You are viewing a draft version of this article.

Civilization Sickness: The Early Years of Sogo Ishii

In his 1984 comedy Crazy Family, salaryman Katsuya Kobayashi (Katsuhiko Kobayashi) feels that his family suffers from what he calls the “civilization sickness,” and moves them out of their cramped Tokyo apartment to a house in the suburbs. The style of Crazy Family acts as an interlude that separates Ishii’s punk years from his newer work, and is interesting in the way that it engages with the new urban reality of the suburb and its place in the individualist model of American capitalism that emerged in Japan following the war. The suburb is neither the traditional country village nor the dense metropolis epitomized by Tokyo. Similarly, it is neither the place for multiple generations of families to co-exist within a single room, nor the compartmentalized isolation of individuals fostered by the city. It is an in-between space designed for single-family dwellings that concentrate on the nuclear family, a new mode of living that emerged simultaneously in the US. Indeed, the emphasis on the nuclear family as a break from Japanese tradition is made when Katsuya’s father pushes to move into the new house with his son’s family, but only after having worn out his welcome at the homes of his other children. Ultimately, however, he is just an annoyance, and in this respect the film nods towards Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953) and its message about the perils of the increasing emphasis on individualist culture within post-WWII Japan.

Crazy Family begins with a silent aerial shot of the suburban grid as Katsuya drives his family to their new home. The silence here suggests his quest for a peaceful oasis amidst the chaos of urban life, hoping that the orderly environment of the suburbs will help ease his family’s distress. This shot also clearly associates silence with the aerial perspective, a physical remove from the streets accompanied by a remove from the din. The film’s silent opening suggests the middle space of suburbia, replete with its own paradoxical isolationism and promise of community.

At a pivotal moment later in the film, this absolute silence is brought to the world below. Katsuya is distressed when he discovers that his new house is infested with white ants, and tries to banish them with chemicals. One day at the office in Tokyo, he has a seemingly metaphysical realization that the ants are still present despite his efforts at extermination. The moment is marked by the bustle of the office soundscape cutting to zero-degree silence as Katsuya lifts his head from his work. Here the camera performs a simultaneous dolly/zoom that keeps his face at the same framing distance while the background compresses behind him. The bizarre effect that this “Vertigo shot” has on the visual space is amplified by the unnatural quality of the absolute silence. Within this moment of auditory null extension his mind reaches across space and seems to connect with his home, a spatial anomaly further suggested by the disorienting effect of the cinematography. Katsuya packs up his bag and runs out of the office, beginning a brilliantly realized sequence that follows him running madly through the city streets, then from car to car on the subway, and finally stealing a child’s bicycle to finish the trip through suburbia to his home.

Here Ishii draws on the visceral hand-held camera style that was his staple during the 70s, fashioning a portrait of one of the most maddening features of suburban living: the commute between work and home, a common theme in Japanese film. More importantly, this sequence gives us a sense of the distance between these two points, a length of space that is collapsed in the moment of silence when Katsuya’s mind reaches across it to realize what is happening at home. Once at home he jumps into a deep hole he has dug in the dining room and begins attacking the ants with a motorized digging tool. Later in the film he’ll use this same tool to attempt the murder of his entire family as he realizes that there is no hope of relief from their urban anxiety. The moment where his mind reaches across space in absolute silence points the way towards later characters in Ishii’s films who use this conflation of interior and exterior as a form of engagement within the city that provides a measure of grounding and personal agency. For Katsuya, however, there can be no balance between the wild and the structured, between the natural world and modern space, and it drives him mad. This is the “civilization sickness” that so many of Ishii’s characters seem to exhibit in their battles against the realities of their modern environments.

The separation between different kinds of space within the built environment of the modern city is a recurring interest for Ishii. Across his entire career he explores different variations on the collapse between these spaces as a function of the ways in which his characters choose to engage with, or remain at the mercy of, urbanization. From Ishii’s very first film we see his interest in the tension that arises between the structure of modern society on the collective level and the chaos lurking within the hearts of individuals.

In Panic in High School, a 15-minute 8mm short from 1976, a frustrated student has taken over the school at gunpoint. Forced to the breaking point by the extreme social importance of exit exams within Japanese society, this student revolts, holding his classmates hostage inside while the police lay siege just outside. The film is structured around alternating views of the interior and exterior of the school which Ishii distinguishes by cutting sound and image simultaneously, shifting from outside to inside with abrupt alternations between non-diegetic music and the diegetic soundscape of the interior. When the gunman is finally cornered by the police and tackled to the ground, Ishii abolishes the distinction between exterior and interior space altogether by introducing the sound of a passing airplane and carrying it over to the scene of the take-down happening inside the school. The roaring airplane creates a suitably aggressive mood for the gunman’s capture, while also motivating a swooping camera movement mimicking the flight of the plane. Most importantly, the limited extension of the school’s interior is thrown open to the vastness of the world outside school, threading the spaces of the police and the gunman together at the moment where they coincide in the narrative.

In addition to the beginnings of Ishii’s play with the auditory distinction of spatial environments, the scene of the gunman’s capture also features his first use of null extension: the moment of complete silence following the end of the airplane sound effect and before the sound of the interior space cuts back in. This isn’t quite a zero-degree silence marked by the physical absence of a soundtrack, but is rather a moment where the recording of the airplane has subsided leaving only the noise of the tape material itself in its place. The extension here is rendered completely null at the apex of the film’s narrative trajectory, just as the drive of the gunman to break from the norms of society is put down by the authorities of the established order. Such plays on extension to reflect the balance of chaos and order are a staple of Ishii’s style, and become increasingly well defined with his later films.

