Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup.
“Professor, let’s create a city—let’s create a city of their own for these Buddhist statues as soon as we can…” So says Miyako (Chiyako Saitō), who studies and loves the statues as though withdrawn from ordinary human life. Together with Professor Fujimori and numerous monks, she has conspired to steal them away from Kyoto, now a place of worldly clamour where no one cares about culture. She looks up at a statue, and a tear slips from the corner of her eye. Yet at the very instant it falls from her cheek, a detective suddenly opens the door, interrupting the monks’ chanting. This is the consequence of Maki’s reporting her: drawn to Miyako, so pure and unblemished in her life among the statues, Maki (Shin Kishida) must nevertheless uphold the righteous duty of his position as a researcher at the Science Research Institute (SRI).
Naturally, people of the secular world have no interest in the statues’ beauty; yet Professor Fujimori, who values and studies their culture, must still be brought to justice for stealing national treasures. The irony plainly belongs to Mamoru Sasaki, this episode’s screenwriter. Such questioning of the claims of a righteous cause inevitably recalls another collaboration between Sasaki and the episode’s director, Akio Jissōji: “My Home Is Earth” (1966), episode 23 of Ultraman. There, the monster, supposedly destined to receive the merciless iron fist of justice, is written as a being that human society consciously excludes, according to circumstances and rules, to maintain its apparent order and balance. The brief sequence in which the detective arrests Professor Fujimori is likewise suffused with Jissōji’s distinctive direction. Almost every shot is a close-up, with little particular concern for establishing or describing the characters’ spatial positions relative to one another. In one close-up, as Miyako turns from a frontal view into profile, her eyes—the feature that draws the viewer’s interest—move to the edge of the frame. Anyone familiar with “The Targeted Town” (1967), episode 8 of Ultraseven, will know what aesthetic effects Jissōji achieves by virtually dispensing with establishing shots and repeatedly introducing close-ups. This control of information, approaching animation in its retention of only what is necessary, must have made a deep impression on Hideaki Anno. And in this sequence, what is necessary is indeed the human face: faces directly interacting across space, responding to one another.
Needless to say, the three television series in Jissōji’s career that have exerted the greatest influence on other directors are Ultraman, Ultraseven, and Operation: Mystery (Kaiki daisakusen). If his direction developed chronologically from an initial display of prowess to full accomplishment, then studying “I Want to Buy Kyoto” (1969), his episode 25 of Operation: Mystery, is indisputably vital in both theory and practice, however little attention it receives in the Chinese-speaking world. It is the supreme achievement of a series some praise as Tsuburaya’s finest tokusatsu production, even the finest in the history of tokusatsu.1 Even Jissōji, notoriously hard on his own work, regarded Operation: Mystery as the creative peak of his career: “television film” (terebi eiga) more uncompromising than the independent films that followed—utterly uncompromising. He also enjoyed relatively favourable shooting conditions on the series. A little scrutiny of the brief sequence just described reveals its meticulous design. Background details appear along a strictly planned timeline, creating rhythmic tension and release: the monks rise as the camera, panning with Miyako as its subject, sweeps across them; a sliding door suddenly opens as the professor is led to the veranda. Background sound passes through three stages: the monks’ chanting; running water and the knock of a tipping bamboo tube; the police siren. Unrelated actions and sound effects coincide: water begins to sound when the detective opens the door, the siren when a monk opens it. Earlier material and motifs recur as Maki chases after Miyako: the focus shifts from the patrol car, its headlights switched on at just the right moment, to their profiles as they enter the frame.
But pursuing Jissōji’s ubiquitous calculations too far is not this essay’s purpose. To speak of the endless fascination of “I Want to Buy Kyoto,” we must return to the facial close-ups mentioned at the end of the preceding paragraph.
Hideaki Anno says that Jissōji treats actors as “matter,” much like props. This is not easy to understand. In ordinary television drama, the actor is generally defined as the subject of perception, action, and affect; images and the movements of other matter are subordinated to this centralized, privileged image, serving it and placed at its disposal at the levels of both dramatic construction and direction. Of course, it would not be wrong to say that treating actors as matter manifests itself in the observational objectivity and detachment Jissōji’s camera maintains, however close it comes to its subject: an autonomous camera filming from the side transforms, reflects, and differentiates the actor’s subjective vision. After all, actors in his shots do not necessarily occupy a privileged or special spatial position relative to props. They may instead find themselves extraordinarily hemmed in by vast expanses of inorganic, manufactured things. And in his extreme close-ups, the actor seems to become a lump of flesh available for playful subdivision into eyes, a nose, ears—to the point that actors dubbing their lines have to identify their own noses. Starting from this free indirect subjectivity and autonomous recording of Jissōji’s camera, then, it seems permissible, for the moment, to speak of Maki and Miyako as two material bodies moving and interacting.
