Millennium Actress—Satoshi Kon’s Nymph

Away! Burn all the records of the realm.

First of all, we must recognize the profoundly epic character of Millennium Actress. This is a premise we need to keep in mind before attending to the many other remarkable qualities of this masterpiece.

This is because, from the outset, Kon is not recounting an actual episode from the film industry of the Shōwa era (1926–1989). (Chiyoko has no single real-life model: she is a composite of Setsuko Hara, Hideko Takamine, Machiko Kyō, Sayuri Yoshinaga, and other actresses who shone in their day; film companies such as Toei and Toho are still alive and well, too.) Instead, through the artistic and aesthetic experience animation affords, he creates a memory of the past for us. And precisely because this longing for a beautiful experience is not purely inward, it points us toward a past we could not otherwise touch. In other words, through artistic technique in Agamben’s sense, Kon conveys Chiyoko’s story to us as a “truth” about the history of modern Japanese cinema and culture. The story does not pre-exist the world that the director and we inhabit. On the contrary, it was created expressly to let us trace our way back toward an impossible past. If, then, epic storytelling is an art directed toward the past, this tracing-back is by no means what it appears to be: a restoration of the past—which would be impossible. Rather, it constructs, through artistic technique, a framework that can itself serve as a memory of the past, giving us a basis from which to confront the reality of the present.

So when the succession of films within the film interweaves seamlessly with Chiyoko’s recollections, making it difficult to distinguish her screen performances from her actual experiences, we should abandon the attempt to tell them apart. As Kon explains in an interview, an outsider can easily distinguish dreams and films within films from the real world: “But for the person who is experiencing them, everything is real.”¹

Kon sets out to depict this condition, and so uses this interwoven framework in both Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress. From the beginning, he wanted Millennium Actress to be “a movie like a trompe l’oeil.”¹ The film does indeed contain scenes of this kind. Determined to reach the painter’s hometown in Hokkaido, Chiyoko jumps off a bus halted by a snowstorm and presses on through the snow on foot. As she walks, the scene shifts into a science-fiction film she once appeared in: now “astronaut” Chiyoko advances resolutely across the white desert of Mars. Eventually, at the desert’s far edge, she sees an oil painting of a snowy landscape that the painter once gave her. The scenery inside the painting blends perfectly with the background outside it. For a dreamlike moment, the painter himself seems to stand just ahead. But as Chiyoko rejoices, he waves and disappears; the camera moves, exposing the misalignment between the painting and its surroundings. There was no painter in the painting after all. The painter she saw there was object a, visible to Chiyoko only through looking awry.² His disappearance from the painting is thus hardly surprising: object a can represent the originally missing object only on condition that it, too, is missing. And the absence of this difference—object a—also seems to account for the loss of perfect love.

But hadn’t the painter already disappeared decades before his figure, seen from behind, vanished from this painting? (The old military policeman’s confession to the young Genya tells us that the painter had long since been secretly executed.) Lack always precedes the loss of object a; the loss of object a is merely an imaginary compensation for the original lack. Besides, the figure in the painting, as an object, could never compensate for the ultimate lack in Chiyoko’s desire. Only by disappearing from the painting can it remain a sublime object, maintaining its transcendence in relation to the subject. Let us not forget that this is the reality Chiyoko recounts: after getting off a long-distance bus and setting out for Hokkaido on foot, she could not possibly have walked onto Mars.

Doesn’t the film scene of “astronaut” Chiyoko advancing across Mars also merge imperceptibly, like a trompe-l’œil image, with her recollection of walking through the snow? If there were a supposedly factual version of events, it would most likely show Chiyoko arriving in Hokkaido in a sorry state, making inquiries, and learning that the painter had died during the war. The audience would then have to “guess” at her changing thoughts and feelings from her expressions and gestures. Rather than being shown her recollections, we would find ourselves shut out by those very recollections. Instead, Chiyoko—or, we might say, Kon—substitutes an allegorical scene from a film within the film for a direct presentation of the supposed “actual circumstances.” Through an aesthetic and artistic understanding, we are given an art of memory with which to face the past. In this fictional scene, we can better feel what Chiyoko is going through at that moment.

We can certainly say that the life story Chiyoko tells in the interview, constantly flashing back and forth between recollections of her life and film plots, is just as false as the films she appeared in. But isn’t this disappearance of real life within the film precisely what provides an imaginary compensation for the epic Millennium Actress’s claim to truth?

We can see, then, that Chiyoko’s recollections during the interview are not a product of some purely objective realm. They constitute a memory constructed to resist forgetting. Chiyoko has forgotten the painter’s face but still remembers their promise; forgetting only brings out the depth of memory. Thus, although the film appears to consist of numerous passages paying homage to other films, as a whole it displays, to some extent, the “large form” of the action-image in Deleuze’s sense.

