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In Wim Wenders’ documentary Tokyo-ga (1985), a run-in with fellow countryman Werner Herzog on the observation deck of Tokyo Tower leads to a conversation about the aesthetics of Japan’s hypermodernization. Pointing down towards the famously asymmetrical lines of Tokyo’s streets, Herzog tells Wenders, “From here you can see that everything is extremely built up. There are few images to be found. One has to dig for them like an archaeologist. One has to search through this ravaged landscape to find anything at all.” Herzog says he is in search of “pure” images, “transparent” images that can accurately represent times times, and reflect inner experience, perhaps now only available on worlds other than our own (to which he would travel if he could). Meanwhile Wenders travels back down to the streets in search of a Tokyo past, the Tokyo of Yasujiro Ozu, a difficult task while distracted by spectacles of increasing virtuality, lingering over late-night golfers at the driving ranges and the manufacturers of plastic food replicas seen in restaurant windows all over town. Here Tokyo is a surface that reflects itself back onto its inhabitants in response to its own density.

Preoccupation with cities as surfaces replete with virtual spaces are commonplace in writings about urban experience, particularly rampant in theories of postmodernity that emerged around the time of Wenders’ trip to Tokyo, a city that became emblematic of space without a center, culture without a subject. Herzog’s appeal to terms like transparency and purity as the only way to access inner experience in the external world is emblematic of a particularly Western view of the world. And I use the word “view” as an exemplar of the visual bias that goes along with this kind of thinking. Yet these German outsiders looking into a city not their own resonate with critiques of urban experience from the perspective of sound as well. In the work of early acoustic ecology, born in Canada in the late 1960s, urbanization posed many related problems. R. Murray Schafer used terms like “hi-fi” to mark a clarity of sound marred by the “lo-fi” density brought by urban environments. And he used the term “schizophonia” as a marker of his fear of virtuality, the power of sound technologies to conflate the space of the unamplified present with sounds recorded and transported from other times and places. The limitations of this thinking have been critiqued at length.

In this essay I will explore an alternative perspective on urban experience, and of Japan’s modern cities in particular, by way of the work of Sogo Ishii, a filmmaker whose unusually varied output from 1976-2005 has addressed the challenges posed by Japan’s post-WWII modernization and, by extension, challenged what it means to live and be human in late 20th Century cities. I argue that across his trajectory making films under the name Sogo Ishii (which he changed to Gaku-ryu Ishii after 2005) we find a uniquely coherent progression of ideas about how to navigate the dramatic transformations in urban space in post-war Japan. Following his characters over the years we discover people for whom the density and peculiar living demands of the modern city first proved impenetrable, like Herzog on the tower proclaiming that he must travel to Mars to find images capable of expressing pure humanity, but through which they learn to navigate, make peace with, and ultimately thrive within. Importantly, to access this narrative arc across Sogo Ishii’s output we must listen as much as we look, for one recurring aesthetic strategy across all the films is the exploration of silence as a marker of interiority that can simultaneously mark a connection to worlds far away. For Sogo Ishii, cinematic silence has been his answer to the quest for transparency within the surface density of millennial Tokyo.

This chapter will trace Sogo Ishii’s use of dramatic fluctuations in auditory extension, epitomized by moments of absolute silence, as an aesthetic device that is consistently tied to themes of urban anxiety and alienation. Silence can act as powerful punctuation, but it is also highly reflexive in pointing to the blank space that is filled in by the filmmakers, like a blank set waiting to be decorated. In the context of Japanese cinema, the aesthetic use of silence also has a connection to the Buddhist concept of mu: an empty space that nevertheless suggests endless possibility, significant only in relation to the form that surrounds it. The idea of mu as an aesthetic principle will aid my discussion of how silence operates in Ishii’s work in which themes of urban alienation speak to universal issues raised by modern cities throughout the Western world, as well as the specifics of Japanese culture in the decades following World War II.

The line between sound and image exposed by Ishii’s use of silence often serves to expose the divide between tradition and modernity in Japanese culture, a subject that Ishii’s films regularly explore. Ishii’s use of silence also exposes the line between interior experience and the external world that his characters must acknowledge if they are to engage more fully with the worlds in which they live. The films of Sogo Ishii use strategies of audiovisual reflexivity in order to call attention to the mediated nature of the worlds they represent, and in so doing they present characters who are also becoming aware of the mediation between their internal experience and the external world. Ultimately I argue that silence in the films of Sogo Ishii has evolved from a marker of schizophonic rupture to a sign of deep interiority that can heighten one’s engagement within urban space. As such, these films are models of a self-reflexive approach to audiovisual synchronization that highlights the positive potential of urban experience.

