The Death of Shinji Aoyama
Obituary
The death of Shinji Aoyama occupies the end of a chain of certain people — some of whom I have had the (mis)fortune of knowing from a distance, who led and ended their lives with an enigmatic uniqueness that combined both genius and obscurity. They remained obscure for the genius they possessed; no everyday genius but a rare genius; they remained obscure despite being admired, not obscure but obscure for what they possessed.
Perhaps that is what I like about them — becoming obscure, not out of need, but involuntarily along the path their art took them on, for they were never responding to any one stream but responding to the very world itself, its endless depths and secrets that they sought to unravel. That they weren’t clear enough obscured their very representation before the world. These conflicting tendencies move them into a vagueness of the surface. “Do not be stereotypes,” a professor, remembering my father, quoted him. Then things begin making sense — the various loves I have harboured, the various views of the world that have moved me to the core — and my strange, vague and intense love for Shinji Aoyama.
Shinji Aoyama was anything but a stereotype — and I think he did most convincingly, unlike other directors, tell me how to make a bad movie, or how to not make a ‘good movie’. Because good movies are in abundance, and good movies remain the same — often what is ‘different’ sharply from good is understood to be bad. No other formulation comes close to this communication.
The beginning days of cinephilia are always the best. You are suddenly provided access to another world in itself — where beauty does not cease to exist, its inexhaustibility shakes you the core and with each passing moment, you are amazed, almost angry at how blind you were to an apparent, obvious beauty that exists for everyone. Perhaps it is this underlying apparentness, the obviousness of certain beauty that hides from our gaze is what characterises the films of Shinji Aoyama. That when you are somewhat able to graze it with the caress of your eyes, you feel you have been given a new sight, a sight that is neither banal or fantastic, that has no special characteristic that would qualify it to be either, that has neither nothingness or everything but possesses everything but nothing; nothing without everything. I can go on to say this: My love for cinema, in its form, is mirrored by my love for Shinji Aoyama.
More often than not, today’s Letterboxd version of cinephilia consists of ravenously collecting trivia and information, and less of watching those films accumulated into the inventory of our minds. Films have degraded into numerical information and have become objects of consumption. While the sense of discovery associated with movies or directors previously unheard of are a thrill by themselves, it is often reduced into a kind of encyclopaedia-isation. When I was on my initial exploration through Japanese cinema, beginning with Kore-eda Hirokazu or Akira Kurosawa — I was led to various directions, tendencies, and yet again to an inexhaustible library of endless discoveries. After Ozu came Mikio Naruse, even Yuzo Kawashima, then Mizoguchi; few detours were made towards Shuji Terayama or Nagisa Oshima before finding yourself thrown off balance by Seijun Suzuki and veering back to the recent past you found Sion Sono, Sogo Ishii, Shinya Tsukamoto or Kiyoshi Kurosawa and even Shinji Somai. And then singularly, Takashi Miike — or in the labyrinth of violence and existence, Takeshi Kitano. Then on another day you find Kinuyo Tanaka, Kazuo Kuroki, Nobuhiko Obayashi waiting there all this while and one day you are in front of the duo of Masao Adachi and Koji Wakamatsu. You are also fascinated by the fact that Hiroyuki Tanaka decides to go with the mononym Sabu. Masaki Kobayashi becomes confidante; Keisuke Kinoshita has left trembles in your heart with She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum. You are in rapture. Beauty throws itself upon you oppressively. You have visited the end of the world, yet the end extends itself — a passage appears and you give in. Cinema. The defective words of “popular” and “obscure” cloud your mind with organising the chaos in your mind.
And then, still no name pops up, hardly any mention in any of them: Shinji Aoyama. And it is preceded by a much more favourable mention — Eureka (2000). The much praised and hallowed masterpiece, its images overflowing around the internet, the accepted high point of Aoyama’s diverse oeuvre — which along with its undeniable qualities of devastating impact, also ticks off another criteria of modern cinephilia: the FIPRESCI Critic’s Prize received at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. The Cannes win made for more visibility — Aoyama became an arthouse filmmaker with strong poetic quality and distinct voice, haunting and lasting. Eureka, one of the great films of the 21st Century, unwittingly found itself, as the years ahead evidenced, superimposed with its own distinct greatness, obscuring the actual discovery of Shinji Aoyama the artist. Eureka took over the entire being of Shinji Aoyama, and coupled with its own poetic sensibilities that conveniently converged with prevailing arthouse sensibility of colour, duration, aesthetics and telling — invented a gap between the rest of his work. The fact that Eureka was the first of Aoyama’s films to have significant international exposure contributed to this: Eureka became an entry point to his oeuvre. More often than not, this entry point also became an end point. No one knew of his other films, they faded into indifference, and inferiority.
