The Visual Aesthetic of Teenage Social Hierarchy

By Jack Miller, Edited by Emma Smith

What comes to mind when you think about Hollywood’s standard representation of the American teen? Maybe it is the sturdy jock, clad in a varsity jacket. Perhaps it’s the popular prom queen, decked out in glinting formal wear. Or possibly it’s the rebel who ditches class, donning dark leather and spiky jewelry. Nearly every Hollywood portrayal of high school teens builds on existing stereotypes to help audiences place characters into distinct social groups. Whether it’s the people they hang out with, the after-school activities they do, or the things they value, high school-aged characters often separate into explicit social titles like “jock” or “nerd.” While these clique-driven categories may seem restrictive, countless films have used them to actually highlight the consequences of social divides. John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985), one of the most rewatched teen films of the 80s, tells the story of five drastically different teens who are forced to serve the same Saturday detention. Each character is a different, easily recognizable archetype that the audience is already familiar with, from jock to nerd to popular girl, rebel and outcast. The grouping of vastly different characters makes more compelling their eventual realization that they have more in common than they thought. Created nearly two decades later, Mean Girls (2004) follows a similar narrative arc as Cady Heron becomes a member of the popular social group, The Plastics. She eventually realizes from the top of the social food chain that the divide between cliques at her high school is causing dissolution and tension. Both The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls utilize dialogue and action to place their characters into specific social hierarchies, but it is the visual aspect of costuming that becomes the most revealing in denoting characters are part of a specific social group. If the “jock” wore a cardigan and glasses or the “nerd” sported a football jersey in these films, their styles would not demonstrate the prominent and visible social divides within high schools that are being highlighted. The outward presentation of characters in The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls helps audiences place individuals within a larger social hierarchy. These films then use their visual presentation of social divisions to eventually expose the fallacies of high school’s hierarchical systems.

Filmmakers may choose to utilize the way a high school-age character acts or talks to associate them with a particular social group, but nothing helps determine where a character feels they belong as much as what clothes they wear to school. Take, for example, a quote that has woven its way into pop culture from Mean Girls. Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried), a member of the most popular group in school, the Plastics, chirps up at the lunch table: “On Wednesdays we wear pink” (11:53). The quote garners its meaning–and tremendous pop culture relevancy–because it makes clothing extend beyond the physical. The act of wearing pink for the Plastics is not the donning of specifically colored clothes but the proud declaration of membership in the most socially revered group at school. It becomes a tradition, a uniform, a broader symbol for their popularity and position atop the high school social food chain. 

The very concept of a high school food chain is reflective of high school’s unique opportunity for interactions between disparate social groups. Creators like Hughes as well as Mean Girls writer Tina Fey and director Mark Waters benefit from this. As Elissa H. Nelson–an expert on 1980s Hollywood and CUNY Bronx Community College associate professor–writes, “as people get older, their regular social associations are with individuals who share similarities . . . In high schools, however, teens can mix with people from a range of social strata, classes, and educational levels.” In very few other real-world environments do individuals witness such a broad range of social experiences happening under one roof. Hollywood seeks to incorporate the uniqueness of the setting into its fictional narratives because it can cast a wide range of compellingly distinct characters. And in a film, unlike real life, costume designers get to control every action and every piece of clothing a particular character wears. This means that each outfit plays a part in representing the social group a character belongs to.

In Mean Girls, Mary Jane Fort, the film’s costume designer, opts for a bold first introduction to the Plastics by choosing to dress them in ultra-stylized gym clothes. Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert) wears her blue P.E. shirt cropped; Karen Smith has somehow found a way to cut off her shirt’s sleeves and turn it into a tank top; and Regina George (Rachel McAdams), the leader of the group, is pointedly wearing a sparkly “R” necklace that pops against the plain shirt fabric (7:27). In a sea of other students who are gearing up to engage in the typical, sweaty athletic activities of a P.E. class, the Plastics immediately stand out as more obsessed with how they present themselves. Mimicking how popular individuals are noticed by others in real world high schools simply by their recognizable appearance, Waters aims to steer the audience’s attention to the Plastics and their wardrobe by keeping the camera’s focus on them. It’s as if their distinctive outfits demand to be given priority in the frame’s composition, mirroring the way fashionable outfits stand out against more common attire. Rather than capturing Regina’s introduction like most other scenes in the movie, she is filmed in slow motion as she is carried like royalty and then set down by a group of five boys. The change in frame rate highlights her bright necklace and clean, poised appearance. Fort has taken a giant leap to suspend reality in conjunction with the manufactured slowness of the scene: Would Regina not want to safeguard her necklace in a gym locker? Would a P.E. teacher allow their students to cut the fabric of the required class uniform? How does Karen’s shirt-turned-tank top look so perfect–did she cut out those sleeves with scissors on her own? All these questions are ignored for the sake of highlighting the Plastics’ social status. They turn their gym outfits, which are usually baggy and meant for performance, into chic representations of who they are. Their unique, carefully presented style choices denote a desire to stand out and be seen as fashionable and popular. 

In stark contrast to the Plastics’ outfits, which scream stylized and trendy, the less popular and more rebellious Janis Ian (Lizzy Caplan) is dressed in a baggy top that boldly reads “RUBBISH” when she introduces herself to main character Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan). While the large block letters draw attention, it is unclear what exactly Janis is trying to say through her fashion choice–is she declaring that the reader of her shirt is rubbish? That she sees herself as such? Fort’s decision to introduce Janis with a loud but ambiguous style helps juxtapose her social grouping with that of the Plastics. While the Plastics turn their gym uniforms into conventionally appealing outfits, Janis opts to make hers a more undecipherable statement. The Plastics desire to be understood as popular through clothing that is tight and trendy; Janis doesn’t desire to be understood at all. This paints her as a rebellious character from the moment the audience meets her.

The Breakfast Club similarly depends on how the costume designer, Marilyn Vance, dresses the teen characters to emphasize distinct parts of their personalities. Though the audience eventually confirms the characters’ social standings through dialogue, by only looking at them in the opening minutes they can start to piece together where their interests and social loyalties lie. Claire (Molly Ringwald), for example, is dressed in a brown leather jacket and matching gloves as she sits waiting for the others in detention to enter the library. On its own, the outfit isn’t necessarily a clue as to what group she belongs to. But when other students start coming in, the outfit stands out as more trendy and upscale than the others, painting her as someone highly concerned with appearance–a member of more popular social standing. 

Brian (Anthony Michael Hall), meanwhile, enters with khakis and a sweater, clothes that are more formal than the typical high school student and markedly preppy. This correlates with his interests in academics and the tendency for his peers to view him as a “nerd.” John Bender (Judd Nelson) comes strutting in wearing a thick coat, a red scarf draped over his shoulders and black sunglasses covering his face. The act of wearing sunglasses indoors marks Bender as out of line with social norms and traditions. Bender also dons fingerless gloves and stocky boots, completing an outfit that showcases his desire for social rebellion rather than conformity. These three specific characters serve as examples for how presentation through dress immediately associates each individual with a particular social clique.

However, The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls are not only applauded for their clear portrayals of the social divides perpetuated within high schools. They are films that eventually topple the notions of these social hierarchies. In Hughes’ 1985 work, the five characters engage in open and honest dialogue about the pressures they face to conform to expectations. A contumacious social rebel like Bender and a straight A student like Brian really aren’t so different from each other, the group realizes. Though Bender’s parents are harsh and physically violent, Brian’s parents are demanding in a different way, hounding him over his grades. At the outset of The Breakfast Club, there was not only a theoretical divide between the stereotypical nerd and rebel characters but a tangible one too. Khakis and a sweater present Brian as put together, classy, and maybe a little bit unpopular. Bender’s choice of wearing sunglasses inside and his grungy fingerless gloves suggests his rebellious spirit. Perhaps Vance’s choices were made to emphasize the broader moral of Hughes’ work. The teens realize that assuming values based on social presentation can become dangerous. As American film scholar Timothy Shary writes in Teen Movies: A Century of American Youth, “One day of honest conversation has exposed the fallacies of facades they’ve erected to cope with their doubts, and the film ultimately suggests that all teens (and adults) could be unified in alleviating their collective angst if only they would abandon their fixation on assumed identities” (70). In some ways, the audience has not been primed for this conclusion. The five people who walked into the library at the start of the day looked so different from each other that it seemed impossible they would grow past their differences. The clothing they wore likely symbolized years of membership on a particular level of the social hierarchy. But within a day, they are able to relinquish those memberships, which were really just “fallacies of facades.” Social divisions are not real or tangible beyond external expressions. What keeps Bender from wearing khakis is a psychological mindset. What keeps Brian from wearing sunglasses inside is the same social-clique driven lie. Indeed, as his voiceover at the end so clearly claims, “we were brainwashed” (3:32). But if clothing items can be used to divide, so too can they be used to unify. Bryan does eventually wear Bender’s glasses inside (56:06). As the teens learn more about each other, the rules about what they can and can’t wear and who they can and can't be grow to become less fixed. External expression becomes a collective effort rather than a divisive one.

Similarly, in Mean Girls, the social hierarchy is broken through an external object. Even though Cady has won Spring Fling queen, she decides to share the crown awarded for the title (1:28:42). While the scene is iconic because of Cady’s rebellious gesture, the use of a fashion object being broken works to impart a greater level of symbolism onto the scene. The crown is the result of Cady’s popularity and is as sparkly and noticeable as the Plastics are in the high school. But just like the Plastics, it is flimsy and, well . . . literally made of plastic. When it is broken and Cady tosses it to people of all social statuses and rungs of the teen social hierarchy, there is a physical demonstration of the film’s message that popularity comes at a cost. In this way, external markers of expression become more than aesthetic–they become symbolic of societal barriers being broken. 