To guide my analysis I will draw on the discourse of the cinematic city and its intersection with acoustic ecology, with a particular emphasis on theories of engagement between pedestrians and the built environment. I argue that we can understand Sogo Ishii’s characters as evolving across the filmmaker’s career, demonstrating increasing levels of engagement with urban space through the navigation of the line that separates interior experience and external reality. In the discussions that follow I will tie the key threads in the discourse of the cinematic city together, and examine how these play out in Ishii’s work with a particular emphasis on the films Isolation of 1 in 880,000 (1977), Angel Dust (1994), Electric Dragon 80,000 V (2000), and Mirrored Mind (2005).

Sogo Ishii’s Unlikely Trajectory through Silence

Writing for the online journal Midnight Eye, Japanese film specialist Tom Mes suggests that Sogo Ishii has been “the most important Japanese filmmaker of the last three decades” (2007, par. 1). However, Ishii’s work remains underappreciated both at home and abroad with very little critical writing available in any language. One of the key members of the 1970s post-new wave generation of Japanese filmmakers, Ishii was a pioneering university-based 8mm filmmaker, and the one most closely connected to the punk music scene in Japan. He is arguably the most significant film director to document musical performers and performances in Japan (i.e. 1/2 Mensch, 1986, on the German “noise band” Einstürzende Neubauten) and one of the foremost punk film aestheticians in the world (i.e. Panic in High School, 1976; Burst City, 1982). He was also a pioneering director of 1980s action (Shuffle, 1981) and comedy (Crazy Family, 1984). Following a 10 year hiatus from feature filmmaking (during which time he produced a handful of short films alongside commercial work and music videos), he returned in the mid-1990s with a series of films that marked a significant aesthetic and thematic shift away from the visceral chaos of his punk sensibility to a more measured, contemplative, and metaphysical approach. In his three 1990s films, Angel Dust (1994), August in the Water (1995) and Labyrinth of Dreams(1997), he also turned away from his previous male-centered narratives to stories driven by central female characters. And in the last ten years his films Electric Dragon 80,000 V (2000), Gojoe (2001), Dead End Run (2003), and Mirrored Mind (2005) have demonstrated a remarkable blend of the various styles he has employed in the past, pushing these genres into increasingly new territories.

Tom Mes describes Ishii’s career as “an ongoing evolution rather than a clearly delineated body of work,” yet one that has nevertheless resulted in “an oeuvre of great cohesion” (2007, par. 2). To some, his marked stylistic shifts might suggest an uneven aesthetic sensibility. His earliest work in the 1970s bears the amateur markers of the 8mm film movement in Japan, full of shaky hand-held cinematography, in-camera editing complete with technical anomalies, and rough location sound recording and clunky overdubs. This early style developed into a well-formed punk aesthetic that found its apex in Burst City. This film features incredible volleys of visceral camera movement and frenetic montage that turn a post-apocalyptic landscape into an abstract world of light, the thick grain of the 16mm blow-up to 35mm as much a political statement as the distortion on the instruments of the punk bands that populate its diegesis. Peter Rist argues that the kind of visceral camera movement that permeates Ishii’s early work, tied to a recurring chase motif, has had a major influence on the current trend of chase films in Hollywood (2010, 35). While moments reminiscent of the early Ishii recur in his later films, 21st Century films like Gojoe are as technically polished as any big budget studio films produced in Japan. And his last film under the Sogo Ishii moniker, Mirrored Mind, is comprised of predominantly static long-take high-definition digital photography of spaces often silent or gently accompanied by sparse Gamelan music. Indeed, even the most attuned critic would have trouble identifying films from his early period with his more recent work. Yet in the midst of Ishii’s ongoing evolution there has been a remarkable thematic consistency across his work, the vast majority of which revolves around struggles to find coherence within the increasingly urban space of modern Japan. And there has been at least one stylistic consistency that recurs throughout his work: the exploration of pockets of silence within the dense and noisy metropolis.

The absence of recorded sound was commonplace in the early days of the synchronized sound film. Technological limitations meant that it wasn’t practical to fill in every second of a film with some kind of auditory material, and filmmakers were not yet convinced that such a thing was even desirable. For many, the coming of synchronized sound was license to explore silence as an aesthetic alternative to the norms of the “silent” era in which films were generally presented with music performed continuously throughout their running times. But with advances in multi-track capabilities the use of environmental ambience became commonplace after WWII, and, along with the persistence of musical scoring as a necessary component to narrative film, it is once again very rare to hear a complete dropout on the soundtrack. Indeed, this situation might also stem from the fact that there really is no such thing as absolute silence in the real world. As John Cage famously reported, even when confined to one of the quietest possible environments on earth – an anechoic chamber – one is confronted with the deafening sounds of one’s own body, internal noise that not even the deaf can escape (1991). Conventions of realism thus dictate that a complete absence of recorded sound on a film’s soundtrack is a disruption that exposes the artifice of the medium. Yet because of this, as in the early days of synchronized sound, moments of absolute silence can be used to powerful cinematic effect, precisely because they break with both convention and the norms of human experience. And few have incorporated silent breaks into their films as richly as Sogo Ishii. The use of silence is highly malleable and can function well in countless of narrative and aesthetic situations, which has given Sogo Ishii the opportunity to maintain his interest in its potential across the highly varied stylistic approaches he has brought to so many other levels of his filmmaking practice, particularly montage and camera movement. I will begin this exegesis with an example from Electric Dragon 80,000, the film that intersects many of his stylistic and thematic concerns within a single film.