Two years later, Ishii made the 43-minute film Isolation of 1 in 880,000 (1978). Here he takes the concept of silence as a marker of interiority, as well as a symbol for the conflation of separate spaces, and makes these central narrative themes. Also shot on 8mm film, and very crudely fashioned, this film is the portrait of a lonely man who tries to communicate with those around him but generally fails to forge meaningful relationships. He is socially awkward, trying to flirt with the clerk at the grocery store, bumping into people on the street and spilling his groceries, etc. Most of his time is spent roaming around town between classes at school, looking in pornography shops, attending pink films, and buying a set of binoculars to better spy on his attractive female neighbour across the street.

Exterior scenes are often completely devoid of diegetic sound, with well-known pieces of classical music providing the soundscape, clearly detached from the environment as is the man himself. 1 In fact, when diegetic sound is heard during the exterior sequences, it is generally only when there will be some form of communication attempt between the man and the people he meets, and each instance of interaction serves to emphasize his difficulties in forging interpersonal relationships. For example, he meets an old acquaintance on the train, and the interaction appears so stressful that the man vomits, and shortly after fantasizes about committing suicide by jumping in front of an oncoming train. Later he sees a friend who he is genuinely interested in talking to, but the two are separated by the gulf between opposite platforms at a train station. He yells to get the friend’s attention, and then tries to run over to the other platform through throngs of people. He can’t get there fast enough, and the friend is already gone on the next train. The urban environment for this man forces unwanted contact while hindering meaningful communication.

These variations in auditory extension, and moments of complete silence, support the film’s theme of urban alienation. The first moment of absolute silence comes as the man is sitting in his room, leafing through the porno magazine he just purchased. With location sound marked by an audible camera running in the background, all of a sudden an insert shot of his attractive female neighbour appears, and all sound drops out. She is speaking, but we hear nothing, suggesting a silent memory that carries over for a moment in the next shot of the man sitting looking into the air, enraptured by his fantasy. The rapture is then rudely interrupted by a knock on the door as the ambient sound of the room cuts back in. Silence here marks the man’s ideal, a transcendence of the space in which he exists, the state in which his imagination might be made real.

Later he is sitting in his room trying to read, visibly agitated by the noise of his neighbours talking loudly, playing guitar, and singing. He throws a book at the wall, and then turns on his radio as a masking agent. It doesn’t help. Then he catches sight of his fantasy woman in the apartment across the street, and begins to spy on her from behind his curtain. He is adopting the position of the voyeur, detached from any real engagement with her but without any agency or control of his own. This lack of control is emphasized when she closes her curtains and moves out of view, at which point he is out of luck. This scene illustrates key problems in modern urban living: the quest for increasing privacy in a situation where people live very close together, and a simultaneous desire to engage with one’s neighbour who is separated by her own desire for privacy. The man has no control over either situation, unable to remain detached from his surroundings, and simultaneously unable to engage.

The case of the noisy neighbours illustrates how the modern city does not afford the ideals of containment to all of its citizens equally. It is easy to build walls that divide these spaces visually, but controlling the flow of sound is much more difficult. The art of modernist architecture on display in a film like Jacques Tati’s Play Time has achieved a high level of sound insulation between walls of transparent glass. But such achievements are not built into low-income apartment blocks that are often found just around the corner in urban centers. Ishii’s film uses an approach to auditory extension that emphasizes the simultaneous isolation and communion that urban living so often entails. The man seeks an island of silence within the chaos of the urban soundscape, and the soundscape of his private apartment extends beyond his walls into the public sphere. He keeps his streets as interiors, but he does not want his interior to become the street. His detachment is not a form of mastery but rather a sign of his lack of control over his surroundings, and he ultimately goes insane.

His noisy neighbours respond to his complaint in a threatening and confrontational manner. Driven to madness over his desire for some control, he poisons a bottle of Coke and leaves it for his neighbour, who is then shown coughing and finally dying the next morning in his bed. As soon as he takes his last gasp, all sound cuts out and absolute silence accompanies a series of shots of the man now packing his bag and setting out for the day. He has stooped to a bit of militant acoustic ecology, banishing the noise of his neighbours through murder and aiding his quest for the silence in which his fantasies – the only form of engagement that he knows – can play out. Ultimately, however, he is doomed to succumb to his madness, and the film ends as he erupts in a violent outrage in the middle of a crowded train car. The build up to his eruption is underscored by a rapid and repetitive montage of train crossing signals and shots the train rushing by on the tracks with their attendant sounds that grow in intensity until he explodes. His quest for silence has failed.

Isolation of 1 in 880,000 exemplifies many of the recurrent issues in the discourse of urban experience. Pornography acts as the central point, a marker of the desire for human engagement but with no potential for this to be realized; it is fantasy engagement, often leading to frustration. The urban setting provides ample opportunity to see other people, but these connections are fleeting. The city often stands in the way of forging deeper relationships, and fosters the kind of alienation and anxiety apparent in this character. His engagement with the city is voyeuristic and decidedly detached. His quest for silence is part of his detachment rather than deep engagement with urban space. His desire for peace and quiet to fuel his mental fantasies is a step in the right direction, but the goal does not lead to heightened engagement. And so the city finally gets to him, his meltdown signaled (literally) by urban noise pollution. As with the student in Panic in High School, the man is frustrated by the modern system of living imposed upon him, and he acts out in a futile attempt at engagement. He is unable to use his ability to search out silence within the interior of his mind to map this onto the space of the world that surrounds him. The ability to conflate interior and exterior space is something that many of Ishii’s later characters develop to more positive effect.