Many dismiss teen films as simple and stereotypical portrayals of high school life. To put it more harshly, Frances Smith writes in Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Gender, Genre and Identity that “Part of the critical dismissal of the genre’s aesthetic and narrative concerns can be traced to the teen movie’s frequent designation as ‘trash’” (2). However, from a more in-depth look at how the use of wardrobe impacts symbolic representations of the social hierarchy overlaid onto students’ lives at school, there are clear visual intentions at play in the work of filmmakers like Hughes and writers like Tina Fey. Costume designers such as Mary Jane Fort and Marilyn Vance aim to outfit characters with styles that emphasize these intentions. Whether it is pink on Wednesdays, sharing sunglasses during a Saturday detention, or splitting a plastic crown into many pieces, the clothing characters wear and the objects they carry matter.

Works Cited 

Nelson, Elizabeth H. The Breakfast Club: Youth Identity and Generational Conflict in the 

Golden Age of Teen Film. Routledge, 2019.

Shary, Timothy. Teen Movies: A Century of American Youth. 2nd ed, Columbia University 

Press, 2023. 

Smith F. Rethinking the Hollywood Teen Movie: Gender, Genre and Identity. 1st ed., 

Edinburgh University Press, 2017.

Home, Sweet Home: Evolution of Home through Shared Memory in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and Happy Together

By Rhea Mehta, Edited By Alexis Lopez, Alison Church

As Zakir Khan proclaims in Tathastu, “When it comes to home, whether you leave it willingly or not, when you do, you never part ways easily. Like a fabric that is overstretched, you get torn away from it. And the loose threads will remain unbound forever. You’ll wear those wounds on your back forever, reminding you of being uprooted” (Khan 41:06-41:26). Although far more beautiful in Urdu, Khan’s message elegantly describes the delicate relationship between migration and home. The shared sentiment of any person who has been exiled, has had to flee, or has simply left a place, is the need to return home. But for those who have never seen it, what is home? In Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014), Iran is reimagined through the eyes of a generation that has little to no memory of it. Instead of trying to depict Iran in its most true, historical form, Amirpour morphs time and space to embody the characteristics of Iran that exist in the shared cultural memory of the diaspora. Alternatively, in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997), home is a low-hanging fruit, a clear memory that is crucial in guiding Fai back to Hong Kong. But Hong Kong’s own identity is fractured by its constant transitory nature. Wong Kar-wai shapes time and space to construct a temporary home, embodying the same transitionary qualities that Hong Kong represents. Both films construct the concept of home through memory, whether it be shared or individual, and connect feelings of nostalgia and belonging by emphasizing spaces of isolation and loneliness. By analyzing the scenes where the main characters find home, we can understand what home is and where it can be found.

In A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Amipour constructs a fictional Iran, melding together a shared perception of what Iran was and the American sensibility she grew up in to create a fictional reality. At its core, the film tries to mirror something it has never seen before. As Wiese explores in “Female Desire and Feminist Rage: Ana Lily Amirpour's Reworking of the Vampire Motif in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” the mirror imagery is distorted due to the fictional, and even fantastical, nature of the setting and “the conditions of exile” which are “characterized by the fact that people can no longer visit their homeland in order to form a picture of the social reality there. Thus, the designed mirror image lacks the original in front of the mirror, just as the Iranians in exile lack Iran” (Wiese 10). Amipour tries to allude to images of Iran by using visual motifs such as ornaments, television programs, and shared practices like cosmetic surgery and using Farsi as the language of the film (Wiese 10). The way that Amirpour tries to make the USA feel like Iran is significant, as it stems from information that is shared between generations through stories and memories. It is by linking vivid memories passed down through the diaspora that Amirpour creates a space in between America and Iran: a space that looks like a suburban town in America, but through ornamentation and manipulation, carries the weighted memories of the Iranian diaspora. 

What, then, is home? If the space Amirpour has constructed is neither Iran nor America, what can be defined as home? The answer to this question lies within the scene in which the unnamed vampire, henceforth referred to as the girl, invites Arash, the protagonist, to her house. In the short five minute scene, the audience watches the girl guide a dazed Arash into her room. She rids herself of her chador, essentially removing her superhero cape, and lays herself bare for him. With every opportunity to kill him, she instead chooses to lay her head on his chest, swaying to the American music that plays from her record player while the disco ball bounces light off of the many posters in her room. The music playing in the background is Death by White Lies, which repeats the phrase, “Fear’s got a hold of me.” This is significant as it plays into the audience’s preconceptions that she will bite and kill him, almost foreshadowing it. Yet, the girl is afraid for a different reason: she has become used to bad, violent men, but is now faced, for the first time, with a good man who does not provoke her feminist rage. Moreover, Arash is dressed as a vampire, his costume reflecting the girl’s true identity. This shared trait, though it may only be momentary, allows the girl to feel emotionally closer to him. Furthermore, the use of lighting in this scene, which comes from behind the girl, illuminates Arash’s side profile and, when he looks up, his neck, which is particularly interesting. It seduces the audience with a promise of violence but supplants a delicate moment of acceptance. The setting is idyllic, the music is ‘romantic,’ and she is content. This is her home. This moment is vital within the narrative of the film because it seals the authentic relationship the girl desires– this is one of the only moments where the girl feels at home (Wiese 11). As seen in this scene, Amirpour crafts the idea of home through relationships, emphasizing those in which the girl is empowered in the dynamic structure, as she is with Arash and other characters like Atti. Amirpour places such emphasis on relationships more than she does space and time to define the lens through which she perceives home. 

Alternatively, Fai in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together is obsessed with the physical place of home. Dictated in the past tense through his memories, the film chronicles his longing to return to Hong Kong from Argentina. Yet Hong Kong is not a foreign concept to Kar-Wai, or Fai, unlike Iran is to Amirpour. It is a space known well, a space that Fai believes is home. However, as the movie progresses, Kar-Wai goes on to deconstruct space. He adds a transient quality to the spaces that exist outside of Fai’s apartment, framing this singular spot as only a temporary home. This is shown through the cinematography: when they are in the apartment, the camera is not shaky or hand-held as it was previously, but has transitioned to a stable, calm presence. Fai is also bolder, arguing and talking more, expressing emotions that burst forth in moments of comfort. But Kar-Wai introduces Chang, who transforms their dynamic. While in the kitchen, the camera movement slows down, allowing Chang and Fai to create an intimate space within a place usually not considered home. Therefore, although Happy Together seems to chase a safe space, home is actually defined by the relationships. 

Through these relationships, Fai creates his own sense of home, the connection standing in for the physical location he pursues. As Kar-Wai explains, “[T]his film is not merely about two men, but about human relations, human communication and the means of maintaining it” (Siegel 279). I would argue, however, that this film is actually about three men. While Po-Wing allows Fai to understand why space is transient, with their toxic relationship and toxic sensibilities, Chang allows him to feel comfortable with another person. The emphasis on relationships and the transient nature of space is demonstrated in the scene where Fai stops at a shop in Taiwan that is owned by Chang’s family. It is in this moment that Fai understands what home is and to what extent his relationship with Chang has influenced his life. Beginning with a shaky handheld camera guiding the audience to watch an array of local restaurants with flashy neon signs, Chang is drawn into a warmly lit and bustling establishment. The camera is framed from the perspective of someone in the stall, perhaps alluding to Chang’s presence in the scene. The people working in the restaurant, Chang’s family, immediately welcome Fai in, and as he watches them scamper around, he is filled with a sense of warmth. The handheld camera movement gives the scene a feeling that is akin to a home video. In the moment where he stands by the phone, the camera frames him as an intruder in the space just as a spout of steam arises from the food. Waiting on the woman who is getting him water, supposed to be Chang’s mother, he is framed by amber lighting and soft steam, which creates a sense of warmth for the first time in the film. The blurry focus and warm lighting also suggest that even though he may not be in Hong Kong yet, this small shop in Taiwan has the same sense of belonging and home he is chasing after. At that moment, the voice-over recounts how lucky Chang is to have a place to return to. But what Fai fails to understand is that it is not the place that matters, but the people. This moment is one of the few in the film where Fai doesn’t seem alone. 

However, the importance of relationships is not the same between the two movies. This is because unlike A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Kar-Wai’s film does not deal with exile as much as it deals with displacement. As Marc Siegel explores in “The Intimate Spaces of Wong Kar-wai,” Happy Together doesn't paint a portrait of Buenos Aires; instead, “it uses certain Argentine spaces in order to localize Hong Kong concerns and perceptions” (Siegel 278). Argentina is never considered home, even when formations of a safe space emerge within it. Kar-Wai even confirms this, stating that “[I]t's more like I'm remaking Hong Kong in Buenos Aires” (Siegel 278). Kar-Wai does this by scattering transient spaces like bars, fast-food joints, and other small locations around the film (Siegel 278). These spaces are not only parallels to Kar-Wai’s other films but also reflections of the transitioning nature of Hong Kong itself (Siegel 278). Here, Kar-Wai used his personal memories of things he related to, which held allusions to Hong Kong to create a world that mirrored one he intimately knew. 

In conclusion, both A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and Happy Together explore displacement and belonging: two key worries of the diaspora. They contextualize the concept of home through space and relationships, allowing for a thorough realization of what or whom home could be. It also traces how being far away from home emphasizes relationships and a shared culture of memory in order to keep the diaspora alive. Although each film deals with a different degree of separation between place and recreation, through thematic and stylistic choices, both filmmakers sketch portraits of their memories in new spaces, reimagining what home would look like in another world.

Works Cited 

Wiese, Doro. “Female Desire and Feminist Rage: Ana Lily Amirpour’s Reworking of the Vampire Motif in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” [Sic] - a Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, No. 2., 12, 2022, https://doi.org/10.15291/sic/2.12.lc.3. 

Siegel, Marc. “The Intimate Spaces of Wong Kar-Wai.” At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World, edited by Esther C. M. Yau, NED-New edition, University of Minnesota Press, 2001, pp. 277–94. JSTOR, 

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv5g1.17. Accessed 9 May 2023. 