In other words, within the overall “ambient space” constituted by recollection itself lies, in a latent state, the totality of qualities and powers from which states of things or events emerge. Take Throne of Blood, one of the films to which Millennium Actress pays homage. There, the encompassing whole Kurosawa establishes is the desire for power. The ruler’s castle is power’s domain: its enormous gates, towering buildings, and countless arrow slits make the space itself proclaim the intimidating force of sovereign authority. That force acts upon the characters, provoking savage slaughter. Spider’s Web Forest, meanwhile, with its dense fog and tangled branches, is a labyrinth of desire. Those trapped within it rush about seeking an exit, only to return again and again to where they began. Recollection is the encompassing whole of Millennium Actress—so much so that, after the shift from the Manchurian story to the Warring States story, Kon stages an awakening to remind us that these film fragments must be understood within Chiyoko’s recollections in the interview.

Corresponding to this encompassing whole of recollection is the characters’ amnesia about the preceding film’s circumstances as one film gives way to another. With each transition in the montage, the characters seem to be deprived of memory—because these are different films. Yet the crucial memory that shapes Chiyoko’s life, her bios, mysteriously persists unchanged, attaching itself to different objects in different films. This also secretly explains why Chiyoko remains young throughout her performing career: memory is essential to living.

At the same time, we discover another presence lurking with the same mysterious constancy: the old witch who will not go away, set against the young Chiyoko (not Eiko, who represents more the standpoint of everyday ethics). Like her prototype in Throne of Blood, the witch is a ghostly presence: she quietly vanishes when we draw near, then suddenly reappears just as we are about to forget her, announcing Chiyoko’s miserable future in a tone of revelation. According to Roland Barthes’s account in A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, the woman at the spinning wheel is a sorrowful old woman (a virgin) pining for her husband. She has time on her hands, spinning as she softly sings; her spinning songs express both serenity and a forlorn sense of absence.³

If we interpret Chiyoko’s waiting negatively, what we arrive at is precisely the tragedy symbolized by the spinning witch. The witch’s superimposition on Chiyoko in the final scene seems, on one level, to offer pessimistic confirmation of this. But we cannot overlook one thing: it is precisely this despicable witch’s deception that makes the young princess drink the “tea of a thousand years of life,” subjecting her to the ageless “curse” of “a fate of burning in the flames of love for all eternity.” This is not a paradox in which “I” deceive “myself.” Rather, we need to see that, for Chiyoko, the spinning witch seems to be something “within me, but not me.” She inhabits the very core of Chiyoko’s body in recollection and, as an “organ without a body,” is the spectral voice issuing from within her. Or, to put it another way, she is the so-called voice-object: object a.

We could say that the spinning witch is precisely the superego organ controlling Chiyoko from within. She could hardly be a more concrete metaphor for the self-control Chiyoko exercises over her body throughout her acting career. Chiyoko is not dazzled by the entertainment industry’s glitter and excess; she remains pure, awaiting love. In the animation—in recollection—this even takes the form of perpetual youth. Decades pass and she still has a girl’s face, while Eiko has turned into a middle-aged auntie. The terrifying witch is to Chiyoko what the undead wound in Kafka’s “A Country Doctor” is to the body: it lives parasitically on my body while preventing me from growing old or dying.

Every appearance of the spinning witch is therefore, for Chiyoko, an experience of a disembodied divine gaze. On the one hand, this is a terrifying ultimate nightmare; on the other, it is an opportunity for Chiyoko to examine herself from outside, through an objective gaze. In much the same way, the witches in Macbeth, the source for Throne of Blood, are not only mockers but indispensable guides who allow Macbeth’s story to unfold. (In other words, Macbeth embarking on his tragic fate out of ambition is better than Macbeth modestly settling down from the outset as a Scottish Duke of Anle—then there would be no great play called Macbeth.)⁴ At this level, the memory that shapes Chiyoko’s very life should be understood as already haunted by this ghost. In Stiegler’s words, being haunted means remembering something we have never experienced in the present, remembering “what, in essence, has never had the form of presence.”⁵ So whenever the spinning witch appears, we should be glad that aging and despair are, at that moment, merely appearances of an inner essence. This holds even at the end, when Chiyoko soars onward in her rocket: after the witch’s reflection overlaps with the aged Chiyoko, Chiyoko instead passes from her aged appearance back to her youthful face.

The key, a recurring thread through the story, repeatedly serves the same awakening function. Finding the painter is the fundamental reason Chiyoko embarks on an acting career. Yet with repeated failures and the passing years, her career gradually represses the search for him. This very repression, however, leaves a blank at the root of her increasingly celebrated career. What represents that blank is the key that has lost its lock—or, in other words, the phallus, a signifier without a signified. (At the same time, this also gives form to the repressed, silent figure of the painter, whom countless cinematic figures try and fail to represent: the object a Chiyoko glimpses in the painting, a signified without a signifier.)

So after the spinning witch’s last appearance before the ending, the key promptly disappears as well: the film director courting Chiyoko has hidden it. After a brief struggle, Chiyoko suddenly seems to resign herself to her fate. Declaring that she is already “past the age of dreaming,” she marries the privileged young director and retires to become a housewife. In a sense, this announces the end of Chiyoko’s life as a legendary actress. Memory is our life; to deprive us of memory is to deprive us of life. Life stripped of memory is bare, to use Agamben’s term: like a beast, it wastes its days in a stupor. But the moment Chiyoko finds the key again while cleaning the storeroom, she is instantly “illuminated by memory” and re-enters her true life. Chiyoko the actress begins to shine again in all her incomparable splendor. (She subsequently loses the key once more; Genya returns it to her, setting this fantastical “interview-performance” in motion.)

