Note: Kore-eda’s newest films are "Still Walking" (2008) and "Air Doll" (2009)

"After Life" & "Distance": The Theme of Memory in the Films of Hirokazu Kore-eda

             According to The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film, Mes and Sharp hold that there was a collapse of the Japanese studio system, which was a gradual process that lasted decades but came to a head in the late 1970s.  Works by masters such as Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu were the products of this system.  After the decline of the studio system there was little activity within the film industry in the 1980s.  However, juxtaposed with the collapse of the studios and waning of the Japanese film industry, Mes and Sharp believe that a renaissance was underway.  “The second half of the ‘70s saw the slow emergence of true independent filmmaking: young enthusiasts with 8mm cameras making their own short films and features on shoestring budgets.  This development took over a decade to come to a boil, resulting in a full-blown re-emergence in the 1990s when a new generation of filmmakers appeared (Mes and Sharp, xii).”  Independent filmmakers in Japan gained a great amount of attention during this period.  Some of the best filmmakers in international cinema today have risen out of this period in cinematic history in which Japan’s independent film gained momentum and world-wide praise.  Sadao Yamane, a film critic, explains that the new filmmakers of the nineties “operated in a terrain far removed from the studio system; and their films were suffused with a postwar sensibility in which the old rules no longer applied…The fusion of fiction and documentary approaches is a distinctive feature of contemporary Japanese filmmaking” (Sadao Yamane, p. 10-11).  Within Japanese contemporary cinema, a filmmaker by the name of Hirokazu Kore-eda, who came from a documentary background, has recently gained recognition for this cinematic technique of blending documentary and fiction in his work.  In his two films, After Life (1998), a film about life, death, memory, and the afterlife, and Distance (2001), a film about death, tragedy, and memory and which “exists in the space between these two forms [of film styles],” Kore-eda communicates the importance of memory throughout both films and uses certain contrasting techniques within each of these films to convey his message. 
             After Life, a film concerning the fictional journey about what occurs at the point after a person’s death and the waiting station he/she is placed in before his journey to eternity in the afterlife, addresses the significance of the notion of memory and how memories may not always be reality, but at times, may be mere fictional re-creations of our human experience.  Through the technique similar to that of documentary-style filmmaking, Kore-eda focuses the majority of his movie on personal stories of characters’ lives and what they remember about their lives in the living world.  The deceased are forced in this waiting station, or purgatory, to choose their favorite memory in order for it to be re-created into a film by the purgatory staff who interviews them.  This single memory, which they have chosen, becomes the sole memory that they will live with for the rest of their lives in the afterlife.  Before the making of the film, Kore-eda interviewed hundreds of people on the subject of their memories.  Within the film he used some of these true-to-life stories, but fictionalized them with the creation of each fictional character. 
            In After Life, the scenes in which the purgatory staff is re-creating and filming, on a low budget movie set, the scenes of the recent deceased chosen memories, we get the sense that a fictional film is being made.  “The role of movies, even the most primitive, in molding, enhancing and even changing our memories is one of this film’s recurring themes” (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times, July 9, 1999). The audience truly feels as if they are watching a documentary film about an actual film being made, because we are able to view the discussion between the staff and the character whose memory is being re-created about the props being realistic, where to place them in the film, as well as the instructions by the directors of the film and the feedback of the recent deceased who act like actors in the memory film of their past lives on earth.  However, something that is quite clear in After Life is that everything on the set of the film, which the staff is making is extremely cheesy and artificial, which poses the question of how real our memories really are.  Kore-eda implies the question that when we reminisce and tell someone about our memories, is it something which has actually occurred or are our memories really fictive?  The audience is pushed into asking: Do we sugar coat our memores? By choosing just one memory, our favorite one at that, we are, in our minds, building up our past and re-creating it mentally into something different than what may have actually occurred in real life.  In other words, we as humans have the tendency to mold memory in a way that is more positive than what truly occurred in order to stimulate happiness and feelings of contentment in life.  We, mentally, replay our favorite memories over and over again.  At times, we are even able to remember an extra detail that we may have forgotten in the past, which changes the present memory that we possess.  We remember things as we want to remember them, which brings us to Kore-eda’s point in the film.  Kore-eda believes that memories may be fictive re-creations of our past realities.  The filmmaker illustrates this point with the middle-aged woman who has been taken advantage of by men all her life.  She, a prostitute, recalls one memory of meeting a certain male client at a hotel.  However, after sharing this story with the male staff member, he sees an inconsistency in her story—the dates she gives do not match up with her story.  Therefore, we know that it is a fictive story.  She, then, realizes that what she remembered must have been incorrect.  This scene is meant to show that some of are memories are false.  Like the shooting of the re-creations of the characters’ memories, we realize that our memories truly are what we desire them to be.  It is our choice to recall things that we experienced in a certain way.  We are our own directors in the mental films and retellings of our memories.  Jonathan Romney holds that Kore-eda’s film is “an eloquent profession of faith in cinema as a means of understanding life; and it suggests that memory is itself a kind of artificial cinema, as if we retained key moments by artificially filming them in our imaginations, like ‘clips’ that stand for the whole six-reeler of the overall life.  After Life is an indirect contemplation of the problems of portraiture—of how you represent someone’s whole being in a single image, and how that image might help people to know themselves” (Jonathan Romney, New Statesman, 09/27/99).  Compared to Kore-eda’s film Distance, in which the filmmaker uses a different cinematic technique to address the theme of memory, the creative technique of the flashback sequence, there are no flashbacks in After Life, only verbal stories being told, (which in form are closer to reality), and film to be seen regarding the fictional memories that those who have died have recreated only to live joyfully in the single memory they have chosen for themselves for all of eternity.