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour. Perfs. Sheila Vand, Arash Marandi, Mozhan Marnò. Film. VICE Films, 2014. 

Happy Together. Dir. Wong Kar-wai. Perfs. Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. Film. Golden Harvest Company, 1997. 

Tathatsu. Dir. Zakir Khan. Perfs. Zakhir Khan. Online Stand-up Comedy Show. Amazon Prime, 2022. 

https://www.amazon.com/Tathastu-Zakir-Khan/dp/B0B8QTZSDM/ref=sr_1_1?keywords= %22Tathastu%22&qid=1683525810&s=instant-video&sr=1-1

Dead Air, Dead Space: Culpability and Collapse in Landscape Suicide (1986), Grey Gardens (1975), and Pictures of Ghosts (2023)

By Micah Slater, Edited by Avana Wang

Documentary cinema has spent time in alignment with prevailing thought and subversion in equal measure. It has engaged as both dissident and conformist; employing the apparatus as an agent of change, of conservatism, and practically every (nominal) shade in between. Subversive cinemas subsequently frequently employ documentary in service to alternative histories and perspectives. Unfortunately, in order to legitimize these perspectives, these documentaries often reference established documentary norms in terms of form and structure. These norms can be and have been established outside the influence of Hollywood alone. Therefore, it is both of note and of interest when documentaries on subversive subjects make use of subversive forms. This paper poses that the unconventional histories told in Landscape Suicide (1987), Grey Gardens (1975), and Pictures of Ghosts (2023), reject both prevailing social sensibilities and conventional documentary form. They instead labor towards a film language of space itself, where events and narratives are not best told by people, but through the places where they occurred, the air through which they moved. They choose to thread their narratives through the cracks in the foundation, revealing the looming, imminent collapse of space itself.

James Benning’s Landscape Suicide is part of an anthology focused on space, in an oeuvre already thoroughly marked by meditations of the same. California Trilogy (1999–2001), Ten Skies (2004), The United States of America (1975), and Thirteen Lakes (2004), should all in name and release date alone indicate the expanse of Benning’s spatial sensibilities. His work has often been described as among the greatest of slow cinema; despite the term itself being coined only in 2003 (Luca and Jorge 2022). This combination of slowness, of a deliberate lingering and occupation of space, and of the topics chosen here—Cheerleader Bernadette Protti, who stabbed a friend to death over an insult, and Ed Gein, American serial killer—creates a stark contrast to prevailing models of true crime documentary in both its patience and its condemnation. “Anti-true crime, or the truest version of it,” Landscape Suicide is a product both of Benning’s preoccupation with space and of an effort towards a more ethically-concerned alternative to conventional crime documentary narratives, notorious for their voyeuristic lens and exploitative content (Cole). Picturing the conventional American true crime documentary about these people makes Landscape Suicide’s individual impetus towards a spatial language much more apparent. The people Benning selected–an all-American cheerleader and the Butcher of Plainfield—are high-profile cases that have stirred deep emotion in the American consciousness for decades. However, Benning’s ethics regarding these subjects are acutely apparent in all of the scenes where the individuals are not present. Landscape Suicide is not solely weighing space as an auteurist signature; it is being used to mediate (or perhaps even soothe) the strong feelings that conventional true crime seeks to inflame. The landscapes audiences see are all spaces that the subjects have occupied, spaces we feel to occupy as we view them. Though the locations themselves are explicit, in that they are tied to events of national importance, the rows of houses, two-lane roads, and ungroomed vegetation could very well exist in any part of America. Therefore, Benning’s common experience of space is his great middleman. The “rejection of drama, the implementation of long takes, and stationary shots [...] allow audiences to come to their own understanding,” pointing to efforts toward a film language that believes ethics are tied to spacetime itself (Ross 261-62). This spatial language becomes concentrated—more so than in Benning’s visual diaspora—in Grey Gardens.

Upon release of Albert and David Maysles’ Grey Gardens, many critics condemned the film, claiming that “the brothers had exploited two vulnerable and perhaps unstable women” in the interest of direct cinema (Abbot 108). While discourse has proliferated on this topic for decades, Grey Gardens’ titular estate has remained a visual landmark, a space so iconic (or iconoclastic) it nearly supersedes its residents. After all, the Beales themselves were not mentioned in a title until the 2006 sequel The Beales of Grey Gardens. The first film was made when Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, two eccentric socialites, were subject to headlines after the Suffolk County Board of Health cited multiple violations against the property. The film makes Grey Gardens’ otherness even further apparent: opening on a brief conversation about a lost cat, the camera drifts through empty rooms, focusing on chipped paint, broken baseboards, and finally, zeroing in on a gaping hole in a wall into which Whiskers the cat has allegedly disappeared. And, while Little Edie remarks on the policies of East Hampton (“they can get you for wearing red shoes on a Thursday. They can get you for almost anything”), the film cycles through static shots of the village—affluent, well kept homes; ponds, beaches—before ending on a static shot of Grey Gardens: unpainted, run-down, overgrown [00:01:50]. The language of space here is not nearly as much of an assertion as in Landscape Suicide as it is a foundation, both the source of the sensation surrounding the Beales and what we first—and most consistently—are presented with. While the Maysles seem to marvel at the otherness of this space, again raising the discourse of exploitation, no compromises or alternative locations are used. Little and Big Edie are not transported to another place for interviews, the camera never again physically leaves Grey Gardens after the introductory contrast: the lingua franca is the space itself. 

Pictures of Ghosts (2023) is both more conventional and more personal than Landscape Suicide and Grey Gardens together. As the only film that makes primary use of archival footage, its treatise serves as a remembrance of the analog cinemas in Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, which were key features of director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s youth and adulthood. He spent both periods in residence in an apartment owned by his mother in Downtown Recife, and after her death, by himself. In fact, the first half of the film centers on this apartment, viewed through the lens of the dozens of amateur, and, eventually, independent films he made there through university. We see decades of change wear away the neighbor's yard; then we see the house devoured by termites. Brick arches go up and walls come down, bedrooms change into media rooms, furniture rearranges and disappears. It’s evident that the apartment, much like Belén Vidals’s theoretical house, has “accumulated a particularly fierce and determined specificity” (Rhodes 86). This is in explicit contrast to the cinemas, which, as victims of the public economy of interest, are presently becoming abstracted—abandoned, transformed into churches and malls, or plainly demolished. Therefore, the footage Mendonça Filho has amassed, in its sheer volume and longevity, is an invaluable resource in the film language he sets forth. Spatial portraits of both locations would be fruitful alone, but forty years of change—especially regarding such a marked decline—transforms the spaces from topics to parts of speech in the type of communication Pictures of Ghosts is aspiring towards. Shots of the same buildings, chronicling apogee, to decline, to shuttering, to decay, crystallize time and its passage. The changes are gradual, but they are drastic, and the cinemas hold those memories diligently. Mendonça Filho is also an interlocutor: in one instance, with the support of footage from three different eras, he notes a plain red external wall of a former cinema palace that used to contain vitrines of posters and memorabilia. It is this kind of rumination—on what used to be, and what is now hidden or remiss—that makes Pictures of Ghosts an extremely compelling (and, due in no small part to its seven-year direct construction and decades of preparation, authorial) tributary to a cinematic language of space. Though subject to time and decay, Recife’s cinema palaces speak for themselves, embodying the spaces—past, present, and future—they occupy.

The documentary form must inherently accommodate space. For decades, documentaries have taken iconic spaces as subjects. However, as these films postulate, spaces are not only passive elements, alike to a stage or venue. Space is a language capable of communicating ethics, character, history, and time. Landscape Suicide circumvents documentary norms by using space to ethically and simultaneously interrogate genres and a subject characterized by polemia and hyperbole. Grey Gardens examines the house as a private and public subject, where space communicates institutionally (and societally) imposed right and wrong ways of being. Pictures of Ghosts sees space in dialogue with time, discussing the changes to downtown Recife, the Brazilian film industry, and the failures of their buildings themselves. These films are all also efforts in preservation. As Paula Rabinowitz has noted, filming an “essentially ephemeral event, a vanishing custom, a disappearing species, a transitory occurrence, is the motivation behind most documentary images” (120). This is true in the cases of many documentaries, but the efforts towards a spatial language in these films augment her argument: it is not just the filmed that is ephemeral, that is in need of preservation, but the act of filming itself. Spaces decay, but they do so in the labor of conveyance. Even the kind of space and the way it is depicted create meaning. 

The spaces of these three films are not only centered as agents of language, but possess a shared discourse on spaces in decay—what happens in order for, and after, a place’s ‘death.’ Landscape Suicide foregrounds the idea of topography itself being capable of murder. Benning is keenly interested in individuals as a born-in parts of the places in which they exist, and in the interconnectivity that arises from this relationship. Therefore, homicide, and especially serial homicide, is the most intimate and violent form of collapse: self-harm against the biblical clay from which we were formed. Landscapes abound; suburban houses and roads stand vacant and anonymous, yet this spatial language encourages the assumption that they are somehow relevant to the crimes that Landscape Suicide centers. An audience is encouraged to imagine how this place, despite its void of delivered context, is somehow liable for murder. Further, they are prompted to consider how these places have been abandoned, due to imprisonment, death, or other intentionally-undetermined exit. In many ways, Benning’s film is a cinema of the rapture. Dead air hangs over once-occupied scenes, landscapes that have caused their own death. A unique kind of rot is represented here: one that is not structural but spiritual, a para-natural abandonment that may one day lead to a collapse that has yet to occur. Perhaps refracted off of the condition of the film’s subjects—prison does not allow for itself nor its subjects to decay—Landscape Suicide sees collapse as a perpetually imminent consequence of the ruin we cause each other. Julian Ross cites Benning with the quote “I couldn’t get a sense of the murder, but the collective guilt still lingers” (271). Where this guilt lingers, out of the abstraction of the crimes themselves, is the locus of blame. For Benning, collapse is the inevitable aftermath. 