Town and Country in Angel Dust

In his films of the 70s and 80s, Sogo Ishii seems to be enacting Nagisa Oshima’s edict to “banish green” from the cinema, “along with its connotations of nature-worship and nationalist sentiment” (Russell 2002, 221). Indeed, Ishii’s early punk characters thrive or find self-destruction within the glass, concrete and steel of the modern metropolis. Yet as Russell also notes, “the demonology of traditional Japanese folktales and fairy tales is alive and well in the urban jungle” even while nature has been suppressed (222). Here we can certainly point to Electric Dragon 80,000 V as a modern folk tale of the urban jungle, borrowing heavily from the cyberpunk aesthetic that Ishii helped inspire through his early punk films. Yet one of the most remarkable aesthetic shifts upon Ishii’s return to feature filmmaking in 1994 is a return of the green, a consistent pre-occupation with the natural world, its connection to the city, and the psychological dimension of this connection. With this turn comes a new interest in narratives driven by female characters almost entirely absent from his punk work (generally included only as objects of male desire and abuse). His three feature films of the 90s all revolve around female characters, as does his most recent work, Mirrored Mind. In this section I will focus on Angel Dust as exemplary of Ishii’s 90s films, and in which we can trace what is perhaps the most systematic use of silence in all of his work.

Angel Dust is a feature-length detective story featuring a narrative that revolves around Mt. Fuji, tying the central symbol of Japan’s cultural awareness of the natural world to a story centered within a Tokyo where views of the mountain have been obliterated. The film also boasts the most prolific uses of silence in all of Ishii’s work. As I will demonstrate, these moments of silence propel the narrative forward and are thematically linked with the heart of Mt. Fuji, the interior depths of which provide the key to unlocking the mystery at the heart of the story.

Setsuko Suma (Kaho Minami) is a female psychologist working within the male-dominated Tokyo police department in search of a serial killer who mysteriously strikes a woman dead on the Yamanote line of the Japan Rail system at 6 pm each Monday night. Suma traces the first murdered woman to a treatment center for victims of cult brainwashing. The center is headed by Suma’s colleague and former lover, Dr. Rei Aku (Takeshi Wakamatsu). As the first murder victim once sued the establishment following her treatment, Aku is initially suspected to be behind the murders. However, it is later revealed that the real killer is another of Aku’s patients, Yuki Takei (Ryoko Takizawa), suffering extreme emotional distress as a result of the doctor’s radical treatments. A confrontation between Suma, Aku, and the killer takes place at the doctor’s “Re-Freezing Psychorium,” a lab in the shadow of Mt. Fuji outside the city where Aku attempts to de-program his patients. The killer ends up turning her weapon upon herself, and Suma makes peace with Aku.

The film is structured around alternating scenes between the police tracking the murderer within the city, and Suma’s journeys to the Psychorium, connecting the rural region surrounding Mt. Fuji to what is taking place within the heart of Tokyo. This narrative structure is tied to deep thematic issues that connect the central position of Mt. Fuji in Japan’s national consciousness to the desire for order in the city. This quest for order is, in turn, associated with Suma’s quest to stop the serial killer. Silence lies at the heart of Mt. Fuji, and it systematically accompanies Suma’s revelations about the case.

The film opens with overhead shots of the city, beginning with the vantage point of Tokyo Tower and gradually bringing us closer to street level until we are positioned inside a crowded subway car. While views of Mt. Fuji are now notoriously absent from within the densely built city, the observation deck on Tokyo Tower remains one place where the mountain is still visible (though the city’s smog often prevents views even from here). Significantly, the film keeps the sacred mountain hidden even in aerial shots by ensuring that the upper edge of the frame cuts off at the horizon. From the very beginning, then, these aerial shots do not help contextualize the city in relation to Fuji, and thus do not contribute to a feeling of synoptic mastery over the urban space.

Exterior shots in the opening sequence are presented with either non-diegetic music or diegetic sound effects, but the sounds of the interior of the subway are strictly diegetic. However, it is here that dramatic alterations of extension are tied to the presence of the killer. As we see extreme close-ups of people’s ears, eyes, and lips, the loud din of the subway is reduced, with auditory close-ups of someone’s breath, music from headphones, the turning of a newspaper page etc. Most importantly, we also hear an eerie whistling that we soon learn will precede each murder, an overt nod to Fritz Lang’s M (1931). In these close-ups accompanied by their auditory equivalent, Ishii takes the visualization of auditory extension developed in Isolation (and developed further in the “Street Noise” segment of his compilation film Tokyo Blood) and develops this as a narrative strategy tied to the pattern of murders under investigation. Immediately after the whistling, a woman drops to the ground. All subsequent murders will be announced by similar variations on auditory extension and the presence of this whistling. Importantly, when Suma is present at the murder scene, either in search of the killer or when investigating the crime scene, the plays on extension give way to moments of absolute silence. Silence is thus associated with Suma’s presence as well as her interiority as she tries to solve the case.

Importantly, silence is also associated with Mt. Fuji. The image of the first victim collapsing on the subway platform is followed by a direct cut to the exterior of a cave entrance that we later learn is an entrance to Mt. Fuji itself. The first few seconds of this shot are presented in absolute silence, thereby connecting this silence with both the murders and the interior of Mt. Fuji. Following the shot of the cave entrance, we cut to a sequence in which Suma and her husband Tomoo (Etsushi Toyokawa) are shown spelunking. The marked quietude of the cave is emphasized by the reverberation on their voices as they speak, and the presence of an unsettling sound in the distance that they cannot identify. Investigating the sound leads them to a dead body, and this revelation is followed by a series of hallucinatory flashes of imagery featuring glimpses of a man we later learn is Dr. Aku. All of a sudden we cut to the interior of a sensory deprivation tank where we see Suma bolt upright in a startled awakening from a dream. The cave sequence turns out to have been a dream while in the tank, a dream that proves significant when she returns to Mt. Fuji as her quest leads her to Dr. Aku.