We should note that the memory of Chiyoko’s true life is precisely the life we discussed at the beginning, in which reality and film interweave. Finding the key therefore also means resuming her acting career. Cinema itself is an image-centered technology of memory. We must not forget that Chiyoko’s story has, from the beginning, been Genya’s interview. To commemorate the Ginei studio, which is about to be demolished, Genya, the production-company president, makes a visual record of its former star, Chiyoko. What he is attempting is precisely to provide evidence for historical memory through recorded images.

Genya’s interview has many other fascinating aspects worth discussing. His stance as interviewer, together with the illusion Kon deliberately creates through montage, initially makes it seem that we are watching the world of Chiyoko’s recollections through Genya and Kyōji’s camera. Their furtive, peeping behavior at the outset seems to confirm this. But from the moment the camera on Kyōji’s shoulder enters the frame, we should realize that it is bound to end up as a mere prop. Sure enough, Genya himself becomes directly involved in remembering together with Chiyoko. The earlier anchoring of the cine-eye in the interview’s viewpoint is thus negated. Yet the earlier montage has already brought about the disappearance of a centered state of things.

In other words, through a remarkably ingenious device, Kon prevents us from treating this world simply as Chiyoko recounting her memories, or as Genya and Kyōji merely observing and recording. Instead, he turns this world of interwoven recollections and films back toward a centerless state of things, allowing the dizzying events in its different films to nestle against one another. Across all the narrative images encompassed by the interview, a condition emerges in which there is no perceiving subject in the phenomenological sense. Perception in the story has no fixed center—or rather, its center is everywhere. Perception inheres in the things themselves, in everything that happens within each apparently disconnected film fragment. Rather than Genya interviewing or Chiyoko narrating, what we have is Chiyoko’s story showing itself.

As Tengu, the masked rescuer, and a former assistant director at Ginei, Genya knows every film Chiyoko appeared in inside out. Yet only the process of remembering together with her can reveal a past beyond the reach of his own internal memory-retention. (Kyōji, meanwhile, remains an embarrassed onlooker, different even from us in the audience, so it is entirely fitting that he should carry the camera that is merely a prop.) Images alone—whether the films Chiyoko acted in, the past events and feelings in her and Genya’s minds, or even the automatic mechanisms generated by the interconnections among them—cannot in themselves be equated with memory. The great movie-medley adventure Chiyoko and Genya experience as they remember is precisely an attempt to reconstruct images in order to restore a virtual past, and thereby restore possibility to the things of the past. In this interview, a different memory is produced, more panoramic and more finely textured than before. The key returns to Chiyoko’s hands once again, and once again she remains forever young as she presses onward in pursuit.

Finally, then, if we are to interpret Chiyoko’s endless pursuit of the painter in Millennium Actress from an Agambenian perspective, we cannot simply regard it as the ultimate control exerted by male power over this female character. We must recognize that Chiyoko represents precisely those Japanese films of the Shōwa era—the images themselves. Agamben likens the image to a nymph, forever seeking union with human beings in order to open the possibility of access to memory and the past.⁶ This, it seems, is “Chiyoko’s” most secret pursuit. It is also the true revelation of the Ginei studio reduced to rubble at the film’s opening: the shot immediately following Chiyoko’s collapse cuts seamlessly to Ginei’s demolition.

For the image is not purely a thing. It exists on a threshold between fully alive beings and inert matter. It has something it can articulate, signs of its own, a grammar, and principles of expression. The image thus reveals to us a possible way to the past. This is why Genya watches Ginei’s old films so obsessively, over and over, never tiring of them. Yet the image cannot by itself open the barriers enclosing sensory experience. This possibility requires a force external to the image if it is to be realized, activated. At the beginning of the film, for instance, Genya watches a rocket shaking as it prepares to launch; a sudden real earthquake instantly opens a sensory passage between the inside and outside of the image, giving even the audience a dreamlike jolt. And the films within the film, with their many homages to older works, are precisely nymphs within which fragments of the past lie sealed. Only at this level do we suddenly recognize that Millennium Actress is in fact Kon’s love letter to Japanese cinema. Through his richly imaginative animation, Kon gives tangible expression to his love for that cinema. As this imagination attaches itself to the images, the nymph, joined with human beings, opens up; the image completes its passage from nymph to living being.

The sweeping past of Japanese cinema and cultural history presented in Millennium Actress is therefore a memory created within the pathos formula of our encounter with the nymphs, infused with Kon’s amorous imagination and our own.⁷ What happens in Millennium Actress, then, is that countless little image-nymphs gather into one immense Mnemosyne-nymph. Through activated images, our technologies of memory gain the possibility of access to the past. In that moment, imagination allows memory to be reborn again and again.

As if in a dream, Ulysses seems truly to have returned to the Ithaca that fills his heart and dreams.

Editor’s note: Bravo!

Text in the image:

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