Meanwhile, Grey Gardens’ picture of dead space is very nearly an argument in the reverse. Big and Little Edie inherently exist as “victims of and subject to the house in which they live,” as they had two years prior to coming under scrutiny (Rhodes 87). Deterioration is the premise of their lives as they lived them at the time of filming: they are surrounded by the debris of memory, sleeping in piles of papers and photographs, a large portrait of a much younger Big Edie leaned against the wall near the door. Grey Gardens postulates that decay is not a consequence of abandonment, but instead of use: it is its tenured occupation by these two particular women, alone with each other for decades, that has caused the house to rot. It is the containment of these years that amplifies the spatial voice of this film; despite the fact that we are not actually privy to much of it. Despite the house boasting 23 rooms, we only see 5, imbuing the space with “potentiality [...] a kind of imminence” that promises new and unknown forms of collapse (Rhodes 87). The Edies seem very skilled at the compartmentalization required to cut themselves off from society and their squalor from themselves. The Maysles filmed two years after the surprise inspection, and two years after affluent relatives (including niece/cousin Jackie Kennedy Onassis) paid for renovations, including hygiene facilities and running water. The unknown of a prior, more dilapidated space is perpetuated in these unseen rooms. Space is being used to proliferate ideas of worst-case scenarios, made more voyeuristically taboo by how frequently the Edies speak from offscreen, or talk about going to (or having been in) rooms we never see. Little Edie searches for cats in the attic and references a maid’s dining room. Big Edie speaks of her bedroom as “concentrated ground” [01:12:12]. A misuse of the word, as one of the Maysles corrects, but nonetheless resonant with the course of collapse as it has taken throughout the house. The very variety of home that Grey Gardens is, or once was, is diametrically opposed to constant, continuous, concentrated occupation. Many (and at the time of its construction, most) of the houses in East Hampton were vacation homes: temporary residences for socialites affluent enough to shirk loyalty to spatial notions of permanent residence. Space speaks loudly of the ways the Beales have neglected to perform their station. 

Pictures of Ghosts uses its spatial language to resist collapse, likely because it has a long-lived and personal stake in the preservation of Recife’s movie theaters. The film is also acutely aware of its inevitability. Neither Landscape Suicide nor Grey Gardens visualize an end to their decay: American prison sentences for murder are synonymous with forever; the Beales will presumably always have relatives to bail them out of eviction. Menonça Filho is surrounded by the imminent demise of the cinemas he loved so dearly, thus the making of Pictures of Ghosts—with its years of footage—while these places are still discernible in the landscape. Mendonça Filho treats the past as a vision of transcendence, acting with a reverence for the unique temporal palaces of cinemas: inside, time stands still, but outside, the winds of time and socio-economic forces chip away at their grandeur. This is particularly emphasized by a remarkably tender interlude in material history where Mendonça Filho grinds to a halt to memorialize a projectionist and a dear friend, who worked in one of the once-many cinemas in Downtown Recife. Aside from the director’s own interjections (including his own voiceover), this is the most human that Pictures of Ghosts identifies itself to be. Cinemas and their magic, at least to modern audiences, have forgone the projectionist for many years. With the proliferation of digital cinema packages (DCPs) and the dwindling need to switch reels during a film, projection—a profession that already intentionally hides itself behind the image—has become personless, automated. It reminds that decay is not merely structural or ideological, but has direct ramifications on concrete modernisms: employment, industry, real estate. A limb of Pictures of Ghosts addresses a time during World War II when one of the once iconic, now defunct theaters was constructed as a UFA cinema, a way for the Nazi party to reach South America with propaganda pictures, and also to benefit financially from Recife’s rich moviegoing culture. This event predates Mendonça Filho, of course, but the history is not being conveyed by him (despite his voiceover). These spaces speak of their own histories, carried forward through time. Marquees here earn their own segment of the film: towering above masses of blurred people, their cinemas mark time in equal measure as they move through it. 

Despite disparate doctrines on what their shared filmic languages actually communicate, Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts raise a shared question: by whom did this occur? What accommodated for these images of decay? Who is truly to blame for these murders? Who allowed the Beales’ living conditions to become so unsafe as to be threatened with eviction? Who took these palaces and tore them down? Who is liable for the death of these places? The indictment is clearly institutional. Throughout a question and answer at AFIFest 2023, Mendonça Filho repeatedly cited one reason for the remaining cinemas’ marginal, but surviving, present condition: state funding and cultural preservation grants. He spoke of cinemas as an endangered species, of the extant few still in Recife as landmarks whose spaces are imbued with narrative. While the spatial filmic language of Pictures of Ghosts allows itself to meditate on theoretical concepts, the utilitarian purpose of the film is extremely clear. Because of this, in many ways, this film is by far the most conventional; and with evidently good reason. Neither of the two aforementioned have courses of action to offer; they do depict problems but are nonetheless without solutions. Interestingly, though, they agree with Pictures of Ghosts in placing blame. Landscape Suicide identifies failures in bureaucratic systems as much as it does in humanity. Collective guilt’ is an accusation towards things that can feel guilt, certainly; but it also speaks towards the judicial verdict. Hinted at with its presentation of public ‘landscapes’ in schools and roads. Grey Gardens, interestingly, finds fault in both the Village of East Hampton and in the distant relatives that merely sent money for minimum repairs and did nothing to ensure the wellness of the Edies, nor the soundness of the house. Spatial language is a particularly effective medium for conversations on negligence: nothing bears accusations of decay like a rotting house, an abandoned building, or an empty street. It is infinitely more possible to defend oneself against a person than an empty room. 

And yet these interpersonal defenses abound. Grey Gardens’ human protagonists insist on their lifestyle; Big Edie “thrives” on the smell of her room (which, if the length of the film is to be considered, is a combination of cat food, urine, food waste, and body odor), and both of the Beales defend their lifestyle vehemently [01:12:08]. Little Edie refers to the Village’s surprise inspection as a “raid” [00:01:51]. Concerns regarding the mental wellness of the two are what sparked much of the film’s initial controversy, but ultimately they are adults who manage a daily life, feed and clothe themselves, and seem, though occasionally cantankerous, ultimately content. An element of resignation colors Pictures of Ghosts as well. For many of these lost cinemas, there is no way to bring them back: the camera meditates on vacant lots where demolition has befallen a theatre; abandoned implements of construction hang like tissue and jut like bone in other half-augmented structures. It’s only natural that these places would not last centuries; the social mode and cinemagoing culture specific to Recife that enabled their renaissance certainly didn’t. Projectionists aren’t expected to live forever; neither is film stock. As intrinsic as time is to space, ephemerality inevitably wins out with decay. For its ideas of shared culpability and shared place, Landscape Suicide occasionally errs to apathy. If we, and all of our loci, are all guilty of every murder, then there is no authority to define or prosecute these crimes. There is no space to hold perpetrators of a crime that is not itself a criminal. 

With a range of concerns, and a wider range of tactics, Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts are all collectively laboring towards an alternative film language, one that centers space as dialogue, as mediator, as lingua franca. Benning’s ethics of duration indict the collective American occupation of land as complicit, our violent crimes a product of our landscape, images of shared guilt echoing through our foundations. Our decay is spiritual, he posits, an internal rot that threatens to erode our structural selves. The harm we do to one another is reflexive; auto-desecration. Grey Gardens speaks in terms of spatial otherness, presenting the Beales in contrast to their neighbors and their estate as defiant of its governing bodies. Space is the mouthpiece of the eponymous house and its turbulent relationship with its occupants, as much as it is their defender. It is what drew the filmmakers to the topic and is what attracts their camera throughout the film. Pictures of Ghosts, in all of its conventional structure, perhaps allows space to speak the loudest. With images spanning a lifetime, these cinemas become familiar, if not trustworthy. They contain iterations of appearance, of use, of structural stability. They accumulate in a demand for continuous support that simultaneously accommodates understanding of the reason for their decline. Documentary cinema’s ability to chronicle environments, locations, landmarks, and even the anonymity of indeterminate places is deeply charged and deeply effective for the thrust of these films. Throughout Landscape Suicide, Grey Gardens, and Pictures of Ghosts, silence speaks louder than words, for it is then when space is permitted to speak for itself.

Works Cited

Abbott, Mathew. "Grey Gardens and the Problem of Objectivity." Emotions, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience. Berghahn Books, 2021.

Directed by Benning, James. Landscape Suicide, performance by Anonymous , 1987.

Cole, Jake. "Review of Landscape Suicide." , 2022.

Luca, Tiago d., and Nuno B. Jorge. "Introduction: From Slow Cinema to Slow Cinemas." Slow Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Directed by Maysles, Albert, and David Maysles. Grey Gardens, performance by Anonymous . Portrait Films, 1975.

Directed by Mendonça Filho, Kleber. Pictures of Ghosts, performance by Anonymous . CinemaScópio, Produções Ancine, 2023.

Rabinowitz, Paula. "Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory." History and Theory :Studies in the Philosophy of History, vol. 32, no. 2, 1993, pp. 119-137. CrossRef, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2505348, doi:10.2307/2505348.

Rhodes, John D. ""Concentrated Ground": "Grey Gardens" and the Cinema of the Domestic." Framework, vol. 47, no. 1, 2006, pp. 83-105. CrossRef, https://www.jstor.org/stable/41552449, doi:10.1353/frm.2006.0006.

