have had repercussions that extended beyond the German-speaking world and have reached translators and critics of our time. In her preface she succinctly outlines the plot and dramatis personae of her penetrating study: This book . . . has protagonists: three great early-nineteenth-century German authors who were translators as well [Kleist, Hölderlin, and Goethe]. It is also intended as an introduction both to a period in which translation began to play an unprecedented role in literary culture and to the theoretical perspectives from which this period can now be most productively viewed. The turn of the nineteenth century was a golden age of translation as an art form with respect both to the quality of the translations being produced and to the seriousness with which they were received. Indeed, the turn of the nineteenth century saw the emergence not only of modern translation in the form in which we know it today but of modern translation theory as well. (ix) The key players on the theoretical side of the stage are Schleiermacher, the Schlegel brothers, J. H. Voss, Humboldt, and, of course, Goethe himself. The author is alert to how their theoretical concerns interpenetrated the inspired translations of the era and resonate in critical issues still very much alive today. Prof. Bernofsky brings unusual talents to this study of an important aspect of the Goethezeit: She is a disciplined comparatist and an acute student of translation in theory and practice. In addition, she is herself a gifted translator, notably of the challenging work of Robert Walser. In her close readings of the translations studied she demonstrates both a linguistic and an aesthetic sensibility. Bernofsky writes with the precision of a scholar but also with the vitality and insight of an artist. [End Page 1282] * * * Akira Mizuta Lippit. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2006. 208 pages. The author of Atomic Light is a professor of cinema, comparative literature, and Japanese culture at the University of Southern California. He has written extensively and provocatively about visual and linguistic art on both sides of the Pacific. His first book, Electric Animal (also from U Minnesota P, 2000), demonstrated his skill in combining an alert theoretical intelligence with a dexterity in doing careful cross-cultural analyses and incisive readings of specific modern artifacts. As one reviewer of the first book suggested, it was "an extraordinarily promising preface to, perhaps the, theory of cinema." Atomic Light continues the development of this wide-ranging program, exploring here the shadow optics of what, to normal sight, is the "avisual" and its effects on the visual world. This project involves the reader in the fascinating history of visual technologies and the dynamics of "unseen" forces: x-rays and scannings, cinematic representations, dreams, "invisible men," and other cultural phenomena. The book reveals these "hidden interiors" of cultural life through nuanced readings of a large gallery of explorers—in the writings Borges and Derrida, Tanizaki Jun'ichirô and Freud, H. G. Wells and Ralph Ellison, as well as in the early cinema and the post-war Japanese films of Kobayashi Masaki, Teshigahara Hiroshi, Kore-eda Hirokazu, and Kurosawa Kiyoshi. And all of these various explorations are comprehended under the historic shadow cast by the deadly "atomic light" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Moving with great agility from the speculative to the specular, from invention...

The Light of Life and Death–The Function of Cinematography and Lighting in Two Films by Kore-eda Hirokazu

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