Page 205 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

192 Nightmare Japan

3
‘camera-stylo’ premise , Tsukamoto’s camera becomes a tool that, to
paraphrase Jean-Luc Godard’s maxim, 4 functions simultaneously as a
microscope and a telescope through which artists can explore the visible
universe and humanity’s role in it. The camera, then, is a mechanism for
dissection and reflection, a means for peering ‘deeper’, looking ‘closer’,
seeing ‘anew’. As Tsukamoto notes in the interview on the Tartan Asia
Extreme DVD:

pictures of stars in our universe and pictures taken through a microscope are
very similar. It depends on what scale you’re using. We usually think of our
bodies as one unit. When we use the measure of our human bodies, the
universe is huge. The microscopic world is tiny. I thought I was looking at the
very same thing except for the way we look at them. The most obscure thing in
the universe can be seen if we keep looking through a microscope at the
samples in a classroom. We won’t get exact answers, but we’ll get some kind
of answer. (2005)

Echoing the discourse of fractal geometry and chaos theory in his
conjectures regarding repetition through scale, Tsukamoto locates cinema
as an avenue through which humanity may search for our place in the
universe. Furthermore, through the central protagonist’s, Takagi
Hiroshi’s, variably penetrating and sympathetic gaze, Tsukamoto
redeploys the ‘amnesiac recovering memories’ motif as a mechanism for
understanding the world as a sequence of lensed objects in both the
term’s verbal and adjectival sense. Consequently, Vital grotesquely
externalises our oldest ‘internal’ mysteries and obsessions, providing a
meditation upon human connections and disconnections.
One of Tsukamoto’s most restrained films, Vital offers a
deliberate yet energetic exhumation of the human body in all its base

3
For a fuller articulation of the camera-stylo, see Alexandre Astruc’s “The Birth of a New
Avant-Garde: La Camera-stylo” in Graham, P. (1968) The New Wave: Critical Landmarks.
Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 17-23.
4
See the transcript of Henri Behar’s interview of Jean-Luc Godard conducted at the 1995
Montreal Film Festival. In this insightful dialogue, Godard states that: ‘…at the beginning,
cinema was a tool for study. It should have been a tool for study - for it is visual, and very
close to science and medicine. The camera has a lens, like a microscope, to study the infinitely
small, or like a telescope, to study the infinitely distant. Having studied that, you could then
convey it in a spectacular fashion’ (para 14).