Ross, Julian. "Ethics of the Landscape Shot: Aka Serial Killer and James Benning’s Portraits of Criminals." Slow Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Herself or Her Self?: Visual Design and Mirrors in Cléo from 5 to 7

By Sophia Fijman, Edited by Bridget Zhang

It is not physically possible for a person to see themself, with the naked eye, as they appear to the rest of the world. A mirror’s image, though it shows life in real time, is reversed and will therefore never truly show our bodies as others view them. Mirror images tend to stand, then, as mere symbols of others’ conceptualization of a person and pursuing that will inevitably cause the loss of an actual sense of self. Renowned for her work as a pioneer of and often referred to as the “mother” of the French New Wave, filmmaker Agnès Varda wrote and directed Cléo From 5 to 7 (1962) as her second feature film (Vincendeau). It chronicles almost the entirety of 2 hours of a young French singer’s life as she is forced to confront her sense of self, one that is informed by her occupation as a performer and identity as a woman. Throughout the film, Cléo (Corrine Marchand) is accosted by mirrors as symbols of her progressive self-actualization. By physically framing Cléo in mirrors placed deliberately throughout the film, Varda engineers the audience’s perspective so that it is Cléo’s. She uses the visual symbolism of a mirror to indicate the way in which Cléo sees herself – that is, through a patriarchal gaze which gradually deteriorates. The presence of a mirror provides a visual representation of that transformation. Cléo initially has no sense of self but, rather, is incessantly enraptured by the mere image of herself. As her journey (and the film) progresses, she is freed of her own gaze and embraces her truer self via introspection as her identity collapses and is rebuilt. In turn, mirrors placed in visual design thread together the viewer’s perspective with Cléo’s own so that the audience might be fully enveloped in the gaze employed in Cléo from 5 to 7 as it changes.

The strategic use of mirrors is not uncommon in film. A well-known, more pop-culture famous example of such is Jack’s interactions with mirrors in The Shining (1980). Ironically, in horror, mirrors tend to symbolize another self. In general, they are often used in moments of reflection or to show that something is not what it seems. In Cléo from 5 to 7, they are assets to both. Mirrors point to how Cléo figuratively sees herself the way other people do. Toward the beginning of the film, she can’t help but identify with the image in the mirror and the perception others have of her – she has no individualized perception of herself. Her lack of any self-examination makes it all the more difficult for her to change as a person, for her own self-image must be broken down first in order to do so. Mirrors frame Cléo, quite literally reflecting her arc as she comes to view herself in a way that aligns more with a feminine gaze, rather than the masculine one. Coined in 1973 by theorist Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the ‘male gaze’ has become a pillar of film theory and analysis. In the simplest of terms, it is a lens through which cameras frame women – one which sexually objectifies them to be looked at and exhibited. As a performer, Cléo’s story is driven by the plight of being constantly on display. When the film begins, she is in desperate need of severing herself from the male gaze as it is ingrained into both her own self-perception and the image of herself presented to others.

When first introduced, Cléo has a tendency to objectify herself, though she doesn’t seem to know it. In fact, one of the first things she does is look in a mirror (4:37). Barely a minute later, she does so again, this time with a mirror behind her as well; she is physically encompassed by multiple versions of herself. In a shot utterly encapsulating of the first half of the film, “Cleo pauses before a hallway mirror which (...) offers a seemingly infinite reiteration of her image” (Flitterman-Lewis 272). In discussing woman-as-image, author Sandy Flitterman-Lewis highlights the “contrasting functions of mirrors in the first and second halves of the film” as they are initially used for the purposes of vanity, and then as visual representations of Cléo’s reckoning with her identity (272). It is not the mirror itself that does this, but rather the character’s interaction with it as an object. Cléo does not become woman-as-image because she glances in a mirror; she plays into this concept by staring into mirrors frequently and for extended stretches of time. This, ergo, is notable because the story of the film happens, for the most part, in real time and the viewer is therefore much more aware of just how much time she spends in a mirror. In many scenes in which Cléo interacts with a mirror early in the story, the camera doesn’t directly show her face, only reflections of it. In a technical sense, this orients viewers and places them in a position of power so that we gaze upon Cléo as she gazes upon herself. This marks Cléo as something framed and displayed, something objectified. She is, as such, fully visually enveloped in the masculine gaze – so much so that she sees herself that way.

The mirror is a lens through which the viewer sees Cléo in her most vulnerable moments, before she fully steps out of the masculine gaze. After leaving the fortune-teller, Cléo visits a cafe. Inside, she spends an extended period of time looking again in a mirror, worried her illness is visible on her face. Though they are conversing and there is quite a bit of implied activity going on in the cafe, the camera shows the audience almost solely Cléo and her maid, Angèle (Dominique Davray). The focus is entirely on her, underlining Cléo’s self-centered perspective and how she makes her way through the world early in the narrative. Throughout this first half of the film, Cléo checks her appearance in almost every location – the cafe, the hat shop, her bedroom. She says that, if her illness is visible on her face, she “might as well be dead already” (7:49). She is absolutely intoxicated by her own reflection, as obvious only a few moments later in the hat shop where she claims that everything suits her (13:01). At home, she is constantly surrounded by multiple mirrors even when she isn’t looking in them. The set design encloses Cléo with them, leading the viewer to surmise that Cléo wants to be able to stare at herself frequently, as they are furniture in her own apartment. In an enlightening rehearsal, she seems to cave in on herself, becoming suddenly aware of and able to understand a feeling of exploitation as a performer. Afterwards, she simplifies her outfit, as if to mourn herself prematurely. Removing her wig and donning a simple black dress, Cléo’s exaggerated, commodified idea of femininity – that which “Joan Rivière called ‘womanliness as masquerade’” (Ezra 178) – is suddenly absent. In discussing objectification in the French New Wave, Elizabeth Ezra states that, “As a star, Cléo herself is commodified, her humanity objectified in the mechanical reproduction and dissemination of her image” (183). Cléo’s decision to change her hyper feminine outfit, though it appears dramatic, catalyzes the long overdue disintegration of her self-perspective: her internalized masculine gaze. In doing so, she begins to physically break down her own image, thus marking the pivotal midpoint of Cléo’s arc.

In the second half of the film, mirrors are more significant in the lack thereof; Cléo interacts with them only a few times. She transitions gradually from being guided by the image of ‘herself’ (appearance according to others’ perspectives) to leading with a renewed sense of ‘her self’ (identity and psyche). Once she leaves her apartment, Cléo does not look in a complete mirror for the rest of the film. As Flitterman-Lewis explains, “The first mirror she encounters in her flight from the apartment is one whose surface is disturbed,” and to lose an unobscured mirror is, to Cléo, to lose “a reassuring image of coherence” – one which previously provided her with “a sense of her own being” (273). It’s here that Ezra as well comments, mentioning that Cléo observes herself, realizes that her own gaze is narrow, and internally monologues “I'm not looking at anyone but myself. It's tiring” (43:23) (180). Throughout the second half of the film, Cléo’s lack of identity is apparent, which in fact makes space for her to self-evaluate. She returns to the cafe around 44:27. However, this scene is starkly different in visual design compared to her earlier visit – unlike the first cafe visit, the camera is not static and does not focus on framing Cléo – as a result, there is a related and obvious change in Cléo’s perception of the world around her as it broadens. As opposed to the first cafe scene, Cléo does not try to catch her reflection at all, instead focusing on the people around her. The camera pans smoothly, showing the viewer her point of view. While the first scene “offers the busy social milieu of the cafe as mere background to Cleo's self-absorption,” this one provides the cafe as a vessel for Cléo’s observation (Fitterman-Lewis 274). She plays one of her songs on a jukebox, then checks thoroughly to see if anyone has noticed. As the camera merges with Cléo’s vision, the audience is practically forced to see things as she does, to notice what she does and, when she eventually sits next to a pillar with many small mirrors, Cléo looks past it and at the people instead. The combination of the presence of mirrors and Cléo’s lack of interest in them in this scene indicates that, while she has not fully transformed yet, she is capable of change.

Cléo from 5 to 7 challenges its protagonist’s comfort by revoking her of the ability to constantly reassure herself via mirrors. Until they’re obscured and then gone, Cléo’s voiceover thoughts are often vain and shallow. However, when there are fewer mirrors, Cléo mentally reflects as she stares at her physical reflection. This is best represented by Cléo’s interactions with her friend Dorothée (Dorothée Blanck), who acts as a sort of guide for Cléo. Dorothée, who poses as a nude model, is happy in her body, while Cléo expresses that she would feel exposed doing the same, “afraid people would find a fault” (52:32). Though both characters are gazed upon, their occupation separates them. Cléo’s “commodified status is the inverse of the sculptures that her friend Dorothée poses for, which comprise a range of original representations of a single referent, rather than the multiple copies of Cléo's hit single” (Ezra 183). Dorothée’s impact in Cléo’s transformation and the audience’s understanding of Cléo’s own gaze is supported by yet another mirror. While with Dorothée, Cléo drops a mirror, notably beginning another chapter. Dorothée immediately moves to clean it, yet Cléo’s hand is frozen in the shot and on the ground, not attempting to pick up the shards. Though Dorothée reassures her and tells her it’s “like breaking a plate,” Cléo believes it is an omen for death, explaining that she’s “overcome with fear” (1:03:16). Entranced by the shards, Cléo stares at her now fragmented reflection. This physical destruction of Cléo’s ‘identity’ severs the tie between the way she sees herself and the person she’s becoming. More specifically, the broken shard she looks at centers her eye in the middle of a crack, emphasizing how her self-perception breaks down, drawing the viewer’s eye. The shard as a symbol entwines her patriarchal gaze with performative femininity, then leaves both behind as Cléo walks away from her shattered self-perception. It’s also worth noting that this happens while she’s with Dorothée, who is exemplary of a kind of feminine empowerment because she is not commodified and resold as Cléo is. As a result, she is more in touch with her self, and her presence is significant as Cléo’s transformation comes to fruition. As they leave, Cléo drops the few shards she’s attempted to pick up, but glances back at them in a moment of self doubt. About a minute later, a reflective glass window is shown broken – a man has been killed and Dorothée says that the omen Cléo believes in must have been for him. This shot (1:04:04) of the broken window is the final time she looks into a reflective surface, confirming that Cléo’s development is solidified; the dismantling of her internalized masculine gaze is now irreversible. Flitterman-Lewis explains Cléo’s arc simply: it “hinges on the turn of phrase: ‘How do I look?’,” yet the phrase’s meaning shifts from a “passive, objectified meaning (‘How am I seen, how do I appear in the eyes of the world?’) to its active complement (‘How do I see, how is the world viewed by me?’)” (269). In short, Cléo cares more about what she sees than how she is seen, her gaze switching focus from image to the world as she experiences it – an embraced yet empowering feminine one.