In the empty darkness of the night, with the siren wailing, directly in front of the patrol car’s headlights as they come on at just the right moment, Maki, who is drawn to Miyako, can only stand before her calling her name, over and over. “I was wrong to want to believe in anything other than Buddhist statues. That’s all.” As she speaks these suddenly chilling words, her nostrils flare; her lips and the muscles along the creases beside her nose tremble intermittently. Just as she finishes, the siren falls mute. In the sudden silence, there is a brief instant in which we can just make out a tear suspended on her cheek. The image cuts to Maki’s reaction in close-up. Stunned, his eyes shine with a wetness no less than hers; his lips part slightly, but he cannot say what he wants to say. By magnifying the interplay of microscopic facial movements and making it visible, this scene takes Jissōji’s constant effort to fill the image with a face to its furthest reach. Subtracting information until only what is necessary remains allows minute differences of speed within the face’s composite movements to emerge, setting pure emotion flowing. At this level, it is hard to say animation can surpass live action. The simultaneity of unrelated actions and sound effects mentioned earlier now admits another, apparently extravagant description: the piercing sound rises and swells without limit through space, then finally collapses, condensing into a single tear. Yet when we find Jissōji calling the sound effect accompanying the statues’ disappearance a “sonification of light,” this description can hardly be dismissed as excessive. Once we are familiar with the Jissōji angle, so striking that everyone has something to say about it, it is all the more important to discover this assured, precisely judged, incisive direction.
When the camera returns to Miyako, tears have already left trails on both cheeks. The lyrical, elegant variations on a theme from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which recur throughout the episode, begin to flow.2 Previously, whenever Miyako and Maki were together, other sound effects, dialogue, or actions would obstruct and interrupt the music. Now, towards the episode’s end, in a sequence that begins with their parting, it will complete a passage. Before Maki’s eyes, she turns to leave, and he will not chase after her again. At the corner, she shakes her head ever so slightly—a gesture to make one despair—and exhales a white mist that disperses into the cold night—it is winter. All that remains is the sight of her back as she descends the steps. A vehicle passes before the camera, as though signalling that time in the world beyond the two of them has resumed after its momentary suspension, but all we can hear is her receding footsteps. Watching her, Maki slowly enters the frame. Though we cannot see his expression, the focus slowly shifts to him, and the image slowly fades out… With the lyrical melody still flowing, the camera suddenly begins filming pigeons pecking at the ground in daylight, then moves to the profile of Maki as he feeds them. Yet he looks quietly, levelly towards the right edge of the frame. What is on the right? We do not know, for the image soon cuts to a high-angle long shot of him with an overcoat draped over his shoulders, climbing stone steps flanked by dense shade towards a temple we cannot see. Unexpectedly, the next shot is another close-up of his profile: he has stopped and, with a different look of bewilderment, lowers his head slightly and looks towards the left edge of the frame. His habit of bringing his fingertips together to touch his lips recalls Jean-Paul Belmondo passing his thumb across his mouth. Judging by the background, he is somewhere else now. In the brief, rather dim long shot that follows, his tiny figure paces slowly left at the foot of a low white wall on the far side of a dry rock garden, towards an old, two-storey temple surrounded by luxuriant trees.
