[Bright Future]
Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Technique:
- Lack of 'depth' in DV (distance between the characters and the camera) compensated by placing objects (columns of chairs leading up to the camera; a green plant close-up on one side with characters further away) between the characters and the camera.
- Extensive use of subdued lighting in interior shots interleaved with bright natural light in 2-way dialogues.
- The long takes sometimes register a slight hand-held tremble.
- Colours are sometimes halucinogenically saturated (a bowling alley of rich blues and greens; and shiny red balls)
- Use of lowlight grain.
- Exterior shots are bleached.
- Overhead shots reveal streets webbed with phone lines and power cables.
- Evening exterior shots, in natural light, of people looking inside lit houses where characters swim in yellow light.
- Stark contrast of protagonists' radical sense of fashion with that of the banausic world around them.
- Establishing shots mislead and demand to be recontextualised in retrospect: a dank cafe interior is shot through light when a 90-degree shot reveals it to be outside, on the street.
Notes from Ambivalent Future, Affirmative Nihilism - Notes on Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Indeterminacy Principle by B. Kite (CinemaScope, Winter 2003)
- The glowing jellyfish is as a good emblem as any for freedom, Kurosawa-style: deadly, diaphanous and mutable.
- Kurosawa Kiyoshi's films are a series of fluctuations between rigid and chaotic elements, grids in which emphasis is place variously on the lines and the spaces.
- The lines: a) hard angles of this long-take long shots sectioning the screen in balanced but asymmetric compositions; b) the confines of genre; c) habitual codes of consensual reality.
- The spaces:unexpected activations of elements within those strict compositions
- Kurosawa: "I think that most humans live with deeply repressed rage and hate. We are repressed by such things as conventions and morality."
- Critics seem to think that Kurosawa perversely abandons control at some point in his films and allows promising situations to dribble away into incoherence. I think the aim is somewhere else: combining traditional elements in unexpected ways to transcend habitual response to the ocean of conflicted and unnamed thought/feeling that lies beyond.
- The film returns at the end to a gang of teens, earlier rhymed with the fleeing jellyfish through an overhead shot of the group drifting , illumined by their glowing headsets. The Che Guevara shirts resonate on indeterminate frequencies: revolutionary sympathy or commodification of rebellion ?
- The extent to which indeterminacy is a guiding force at every stage of Kurosawa's artistic process is exhibited when he expresses an almost Bressonian refusal to either create psychologically defined figures ("I can't invent a character...with a reason for everything") or help actors find their way into a role ("I'm terrified that the more we talk, we'll clarify motivations, which I hate"). He searches, he says, for the proper balance between "freedom and form", so it's easier to make films "in and out of the conventions of genre."
- Much to the irritation of viewers expecting tidy twists on favourite formulas, Kurosawa's heroes move fluidly between positions, refusing to treat actions as blocks in a prefabricated narrative architecture. Any given occurrence functions as a pivot, opening new directions for movement.