Varda’s strategic use of mirrors as visual design functions as underscore, as if to say that Cléo’s perception of herself was never truly her self at all – it was reversed. The film employs gaze theory in a bit of a self-referential way – it engineers how the audience sees how Cléo sees herself. Any progressive intent this film has is a staple of the French New Wave, yet its overall theme keeps it poignantly relevant over 60 years after its release. Woman-as-image spurring woman in crisis is ever-present in film, as are mirrors as visual representations of gaze styles. Mirrors are not able to show us our true selves as others see us, yet it is when one separates physical beauty from one’s sense of self that progress is possible. A bit of an ironic motif, it is the destruction of that which allows Cléo to see her body as physically unaltered that motivates her to introspect and ‘see’ her self.

Works Cited

Ezra, Elizabeth. “Cléo’s Masks: Regimes of Objectification in the French New Wave.” Yale French Studies, no. 118/119, 2010, pp. 177–90. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41337086. Accessed 24 Feb. 2023.

Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. “From Déesse to Idée: Cleo From 5 to 7 .” To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema, Columbia University Press, 1996.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, Columbia University Press, 1986, pp. 198-209.

Cléo de 5 à 7. Directed by Agnès Varda, Ciné-tamaris, 1962.

Vincendeau, Ginette. “La Pointe Courte: How Agnès Varda ‘Invented’ the New Wave.” The Criterion Collection, 22 Jan. 2008, www.criterion.com/current/posts/497-la-pointe-courte-how-agnes-varda-invented-the-new-wave. Accessed 3 Nov. 2023.

Lost in Translation (2003): The Incompatibility of Zen and Solipsism

By Matthew Chan

In Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), aging actor Bob Harris (Bill Murray) speaks to recent philosophy graduate and aimless newly-wed Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) almost exclusively in sardonic, meaningless non-sequiturs. When told he is too tall Harris effortlessly fires back “Has anybody ever told you, you may be too small?” a rhetorical question that wraps up their interaction with a snarky plea to recognize one's immediate reality (43:22). When taken in the context of the film’s setting of Japan, the birthplace of Zen Buddhism, Harris’ comment can be seen as a koan, traditional Zen sayings, which T. Griffith Folk defines as a “riddle or a nonsensical question posed to a student with a demand for an answer” which scrambles one's discursive reasoning, causing intense mental concentration freezing the mind into a “ball of doubt” (Wright and Heine 26). The ultimate value of the koan is essentially its logic-defying nature, which draws unenlightened people into intense doubt and causes them to confront the reality and complications of their own lives. The koan as such is used as a tool to impart Zen teachings, which David Scott and Tony Doubleday define as having the aim to “lead the practitioner to a direct experience of life in itself” to “eliminate all dualistic distinctions” between oneself and the world at large and to experience “unveiled, unadorned reality” (Scott 3).

Lost in Translation, as such functions as a cinematic koan, as through individual scenes and lines of dialogue, Harris and Charlotte are faced with the absurd and unanswerable because of the language and cultural barrier of their new surroundings. It is these conditions that force them to contemplate their immense dissatisfaction and feelings of emptiness within their lives, careers, and marriages and come closer to understanding their immediate reality. However, the Zen qualities of the film reach a limit because of the overreaching solipsism of its characters, which in this case can be defined as “a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing” (Stamper). Solipsism ultimately emphasizes an individuality contrary to Zen teachings as expressed through the film’s cinematography and attitude of condescension towards Japan’s locals. The ultimate answer to the film’s riddle is only partially a Zen acceptance of reality and more discernibly a desire to transcend one’s surroundings through embracing individualism.

However, we can firstly consider how the film functions as a cinematic koan through various aspects, such as Murray’s aforementioned sardonic dialogue, but also through how the film is structured around individual scenes that attempt to impart the teachings of a koan by visual rather than verbal means. Throughout the film, major scenes are punctuated by shorter ones, which the viewer is dropped into without immediate context and which typically include Harris encountering some absurd situation that he struggles to deal with, because of a language or cultural barrier, with minimal dialogue and an emphasis on physical comedy. An example of this is how a crucial scene in the film, Harris and Charlotte’s first true interaction which involves passing snacks at the hotel bar, is immediately followed by one of Harris struggling to use and understand a Japanese-speaking exercise machine, which, because of its increasing speed threatens to throw him off as we see his body comically jerk around and hear his cries for help (25:17). The scene is only under a minute long and is one of many absurd detours the film takes. These scenes are of particular interest because they are comic moments enmeshed within a film that otherwise adopts a contemplative tone. What Coppola is doing is playing with our preconceived understanding of Murray’s established comic persona from films like Ghostbusters (1984) and Groundhog Day (1993), taking gags that would normally play for laughs and introducing them into a more thoughtful context, where specific concerns, particularly Harris’ crumbling marriage and his displacement within the restrictive liminal space of his hotel, are placed at the forefront. As such, through this tonal contradiction, Coppola suggests that by recognizing that absurdity can coexist with hardship we can understand the varied complexity of life and start to see things as they truly are. As such, it is clear that the scenarios Harris is physically subjected to essentially function as koans, absurd, unanswerable situations that render him helpless, and force him to go into a contemplative state, both pondering the ridiculous nature of his current scenario and larger issues in his life: whether of his feeling of entrapment in the hotel, his health or his mortality. Moreover, these physical riddles Harris is subjected to do appear to actually have an impact on his outlook in life, as evinced by a later scene where, in one of his few moments of clarity, he declares to his wife over the phone that he wants to start eating healthier like the Japanese (1:20:25). His confusion towards the exercise machine seems to lead him to a clearer understanding of his immediate reality, particularly of his physical fitness.

Furthermore, two critical scenes demonstrate how these koan-esque scenarios cultivate both contemplation and change in Harris and Charlotte. As these small scenes accumulate the audience finally views one that suggests a sense of contentment in Harris and an acceptance of his current situation, which comes in a three-second scene of him playing golf in his hotel room, silently celebrating as he hits the ball into a glass cup (1:03:06). The scene appears inconsequential but it communicates that he has finally learned to accept the absurdity of his life and make something better out of an unideal situation in the hotel. But the film’s final use of a visual koan is in a quick shot near the end where, after Harris and Charlotte resolve a prior quarrel, Charlotte glances at Harris’ feet and the film momentarily cuts to a close-up of his toes comically bulging out of hotel slippers that are way too small for him (1:27:17). In this moment Charlotte essentially finds clarity and grounding through acknowledging and embracing the absurd, fully absorbing the message of a koan by understanding that despite all the chaos and complication of life, to find enlightenment is to focus on what's directly in front of you. The film as such functions as a cinematic koan through the accumulation of small absurd scenes which punctuate the film, with the answer to the koan being that one needs to accept reality for what it truly is.

But to believe that the answer to the film’s koan is that the film ultimately endorses and fully encapsulates Zen values, by asserting an acceptance of reality, would be disingenuous because of how it foregrounds its characters' solipsism which runs antithetical to Zen teachings, and ultimately emphasize an individual desire to transcend reality. As articulated by Scott and Doubleday, another crucial aspect of Zen is the realization that “one is all things: mountains, rivers, grasses, trees, sun, moon, stars, universe, are all oneself”, that “Other people and things are no longer seen as apart from oneself, but, on the contrary, as one’s own body” (Scott 7). The critical idea here, that there lacks a distinction between oneself and the world, is wilfully subverted by the gaze of Coppola’s camera. Thematically the film is centered around the alienation one feels when in a foreign land, and the camera does much to emphasize this isolation. In practically every shot where either Harris or Charlotte are in frame they are the only thing in focus with everything else, the people inhabiting the space and the architecture of the country itself, blurred out in the background. The intention is clear, to suggest their mutual feelings of loneliness and displacement in a country that can feel frustratingly opaque. In practice, however, the camera essentially cuts both characters away from their surroundings, the Zen concept of oneness with the world is hence subverted by an assertion of their individualism.

Moreover, this prioritization of the perspectives of Harris and Charlotte serves to excise other characters from scenes entirely. An example of this is a scene where Charlotte and her husband bump into an actress they both know. Since the camera is locked to Charlotte’s point of view the main focus is on the actress, as such, her husband’s face is never in focus, we only see the back of his head and his blurred side profile even when he is talking (26:20). This scene effectively communicates the disconnection Charlotte feels from her husband and the emptiness she encounters in their marriage. However, it serves as a microcosm of how the film treats characters that are not Harris or Charlotte, particularly the actual people in Japan, who at best lie at the periphery and at worst serve as mere props for their process of self-discovery. The encroaching sense of narcissism in the film could be excused if the ending broke the prior visual pattern by dropping the use of close-ups and a low depth and field and by depicting Harris and Charlotte on the same discernable visual plane as those that surround them, that is to suggest that by recognizing reality as it is they have finally absorbed Zen teachings and become one with the world. However, the closing scene does the exact opposite, it expands the number of subjects in focus, from one to two, but this is merely to accommodate both Harris and Charlotte in the frame, as the world remains blurred behind them and Harris whispers his final message (1:32:55). It becomes increasingly difficult to view the film's ending through the lens of Zen teaching, as what the composition of the frame ultimately suggests is that it is only Harris and Charlotte against the world. A world that they have become momentarily suspended from through their relationship with one another. The final answer to the cinematic koan they seem to take away is not an understanding of the immediate nature of their reality or a recognition of the interconnected nature of life, but a desire to wilfully shun it– to transcend the difficulty of their lives and assert their individuality against a complex world.