Whenever I came across a post on the internet that revelled in the greatness of Eureka; it blanked out the artist himself — if people were calling him an auteur thereafter only because it set well within a certain complex notion of an arthouse cinematic aesthetics, nothing could be farther away from the truth. For two reasons: there was no further appreciation undertaken to find the rest of his oeuvre, to form links and associations between his films and find therein a universe; second, because Eureka possesses a clear aesthetic intention that spreads over the elements of cinema, forged together with a story that holds various gestures, spaces, gaps — giving it the impression that it is a film guided by a clear, definite, underlying aesthetic logic. This is where the appraisal stops, for we see nothing of Shinji Aoyama enter the world of the film. This moment of appraisal, what in reality is only an intermediate appraisal, must seek out the subjective and moral gaze of the maker — to really be able to reveal an auteurship behind it, if there is any. This is where an entire filmography becomes indispensable. The auteurship lies in the deepest secrets manifested in the subjective impulse of the film notwithstanding sepia tinted wide frames, or crane shots that began from a possible camera. It may be fleeting but its ghost will cast a shadow upon the film for its entire duration.
In Eureka: guilt, trauma, bottled emotions, seemingly blank characters with an accidental (or not) Bressonian quality which however do not serve their Bressonian purpose but are committed to Aoyamaian quality that persists in his characters throughout the years ahead. Aoyama ideates on the individual and writes in his Nouvelle Vague Manifesto; or, How I Became a Disciple of Philippe Garrel:[1]
What does it mean to present an ‘individual’ in film? Of course, it is the voice and the figure projected on screen and nothing else. But there should also be a mode of direction for presenting the individual. Garrel discovers that in speech. For instance, several of the actors who appear in La Naissance de l’amour (1993) cannot properly speak French. Normally in Japan, one ‘adjusts’ the speech of an actor with an accent into standard Japanese (hyōjungo), even if the meaning does get across. Garrel does not try to correct those who cannot speak or understand French, but simply puts them on screen as they are. At that moment, the actors are placed in a ‘liberated’ situation in which they feel they ‘don’t know what to do’. As a result, individuals appear who are inseparable from the Lou Castel or Johanna ter Steege playing the characters. French with Italian or German accents is materialistically thrown before us, representing these individuals themselves.
And then one day when an unsuspecting viewer finds an opportunity to explore another entry in his filmography: Helpless (1996) — one is often in for a rude shock, one is confronted with a disavowal of one’s erstwhile convictions, formulations and betrayal pervades the viewer. They suppress their discontent with indifference — the film is poor, unfit in comparison to the towering Eureka; its various aspects worthy of shunning, it is seen poorly formed. Everything that it does only belies the greatness of Eureka — where are those masterful mise-en-scenes? Here, it is useful to hold on to what Andre Bazin wrote in his essay (and consequently critiqued) “On The Politique des Auteurs”, that when one is confronted with genius, and where a weakness arises in a film, it is good to consider a priori that the weakness is only a beauty that is yet to come to understanding.[2] Indeed, Helpless only vindicates the spirit of Eureka — its apparent rebuff is in fact a closer, intimate access to what the maker unearthed from his deepest recesses and found form to say. If anything at all, Helpless is a film that is as close as it can be to Eureka. The dissuading surface qualities that may alienate a viewer from Helpless stems from an improper assessment of Eureka itself — where the subjectivity of the gaze is sacrificed for rather objective aesthetic standards. While technical aspects diverge greatly in Helpless from Eureka especially the colour tone and the aspect ratio; these factors themselves should not be taken to be the markers of a lesser film as is increasingly done. The moral concern and subjectivity that Shinji Aoyama exercises in Helpless, reveal to us the person behind the work, the maker, a unique worldview that is quietly reflected in his film; if viewing Eureka birthed in you a certain excitement borne from the gaze, a similar excitement will pulse through you upon seeing Helpless. If Eureka becomes a mere ‘good film’ or a ‘masterpiece’ to you, you will risk not seeing the film at all; you will risk not seeing Shinji Aoyama. Why is the person so important? It is not necessarily the person, but what the person is trying to say, which in Shinji Aoyama’s terms may be quite oblique, yet still one can sense a saying. The saying is often clouded by analyses of simple theme and telling, which while inevitable, may hide a work of art than reveal it.
One can say that to really appraise a filmmaker, one must view their body of work rather than conclusively bringing filmic analysis to a halt. There is no doubt about this, however here, the first analysis (i.e., of Eureka) hides an entire oeuvre itself. This is coupled with the fact that Shinji Aoyama’s cinematic themes and concerns are themselves not the most decipherable — not necessarily in an obscurist way but in a reticent manner where an underlying emotion or possession of a feeling is not easily said out loud to the viewer. What we see are a few fragments stitched across the duration of the film which when taken together suggest to us an entire world. The evidence of this suggestion is found in his other films.
