From solitude to ruins. The sinister and the crisis of identity in the films of Kiyoshi Kurosawa
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Abstract
Three films by Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa - Cure (1997), Pulse (Kairo, 2001) and Retribution (Sakebi, 2006) - are analysed from a common perspective: the sense of disintegration or end of society to which his visual treatment of urban space points. Kurosawa resorts to narratives of solitary characters who become progressively alienated from their surroundings. At the same time, his shots reimagine the city of Tokyo as an extension and amplification of the mental state of these characters. Either through apocalyptic representations, or through the location of ruins - whose scenes are the focus of the analysis - that evoke ghostly reminiscences of the city's erased history. Such an image of Tokyo offers its sinister reverse, the disturbing emptiness that remains after stripping it of its postmodern signifiers. This expressive strategy relates to Japan's national identity crisis in the 1990s, the result of a long recession. Faced with the stagnation of social and economic progress, Kurosawa's genre mechanisms filter identity loss and buried historical memory.
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