Furthermore, the attitude of condescension the film has towards the Japanese people is undeniable, which once more goes against Zen teachings of oneness in the world between yourself and all people. There is an argument to be made that the pronouncements the film makes on loneliness and alienation in foreign lands can be read as universal to the extent that the setting of the film becomes merely incidental. Especially in the sense that the film could take place anywhere to a similar effect and that what the audience is actually seeing is not the exclusion of the experience of locals but simply a narrative that runs parallel to their lives. However, this is undercut by the act of othering the character Harris performs on those around him. Drawing once more on Bill Murray’s comic persona, the many snarky comments he makes, much of which presumably stems from improvisation, consciously or unconsciously project a casual racism. This is noticeable in a scene at a sushi bar where Harris makes various comments at the expense of a sushi chef, taking note of his inexpressive face (59:32). This scene can be construed as Harris making a mockery of the chef on an individual and not cultural level but it is indicative of the way he treats the locals throughout the film, less as people with their own lives and agencies but props in a comic routine he can poke fun of without retaliation because of the language barrier. This piece of characterization could be overlooked if Harris’ larger character arc was one of learning to tolerate others outside of himself but this is subverted by one of his final passing remarks to Charlotte, joking that she should tell him “Have a good fright” a callback to a prior conversation that mocked the Japanese people for mixing up Ls and Rs when speaking English (1:31:12). As such, as the film concludes, it appears that Harris has not learned how to look beyond his own perspective or to see those around him as one with himself and the world. The final shot of the two in focus takes on an even more egregious meaning as if to suggest that their relationship has created a vacuum away from foreign influence and things they cannot comprehend, precluding a willingness to learn. The final answer to the cinematic koan once again may be the assertion of individualism against a world too complex to understand, celebrating ignorance over a shared existence.

The film’s larger failure to abide by Zen teachings can be further examined in relation to one of Coppola’s primary cinematic influences within the film, that of Yasujirō Ozu, who was regarded as the most traditionally Zen Japanese filmmaker (Schrader 46). What Coppola most noticeably borrows from Ozu is that of his various “codas”: wide shots of outdoor environments that bookend indoor scenes, which in the case of this film typically comprise shots of Tokyo’s cityscape. At the most basic level, these outdoor shots are meant to suggest the wider world characters are a part of and the oneness with nature and existence they should strive towards (Schrader 57). Within Ozu’s films, these codas help form a visual syntax, within the film’s editing that is reflective of a traditional Zen saying: “Before you study Zen, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers; while you are studying Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers; but once you have enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and rivers once again rivers” (Ross 181-182), An example of this syntax can be seen in the ending of his film Late Autumn (1960). As a mother is finally left alone in her apartment after having married off her daughter, the film cuts from a shot of her in deep contemplation to a shot of the walls of her apartment, back to a shot of her now smiling, and finally to the empty hallway outside (2:07:58). The first cut to an unoccupied inanimate space, that of her walls, is filled with the connotation of sadness because of her contemplation, in essence, the mountain (her apartment) is no longer a mountain. But the cut to the empty hallway, juxtaposed by the sense of contentment implied by her smile, is alleviated of the heavy emotional connotation, now the mountain (the world outside the mother) is once again a mountain, and her oneness with the larger world is emphasized.

In comparison, Coppola edits a scene in Lost in Translation in a similar manner. The scene takes place in a taxi after Harris and Charlotte share a night out, the viewer sees a shot of the city at night in motion from Charlotte’s perspective which holds very little emotional connotation apart from bemusement, then cut to Charlotte inside the car as she turns her head to Harris, then cut to a shot of Harris, a shot of Charlotte smiling and then to the city once more which is no longer in focus, instead capturing an impressionistic, expressive blob of colors, suggesting the explosive, indescribable emotions Charlotte feels when with Harris (53:09). What we essentially see is a reverse of Ozu’s traditional syntax, as the mountain, in this case, the city, is initially seen as a mountain but is then transformed and noticeably abstracted through Charlotte’s emotional subjectivity. The outdoor coda no longer represents oneness with the world and clarity in recognizing it as it is, but the opposite, the bending of the world’s objectivity towards one's emotions and subjectivity. Traditional Zen values are hence subverted and replaced by an assertion of one’s individuality within the world.

Moreover, the closing shots of the film, which only comprise of outdoor shots, hold a similar connotation. Throughout the film, shots of the city from Harris’ perspective are colored in by a banality, because of his resistance to being there at all. Yet the final city shots from his perspective now hold a deeper emotional connotation, bolstered by the dreamy sounds of The Jesus Mary Chain song “Just Like Honey” (1:35:14). Now from the perspective of Harris and Charlotte the city can never be seen as just a city, they can never look past themselves and see their exterior reality as it truly is. Tokyo will only ever be the place where they found each other and temporarily enjoyed one another's company. The visual syntax of Coppola’s film thus prevents the answer to the film’s cinematic koan from being that of a Zen acceptance of immediate reality, as her characters are left too enamored by their individual subjectivities, the only answer they can find to the emptiness of life is to briefly pretend they had transcended it.

The question then is, if the answer to the film’s cinematic koan does not fall into traditional Zen values, what belief system, if any, is guiding Coppola’s film? Especially since the final inaudible phrase Harris whispers into Charlotte’s ear is delivered with enough emotional portent to read as transcendent. It is a scene where the difficulties of their individual lives, their disappointments with their marriages and careers and their emptiness seems to be momentarily alleviated. A place to start would be to consider the two value systems Harris and Charlotte bring into Japan itself as Americans: the Judeo-Christian values of Western society and that of modern neoliberal capitalism. For the former, one can look to the belief system as espoused by director Robert Bresson, whose films all share a similar structure in guiding the viewer toward the transcendent in a distinctly Christian manner. An example of this is his film Pickpocket (1959), which follows an inexpressive man obsessed with pickpocketing, tormented by his earthly desires. The only way he finds absolution is in the film’s final scene where the character Jeanne, declares her love for him (1:14:53). There is an irrationality in this gesture yet it signals an act of forgiveness that cleanses him of his sins and ends his torment. In this same way, the whisper can be interpreted as an act of forgiveness, as Harris and Charlotte air their compounding frustrations out to each other throughout the film, perhaps the only absolution they can find is in their individual acceptance of one another flaws and all, with the whisper suggesting this mutual understanding. In this case, perhaps the grace one can freely offer to another individually is the answer to the film’s cinematic koan and the question of how we can curb the emptiness of existence.

However, their final interaction reads too much as a temporary balm to their problems and does not suggest the finality Christian forgiveness traditionally implies. One can then look to the system of modern capitalism as the guiding belief system in Coppola’s film. Perhaps Coppola’s largest influence next to Ozu is Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. Throughout Lost in Translation, Coppola borrows liberally from Antonioni, mimicking his use of negative space within compositions, with characters being dwarfed within the frame by their surroundings, and adopting a similar thematic focus, depicting a modern sense of ennui and alienation. The ennui Coppola’s characters feel perhaps has as much in common with the Buddhist notion of a clinging emptiness as with the dissatisfaction Antonioni’s characters feel within a post-war Italy increasingly governed by capitalism. After all the archetypes within Antonioni’s films, particularly his trilogy of L’Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L’Ecclisse (1962), are similar to Coppola’s film, following members of the bourgeois elite within economic hubs who, despite having unrestricted access to anything they could possibly want, only find an unexplainable sense of longing. This longing is fostered in large part by the isolating individualism the system of capitalism breeds, de-emphasizing the importance of community and promoting personal gain at the expense of others. Just as Vittoria (Monica Vitti) encounters a profound emptiness within the Rome Stock Exchange in L'Eclisse, so do Harris and Charlotte within the neon-lit center of one of Asia’s economic powerhouses, guided there by their status and wealth, commanding lifestyles they find increasingly meaningless (19:30). The isolation of both characters is fostered by the roles capitalism has prescribed them: Harris as the patriarch whose only intrinsic value to his family seems to be to provide financially, losing touch with his children in the process, and Charlotte as an accessory to her husband who is constantly absent, consumed by his work. It is also pertinent to recognize that the development of modern neoliberal capitalism in Tokyo was fostered by American aid post-war, so the sheer presence of Charlotte and Harris echoes America's larger presence and legacy in Japan (Lee 509). By refusing to change their ways they continue to impose the American value of individualism within the country. Yet at the same time, they bear direct witness to how American influence has introduced transactional values that have produced a similar homogenizing emptiness in Japan, traversing through meetings with corporate handlers, photoshoots, and trips to the strip club, and leaving these interactions with very little in the way of meaning or fulfillment.

If there is anything shared by the endings of Antonioni’s films it is their common sense of irresolution, the acknowledgment that it is perhaps fruitless to try and discern meaning in life or to fight against capitalism. Though this appears to touch upon the Zen idea of accepting reality, his films frequently end in solipsism, with his characters retreating into themselves, their bad habits, and their desires to temporarily alleviate their longing. Perhaps this is the value system the ending of Lost in Translation best abides by, with both characters coming to fully recognize their emptiness but choosing to never look beyond themselves. Ultimately finding temporary relief and escape from their predefined roles through each other but otherwise choosing to surrender to the values of individualism as espoused by Western Capitalism. The answer to the film’s cinematic koan may be just this: solipsism.

In many ways, it is frustrating to approach a film that appears to align itself with a certain value system but otherwise fails to consistently live up to the ideals it is purportedly attempting to preach. Though it is undeniable that Lost in Translation functions as a cinematic koan, the answer it provides is nowhere close to that of Zen teachings. The film as such appears to be more about Westerners who impose their values on Japan rather than about foreigners who learn to alleviate their problems by adopting the philosophy of their new surroundings. If there is any consolation it is in the void Coppola leaves us with at the end. Perhaps a recognition of emptiness is enough to guide the viewer towards finding their own solution, whether through overcoming the self through Zen, through the Christian value of grace, or through any other belief system. The film as such is a koan, offered not to its characters but the viewer, providing no instruction on how to achieve absolution and only leaving one with the option to contemplate, to form their own “ball of doubt” and to perhaps find personal clarity through a film that offers little.