The Ancient and the Modern: Electric Dragon 80,000 V

Sogo Ishii’s film Electric Dragon 80,000 V is the clearest amalgam of all of Ishii’s stylistic tendencies over the years, making for an extremely dense and sometimes erratic formal re-visitation of his earlier work. It is also arguably the clearest expression of the main theme that I am going to excise in his work: that of a character’s struggle to find balance within the metropolis of Tokyo, itself a dense and often erratic terrain. Made several years after a marked stylistic shift from his high-energy gangster/punk films to the contemplative psychological thrillers of the 1990s, Electric Dragon is in many ways a return to the anarchy celebrated in films like Burst City and Crazy Thunder Road. Yet it also bears the mark of a highly refined audiovisual stylist, with ultra-crisp cinematography and an elegance of montage that was decidedly absent from his early work. Alexander Zahlten has focused on these qualities to suggest that the film is only a superficial return to the punk aesthetic, amounting to something of an empty formal exercise without the true anarchic spirit that made his early punk films so iconic for the Japanese punk movement (2009).

Value judgments aside, the film is the first in a series of 21st century films that demonstrate a major refinement of the director’s technical skills while remaining true to a thematic path concerning urban engagement, along with a particularly Japanese interest in the co-existence of the ancient and the modern within contemporary Tokyo. The film also contains poignant examples of Ishii’s recurring interest in representing urban experience through fluctuations in auditory extension and moments of absolute silence. As I will demonstrate, Ishii’s approach to sound design is tied to themes of urban anxiety and the search for coherence within the chaos of the city.

After suffering a severe electrical shock, the reptilian area of a young boy’s brain is awakened, and he grows into a man with uncanny abilities to harness electrical current and communicate with reptiles. He takes the name Dragon-Eye Morrison (Tadanobu Asano), an embodiment of the co-existence of the ancient and the modern, and appropriately earns his living finding lost pet lizards within the city while playing electric guitar on the side. Much of the film is spent following Dragon-Eye as he roams the city in search of lizards. Meanwhile he is being stalked by a mysterious stranger known as Thunderbolt Buddha (Masatoshi Nagase), wearing a metallic Buddha mask over one side of his face and sporting high-tech audio surveillance gear.

While Dragon-Eye is a definitive pedestrian, Thunderbolt spends much time on the rooftops of the city, scanning cell-phone conversations and surveying the targets of his unexplained vigilante exploits. The film evolves as a kind of dance choreographed around the movements of these two characters as they come closer and closer. Finally, Thunderbolt pays a visit to Dragon-Eye’s home while the latter is out, viciously slaughters his lizard collection and chops his guitar into hundreds of little pieces. Enraged upon his return home, Dragon-Eye explodes in an electrical fury, running through the streets of Tokyo as electrical boxes overload and explode all around him. He finds Thunderbolt Buddha on a high-rise rooftop where they battle it out to the end. It is a contest between the ancient and the modern: we are told that Thunderbolt’s powers emerged from a lighting strike, while Dragon-Eye’s came from technologically harnessed electricity, a fact that Thunderbolt uses as supposed evidence of the superiority of nature over technology. Yet in practice, Thunderbolt is far more technologically engaged than Dragon-Eye, the latter spending most of his time getting in tune with the ancient part of his brain as way of navigating the modern city. In the end, Dragon-Eye is the last one standing after a battle sequence as viscerally charged as anything Ishii has filmed before or since (although Thunderbolt Buddha doesn’t so much “die” as “dissipate” amidst the lighting clouds that gathered over the city as they fought, his energy returning to its point of origin).

Although the two men are positioned as opposites who clash, the two men also fight battles within themselves. Thunderbolt is positioned as a figure literally divided, half Buddha half-man. At one point he even attacks himself in a slapstick-sequence where one hand tries to force a taser into his own face while the other hand struggles to keep it at bay. Dragon-Eye, on the other hand, is not so much divided as he is mixed, a man whose reptilian ancestry expresses itself through the flow of modern electrical current. He doesn’t fight with himself, but sometimes his primal urges require expression through the modern technology of the electric guitar. As such, the two men stand as differing expressions of the idea of the ancient and the modern co-existing: one as a mixture where the old fuels the new and vice-versa, the other as competing elements where points of intersection between the old and new create tensions. The two men are symbolic of different takes on urban experience, and in turn they act as metaphors for audiovisual ecology in the cinema: a medium divided along the lines of sound and image yet whose audiovisual totality is a function of the inextricable links between its two component parts.