Suma’s interest in sensory deprivation is a mark of urban society’s quest for peace within the metropolis. The sensory deprivation approach is premised upon detachment from the city rather than engagement, a quest that Sogo Ishii has condemned in earlier films like Panic in High School and Isolation of 1 in 880,000. However, in Angel Dust the flotation tank sets up Suma’s interest in looking for emptiness as a function of her aptitude for detective work. This detective work is premised upon her ability to get inside the minds of her subjects, breaking down the barrier between interior and exterior experience. As one of her colleagues explains to her partner in the case: “She analyzes the evidence, and slips her mind into the evidence to assimilate the thoughts and emotions of the perpetrator.” As the film progresses, she will find moments of silence in the heart of the city as she grows nearer to the source of the murders in the Psychorium near Mt. Fuji.

The first time we see Mt. Fuji as a recognizable landmark, it is through a decontextualized shot that presents the mountain rising up from the bottom of the frame but without evidence as to where the shot was taken. The significance of this shot is made clear shortly thereafter as Suma arrives at a psychiatric hospital outside the city where she receives directions to meet Dr. Aku in the woods on the side of the mountain. This meeting establishes the connection between Aku and Mt. Fuji. Shortly thereafter, Suma gets a follow-up call from Aku suggesting that she get in tune with that part of the killer’s mind that already exists inside her. Right after this phone call, Fuji becomes visible from the city for the first time. Cut to a shot overlooking Tokyo near dusk with Mt. Fuji prominent in the background, and then on to the next murder.

Later we see the mountain from the window of Aku’s office inside his Psychorium. The window frame mirrors the mountain’s conical shape and flattened peak. This window and its view establishes Aku as something of a Fuji fetishist, suggesting that he has constructed his Psychorium as a Fuji of his own, its interior laboratory a space where he can get inside the minds of his patients just as the interior of the real Mt. Fuji is associated with Suma’s own psychic abilities. So it is no surprise that Suma has a private Mt. Fuji of her own in the form of a pyramid-shaped steam-room surrounded by lush greenery in the back of her apartment, a bit of nature in the big city where she goes to clear her mind. Finally, after the climactic showdown inside the Psychorium, the police arrive and Suma embraces Aku, now sure of his innocence, while leaning up against a car in a shot that frames them against the mountain. So the film clearly positions Mt. Fuji, and the presence of silence, as markers of interiority that represent the connections that Suma will make between town and country as her quest to find the killer progresses.

Angel Dust thus establishes clear connections between the murders, silence, Suma, and Mt. Fuji, which are fleshed out as the narrative progresses. Suma is obsessed with mapping the trajectory of the murders within the physical geography of Tokyo as well as within its psychic space, essentially employing a psychogeographic approach to hunting down the killer. In the film’s climax, Suma returns to the Psychorium to have it out with Aku where Yuki then attempts to kill them both, revealing that Aku was not responsible in the end. In this final confrontation there are, as expected, key moments of silence. As Suma attempts to attack Aku, Yuki enters and reveals herself as the killer. Rather than the subject of Aku’s mind control, as Suma once suspected, we learn that her homicidal mania was an unintended byproduct of Aku’s attempted reprogramming. He was trying to relieve Yuki of her fixation with death, but in the end he only made it worse. Yuki tries to attack, but the doctor wrestles her to the ground. Here, in the film’s most dramatic use of silence, they pause as he has her pinned to the ground, and then begins to speak. He begins to speak, his lips moving but with nothing audible. This is a reflection of Yuki’s retreat into interiority as she is confronted by her own psychosis. The sound of a child’s voice emerges in synchronization with Aku’s moving lips, a schizophonic replacement reflecting the implanted childhood memories of the patient. Silence is what allows her interior experience to be reflected in the image of Aku’s moving lips. Ultimately Yuki kills herself, and the police arrive at the Psychorium to close the case. The film ends with a shot of the police cars framed against Mt. Fuji in silence, followed by a brief resolution between Suma and Aku.

While Suma was unable to finally master the situation, her psychic connection to the case resulted in its resolution. This connection can be tracked through the recurring use of silence that draws consistent relationships between four main physical or psychic locations: the interior of Mt. Fuji, Suma’s psychic interiority, the interior of the Psychorium (patterned after Mt. Fuji), and finally the psychic interiority of the killer Yuki. The interior of Mt. Fuji is immediately established as a quiet place that is connected to Suma’s psychic space through the dream that opens the film. Silence is then associated with the killer by way of the narrowing of extension that accompanies each murder. Silence also punctuates key moments of Suma’s investigation, moments where Suma gets closer to the truth by getting closer to the killer’s own mind. And finally, the silence of Aku’s Psychorium, literally patterned on Mt. Fuji, is the space where the killer’s mind was first emptied, and where her own silence is thus connected to Suma in the final confrontation.

While Tom Mes considers the film’s conclusion to spoil the mystery through too much resolution (2001, par. 5), the film’s climax plays an important role: it is essential that the killer’s mind is opened up through silence in the presence of Suma within Aku’s Psychorium, for this event brings all the connections described here together for the first time. The narrative strength of these associations demonstrates how Ishii uses variations of auditory extension and silence as formal support for the story of criminal investigation. At the same time, associating silence at the heart of Tokyo with both the interiority of an individual’s mind and the interior of Mt. Fuji – a powerful symbol of Japan’s collective mind – the film connects town and country to reveal key themes about the relationship between the individual and urban space that have been staples of the director’s own work.

