Minimalism?

[Aaron Gerow]

Dennis wrote:

>Aaron, I definitely saw a relationship between Eureka and Maborosi. Eureka's 
>use of silence and landscape, the lack of dialogue and artificial lighting, 
>and the theme of how a person "gets on" with life after the shock of sudden 
>and violent death made me think of Maborosi. The directors may have 
>different 
>perspectives. They both might disagree with me, but it's like comparing 
>early 
>Rossolini and Pasolini. Entirely different results, but concerned with the 
>same themes and cinematic vocabulary.

If there is a relationship between the two films, it is one of both 
taking up the issue of trauma and loss, but dealing with it in very 
different ways.  In many ways, you can say that Aoyama is in fact trying 
to "correct" the errors of Maboroshi, both in terms of its 
conceptualization of the issue and its cinematic approach (whether he 
succeeds in that or not is another matter).  One of the big differences 
is in the issue of the answer to "why?"  Certainly that is the main 
question tormenting Yukiko, but the film's answer--some people just see 
the light and are lured to death--is not only unsatisfying to many (as 
evident in criticisms of the film) it is backed by the aestheticism of 
the shot--as if unity with landscape somehow soothes the soul and 
provides a solution to our suffering.  Hikoe Tomohiro in Cahiers du 
Cinema Japon, using the Freudian notion of melancholy, argues quite 
convincingly that films like Maboroshi and Nemuru otoko exhibit the 
symptoms of melancholy: a narcissitic identification with the lost object 
to preserve it, refusing to recognize its loss.  Instead of accepting the 
loss by separating oneself from the other, Maboroshi depicts the unity of 
self and landscape/other in a process that never succeeds to truly 
overcome the loss of the other.  Hikoe argues (less convincingly, I might 
add), that many of Aoyama's films deal with melancholy, but through a 
process that focuses on mourning and accepting the loss of the other and 
the separation of self and other.  Since Aoyama writes for Cahiers, knows 
the people there, and admits his films are influenced by the writings of 
his colleagues, I think it is a fair bet that Eureka was in part sparked 
by Hikoe's essay.

Eureka differs from Maboroshi in many areas.  First, while the 
photography is very beautiful, it does refuse the aesthetic unification 
of figure and landscape found in Maboroshi's tableaux: here characters 
are often in conflict with landscape.  His "materialism" in fact, tends 
to resist the animism of nature found in Oguri, Yanagimachi, or Suzaku 
(which is interesting, given his use of Tamura Masaki).  The film also 
deals with the question of loss in a fundamentally different way.  In the 
end, Kozue deals with the problem of not only loss, but also human 
contact, by throwing away the stones/shells she has named after the 
people she knows.  In other words, she is separating herself from the 
other in a fundamental way (in Maboroshi, a similar method would have 
been for Yumiko to throw away the bike key given to her by her husband, 
something she does not do).  But most importantly, Aoyama refuses to give 
an answer to "why?"  As he said in an interview, the title "Eureka" 
itself is a paradox, since the film itself does not offer that kind of 
final answer.  Its answer, at best, is the difficulty of living with loss 
and separation, with nothing, from landscape to the people around you, 
providing any easy answer.

Aaron Gerow
Yokohama National University
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