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Isle of the Dead: Ghosts and the Supernatural in Japanese Cinema
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14479 |
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THE ARTS
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3 / 1988 |
2,768 Words |
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Paul Coates
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To live on an island means not being able to escape from the presence of your dead. And so, like an enormous haunted house, Japanese cinema is riddled with ghosts. The fundamental reason for this is obvious: Japanese Noh theater has remained close to its origins in the ritual manifestation of spirits. When cinema arrived in Japan and theatrical traditions were transplanted to the new medium, they were not those of melodramatic exaggeration that marked the early silent cinema of the West, but to a large extent drew on the stylized traditions of Noh.
According to the main theoretician of Noh, its fourteenth-century founder, Zeami, primary components of the genre include a quality termed yugen, a word that literally means "obscure" or "dark," but that also connotes mystery and suggestivity and an ethereality reflected in the sparse accompaniment of flute and drum. This other-worldliness was what attracted Yeats and the French Symbolists to Noh theater. Noh often involves the reenactment of past events by ghosts unable to find peace because of sins they committed in life. Of the five categories into which Noh plays fall, three involve the other-worldly, in the form of deities, dead warriors, and demons.
Defeated by Mortality
The ghost is a person who has been defeated by mortality, yet who in some sense still continues to exist. The elective affinity between ghosts and film that resurrects the dead from the black box of the projector--the funerary urn containing the genie's ashes--is perhaps one reason why the Japanese cinema is among the world's greatest.
The fact that the ghosts of Japanese cinema are at first indistinguishable from ordinary human beings is what makes them so profoundly cinematic--for cinema, like Rilke's angels, is unable to distinguish the living from the dead.
The most famous and seductive of the ghosts in Japanese cinema is surely Lady Wasaka in Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu Monogatari (Pale and Silvery Moon, 1953). Her seduction of the peasant Genjiro implies that the power of the aristocracy she embodies is such that it can live beyond death (as does Dracula). Mizoguchi's film evolves toward the domestication of the Other after initially opposing the worlds of the familiar and the phantasmic. The very tracking of his camera calls up the gliding movement of a ghost.
The potter Genjiro goes to market to sell his wares; Lady Wasaka expresses interest and invites him to visit her in her castle. No sooner has he arrived than he is ensnared in the web of an erotic idyll with the ghost-woman. At first, Genjiro views this lyrical interlude as a welcome relief from the daily back-breaking toil and periodic attacks by marauding soldiers that make up village life.
Before long, however, a neighboring priest warns Genjiro that Lady Wasaka's castle has long been a ruin, and she herself is a ghost. Genjiro allows the priest to paint a protective sutra on his body and returns to the castle only to be rejected by an appalled Lady Wasaka. Wakening from a kind of walking dream, he can see the castle in its true state. Having given himself to a ghost, he now returns home to discover his own wife has become a ghost too (we have seen her killed in a bandit raid). Finding his house empty, he walks around it, as if describing a
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