The Tokyo of Angel Dust doesn’t aim to recapture an idea of Old Edo in which 20 spots were identified for excellent Fuji viewing as made forever famous in Hokusai’s famous series of views rendered in the Edo period. Nor does the film seek to construct an imaginary stability in Tokyo as in immediate post-war films that Russell discusses. Rather, it suggests the possibility of maintaining a connection with what is still there – Mt. Fuji – even if its views have been obscured from within the city. Tokyo remains the dense and untotalizable metropolis that it is renowned for. Yet some order is possible within as a function of the psychological experience of its inhabitants. An idea of stability lies in the heart of Mt. Fuji’s dark and silent depths, equated here with psychological interiority, a psychic thread between town and country rather than one based on visibility. In Angel Dust, the long-range listening of Schafer’s hi-fi soundscape is a function of the silence of interior experience, allowing for a connection to Mt. Fuji from the city despite its lack of visibility.

The experience of the silence of interiority becomes a tool for the urban dwellers to reclaim some personal space within the dense population of the city, as well as extend outwards towards the countryside that defines the city’s limits. The city in Angel Dust is the embodiment of the Zen principle of mu, a space that is defined by its surroundings. Tokyo’s sprawl is not without limits, even if the limits are invisible from the ground. Silence helps connect the individual to the city’s limits through the natural world beyond its borders. Sogo Ishii continues to develop these themes of connection between town and country, and between individual and city, in the films that follow Angel Dust, culminating in his most profound portrait of Tokyo to date: Kyoshin (Mirrored Mind).

Mirrored Mind: Window Shopping and Mobile Spectatorship in the Urban Jungle

Like Isolation of 1 in 880,000, the director’s final film signed with the Ishii Sogo moniker, Mirrored Mind, features a character suffering from urban anxiety. Like Angel Dust, the film represents the search for grounding within the modern metropolis, a grounding that is equated with silence. An unnamed actress (Miwako Ichikawa) is distressed with her life in Tokyo and the difficulties she has in expressing herself creatively, enough so that she attempts suicide via an overdose of sleeping pills. She winds up in a coma, and when she awakens she has undergone a psychological transformation and is now able to cope with the urban world that surrounds her. The centerpiece of the film is a journey to the tropical paradise of Bali where the woman finds some peace and quiet amidst the palm trees and the ocean breeze. The film remains ambiguous as to whether or not she actually took the trip to Bali, suggesting that it was perhaps a dream while unconscious in the hospital. Either way, the journey has affected her deeply, and her newfound peace within the city is positioned in direct relation to her experience in the wilderness.

The events presented in the film revolve around five settings: the streets of Tokyo, the woman’s apartment, the film set where she works, the tropical setting of Bali, and the hospital where she is admitted after her overdose. In addition to scenes in these settings, the film also has psychedelic interludes consisting of nature imagery abstracted through a mirrored split-screen effect that recalls a view through a kaleidoscope. The first recognizable images visible in the film are of the streets of Tokyo, followed by a sequence within the woman’s apartment. Without revealing her face, the film follows her hands as she sets up a video camera to shoot in the living room area. A close-up of the camera’s lens cuts directly to a close-up of a TV screen: here we see images of the ocean, followed by images of the woman in her kitchen mixing an alcoholic drink in the blender. In the middle of the drink-making process we cut from these images presented on the TV screen to a direct shot of the woman in the kitchen. The sequence ends as we see reflections of the televised water bouncing off the liquor bottles, followed by images of the floor of her shower as the water runs.

Over the rest of the film we see her walking the city streets, playing a scene at work, and spending some time in Bali. Yet the film returns to the living room scene at various points, each time providing us with non-linear access to key details that the opening sequence leaves out. Most notable among these details are the message that she videotapes in her living room, and the fact that she included a handful of sleeping pills in her blended drink recipe. This last detail is given only after she has woken up in the hospital, an event that is positioned after her trip to Bali. So it is only in retrospect, after viewing the film and sorting its events into linear order, that we realize her trip to Bali might have been a coma dream. Therefore, part of the film’s ambiguity about the line between fantasy and reality is achieved by its non-linear structure.

Another key to the film’s blurred boundaries between fantasy and reality is the mediating technology of video. As an actress, the woman’s identity crisis is, in part, a function of her own self-representation. This is compounded by the fact that the scene she is shooting at work was scripted by her, a reflexive tale of a woman who cannot express herself creatively. It is essential that her trip to Bali, whether real or imagined, is initially presented on her TV screen at home, and then shortly after as a representation on a video screen in a shop window on the streets of Tokyo. While her crisis is positioned at the center of the tension between reality and screen representation, it is important that this crisis is equally a function of tensions between urban space and the wilderness. The film’s conclusion rests upon the dissolution of these boundary lines so that she manages to bring some of her fantasy into reality, to make real what she has seen on the video screen, to bring some of the wilderness into the city. To illustrate how the film presents the theme of overcoming urban anxiety, I will compare an early sequence to the film’s conclusion and then demonstrate how this conclusion is a function of the film’s representation of the wilderness.

Following the opening apartment sequence, we first see the woman in full as she crosses the famous multi-directional pedestrian walkway in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, complete with its attendant noisy soundscape. Here she becomes disoriented amidst the flow of people from every direction and has to pause for a moment in the middle of the street. From here we cut directly to a close-up of a textured glass surface with a mass of water visible beyond, matched with a cut on the soundtrack to complete silence. Air bubbles embedded within the glass look as though they could be droplets of water following a rainfall. The surface of the glass adds an abstract texture to the water visible in the distance, and it is not immediately clear that we are, in fact, inside a modern building in the middle of Tokyo. Two shots later the actress is revealed in front of the window, followed by a wide shot that reveals the frame of the window itself. At this point it becomes clear that the water visible beyond the window is part of a fountain in an urban courtyard, with traffic now also visible in the distance. Along with this revelation comes the emergence of the light din of traffic noise, the absolute null extension of the interior’s first shot opening up to the vastness that corresponds with its visual equivalent. Finally, it is revealed that the actress is in the middle of playing a scene, the film crew revealed at the other end of the large open room. Here she explains her artistic crisis, unsatisfied with her work as a filmmaker and depressed about any prospects for the future.

