Volatile space, Takemitsu and the material contagions of Harakiri

Anne Rutherford

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticle

    Abstract

    Sometimes the very best essays are the ones that reveal their flaws with the greatest clarity. Cynthia Contreras’ analysis of Kobayashi Masaki’s film, Harakiri (Japan, 1962), titled “Kobayashi's Widescreen Aesthetic”, represents a limit case in the application of some key methods of art history and the study of visual culture to the analysis of film.[1] In a lucid and scholarly account, Contreras peels back the layers of Kobayashi’s architectural sets like a palimpsest to reveal a construction of pictorial space reminiscent of what she calls an “Asian visual legacy” (p. 243) of scroll painting, Buddhist mandalas and the kabuki stage. These insights open up another world of the cultural specificity of Japanese visuality that a non-Japanese viewer may totally take for granted. However, at the same time as the reader is enlightened by these excavations, the film as a film – what brings it alive on the screen in one of the most exhilarating achievements of 1960s Japanese cinema – slips through the cracks of Contreras’ approach. Energetically, as it is lived moment by moment in its tensile performances, its volatile spatial dynamics and its poised, meticulously articulated sound track, Harakiri is a film that brings space alive, that forges its layered architectural sets in the crucible of a taut, electrifying dramaturgy into something profoundly cinematic that a visual culture analysis can never fully address. To understand how the film achieves this, we need to refigure the ways we think about space itself, to develop a performative understanding of mise en scène, and to examine the pivotal role of the film scores of Takemitsu Toru in firing this crucible.
    Original languageEnglish
    Number of pages17
    JournalScreening the Past
    Publication statusPublished - 2010

    Keywords

    • Harakiri
    • Japan
    • Kobayashi, Masaki, 1916-1996
    • Samurai films
    • Takemitsu, ToÌ„ru
    • motion pictures
    • music
    • scores

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