alienation and Yaguchi Shinobu

Jonathan M. Hall jmhall
Fri Nov 22 05:25:25 EST 2002


First of all,  thanks to Joe Murphy for his suggestion of Yuube no himitsu.
I will try to find some manner of seeing the film on my next trip to Japan.
Recently, I've become interested in Hashiguchi, Kurosawa K., and
Yaguchi--especially in the physics of their object relations (not in the
Kleinian sense here).  This is not an anthropomorphizing of objects, but
something closer to a double-reverse--namely the anima-ting of humans as
spirited objects.  It seems to me that this relates strongly to common
concerns about the state of the subject in late capitalism.  But I digress
....

The meat of Joe's email was asking me about my suggestion of Hadashi no
pikunikku for his university's series on sub/urban alienation.  I wasn't
quite thinking of Hegel when I thought of this connection, but it did seem
to me that our delight with the film is precisely the degree to which the
main character is expelled from any conventional sense of narrative
development.  Something similar happens in Adrenaline Drive, but there the
"heteronarrativity" is sustained, albeit in the most awkward of ways. In
this sense, there is no homo faber of the Marxist type to be alienated--but,
if the natural order does seem to be one of heteronormative narrative--the
girl and boyfriend, the teacher as sexual actor--, how else do we read her
ejection from that domain, the poor woman thrown willy-nilly to random
action.  It seems that her "unhappiness" (a term borrowed from the film's
self-promotion) is precisely her inability to follow tracked growth or
progression.  I took this as a kind of alienation. That much of the action
seems to take place in spaces at the edge of centers of
population--highways, trains between cities--also reinforces for me the
film's emphasis on interpersonal communicative failure and a kind of
confluence of communicative, spatial alienations.

Off the cuff, heart on the sleeve,

Jonathan



From: Joseph Murphy <urj7 at nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu>
Reply-To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Date: Sun, 3 Nov 2002 22:38:25 -0500
To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
Subject: Re: recommendations


Thanks to everyone for the recommendations on the theme of "sub/urban
alienation."  We ended up going with A Scene at the Sea (Kitano, 1991) and
Giants and Toys (Masumura, 1958), but have all the others on slate for the
future.  Jonathan recommended, in addition to Tsai Ming-Liang's The Hole,
and the Korean film Peppermint Candy, this one:

And especially since you've written on it, how about Yaguchi's Hadashi no
pikunikku [Down the Drain], which is also now available on DVD with English
subtitles.  If "Japan's most unhappy girl" isn't alienated, then I don't
know what to call her.

I wanted to ask about this because it would not have occurred to me.  I know
there is a certain context in which alienation and the unhappy consciousness
necessarily go together (I won't say which, but his name begins with H), but
is there really necessarily a direct relation between alienation and
unhappiness?  I'm interested because part of the point of an exercise like
this of course is to figure out what alienation is.  I know you were writing
off the cuff here, but any thoughts on that?
By the way, I'm glad to hear you're working on Hashiguchi and Yaguchi in a
context I've sort of resolutely bracketed.  They came out of the same
generation of PFF grand prizewinners (Hashiguchi 1989, Yaguchi 1990), and
I've always associated them together. It's an 8mm mid-length film, but
Hashiguchi's prizewinner, Y?be no himitsu is really worth a look. It's about
a small group of high-school kids who sit around one evening and have a
drinking party in one of their houses.  It's really desultory, and in the
flow of drunken conversation, one of them confesses his feelings for the
biggest, most athletic member of the group.  He's okay with it, but the
other kids there, a boy and girl, you can just see them start icing over and
lapsing into cruel ostracism.  He plays this theme out in Nagisa no
sindobaddo, but it's kind of crystallized here, absent the story.  It's very
powerful, and gets stunning performances out of what appear to be amateur
actors. 
yours,
J. Murphy
-- 


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Univ. of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32601, USA
<http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/jmurphy>
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