Silence in this sequence is married to abstraction, a lack of sense of place that has the potential to become anything, like a scene waiting to be played. Silence here is also related to the natural world, for the first we see of this interior are suggestions of the wilderness that stand in stark contrast to the images and sounds of Shibuya presented just prior. The textures of water from the fountain and the windowpane itself are pockets of the natural world embedded within urban space, and the silence of this interior space is thereby equated with these pockets. But it is an artificial silence created by architectural design. As I will suggest, the actress wants to find her way out of this artificiality and come to experience nature within the city as a function of her very being, rather than one dictated by the design of the built environment. Reflections of the natural world in the city must give way to the real thing, and this is the suggestion made at the end of the film.

Mirrored Mind closes with a sequence that mirrors the woman’s street crossing at the beginning, only this time the cut to silence does not come with a visual cut to an interior space. Rather, the silence exists with her outside on the busy street. Standing at the same Shibuya crossing where she became disoriented at the beginning of the film, here she takes a moment and stretches her arms outwards in a gesture that recalls her time on the Bali beach. A cut to absolute silence on the soundtrack comes as she performs this gesture. A young man also waiting at the crosswalk sees her gesture and does the same thing himself. Then, as the rushing sound of the city traffic returns, she crosses the street with a smile and a confident gate that stands in stark contrast to her demeanor at the beginning of the film. As we watch her cross, the film cuts to what is perhaps the most iconic shot in the film: a simple view of light clouds in the blue sky, framed by buildings on either side. This shot is a visual literalization of the principle of mu, the emptiness of the sky emphasized by the buildings that frame it. It is the visual equivalent of the film’s characteristic moments of rupturing silence, given significance because of the sound that frames these moments – in this case, the roar of the city.

So what precipitated this shift between her initial disorientation and subsequent peace within the city? The middle of the film presents a transcendent journey to Bali that begins with images of the tropical paradise that the woman sees on a television screen in a shop window. As she stops in front of the window we hear Gamelan music and the slightly distanced din of traffic. The two-dimensional nature of the window and screen are emphasized by their glossy surfaces as we see reflections of streetlights, cars and people passing, etc. At the same time, these reflections suggest the inseparability of these surfaces from the environment that surrounds them, the connection forged by the reflections themselves. What follows is a rich formal exploration of the relationships between what we see on the screen and the environment that surrounds it, established largely through connections made between the soundscapes of the city and the natural sounds of the Bali seaside.

A light wash of white noise emerges as we see the images on the video screen, suggesting the sound of wind emanating from the mise-en-scène presented therein. Yet this sound, even if it were part of the video being screened, would not be audible through the glass of the window. Instead, the sound functions as a marker of the transcendence from representation to reality that is about to occur. From here we cut to a direct shot of a sunset, now with none of the materializing evidence of the window or screen. The traffic noise continues in conjunction with the white noise, but in this new context the two begin to merge, suggesting a transformation from din to wind. Then we cut to a shot of waves lapping gently on the beach, and sounds more recognizable as those associated with water emerge. Then we cut back to a shot of the woman’s face looking at the screen, and immediately the ocean and wind sounds drop out, leaving only the din of traffic. This is a sudden separation of wind from traffic just as they were beginning to merge beyond distinct recognition. And so we have moved from the city street through to the environment represented on the TV screen and back again.

Cut to a shot of the woman’s feet reflecting in the chrome panel at the bottom of the window, and all sound drops out for a moment of absolute silence. Another pair of legs enters the frame next to hers, but no new feet reflect in the chrome. Cut to a direct shot of the ocean, now presented in a mirrored split-screen effect. The light sound of white noise emerges again, and as we cut back to a frontal view of the woman’s face we see another woman standing behind her, the sounds of the traffic din now re-emerging on the soundtrack. Cut to a shot of a tree blowing in the wind, and the sound of a car passing in the previous shot seems to morph into the sound of wind in the leaves. Cut back to a profile shot of the woman, and as she turns to look behind her the sound of the wind fades out and leaves us with another moment of silence.

Cut to another shot of the ocean, and the white noise emerges once again. Cut back to the woman looking behind her, now in medium close-up so that we can see the other woman standing behind her. The sound of the white noise yields to the traffic din, the two now easily transitioning into each other. Cut back to a shot of the ocean, and the specifics of the traffic noise fade out, leaving only a distant din once again. Cut to the women looking at the screen with the sound of wind and water continuing, but now these sounds do not appear out of place on the city street until we see cars in the background whose individual sounds are now absent. Cut to a sunset over the water, and then back to the women looking, the sound of the wind and water continuing until the traffic noise emerges. Then comes a third fade-out to complete silence after which we cut to a long shot from behind, the two women still looking at the screen, Gamelan music now gently filling the silence, just as it will later in her journey to the places she has just seen on the screen.

This sequence is an exploration of the remarkable similarities and differences between an urban soundscape and one positioned at a rural seaside. It also explores the tensions inherent in the representation of these landscapes by way of the screen. Throughout this sequence, the image track keeps us precisely oriented, never leaving any question about whether or not we are seeing a shot of the wilderness on a screen in the city, or a direct shot of the wilderness itself. The soundtrack, however, is more elusive. The shifts between sounds that are clearly identifiable as either urban or rural roughly follow similar changes in montage, yet only once does a direct cut on the image track come with a similar direct cut on the soundtrack. The rest of the time, the sounds of the ocean overlap with shots of the city street, while the sound of passing traffic carries over to a shot of wind in the trees until it seems to dissipate upon that very wind.