The theme of tradition and modernity co-existing in Japanese culture is embodied by these two men. This theme is formally supported by the film’s interest in plays on auditory extension – how far into the distance we can hear – as a way of representing the urban soundscape. In one of the most iconic scenes in all of Ishii’s work, the camera follows Dragon-Eye down narrow alleyways as he searches for a lost lizard. A moment of silence precedes a fade to black, and then some non-diegetic music emerges as we fade-in on a wooded environment. Then we cut to two shots of Dragon-Eye moving through the woods and finding the lizard he sought, with a simultaneous cut on the soundtrack to the sounds of leaves crunching under his feet and birds chirping from the trees. The space becomes, for a moment, distinctly rural. Finally we cut to a wide shot revealing that this rural setting is actually a tiny plot of vegetation within the busy city. There is a simultaneous cut on the soundtrack and traffic noise now dominates the soundscape. With this last audiovisual cut we discover that the previous shot’s soundscape consisted of an artificially limited auditory extension to match the narrow view of the space on the image track. This strategy creates the sense that the forested environment is a space distinct from the city that surrounds it, when in fact it is a part of this surrounding space. Dragon-Eye is able to find ancient spaces within the metropolis, signified by the limiting of urban noise within his soundscape. As such, Electric Dragon suggests a path where the main character embraces his conflicted nature, making productive use of his primitive leanings within his modern environment.

Thunderbolt Buddha also has the capacity to play with auditory extension, yet for him it is the result of modern sound technologies. At one point in the film, Thunderbolt is scanning cell phone frequencies in an attempt to hone in on the conversation of a gangster he is stalking. Having found the frequency, he listens in on the conversation while keeping the gangster in view on the balcony of a nearby building. At one point the gangster is presented in a long shot, while the sound of his voice is given in auditory close-up as heard through Thunderbolt’s headset. The effect is disconcerting, an unnatural extension afforded by schizophonic technology. Where Dragon-Eye is able to narrow his extension to focus on his immediate environment, Thunderbolt seeks to artificially extend his hearing in order to focus on things that are far away.

Each of these examples demonstrates the creation of a hi-fi soundscape that transcends the masking qualities of urban noise pollution, and each example approaches the representation of this soundscape in a different way. In the first example, mise-en-scène is closely connected to the sound design; when we see only the wooded environment, we hear only sounds that seem appropriate to that environment. As soon as urban features of the mise-en-scène are revealed through an adjustment in the framing, the sound changes to suit. In the second example, Ishii takes the opposite approach. A long shot of the gangster on the phone is paired with the close-miked sound of his voice, the soundtrack thereby defying the distance implied on the image track. Both methods reveal the cinema’s power to defy spatial realism through the divided nature of sound and image.

Later in the film, the strategy of limiting auditory extension is taken to a much further extreme as Dragon-Eye again wanders the city. In the midst of the chaos of the dense metropolis, complemented with urban noise and heavy electrified non-diegetic music, he pauses for a few seconds with his hand on a power pole. All sound drops out in a moment of absolute silence. He taps into his primitive past through the technological present, communing with a power pole to reach deep into his reptilian brain and become one with the city’s grid. Like the previous example in the wooded area, the sound of the surrounding environment is limited according to Dragon-Eye’s intense concentration on the task at hand. But while the previous example transformed urban space into a forested area, now the limited extension is completely null. He turns absolutely inward to throw his awareness outwards, marking a key point about silence: it can be a sign of absolute inwardness while also providing the ideal conditions for the vast extension associated with the hi-fi soundscape. Silence has a duality that reflects Dragon-Eye’s own dual-nature, the ancient and the modern within the same space at the same time, just as his interior experience is mapped onto the external reality of the city.

Electric Dragon is the story of two ways of being within modern-day Tokyo, a place that carries with it centuries of tradition through to its ultra-modern present: one way of being in which the old and the new are divided and at odds with one another, and the other in which the two share a reciprocal relationship that feeds each other. These different modes play out in many of the characters in Ishii’s films across his career, and they reflect a mode of urban representation that explores the space of Tokyo as a space in which lived experience results in various forms of crisis and resolution. The theme of the old and the new co-existing is also an ongoing theme in the discourse around Tokyo’s representation on film throughout the history of film. The issues raised by this discourse point, in turn, to many of the issues pertinent to the more general discourse of urban representation on film. I turn now to a discussion of the major themes in the discourse of the cinematic city, and to representations of Tokyo in particular, and tie these to issues in film sound and acoustic ecology that necessarily intersect with key issues in film studies. The films of Sogo Ishii will then provide a series of ideal case studies to illustrate how these intersections play out with respect to the filmmaker’s recurring interest in the soundscape of urban space.