Here, surely, is a splendid montage arrangement Jissōji gives us, repeatedly working through relations of motion and rest as Maki wanders, at a loss, through Kyoto. The distribution of Maki’s movement and stillness has been rigorously designed along the timeline, revealing pure contrasts and changes of speed. In this way, the montage seeks to draw out micro–macro–micro–macro movements, separating them from the flesh that supports them and bringing them into a collective, relational configuration alongside other movements: an attempt, in other words, to make movement autonomous, subordinate to itself. At the same time, the sequence contains nothing but walking itself. This arrangement boldly dismantles narrative function and form, particularly when we consider that the episode is only a television programme of a little over twenty minutes. We might say that its unexpected departure from the series’ fixed character roles, functional demands, and overall aims releases movement itself, since we have no idea what Maki perceives in a given shot or what result his movement leads to. I think this is also the key to Mamoru Oshii’s description of “I Want to Buy Kyoto” as a stroke of genius, utterly unlike even the other already wildly unruly episodes. After all, this sequence is a little like the famous three-minute passage Oshii calls a dareba in Ghost in the Shell (1995).3 Even on the most superficial level, that dareba follows the crucial turn when Motoko and Batou experience an auditory hallucination; it presents a cityscape at a particular moment, in particular weather, and seems to have Motoko searching within it for an absent one who is nowhere to be found. Oshii also portrays Jissōji as an anarchist who maintains a defiant stance within the Tsuburaya system, insisting on his convictions and recklessly charging ahead: a saboteur within the framework, a breaker of conventions. This is plainly praise. Even before “I Want to Buy Kyoto,” the Jissōji–Sasaki partnership had a long record of offences. They were the most subversive terrorists, delighting in the collapse and disintegration of form. Jissōji, whom some call a master of tokusatsu, perhaps bared his most anti-tokusatsu fangs in Ultraman: in episode 22, “Overthrow the Surface” (1966), he imitated Godard’s Alphaville (1965), cutting special-effects elements as far as possible and shooting the underground world on location at a gymnasium; again and again, he dispatched monsters with throws rather than the Spacium Beam. Episode 15, “Terrifying Cosmic Rays” (1966), and episode 23, “My Home Is Earth,” reversed Ultraman’s righteous position, making children cry, “Ultraman is a bastard!” Episode 35, “The Monster Graveyard” (1967), went further still, having Science Patrol member Fuji say outright, “Just because [the monsters] look different from us and are stronger than we are, they’ve been banished into space,” and having Hayata repent and apologize. Episode 34, “A Gift from the Sky” (1967), the series’ only comedy episode, sought to exploit the stupidity of tokusatsu, pumping hydrogen into a monster’s anus and having Hayata raise a spoon to transform.
The subversion of “I Want to Buy Kyoto” is subtler and more far-reaching. Indeed, this essay seeks to describe precisely that subtlety, to overturn prejudices about television images and even about Jissōji’s direction. Through the montage, we follow the camera from one old Kyoto temple to another, sensing the false continuity through which scenes outside one another’s frames, though not directly adjoining, combine into the scenery of the ancient capital. Viewpoints placed at arbitrary points in space create interactions between viewpoints; relations themselves—such as that between camera and character in terms of distance—begin to reveal relations with one another. Perhaps this is why the sudden close view of his bewildered profile, facing the left edge of the frame, gives us such a jolt. If we take Maki as our reference point, he seems trapped within the changing Kyoto scenery, within a continuous space-time that seems to present a homogeneous appearance. Reversing the coordinate system in this way, we might to some extent say that, with Shin Kishida as the embodied subject—the privileged image that serves as an anchor—the constantly changing yet continuous background image behind him becomes the more exceptional one. But his gaze is always directed towards an absolute out-of-field: that “something” he sees and perceives of which we can know nothing. This absolute out-of-field, a wholly heterogeneous presence, thus breaks the frame’s enclosure and ruptures the continuity of space-time, escaping homogeneous space-time to become a “something” spiritualized and made sacred. This is a further rupture within the ruptures of those indirect out-of-field relations that create a false connection. Beginning at internal faults, it repeatedly blasts open the framed image’s completeness, its organization as a set, its integration. Through the openness of the visible image’s infinite, ever-changing relations, a further connection is made to a “something” we cannot see. It asks us to perceive the imperceptible, and so the first, purest bewilderment is born. This spiritualized unknowable, hinted at everywhere, has already brought us an inexpressible feeling of confusion and disquiet, just as the “something” Motoko tries to find in Ghost in the Shell does. To put it in what may be a rather irritating way, this absent one—nowhere there at all, infinitely meaningless—has already suffused every part of the image with its colour, hasn’t it?
