Page 55 - Nightmare Japan Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema

42 Nightmare Japan

Butchering Masculinity in Kuzumi Masayuki’s He Never Dies

Discussing Realism as an aesthetic and political methodology, Bertolt
Brecht remarked that, ‘Realism is not what real things are like, but what
things are really like’ (Stremmel 2004: 42). In other words, art may be
considered Realist(ic) as long as its mode of presentation both accurately
conveys some element of the complex logics informing human
interactions, and reveals the social, cultural, or political ‘realities’ of the
world in which the artist and her audience live. A high modernist whose
best known plays frequently abandoned conventional sets, props, and
dialogues, Brecht worked to disallow the kind of fantasy worlds evoked
by the conventional theatre’s tendency towards verisimilitude. In the
process, Brecht endeavored simultaneously to entertain his audiences and
to stimulate their critical faculties to such a degree that the viewing
experience became an active intellectual engagement with the ideologies
on display. Many directors, from Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-Wai to
Lars von Trier and Tarr Béla (to name just a scant few), have variously –
and, in some cases, famously 11 – deployed ‘Brechtian’ strategies
throughout their films. In recent decades, similar disruptions of the
traditional viewing experience have become as commonplace as classical
Hollywood cross-cutting and continuity editing. However, when applied
to documentaries, a filmic genre predicated upon the illusion of
conveying a ‘reality’, such attempts at audience distantiation still
possesses the potential to impact radically the way viewers understand the
artistic creations they encounter. As a result, mock documentaries, in
their subversion of the conventional documentary’s verist aesthetics,
stimulate a pronounced intellectual engagement with the very real social
and political ideologies informing the genre’s always-already impossible
claims to objectivity.

11 Although I could cite virtually every text by these directors, consider: Jean-Luc Godard’s
characters’ frequently ruptures the ‘fourth wall’ through direct address (Pierrot le Fou [1965]);
Wong Kar Wai’s expressionistic colors and his application of intentionally disorienting
temporal manipulations (2046 [2005]); Lars von Trier’s vacillation between melodramatic
histrionics and explicit minimalism (Dogville [2003] and Manderlay [2005]); and, lastly, Bela
Tarr’s epic dolly shots and elliptical narrative structure (Sátántangó [1994]).