The approach to sound design in this sequence illustrates how easily an urban soundscape can transition into that of an ocean side setting. This ease of transition is, I argue, the main theme of the film. The three moments of absolute silence each occur just after the two soundscapes have blended into each other, almost as if to suggest that their similarities cancel each other out, leaving an empty space at the point of their most complete intersection. This silence at the heart of the connection between town and country is the silence that the woman finds at the end of the film, a representation of the overlap between the two, the ability to find nature within the city.

The blending of the urban soundscape into that of the wilderness can be thought of as an extreme form of auditory extension. The images on the video screen offer a similar extension, though one that is the product of technologies of representation, the kind of virtuality that R. Murray Schafer has deemed negative. Yet these images of the video screen give way to direct shots of the location itself, and these are accompanied by soundscapes that appear unmediated by any technologies within the diegesis. Instead, these images and sounds of Bali suggest the woman’s imagination while she watches, while also foreshadowing later shots in which we will see the woman within these same locations and hearing these same sounds.

Schafer’s bias for the pre-industrial landscape fails to recognize that the sounds of the city can so easily blend into the sounds of the country. However, later acoustic ecologists, like Gordon Hempton, have recognized similarities between certain kinds of urban and rural soundscapes as an important indicator of how the wilderness and the city can find points of experiential intersection (2009). So the fact that a recent report states that Japan is thinking of adding the sound of running water to their silent electric cars isn’t as ironic as it might first appear (Ryall 2010). This point of intersection between the sound of traffic and of water is used here to mark a point of mobility between reality and representation for the actress, and where the two meet in the space of her psyche. This type of mental overlapping is exactly what Westerkamp represents in her composition “Kits Beach Soundwalk”, which posits a form of engagement with urban space that finds pockets of the wilderness through a connection between the imagination and the external world. This form of engagement is the premise of the soundwalk 2

The interchangeability between urban and rural soundscapes in this sequence is also an interesting example of what Chion calls “added value” in sound/image relationships (1994, 5). You can change how a sound is interpreted by pairing it with different images. In fact, as Chion discusses, people’s response to the same sound can change depending on what they are told about that sound. Because urban noise pollution has a built-in negative connotation in the age of the highly contained ideals of modern architecture, when people hear what they think is the din of traffic they will respond negatively. However, if they believe the same sound is that of the ocean in the distance, a sound with much more positive connotations, they will respond positively. This is one reason that water fountains are so effective at masking traffic noise and are used as such in many urban parks (Hempton 2009, 75). Westerkamp’s trick is to use the power of the mind to alter the personal significance of sound through its interiorization, and I argue that this is what the woman in Mirrored Mind is doing as she watches the video screens.

As a screen spectator within urban space, the woman also embodies many of the key issues about urban experience and screen culture that have been at the forefront of the discourse of the cinematic city. Anne Friedberg argues that the emergence of a female flanerie through spectatorship in the cinema and the shopping mall has helped give way to theories of mobility in the face of virtual representation (1993, 120). In the window scene from Mirrored Mind, the frame of the shop window bears the historical marker of the emergence of female flanerie. The window frame gives way to the frame of the video screen, itself another marker of the emergence of female flanerie. And then both frames are obliterated as we are presented with a virtual view of the actress’s interiority. In addition to the connection between town and country by way of the silence of interiority, this film posits an example of the virtual mobility that Friedberg ties to screen culture as an extension of the evolving flanêuse. The woman here is literally a spectator, combining the art of window shopping with screen spectatorship, something that Tokyo offers perhaps more than any other city in the world through its excess of screens that have stepped in to replace long-range views of the surrounding countryside. Further, this scene extends the concept of mobile spectatorship to considerations of sound through the formal treatment of audiovisual synchronization I have described here. She is soundwalking while standing still, threading interior and exterior space aided by technologies of representation.

The Tokyo of Mirrored Mind is not the unsafe environment of Angel Dust in which women are stalked by a serial killer. Rather, this is the Tokyo that is renowned as the safest big city in the world, with the lowest rates of violent crime. This is the perfect environment for the safety required for female flanerie – once associated with the shopping mall and the cinema – to spill out onto the streets of the city. Here, in her rapture over the screen in the store window, her psychological journey to the world pictured on the screen can be positioned in relation to the key questions that Friedberg poses about the experience of screen culture. This is what Friedberg identifies as the “tension between the material and immaterial,” addressed by two questions: “Where” and/or “When are we when we watch film or television or sit at the computer?” (2006, 178).

Friedberg takes us through the various answers to these questions posited by different strains of film studies. In the psychoanalytic approach, “we would say we are in the ‘imaginary,’ a place of psychic regression produced by cinema’s apparatical effect” (2006, 178). The phenomenological approach remains “stubbornly concrete, immanent, and pre-reflective: it is devoid of depth and interiority” (178). In the approach taken by those of the Kulturkritik school, we might emphasize the tension between film’s two-dimensionality and the three-dimensional space in which the screen is being viewed (179). Friedberg concludes that no matter what size or type of screen being viewed, “the space of the screen is a virtual space, an elsewhere that occupies a new dimension” (179).

In Mirrored Mind, all of these questions are brought to the fore when thinking of the principal character as a screen spectator. Interestingly, these questions take on a new significance when sound is added to the equation. In the shop window sequence, we find a kind of literalization of the psychoanalytical approach, where the woman’s experience of the screen takes her into a psychic space, and the film then presents this as a reality in the tradition of the fantasy or dream sequence. The film does this by playing on the tension between the screen’s two-dimensionality and the three-dimensionality of the world around the screen: the flat depthless surfaces, emphasized by the frame of the screen and the store window, dissolve as the film transcends both and takes us into the three-dimensional world pictured on the screen. The space of Bali is then brought back to the city streets through the soundtrack, allowing for an overlap of the two. While the screen in the window remains a flat surface in shots of the Tokyo street, the sound of the Bali soundscape combined with urban noise keeps the three-dimensionality of the wilderness alive even when its image is put back in its depthless place on the TV.