Tokyo and the Cinematic City

Electric Dragon deals with the theme of the tradition/modernity divide in the Japanese cultural imagination through two characters that suggest opposite poles of this situation: Thunderbolt Buddha is divided, and often self-destructive in being so. Dragon-Eye Morrison, while appearing unstable in his inability to control his electrical outbursts, is nevertheless harmonious in the balance between his pre-historic side and his modern technological side. In many ways, Dragon-Eye is the more emblematic of a Japanese society that, as Noel Burch suggests, “may be identified as belonging simultaneously to several apparently incompatible types and stages of historical development,” in part due to the fact that Japan “is the only major non-Western country to have escaped the colonial yoke” (1979, 27). Even following the adoption of capitalism and “a thirty-year inoculation of American individualist ideology,” the Japan of the 1970s that Burch is commenting upon “still bears the unmistakable stamp of three centuries of standardization” (26). Where Thunderbolt Buddha might reflect the seeming incompatibility of these various co-existing stages of historical development, Dragon-Eye Morrison exemplifies how they can be embodied within a single individual, here standing in for the nation of Japan.

These two characters also illustrate different levels of engagement with the city: Dragon-Eye is comfortable on the streets, navigating the labyrinth of the city, able to attune his senses to focus on his objects without the benefit of the synoptic overview often associated with urban mastery at a remove from the lived experience of life on the streets. Thunderbolt Buddha, on the other hand, surveys the streets from the rooftops, using technology to transcend the din of the urban noise and isolate individuals within the city. In a sense, these two characters embody the poles of technological mastery and pedestrian engagement, major themes within the discourse of the cinematic city, nowhere more prevalent than in cinematic representations of Tokyo. As a city, Tokyo embodies a massive and rapid urbanization within a country still steeped in the traditions of centuries past. As such, the city raises some key issues in how the co-existence of tradition and modernity play out within this urban space and those who live within it. Many of these issues also reflect more general anxieties about urban transformation in Western countries all over the world following WWII. These will be key issues in my study of representations of urban experience in the films of Sogo Ishii, so let us now consider them in some detail.

In her article “Tokyo, The Movie” (2002), Catherine Russell discusses how Tokyo is a site that is particularly hard to access as a totality. In the transformation of the old city of Edo into Tokyo, long range views were lost (i.e. Mount Fuji and Tokyo Bay). And in their place has emerged a Tokyo filled with giant video screens replacing real views with representations of views that are, of course, always changing (213). This dissolution of perspective is a function of the discursive nature of Tokyo in which, Russell argues, the built environment and proliferation of large-scale video screens have limited visual perspective and positioned a virtual perspective in its place. In response to these transformations, Russell notes that “an imaginary Tokyo has come to stand in for a metropolis that has few distinctive landmarks and no familiar skyline. This imaginary city plays a central role in the narrativization of the great social shifts of twentieth-century Japan” (212).

Yet Russell argues that Tokyo’s discursive nature stems back well beyond modernity to Old Edo, itself a city of self-representation and constant transformation. Russell notes that the frequent fires that raged through Old Edo came to be known as the “flowers of Edo,” indicative of a desire to express this constant transformation as an aesthetic practice (213). At the same time, Old Edo is regularly imagined as a stable fixed historical point that posits modern Tokyo as its opposite. Edo is something to move towards as an escape from modernity: “Edo-memory sometimes eliminated the tradition-modernity divide altogether. Edo became tomorrow” (213).

Russell charts cinematic representations of Old Edo in Japanese films of the classical period, often framed symmetrically using composition to complement the architectural forms which aid in rendering the city as “a kind of interior space” (2002, 216). This interiorization of exterior space is related to growing angst over increasing urbanization and the sense of the “violence implicit in the modernizing process” (218). She notes that Tokyo films of the 30s, 40s and 50s often dealt with family, and treated urbanity as a threat to domestic peace. Many films sought to position a family enclosure within the sprawl of the urban sphere, creating the city as “modular extension of the home” and by which family drama can become social drama (i.e. the park in Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru as shelter from urban space) (217). The 50s and 60s saw Tokyo transformed into a sea of skyscrapers where even distinguished modern buildings disappeared. This ushered a new era of cinematic representation where Tokyo is not only positioned against the village, but new Tokyo is pitted against an older version of itself that is imagined to have been more stable.

