structuring of hana-bi

[Joseph Murphy]

WARNING:  AC-17 the following post contains academic/scholastic and/or
metaphysical material.  skip the part in brackets if you do not want to be
exposed.

>Kitano is hardly alone in this respect in Japan though is he? The most
>obvious example I can think of is Seijun Suzuki, who similarly provides no
>such transitional cues between scenes. For example, does Branded to Kill /
>Koroshi no Rakuin ('68) have a determinate chronology to it? I've noticed
>that the narrative of many Japanese films is structured in an entirely
>different way to the Hollywood Syd Field template, with vast amounts of
>screentime given away to flashbacks and unsignalled lurches between past and
>present. I think it might be wrong to look at Kitano in this respect as
>pioneering a new narrative style, but instead see him as building upon a
>uniquely Japanese cinematic tradition which in the West, due to almost
>non-existent distribution outside of the festival circuit we're generally
>unfamiliar with. I guess the main reason Tarantino's Pulp Fiction met such
>acclaim was because most of its target audience had never even heard of
>Rashoman.

[I don't think anyone's claiming that Kitano is original in this respect,
though he's certainly very good at it, and it seems central to his artistic
vision.  You can go back to Porter's "Life of an American Fireman" in 1903
before they even had irises and fadeouts, where they show the same action
twice from different perspectives.  The question at this point is what
everyone means by terms like, "indeterminate," or "logical break/rupture",
different from heterogeneous, nonlinear, etc.  So, let me say what I mean.
My understanding is that indeterminacy results when one is maneuvered into
a position where you have to affirm two contradictory positions at the same
time, ie you are led there of necessity, and can't ever, with any amount of
further analysis, decide between them. Its a formal point, hard to show for
complex systems where there are always more considerations to add.  I think
a lot of movies gesture, though, to this kind of indeterminacy, but there
are all sorts of ways to escape the contradictions, the classic one being
where one of the characters wakes up and you find out it was all a dream
and then you feel a sense of relief.  Rashomon I think pretty resolutely
subsumes that indeterminacy by parcelling out the different versions to
individual character's subjective views, giving rise to speculation about
reliability and truth of the versions.  I don't think its in the same
category.  Similarly, resolving the narrative into levels is another way to
head off the logical break.  The question for me is whether Kitano, whether
he thought about it or not, has produced something that forces you to hold
two contradictory positions about the time of the story.  That's my term,
though, and I am getting the sense Andreas is looking at something more
like the nonlinear logic of memory, maybe whether the film produces or
performs the kind of associative processes involved in memory.  Either one
seems like a legitimate way to try to account for the power of the film,
which isn't likely due just to the violence, or] the characters and story,
which are pretty melodramatic.
JM







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Joseph Murphy
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