A Certain Dark Corner of Modern Cinema

Abstract

Japanese director Naomi Kawase (born 1969) is a celebrated filmmaker on the contemporary stage of World Cinema. Her best-known feature films since Suzaku (1997) have been screened and acclaimed widely, both on the film festival circuit, and (more intermittently) in art-house cinema seasons. These elaborately stylised yet strikingly personal narratives, shot on 35 millimetre film, have invited comparison with current masters such as Alexander Sokurov and Terrence Malick — especially in their exploration of sublime, spiritual themes and subjects, such as the constant return to motifs of birth and death.

My body … is not plunged in one unique and specified variety of space. It works in Euclidean space, but it only works there. It sees in a projective space; it touches, caresses and feels in a topological space; it suffers in another and hears and communicates in a third … This intersection, these junctions always need to be constructed. And in gene ral whoever is unsuccessful is considered sick. Her body explodes from the disconnection of spaces.

Michel Serres (1983, p. 44, translation amended)