            In Distance, which stands in contrast with the film After Life, memory is projected on film differently by Kore-eda.  There is the constant shifting of the camera’s focus from the living present of everyday life to flashbacks to the past of the main characters’ tragic memories of their family members who belonged to a cult group that were the perpetrators of a massacre that killed a large number of people.  This horrible event resulted in the killing of cult members by those within the same sect.  These fictional cult members portrayed by Kore-eda are a link to the real cult group in Japan, the Aum Supreme Truth sect.  “This picture is obviously about the real-life sect that let loose sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system in 1995 to provide an apocalypse its leader had prophesied.  At the same time the film must read as an extended and convincing allegory of Japan and its protective amnesia concerning its own wartime past.  Kore-eda indicated this when he said he believed that the line between victim and victimizer is always blurred and that ‘in a sense we are all families of the perpetrators’ (Donald  Richie, International Herald Tribune, June 15, 2001).”  The audience cannot help but to wonder exactly what type of personal relationships each of the people in the group of family members had to the deceased cult members and ponder questions like: What was the cult like? What type of abnormal lives did they lead? What were their odd behaviors that caused them to be different and become outcast in Japanese society? And how did the cult members’ activities involve and/or hurt in anyway those people that they were closely related to?
            While watching Distance, one cannot help but to ask these questions throughout the film and desire for the filmmaker to delve into the answers, which he accomplishes to do through the mode of the flashback sequence.  We are given flashback scenes of the female teacher’s brother who is mesmerized by some type of philosophical cultish bible that he focuses on and reads obsessively, which ultimately leads to his sister physically pushing him out of the door of their house, as well as the flashback scene of a man’s wife who strangely sits across from him at a restaurant table with a freakishly calm demeanor along with her newly found lover who is a fellow cult member.  These flashbacks are extremely helpful in displaying the true feelings of the family members, who are devastated, and of the feelings of cult members, who appear to be content with their new found lives in the sect and cult philosophy.  By focusing on the trivial conversation and joking around of some of the film’s main characters, which deeply contrasts with some of the heavier scenes in the movie seen through the flashbacks of difficult memories, it seems that Kore-eda is pointing to the fact that life goes on even after a tragedy such as what these people experienced.  There must have been a great amount of sadness and confusion on the part of the family members of those in the cult.  As they arrive at the old lodgings of the cult in the woods, one man attempts to figure out how his wife and the other cult members lived.  For example, he asks the single cult member that survived where his wife slept in the house and with whom she slept with.  Because these family members were not in the cult themselves they did not understand exactly what the cult believed or what they did in their newly found everyday lives in the cult group.  Therefore, there is a bit of mystery and confusion on their part.  The beliefs of the cult members are a mystery to society and from viewing the flashbacks of the memories of the family members of the perpetrators we are informed of their feelings of disbelief, anger, and confusion when they are confronted with cult philosophy and aloof attitudes that seem to be part of cult behavior.  The flashback enlightens the audience to the real truth of the characters’ past and their relationships with the cult members.  There is no question of the possibility of the characters memories being fictional, as with After Life, because they are not telling these memories as stories.  Instead, the audience is given the flashback scenes to watch as background and proof of information and insight into the characters’ mentalities and their dealings with the cult, as well as how it touched their lives in such peculiar, abrupt ways.  In addition to the filmmaker’s flashback technique, Kore-eda explains his documentary-style of dealing with his actors and the 8mm camera, which creates in his film the feeling of a non-fictional portrayal of the lives of cult members and their family members.  He states in a recent interview: “When you make a documentary you have to adapt to what reality imposes upon you…With regards to fiction, I used to think that documentary-style filmmaking was impossible because everything is already set down in the screenplay and the storyboards.  On Distance I wanted to catch what came from the actors, which meant doing away with storyboards and always using handheld cameras (Midnighteye.com, 6/28/2004).”  His way of stimulating the true feelings of the actors caused the film to be more believable and emotionally revealing.
As an up and coming Japanese filmmaker, Kore-eda desires to make films that force the audience to contemplate social and personal issues.  Through addressing the notion of memory in fiction films while using a documentary-style, he portrays the role of fiction in human memory in After Life, which is easily viewed in contrast to the role of the more realistic, truthful notion of memory, shown through the use of the flashback in his film Distance.  With films such as these and his most recent award winning film Nobody Knows (2004), Kore-eda is consciously moving into the international market in the film industry.  However, he states that even with the film festival in Toronto, which has created a section titled “New Cinema from Japan,” “when it comes to moving beyond film festivals to general release, there is still a way to go.  In Europe, for example, there are still barriers to a wider release [of Japanese films].  We have to try harder if we want our films to reach average filmgoers (Schilling, 117).”   Although new Japanese film has made progress in the international film arena, as Kore-eda has stated, he feels that there is a much longer road ahead in order to jump the hurdles that lead to the broader acceptance of contemporary Japanese cinema.

Bibliography

1.  Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp, The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film.               
Berkeley, California: Stone Bridge Press, 2005

2.  Donald Richie, “Distance,” International Herald Tribune, June 15, 2001, p. 9

3.  Jonathan Romney, “Days of Heaven,” New Statesman, v. 128, issue 4456, 09/27/1999,
p. 71

4.  Kuriko Sato, “Hirokazu Kore-eda Interview,” Midnighteye.com, 6/28/2004.

5.  Mark Schilling, Contemporary Japanese Film, “Hirodazu Koreeda”. New York: Weatherhill, Inc., 1999

6.  Kenneth Turan, “’After Life’s’ Poignant Question Resonates With Eternal Answers,” Los Angeles Times, July 9, 1999, p. 8

7.  Sadao Yamane, “Sadao Yamane on the ‘post-postwar’ generation of Japanese filmmakers,” Film Comment, v. 38, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 2002), p. 10-11.