Yet there is more going on in the sequence than simply attempting to represent the woman’s psychological experience of the images she sees on the screen. Rather, this sequence illustrates Friedberg’s idea of screen space as a new dimension of its own that gives birth to a form of virtual mobility that has emerged along with screen culture. The woman here is taking her first step on a virtual journey that will then inform her experience of the city as a pedestrian, even in the absence of any such screens. The film’s positive conclusion, the woman’s experience of silence in the city, is the result of combining the “imaginary” interior space prompted by the images on the screen with the screen’s depthless materiality. The interchangeability of the soundscapes is a metaphor for the interchangeability of the real and the virtual, of the flat surface of the screen and the three-dimensional world, of interior experience and external reality. The film posits a character who makes productive use of all these paradoxes and tensions, each of which is embodied by silence, at once a marker of depthlessness and interiority and the potential for great depth and exteriority.

The reflections on the window and video screen that keep us grounded within the city are a key theme throughout the film, which continually exposes reflections of the wilderness within the city. The film is full of minute visual details that bring nature into the city, through textured glass that resembles water or images of the ocean on a TV screen that reflect on the wall just as real water would. As Tom Mes suggests in his review of the film:

Beauty is not the exclusive domain of utopian travel destinations. The man-made environment contains just as much of it, but we need to be willing to open our eyes, minds and hearts to it. The same sun that sets into a tropical sea also reflects off steel. The same rain falls on leaves and on asphalt. The same clouds pass over forests and cities. The same human beings dwell among both. Indeed, humanity is the key, the knot that ties both ends together. If man is a product of nature, then what is man-made must inevitably contain something natural inside it. (2007, par. 4)

Mes points out that the film presents a city that reflects the natural world, and that much of these spaces are conflated. Yet this film is not an illustration of a character that loses herself to the city. Instead, she retains her autonomy, making her peace within the city by way of an interior journey that allows her to reflect upon the relationship between what lies within her mind and that which lies outside. Her ability to bring silence into the space of the city is a result of her psychological experience, to move inward in order to open outwards. A trip to the wilderness becomes a trip to the depths of her interiority, like Suma’s journeys to Mt. Fuji in Angel Dust. As in Angel Dust, this interiority is marked by silence. But Mirrored Mind also suggests that this interiority is the key to affecting positive change on our experience of the urban. It is this recognition of the “natural” within the built environment that the film seeks out, and that is explored by the relationships between urban and rural soundscapes in the window-shopping sequence. While the store window provides a frame, and the TV screen another frame, her experience of these is transcended to the plane of the virtual, represented here by the impossible soundscape that emanates from these images on the screen and replaces the soundscape of the city street. This is a marker of the kind of space replacement model of schizophonia that Schafer fears in the face of virtuality. But Mirrored Mind suggests this virtuality is a positive thing.

It is through psychogeographical engagement that our experience of the urban world can be transformed. The individual is an engaged member of the urban community with some autonomous agency, without retreating to the distanced aerial view associated with synoptic mastery. In turn, this experiential shift of urban space can yield new forms of practice within this space that can effect concrete change on the built environment, just as the woman in Mirrored Mind starts to add greenery to her apartment. The woman’s experience of silence in the city is her first step towards mapping her own experience onto the space that she inhabits.

Conclusion

The moments of silence in each of the examples I have discussed from across Ishii Sogo’s career all share one thing in common: they are important because they stand in stark contrast to whatever is visible on the screen, and whatever sound came before and returned afterwards. Here, silence is mu, framed by the sounds on either side of the pockets of silence, and also by the images of space on the screen. As such, these examples of silence are all reflexive strategies that call attention to the artificial pairing of sound and image, emphasizing the missing soundtrack that lies at the heart of all sound film. These are reflexive moments that threaten to disrupt our engagement with the illusion of the film’s diegesis, and yet they also serve to heighten audience engagement by highlighting the dividing line between sound and image in the cinema, the gap between which we must make our own meaning. Just as Ishii’s characters must recognize silence as a presence rather than an absence, so too does Ishii’s audience need to understand his reflexive use of silence as a way of engaging them in the process of the film’s construction, an awareness of mediation that is a necessary part of urban living. To navigate the urban environment we must make peace with its architectural peculiarities, to gain a sense of grounding by recognizing how our own experience can be mapped onto the city.

It is essential that silence is so regularly equated with interior experience in the films of Sogo Ishii, an interiority that allows the characters who experience this silence to connect with the world outside. Some fail, others succeed. But the quest to thread these separate spaces is consistent across Sogo Ishii’s career with its many stylistic shifts. Recently, the filmmaker announced that he has changed his screen name to Gakuryu Ishii and will no longer use the given name Sogo. So it seems the era of Sogo Ishii has come to and end, while the era of Gakuryu Ishii is just beginning. Given the thematic consistency across the films of Sogo Ishii, it will be interesting to discover if the break in this cycle will distance Gakuryu from the work of his previous identity. Only time will tell.

Notes

1. This detached effect is emphasized by the fact that the music cues on the DVD release in the Punk Years box set have been positioned in the film separately from the sound on the print source. I don’t know if these same cues were used in the original film or not, but my analysis will be based on the DVD version of the film. ↩
2. See my in-depth analysis in “Film Sound, Acoustic Ecology, and Performance in Electroacoustic Music.” ↩

Essays   cyberpunk   film sound   japanese film   japanese new wave   silence