Beneath a huge deep-red parasol occupying the upper part of the image, Maki emerges from a roadside shop that seems chiefly to sell sake, walking right, in the opposite direction to the previous shot. The camera captures him in a relatively tight framing. In a composition that can only be called perfectly suited to the standard 4:3 frame, he takes a few short steps and lingers briefly. At that instant, the wind turns a picture of a yōkai, a supernatural creature, beside him towards us. Through this unbelievable “chance,” which can only be called cinema’s own, a pure event comes into being, completing the composition’s elements. In this sense, we may say that the image itself adjusts the image and its own montage. Continuing along the path that recedes into the right side of the image, he suddenly turns back towards us, as though someone behind the camera has called him, or as though he has suddenly realized or discovered something. Yet we still know nothing. In this bewilderment touched by loss, without cause or consequence, his reaction can only become the purely autonomous act of reacting itself. After a brief close-up from behind, at an angle unlike those before it, in which we can see a slight trembling of his facial muscles, a steady lateral tracking shot follows him through a dense cluster of stone pagodas. This is the only moving-camera shot in a passage composed mainly of relatively restrained fixed-camera shots since the feeding of the pigeons. It probably owed its realization to production assistance from Toei Kyoto, which allowed the camera crew to redeploy the lavish equipment from Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), whose shoot there had been halted and from which Kurosawa had departed. Learning from Toei Kyoto’s veteran camera technicians and introducing camera lifts and high-speed dollies capable of travelling long distances marked a conspicuous change in Jissōji’s direction in this episode. It is also one reason for the favourable shooting conditions mentioned earlier.
Within the pure-white, shifting mesh of flurrying snow, Maki passes through a temple gate. Above him are branches stripped of their leaves; the path has already been slightly dampened by the fine snow. Then, in a courtyard of luxuriant green, he stands beside a thickly mossed stone lantern, quietly smoking. The frame cuts him off at the shoulders and places him in the lower-left corner, while a huge, heavy, dark, cold rock blocks the space to the right. One can only marvel: surely this strange affinity is Jissōji’s very breathing. A few grains of snow rest on Maki’s black hair. The cloud he exhales rises vertically, making him blink a few extra times, clings briefly to his hair, then gradually dissolves into the cold air—a marvellous rendering of states of action, contact, and mixture. After a low-angle shot catches his back as he trots up some steps with his coat draped over his shoulders, we see him from farther away, standing before a courtyard gate and catching snowmelt dripping from the eaves in his hand. Shaking off the drops, he looks up, turns, smooths his hair, slips his other arm into its sleeve, and descends steps we cannot see, thus dropping below the camera’s level, which had been aligned with his head. As though playing a game of jumping from stone to stone, he hops in a zigzag into the depths of the landscape, within a frame inside the frame. The changes between fast and slow movement across the montage seem to locate the impulses driving his behaviour in the contingencies of his own circumstances and in sheer amusement. Whether it is grief that closes in on itself or pleasure that offers a little consolation, what we see is a body’s outwardly manifested power of acting in continuous variation—increasing, diminishing, increasing, diminishing. The montage arrangement that draws out micro–macro movement thus releases oscillating particles that sustain nothing but differential relations of motion and rest, fast and slow. These particles of movement blend with one another, passing through the subject, Shin Kishida, to communicate with one another. Movements interconnect and interact with precision to form this assemblage. Within it, the pure relations of fast and slow between particles of movement are themselves a desubjectifying movement that dismantles functional forms, turning Shin Kishida into a desubjectified, living material body.
The material body is itself constituted as a particular local relation of motion and rest. As it undergoes states of action, contact, and mixture, this differential relation of speeds runs through changes involving infinitely diverse parts. Under the ordering of Jissōji’s assemblage, the clouds Maki breathes out beside the stone lantern make human respiration visible, just like the white mist Miyako inadvertently exhales as she rounds the corner and slightly shakes her head. These clouds, the cold winter, white air, the speed of falling snow, moving wind, lush moss, dark cold rock, and clear chilly courtyard compose with one another as elements of states of heterogeneous intensity. This is not a physiological synchronization of body and landscape through rhythm. It is a material expansion of the body, spreading like cloud or mist, ungoverned by a pulse, with differences discernible down to a hundredth of a second. The body as an individual and winter as an individual occupy the same plane; landscape and body share states of motion and rest. Their characteristic relations compose with one another in an intrinsic accord, and so there emerges a world as a single body, or a single body as the world, in which even the slightest differences of speed and force combine.
