Affect and material contagion in Harakiri

This piece is an excerpt adapted from a longer article that explores an affective resonance between sound and image in Kobayashi Masaki’s 1962 film, Harakiri.[1] It draws on a performative exploration of how mise en scène becomes charged through image-sound relations, and how sound pulls us into the cinematic materiality of the present moment, into an experience of heightened embodied affect. The longer article argues that space is not just visual or aural; it is experienced in a fully embodied way, through the “thickness” of the body. This happens through the awakening of the sensory experience of the spectator to a heightened mode of mimetic perception—a sharpened engagement with the moment of experience as it is unfolding, an attunement with the pulse of the film as it flips effortlessly from sound to vision. [2] Furthermore, this intensity accumulates: a shot pulls us into the sensory moment but that immediacy is not only in the present: a shot contains movement and energy that come also from the accumulated sensory awakening and intensity set up by previous moments. Exploring affinities between Eisenstein’s approach to montage and concepts of traditional Japanese aesthetics, the longer article argues that a space is not simply a physical space, an actual space with physical correlates—it has affective correlates: it is a space laced with sensory-affective memory.