For the aforesaid, it must be mentioned that the same characters recur in both films, which would be fair to say that the films exist in the same universe. There is a third entrant to this universe — Sad Vacation (2007) named after the Johnny Thunders’ wallowing wonder of a song. The Kitakyushu Trilogy, as it has been increasingly referred to. This recurrence does not take place sequentially but parts of a life, independent and free from sequel or prequel unfold before us, involve us within a world — and it is here that these films are starkly different in terms of experimentation, and bringing to the fore certain possibilities of cinema. At the same time, this is where the auteur is enduring and leaves us with familiar sensations, conflicts and thoughts to take back home. The Film Festival nexus too confirms this ‘degradation of a filmmaker who peaked with Eureka’ — by then no longer including a film by Aoyama amongst the holy few of apparent subversive arthouse cinema, or relegating it to sidebar sections, where critics were hardly lavish in their praise, if they did offer praise.[3] People by now were so convinced by what subversive meant that they became blind to the subversiveness of Shinji Aoyama’s cinema.
The three films are their own, and completely different — but what must one make of this? That for Aoyama, a thought which I echo, the characters we produce and that come to existence inhabit a single world — that there are characters in a world which is the same, but continually conditioned to be different through different eyes, relationships, spaces and feelings. He cites Francois Truffaut as an inspiration behind this thought — Truffaut who would continue to use Jean-Pierre Leaud as Antoine Doinel in a string of films beginning with 400 Blows (1959).
Aoyama discovered in his films what I would call ‘non-poetry’ — where unlike overtly poetic works of art, the untethered nature of poetry, where it is constantly on the move, shifting through forms, words, shades from the banal to the fantastic, the drab to the ornament, is found in his films. In this spirit of moving away from ‘good movies’, he brings to me the creator of the frame; an excitable quality where a burning love for cinema is transmitted to me through the maker. What Shinji Aoyama eventually does is to disrobe an entire poetry hidden within cinema — a nouvelle vague so to say, where cinematic perception and an enquiry into cinema vis-à-vis life finds unexplored realms of consciousness — where the very relationship between life and cinema come upon us disarmingly. This is where the maker of the film becomes visible, a sort of physicality wraps itself around the sequences that play out, the intangible that is now possessed by a force which is not as tangible but something always in transit — life. The realness of life reveals an inner energy that does away with life, but while doing so, makes one more contemplative of life and its fragments. Aoyama’s films provide the layer to take life outside of itself to only articulate the love of life and the living. Why is this a love of life? This love is cinema itself. And what is cinema? That which composes life.[4] This theoretical proposition towards cinema that Aoyama articulates is a suitable way to describe his cinema. And it is precisely at this point where his intervention justifies my sensation of experiencing his films: the presence of the maker of the film, the physicality of the filmic process that burns through the frames that are projected — point towards labour. He writes:
To rephrase this in the spirit of Arnaud Desplechin, with his slogan-like ‘Cinema composes the world’, (11) we can say that filmmaking is, in other words, the ‘labour that composes the world’. We can term our attitude towards labour ‘politics’, but it goes without saying that politics does not appear through depicting Tōjō Hideki or persecuted prostitutes. That is simply ‘narrative’. ‘Politics’ appears — and Ōshima Nagisa said something similar before — depending on the way it is filmed: the labour. Or, perhaps we can say it this way: no film can escape ‘politics’ as long as it undergoes a production process: labour.
Jean-Luc Godard, however, says that, ‘There are only love stories in cinema’: ‘In a war film, love is the feeling the young soldier has for his gun, in a gangster film, the feeling they have for what they steal. I think that love is cinema itself’. Godard, who the previous year had already depicted the ‘love’ for labour in Passion, is another person who treats cinema as ‘labour’. And as with labour, his attitude towards ‘love’ is also nothing other than politics. In this case, what should be referred to as ‘politics’ is the love or labour of the individual that (or who) can in no way be universalised or generalised. However, even if we have the ultimate ‘political’ film in A Tale of Sorrow and Sadness (Hisui monogatari, 1977) (12) — a film equating politics with love that possesses far more destructive power than Tiger Woods — that work has continually been ignored from the time it was released. That is because it depicts the politics of individuals that cannot be universalised or generalised. Even in the era that was thought to be the ‘season of politics’, I cannot help but think that there was no politics — with perhaps the exception of Suzuki Seijun and Yamatoya Atsushi. (13)
This is what Godard says after the above statement: ‘And that is what the Nouvelle Vague brought into the cinema for the first time’
As Shinji Aoyama departs, his films must arrive — for they have always resided in a departure, an exile. I daresay, a departure which he sought, but only so that it may arrive to us one day. Like how life is moulded by Aoyama’s films or like how life moulds his films — in me, a burning ecstasy for cinema is born, moulded by life, and then moulded by locking life within the frame of a camera — where an entire association is birthed. This association between life and cinema that Aoyama has sculpted causes me to swell up in wonder and taste the beautiful, origination of love for cinema. Cinema is not the films he had made but the association. Films form a small part of it.
[1] http://www.lolajournal.com/6/manifesto.html
[2] http://www.newwavefilm.com/about/la-politique-des-auteurs-bazin.shtml
[3] https://variety.com/2007/film/reviews/sad-vacation-1200556777/
