Eureka

[Ono Seiko and Aaron Gerow]

Too early to give my full review of the film, but here is a section I 
wrote on the film for the Viennale catalog (the Vienna Festival is doing 
a special on Aoyama).  Be forewarned there are some spoilers here: 

	Eureka is a rich reworking of these issues.  Made in a context where a 
spate of sensational youth crimes have sparked a wave of discussion about 
the inability of contemporary youth to recognize the humanity of others, 
the film centers the issue on the problem of mourning.  If Naoki ends up 
repeating the killings he was at first only witness too, it is in part 
because he, as the one who destroys the "graves" in the yard, cannot 
fully mourn those who were lost.  While this can serve as an allegory for 
the fact that Japan, by not properly mourning/acknowledging the 
atrocities it committed in WWII, is doomed to internally suffer their 
reoccurrence, it bears more individual meaning on the level of cinema and 
character.  Eureka in itself, featuring the same Akihiko from Helpless, 
is in some ways the filmic work of mourning those lost in Aoyama's debut 
feature.  Eureka is thus an odd "sequel" or "repeat" of that film, but 
not because of a failure to mourn on the part of Helpless.  While those 
who do not properly mourn are likely to repeat the loss, conscious 
repetition can itself become the way to overcome what was gone.  Makoto 
must return to the town, meet the children, and go back to the scene of 
the crime (Akihiko's problem is precisely that he has not done that).  
The option he gives to Naoki upon finding him stalking a woman is to 
either continue repeating the circle they are making on their bike, or to 
stop it--to reject mourning--and go off and kill Kozue.  
	Importantly, this process of repetition and mourning is also Naoki's way 
of recognizing his love for his sister--and her existence as an other.  
It is significant that one of the most repeated acts in the film--the 
tapping on the walls--is actually a means of communicating with others.  
It, however, is not a tool for relating specific information; it 
recognizes the Other only to the degree the reverberations in a material 
thing confirm the physical presence of an other.  This reminds us of the 
difficulty of contacting the Other, especially in a film where laconic 
characters abound.  But compared to the excessively talkative Akihiko, 
who seems ultimately unable to understand his cousins, Kozue and her 
materialized "words"--the shells named after those she has 
encountered--are more eloquent.  The shells become her first speech, but 
also her means of overcoming loss precisely by being thrown away; she 
acknowledges loss precisely by recognizing her separation from all those 
others.
	Eureka still evinces the cold, intellectual gaze of Aoyama the 
intellectual, who even in this film seems to be engaged in a conversation 
with his critic colleagues.  At the same time, the sheer weight of the 
film, both in terms of its temporality and the cinematicity of the image 
returned to its spectacular black and white, reinforces the materiality 
of its world and individual characters.  These two sides to the film 
reflect the dual intellectual and physical facets to Aoyama, but I would 
argue promises a better resolution to their union.  Unlike Yoichi, who 
continues to mope around the beach after Michio's death, Makoto and Kozue 
turn away from the sea and head back to the closed space of Japan to find 
a way to speak.  Their discovery--their "eureka"--is in part the 
revelation that the material can feeling and have significance.  It is 
not a return to internality, but rather an acceptance of its loss, and 
the blazing of a new path combining the material, the intellectual, and 
love.

That's, in part, my reading of the film.  So what did I think of it?  I 
liked it a lot, though I'll probably have to see it again in Vienna to 
mull it over a bit more.  

A few quick comments on the things mentioned already.  First, Aoyama 
definitely does not have a bad reputation in Japan.  If he did, he 
wouldn't get so much film work, have Eiga geijutsu and Cahiers du Cinema 
Japon do special issues on him, or get jobs like editing the KineJun 
special book on Wim Wenders.  He is, however, controversial.  Just read 
the Arai Haruhiko interview with him in the latest Eigei and you see one 
person who simply is from a different school of filmmaking and has a hard 
time understanding Aoyama (Aoyama, however, is his usual polite, humble 
self...).  There are a lot of people who have the same problems.

About what Mark said about minimalism.  We've had this conversation in 
part before, but I do want to note here that Aoyama and a lot of others 
would balk at having his work called minimalist (see some of the writings 
in Cahiers Japon).  Part of this is a stylistic issue which I do think 
needs clarification: I too would call elements of Aoyama's style 
minimalist and I intend to press him on this issue sometime.  But what 
must be understood is that Aoyama and others would draw a strong line 
between his style and that of Maboroshi, Suzaku, Nemuro otoko or other 
"Japanese" minimalist films (I was very surprised by Dennis's comment on 
Eureka's similarity with Maboroshi: I think Aoyama made that film in part 
because he disliked Maboroshi.  See Hikoe's article on melancholy in 
Maboroshi versus Aoyama).  While the latter, they would argue, helps 
construct a unified Japanese self based on "mono no aware" and the 
subsumption of the other in an aestheticized nature, Aoyama has been 
presented as rejecting that through a stance that resists 
aestheticization, emphasizes the individual as an unknowable other, and 
questions history.  Maybe sounds like nitpicking, but these are serious 
divisions in the critical and filmic sphere here.  

The problem remains, however, if these stances can be reduced to style.  
Personally, I am more and more convinced style is ambiguous, while at the 
same time being amazed how only slight changes in the use of a camera can 
make two films, both ostensibly "minimalist," totally different.  Thus 
while I too am sick of a lot of the minimalist films, there is a big 
danger in just labelling and ignoring the rich differences that exist 
between works.

Aaron Gerow
YNU