Russell notes that critical discourse on cities often involves layers of meaning built up in architecture, like Berlin. In Tokyo, however, the process has been so “swift” and “violent” that “there is little by way of ruins, little evidence of historical process” (2002, 220), creating even more need to latch onto an imagined stability of the past in the face of bewildering change. Yet, Russell warns, it is a mistake to think of all this constant transformation as suggesting an un-centered Japanese subject, for to do so would be to forget that these are spaces “where people actually live” (222). Herein lies Russell’s most poignant argument: that the idea of a totalizing view, of a city graspable as a whole, is not the answer to understanding the reality of lived experience within such a discursive space as Tokyo. As we will see, life in the absence of totalizing spatial coherence is a guiding theme in the discourse of the cinematic city, and is crucial to understanding the work of Sogo Ishii.

Many of the issues Russell raises in relation to Tokyo are common to the discourse of urban studies in general. The distinction between the coherence sought through synoptic overview and the fragmentary nature of lived experience of pedestrians on the street is particularly important, especially how this distinction relates to the idea of “interiorizing” exterior space. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) Marcel de Certeau relates the aerial view/street view dichotomy to differences in consumptive practice. Referring to his experience of viewing New York City from the top of the World Trade Center, he says, “Having taken such a voluptuous pleasure in it, I wonder what is the source of this pleasure of ‘seeing the whole,’ of looking down on, totalizing the most immoderate of human texts” (92). This position of “voyeur-god,” he says, entails a separation from the lived practice of the people down below (93). “They walk – an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmanner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it” (93). What is most important for de Certeau, and many urban theorists to follow, is that the lived experience of the pedestrian is a productive form of urban engagement despite the lack of totalizing coherence one can gain from this vantage point.

As Tasha G. Oren argues, the emergence of large urban centers in recent decades suggests that it is time for a move from Marshall McLuhan’s concept of the global village, with its evocation of a quaint, unified world, to an idea of the global metropolis which is “inherently messy, multivariant, and decidedly serpentine” (2003, 64). As different from the village, she says, the global metropolis “is never fully known to any singular resident and is only decipherable from a brid’s-eye view, gaining coherence as it loses detail” (64). She likens this to de Certeau’s distinction between observing a city from above and living down within it, the difference between actively writing a narrative and simply reading one. The “instant total field of awareness” is opposed to the lived experience of city dwellers (64), and thus exposes the details of daily practice as the life of the global metropolis. The key point here is that this lived experience doesn’t depend on totalizing knowledge to make sense of its world, an idea that will become very important in the literature discussed from here on.

Walter Benjamin understood that the fragmentary nature of urban experience does not necessarily prevent one from gaining a productive understanding of the world. In the Arcades Project Benjamin sought to gain access to the lived experience of the era of the Parisian flâneur through the material artifacts of the culture that produced this figure. Through fragments of actual historical documents, Benjamin presents an array of historical materials which, as Susan Buck-Morss notes, “made visible the philosophical ideas” at work in the culture that produced them (1989, 55). “In them,” she says, “history cut through the core of truth without providing a totalizing frame. Benjamin understood these ideas as ‘discontinuous,’” and notes that “the images themselves cannot be strung together into a coherent, non-contradictory picture of the whole” (55). Yet through this material we can gain a profound understanding of the culture from which it came, an understanding that is closer to the experience of the people who made up that culture than one can get from traditional modes of detached historiography.

Benjamin collects a variety of materials in which the figure of the flâneur is characterized. For present purposes, I would like to focus on Benjamin’s description of the flâneur as one for whom “the city splits … into its dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closed around him as a room” (1999, 417). For the flâneur, the streets are experienced as interior spaces that can be inhabited in a way that emphasizes the lived nature of the social and cultural landscape rather than the alienating detachment so often attributed to urban living (421).

Critics like Anne Friedberg (1993), Anke Gleber (1993), and Tom Gunning (1997) have argued for different ways of thinking about flanerie and its offshoots when accounting for female subjectivities and the changing nature of modernity since the 19th Century origins of the term. Friedberg in particular has pointed to the emergence of the flâneuse in the cinemas and shopping malls of the early 1900s, allowing for a form of mobile spectatorship through the experience of screens and shop windows that operate on a virtual register. I will return to this figure of the flâneuse in my discussion of Mirrored Mind below.

Invariably, however, flanerie is theorized through attention to vision alone. I argue that thinking of forms of pedestrian urban engagement through sound can add another corrective layer to this discourse. In particular, I think it is valuable to consider the concept of interiorizing exterior space by way of the soundwalker described by Hildegard Westerkamp. As outlined in her “Soundwalking” essay (1974), Westerkamp’s prescription for soundwalking posits a way of practicing urban space that likens the act of engaged listening to an act of composition, recalling de Certeau’s conflation of the divide between reading and writing, consumption and production. The soundwalker does not physically alter the environment through her listening strategies, but she does come to understand it and to find the possibility for making peace with it. Most importantly, this engagement is a function of mobility, but not a mobility that is necessarily marked by physical movement through space. Just as important is a psychic mobility, a movement through space by way of perceptual exercises in varying extension of one’s listening, and by recognizing the inextricable relationship between interior experience and the external world. The soundwalker can travel through space while standing still, shifting perspective within the soundscape and mapping that space by way of her own memory.