Next, Maki sits in front of Hiranoya, pouring himself tea and drinking it. The composition draws directly and frontally on the design of the local architecture, deftly transforming it to its own use, making one exclaim: is Kyoto itself really this beautiful? The precisely judged dark red of the covering on the bench outside the entrance plays conspicuously against the earlier parasol’s deep red across the surface of this clear, chilly visual field. The lively red and the muted yellow of the lantern included on the right fit beautifully into the image. From beginning to end, the flowing lyrical melody has been so well suited to the scenery and the character’s gestures and movements. In the sequence’s final shot, background noise returns: anyone can tell that the briefly suspended story is about to resume, that Maki will encounter Miyako again. Sure enough, as he strolls through a garden, he sees a Buddhist nun on a path, dressed in black with a white cloth over her head, sweeping with her head lowered. In the composition containing the two of them, a red flower at the top, nearest to us and seemingly placed there deliberately, stands out against the sombre background. It inevitably recalls the two or three violets, out of focus and then in focus, in Red Desert (1964), which Pasolini mentions in his praise of Antonioni’s cinema of poetry as utterly free, poetic objects of formalism. On hearing the resolute request that he forget Miyako, who intends to spend the rest of her life with the statues, Maki can only stand speechless, choked with emotion. A lonely light shines in his eyes; his fingers slowly touch and pass across his lips. He turns away, shrinking into himself, but cannot resist looking back once more—only to find a Buddhist statue standing before him.
If, until now, the landscape has been contracting in the opposite direction as the human body expands without a governing pulse—a facialization, a face in harmony with the present moment and its weather—then this evolution through the double capture of body and landscape truly manifests itself in her. She becomes a Buddhist statue, appearing before him as a Buddhist statue, exceeding life itself, crossing the final line, and only then truly bursting into silence. From the proliferation of multiple viewpoints in the Kyoto landscape montage, we arrive at a silence that gathers at a single point and explodes. Becoming a Buddhist statue is pure stillness at its maximum; it may also be regarded as an absolute state of movement. At this moment, the ringing of a wandering monk’s bell is sounding silence at its maximum. A tear slips from the eye of the purely motionless statue. The tear is purification, purity, bathing. Before the gulf that severs them from one another, this single, minute movement she leaves him resonates and intertwines with sounding silence, giving rise to still greater sublimation and stilling. Before this absolute movement or absolute stillness, in its continually entangled feedback, surely anyone would feel only fear—and flee, taking the clamour of worldly traffic with them.
I thought this nearly perfect episode would end there. But the superb cinematography and editing of the images accompanying the closing song bring an even more enduring aftershock. Street noise runs throughout. The camera films electrical wires densely webbing the sky, the city’s smoke, dilapidated houses; it attends carefully and patiently to a sheet of plastic fluttering in the wind. A square, flat-sided high-rise stands between grey, low houses and a distant old temple like a foreign body lodged in a windpipe. Beyond the river’s surface, glittering in the setting sun, industrial chimneys tower. Suddenly, with the refrain, snow comes tumbling down; a train passes beyond the uneven succession of old rooftops. In this persistent recording of a chaotic landscape, I feel a bewilderment and disquiet like Maki’s as he wanders through Kyoto. Smoke, plastic sheeting, drifting winter snow: the recording of these details does not seek to distinguish and contrast their respective meanings. On the contrary, they merge, simply stating themselves, without attempting to go beyond those statements. Of course, Jissōji has always taken a particular interest in the expansion of new urban landscapes and the old landscapes on the verge of vanishing. Ultraman’s image overlaps with that of developers and construction firms bearing the mantle of righteousness during the years of rapid economic growth, while the requiem for monsters is an elegy for landscapes destined for destruction and disappearance—for the so-called spirit of place. In Jissōji’s own Ultraman episodes, we often see records of contemporary construction sites, such as timber yards and quarries. But what is so good about these closing images is that they do not declare their position as nakedly as “The Untargeted City” (2005), episode 24 of Ultraman Max, and therefore do not fall into the tyranny of redundant signification.
In fact, I think the entire passage discussed here, including the images accompanying the closing song, embodies an aesthetics that begins with texture. What is texture? Light in diffusion and flow. Take the ending of “The Targeted Town”: bubbles on the water nearby, smoke from distant chimneys, the red setting sun, the town’s lights, the aircraft’s beautiful, fleeting flow of crimson light, the lights flashing in Ultraman’s eyes and on Alien Metron’s body, the flash of an explosion and the smoke curling and scattering… As things, they mingle with other things, scattering in every direction, proliferating. Colour spreads and extends in this way, giving all the shots an aesthetic consistency. Light’s own flow and self-manifestation expand from a single scene in “The Targeted Town” to an entire sequence in “I Want to Buy Kyoto.” I said earlier that Jissōji was anti-tokusatsu. But that was wrong. This is tokusatsu. Perhaps it is fitting to end with Deleuze’s brief, mysterious maxim:4 image = movement = matter = light.