Page 177 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

164 Nightmare Japan

impression that the sky is consistently overcast – a thick steam-white
glow that obscures far more than it reveals. Thus, throughout the film, the
settings go ‘far beyond being a simple décor…to the point of becoming
characters in their own right, breathing, moving and living, as
unpredictable as any of the human characters on the screen’ (Mes 2001:
para 6).
Kurosawa’s compositions are likewise designed to heighten the
film’s theme of isolation and alienation. When more than a single
character occupies a shot or series of shots, they rarely engage in
prolonged eye-contact, even when conversing with one another;
characters frequently speak to the backs of other characters’ heads or look
away completely, muttering ambiguous utterances like ‘huh’, ‘hmm’ and
‘oh’, or beginning sentences that end in mid-articulation, a verbal gesture
suggestive of a profound degree of distraction and disconnection. What’s
more, Kurosawa divides his figures in such shots not only through the
calculated deployment of negative space (for instance, scenes containing
two or more characters are frequently lensed so that their pronounced
physical distance from one another accentuates their emotional
detachment), but also through the use of strong vertical lines, like
doorways and the edges of walls, conveniently located within the sets’
geography. These visual arrangements, in turn, strengthen the impact of
the rare instances where characters actually reach out to one another or
actually make physical contact. However, carefully executed eye-line
mismatches invest even these moments with a tone of almost
heartbreaking estrangement. So powerful are these compositions that
when characters actually touch one another, these otherwise simple and
tender gestures resonate with a sadness that, nevertheless, provides a brief
respite from the film’s dominant images of loneliness and disconnection.
Furthermore, by combining elements of the Japanese kaidan
tradition with cyberpunk motifs, including the transformation of the
corporeal by the mechanical and the ‘ghost in the machine’ trope
popularised by cyberpunk novels like William Gibson’s Neuromancer
(1984) and exceedingly popular science fiction anime such as Oshii
Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell (1995), Kairo contributes to dystopian
visions grounded upon the paradoxically alienating impact of so-called