Key to my interests in the films of Sogo Ishii is how the relationship between interior and exterior space relates to the engagement a person has with their environment, of gaining a measure of productivity in the absence of totalizing spatial coherence. I argue that the use of silence in the films of Sogo Ishii marks a deep interiority that opens the characters up to their external environments, offering the potential for a profound level of engagement, an example of how the increasing urbanization of Tokyo does not necessarily result in a corollary urban alienation.

Edo Memory, Silence, and the Aesthetics of Emptiness

In Catherine Russell’s account of Tokyo’s transformation from Edo into contemporary metropolis, Old Edo embodies a kind of duality with respect to Tokyo. On the one hand, Edo itself was a discursive entity, constantly under transformation and subject to self-representation, making for the perfect environment from which modern Tokyo might rise. On the other hand, within the post-WWII environment, Edo stands as a stable representation of the village of the past, in stark contrast to the ever changing and indefinable complexity of modern Tokyo. In the popular imagination, Edo acts as an imaginary past that residents of the metropolis might try to evoke through the maintenance of traditional architecture, furnishings, and dress within the context of the modern city. Filmmakers have certainly latched onto this ideal as a way of selling the idea of tradition to the modern urban public, a point that Russell drives home when she argues that the “traditional” domestic architecture of the post-war films of Ozu and Naruse are the product of simulated tradition marketed to mass culture in an era of rapid urban expansion (2003, 93).

In simulating a tradition based on the past, Edo memory positions the city against an earlier version of itself, while also defining itself in relation to the countryside. This can be seen in two main features of Tokyo’s transformation: the disappearance of long-range views that connect the city to Mt. Fuji and the Ocean, and a replacement of these views with virtual ones. The imagined stability of old Edo is, in part, a function of the long-range views of Mt. Fuji, popularized in the Japanese imagination by works like Hokusai’s print series Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji. Many of these prints represent views of the sacred mountain from positions within the old city of Edo that still exist in modern Tokyo but from which these views of the mountain have been banished. So, the stability of the city comes, in part, through its contextualized relationship to the countryside, another familiar tension in the discourse of urban studies, and one that is certainly rife within Japanese cinema that so frequently positions Tokyo against the rural village.
These transformations are perfectly in line with R. murray Schafer’s thoughts about the problems posed by modern urban space. As I have discussed at length elsewhere, Schafer holds a bias towards an imagined pre-industrial auditory environment, one that emphasizes what he calls the “hi-fi” soundscape characterized by long range listening and an absence of the schizophonia induced by technologies of representation. Schafer would argue that along with the disappearance of views of Mt. Fuji from within the city, long range listening has also been banished. Artificial views have stepped in to take their place, along with the schizophonic soundscapes created by the proliferation of sound transmission technologies within the city. As I will discuss below, the relationship between Mt. Fuji and modern Tokyo is a crucial component of Ishii’s Angel Dust, while issues raised by Tokyo’s signature proliferation of virtual views is at the heart of his most recent film Mirrored Mind. I will demonstrate that these issues are bound up with the idea of silence as it relates to different forms of engagement in the city.

Silence is a Holy Grail for some strains of acoustic ecology, nowhere clearer than in Gordon Hempton’s recent book One Square Inch of Silence (2009) in which the author goes in search of the lowest possible sound level readings within the United States of America. Yet it is important to understand that what acoustic ecologists usually mean by “silence” is actually better defined as “quietude,” for the silence they seek is in aid of hearing certain kinds of sounds rather than hearing nothing at all. This situation is well illustrated by Hildegard Westerkamp’s journey to the Zone of Silence in the heart of Mexico. This is a space within the open desert is so quiet that Westerkamp was compelled to make her own sounds, and these stood out very well for recording because of the silence that surrounded them (McCartney 2000, chap. 7, p. 2).

Acoustic ecology’s quest for silence can thus be understood as an interest in quietude shaped by the sounds that surround it or, conversely, sounds that are shaped by the quietude that surrounds them. Both permutations of this interest in silence can be read through the Zen Buddhist concept of mu. The concept of mu has many permutations, but on a very basic level it translates as “nothingness,” the basis for the enlightenment sought by Zen practitioners. While its monastic connotations are perhaps less important in late 20th century Tokyo than in times past, mu has been adopted as an aesthetic principle that still permeates modern Japanese culture. As Paul Schrader describes it, “Emptiness, silence, and stillness are positive elements in Zen art, and represent presence rather than the absence of something” (1972, 27). He draws on several noted Western authors on Zen Buddhism who explain that the emptiness of mu is a function of that which shapes it: the empty spaces in a flower arrangement are only recognized as formal nothingness because they exist within the form of the flowers. In Will Peterson’s words, “the sound gives form to the silence” (in Schrader, 27). Without the sound, the silence is not recognized as a formal quality. A blank sheet of paper is only paper until it bears markings, and then the space between these markings will be recognized as formal emptiness (27).

As an aesthetic principal, then, mu offers a way of understanding silence in the sound film as well. Silence only became an aesthetic option once the synchronized film soundtrack came into being. Yet because of the conventions of constant ambient sound that increasingly became the norm as the decades progressed, audiences from the 1970s onwards no longer expect to hear a complete absence of recorded sound, what Chion calls the “zero-degree” of the soundtrack (1994, 57). As Chion has observed, “You can’t just interrupt the auditory flow and stick in a few inches of blank leader” for fear of the audience believing that such silence is the result of a “technical break” rather than an aesthetic choice (57). This is why most filmmakers opt for “synonyms of silence: faraway animal calls, clocks in an adjoining room, rustlings, and all the intimate noises of immediate space” (58). These synonyms of silence are all tied to Schafer’s notion of the hi-fi soundscape that allows hearing far into the distance, or of the very quiet in one’s close surroundings, because of an absence of other sounds that would obscure these finer details. Silence by these standards is an example of mu: absence that is understood as presence because of that which shapes it.

For Schafer and those of like mind, quietude is lost on the city streets, marked by continual din. Or else it is artificially constructed, so that interior spaces offer quietude without the potential for one’s hearing to extend beyond architectural boundaries. However, when mu is understood as a formal quality shaped by its opposite, this gives hope that silence can be found in the city, that where there is form there is also emptiness.

Thinking about spaces of silence as a function of noise is to recognize its presence within the modern city rather than in some distant and imagined past. Thus the idea of silence is marked by a certain paradoxical nature that I argue is rather similar to the concept of Edo memory. What if the noise of the city provides access to pockets of silence, just as silence in the country provides access to pockets of sound? Perhaps the city can be thought of as a “presence” between the structuring emptiness of the country that surrounds it, just as ideas about the country might be structured by the city. This is a circular notion of the relationship between town and country that suits the circularity of much Buddhist thought as embodied by that most well known of symbols, the yin and yang. This can be understood as circularity governing relationships to the past, as well as to the imagination. Imagined space is structured by the reality of the space that surrounds us, just as our idea of the past is accessible only in how it is made manifest in the present. These are the circularities that lie at the heart of Sogo Ishii’s characters in their quest to come to terms with the urbanization of post-war Japan, and the dichotomies of silence are a way for Ishii to aesthetically invoke these dichotomies within his films. As I will illustrate, Ishii’s films revolve around questions of engagement between characters and the urban spaces they occupy. This engagement is marked by relationships between the interiority of the mind and the external world, between town and country, between noise and silence.

Sogo Ishii’s use of silence is also a reflexive strategy, particularly when it involves sudden ruptures in the soundtrack that reveal moments where there is no recorded sound. He often uses sudden moments of silence to dramatically contrast between spaces, and sometimes to simply drop the sound out of a given space altogether. Both of these strategies serve to call attention to the artificiality of the sound’s grounding within the image, disrupting both our sense of the space pictured on screen as well as our sense of the realist conventions of synchronization as well. Ishii ties these ruptures in the soundtrack to themes of urban anxiety, more often than not set within the dizzying labyrinth of Tokyo. These ruptures can be read differently from one film to the next as characters respond differently to their environments, but are always tied to the dual nature of silence: as intensely introspective and expansive at the same time. As such, they reflect the idea of Edo memory evoked by Russell as a staple of representations of Tokyo in Japanese cinema, an imagined stable presence that is itself open to discursive transformation. Silence as an aspect of mu is a way to understand silence in the city by way of its connection to that which surrounds it, a kind of totalizing perspective that is available even from within the heart of its obscuring density.

I argue that many of the characters in the films of Sogo Ishii struggle with attempts to embody the model of urban engagement proposed by Westerkamp’s concept of the soundwalker, and that silence in these films is a marker of deep interiority as well as a profound connection with urban space. This interest in urban experience is tied to themes of the divide between tradition and modernity in these films, and is particularly emblematic of Russell’s account of Edo memory in films that represent Tokyo following WWII. Mu, then, becomes a marker of an extreme shift in extension to bring the world to absolute silence from which the soundwalker can then begin to compose the soundscape according to listening practices that seek out relationships between her interior experience and that which exists outside. Silence becomes an expression of mu, a way of engaging with vast extension by way of the very narrow, connecting interiority to exteriority, giving pedestrians a way of extending beyond their limited position on the street without the distancing effect of the synoptic overview.

Essays   cities and cinema   cyberpunk   film sound   japanese film   japanese new wave   urban space