Works Cited

Antonioni, Michelangelo, director. L'Eclisse. Cineriz, 1962.

Bresson, Robert, director. Pickpocket. Compagnie Cinématographique de France, 1959.

Coppola, Sofia, director. Lost in Translation. American Zoetrope. Elemental Films, 2003.

Lee, Yong Wok. “The Japanese Challenge to Neoliberalism: Who and What Is 'Normal' in the History of the World Economy?” Review of International Political Economy, vol. 15, no. 4, 2008, pp. 506-534. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25261984. Accessed 1 March 2023.

Ozu, Yasujirō, director. 秋日和 [Late Autumn]. Shochiku, 1960.

Ross, Nancy Wilson. Three Ways of Asian Wisdom: Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, and Their Significance for the West. Simon and Schuster, 1966.

Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer. University of California Press, 2018.

Scott, David. The Elements of Zen. Barnes & Noble, 1992.

Stamper, Joshua. “Solipsism Definition & Meaning.” Merriam-Webster, 23 February 2023, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/solipsism. Accessed 1 March 2023.

Wright, Dale S., and Steven Heine, editors. The Koan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism. Oxford University Press, 2000.

In Defense of the Sprawl: An Ode to Long-Running TV Shows

By Sana Belaluddin, Edited by Alexis Lopez and Vrinda Das

There’s a quote by author Heidi Priebe that goes, “To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the person they used to be.” The same is true, I’ve found, of television. I often return to this quote when watching Community’s frustrating later seasons. The six-season sitcom follows a group of ‘zany oddballs’ who form a makeshift family as students at Greendale Community College. Greendale brings together misfits from all walks of life, conveniently demonstrated by the members of the central study group: manipulative ex-lawyer Jeff Winger (Joel McHale), socially oblivious cinephile Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi), overachieving former addict Annie Edison (Alison Brie), misguided activist Britta Perry (Gillian Jacobs), recent divorcee Shirley Bennet (Yvette Nicole Brown), kindhearted jock Troy Barnes (Donald Glover), and abrasive retiree Pierce Hawthorne (Chevy Chase). Community became known for its high-concept riffs on pop culture formats ranging from the Western to stop-motion animation. But the majority of their episodes, whether modeled after Law and Order or The Civil War, tend to follow the same structure: a character makes a mistake that leads to conflict within the group, they learn their lesson, and everyone hugs and makes up. Even when episodes diverge from this formula, they maintain the idealistic outlook behind it. For four seasons, the show’s message is one of optimism—these friends are made better by each other. This message is embodied by the show’s lead, Jeff Winger, whose cold heart is softened by his newfound community. While Jeff enters Greendale as a selfish con artist who only cares about himself, he gradually learns to use his skills of manipulation to help the people he loves. 

But the last two seasons of Community are a bit more somber. After graduating at the end of season four, Jeff tries to restart his law practice with a new moral code. He quickly finds that morals don’t get you very far outside Greendale, as his business fails disastrously. He’s now stuck at Greendale and thoroughly depressed about it. He starts drinking more frequently; when a glass of scotch is taken from his hand in the season five premiere, he remarks despondently, “That was it. That was all I had” (“Repilot” 00:02:22). He struggles to accept his new existence as “a middle-aged community college teacher,” and expresses fears that all of his friends will leave him behind (“G.I. Jeff” 00:13:56). This change in Jeff reflects a broader transformation in the tone of the show itself. There are no more tidy resolutions, no more palatable lessons learned. Seasons five and six are even visually distinct from the previous four. Where the earlier seasons are characterized by a vibrant color palette, the last two feature desaturated colors, cooler tones, and dimmer lighting.

Even the show’s quirky adventures take on a darker tone. A season five episode modeled after David Fincher’s mystery thrillers, for instance, ends on an ambiguous note that leaves viewers with more questions than answers. In “Basic Intergluteal Numismatics,” Annie and Jeff team up to catch a bandit who’s been terrorizing the school by dropping quarters down unsuspecting students’ pants. On a deeper level, the episode centers around Annie and Jeff’s long-standing will-they-won’t-they romance, as the dean of the school suggests that they like to solve mysteries together in order to avoid acting on their feelings for each other. The episode is evocative of season two’s “Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design,” which also saw Annie and Jeff partner up to solve a mystery. In that episode, which pays homage to the conspiracy thriller genre, Jeff tries to get credit for a fake class and discovers his made-up professor actually exists. Annie persuades Jeff to unravel the mystery, leading to a comedic climax in which four different conspiracies are revealed in quick succession. Like “Basic Intergluteal Numismatics,” this episode also teases the unresolved tension in Jeff and Annie’s relationship, but it ultimately ends with the two of them on the same team, united in their plan to teach the dean a lesson for conspiring with too many people. Even while borrowing from labyrinthine conspiracy thrillers, the episode delivers a satisfying ending in which all loose ends are tied up (almost laughably so). Unlike “Conspiracy Theories,” however, “Basic Intergluteal Numismatics” leaves everything unresolved. Jeff and Annie never catch their culprit, nor do they meaningfully address their relationship. 

In perhaps the show’s most disturbing episode, Jeff finds himself in a warped version of the ‘80s cartoon G.I. Joe. He experiences brief flashes of the ‘real’ world, including the beeping of a heart monitor and his friends tearfully calling out for him to wake up. Eventually, we learn that this cartoon is a strange fever dream of Jeff’s, who overdosed on a fifth of scotch and some youth pills after an existential crisis about aging. When ‘cartoon’ Britta asks if he was trying to commit suicide, Jeff insists he wasn’t, but he also demonstrates a reluctance to rejoin the world of the living. “I chose this,” he says, referring to the G. I. Joe dream world (“G.I. Jeff” 00:14:17). Jeff may not have actively tried to kill himself, but for at least a moment, he chose death over life. And yet, the show never really reckons with those darker implications. The episode ends with a classic Community group hug, but it rings hollow. Jeff’s brush with death is never mentioned again, and his frequent drinking becomes just another quirky character trait. When Frankie (Paget Brewster), a consultant introduced in season six to fix up the school, suggests he’s a “functional alcoholic,” it’s played off as a joke (“Basic Email Security” 00:14:05). 

“G.I. Jeff” highlights the dark undercurrent that runs through Community’s two final seasons. Greendale, once a refuge, has become a prison. The initial charm of Greendale was that it was a place for lost souls to temporarily figure out their lives; the longer the characters stay there, the more depressing their inability to make it in the real world becomes. While the show used to argue that the study group pushes each other to become better people, it now frames their bond as toxic. In the season six episode “Wedding Videography,” Jeff remarks that the group is strong because their “flaws feed into each other” (00:07:01). Frankie observes that this could also be called “codependence” (“Wedding Videography” 00:07:05). She’s proven right when the group shows up to a classmate’s wedding drunk and proceeds to take over the entire event. Shot in a mockumentary style, the episode seems to suggest that these selfish, unlikable people are what the study group would truly look like to an outside observer. Instead of helping each other to become better people, the group now enables each other’s most obnoxious behaviors. In another season six episode, the gang bands together in classic Community fashion to ensure a racist comedian gets to perform at Greendale. Reflecting on their actions at the end of the episode, the group’s former enemy turned friend Chang (Ken Jeong) asks, “What’s the lesson here? I always wanna make sure I know what the lesson is” (“Basic Email Security” 00:24:12). His remark pokes fun at the formula that once governed the show, in which the characters usually walked away having learned a lesson. As the group throws around nonsensical buzzwords like “Government is terrorism” and “Tarry not, for terrorism terrifies,” it becomes clear that there is no lesson this time. The structure of the earlier seasons has fallen apart. Community has essentially started to parody itself, abandoning its optimistic worldview for hardened cynicism.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this. It’s just not Community. At least, it’s not the Community that fans grew to love for the first four seasons. I can understand why this would alienate some people. Viewers want consistency. They don’t want to watch their beloved show morph into something they don’t recognize. A common complaint about long-running TV shows is that they “overstayed their welcome,” suggesting that there’s an inevitable decline in quality that comes with lengthy series (Khan). Consider the reactions to the recent ending of Succession. The news that the gripping HBO drama would be ending with season four was met with the usual dismay from viewers sad to see it go. But many also praised creator Jesse Armstrong’s decision to end the show on a strong note. Tom Nicholson argued in Esquire that the news was a “relief” because “most great TV programmes go on slightly too long.” Stuart Heritage made a similar argument in favor of shorter shows in the Guardian: “No bad seasons. No listless wheel spinning. No crazy new characters being introduced after seven years to cover for the sudden loss of a cast member. Just good, succinct storytelling.” I can see where he’s coming from. I remember raging about how Grey’s Anatomy became unbearably melodramatic around season ten. In its early seasons, the medical drama balanced its heavier storylines with a healthy dose of comedy. Ten years on, however, it seemed to run out of jokes. Half of the original characters had either been killed off or banished. Those that remained had been through an almost comical amount of trauma—plane crashes, mass shootings, near drownings, you name it. Grey’s became a different beast, trading in its catchy pop rock soundtrack for soulful stripped-down covers. I hated it. It’s tough to watch a TV show you love lose what made you love it in the first place. Many would rather the show just die a merciful death before that happens–I used to be in that camp. 

And then the pandemic happened. I was a freshman in college at the time, sent home over spring break for who knows how long. As we all slowly began to grasp the reality of the situation, I struggled to adjust to the new normal. I had to let go of whatever ideal college experience I had imagined for myself. I said goodbye to the apartment in the university village I was planning to live in next year. I drifted from my closest friends, and eventually had a falling out with them that left me completely isolated. When my school finally reopened for in-person instruction, I was hit with another change: my mom got sick. It turned out she had an autoimmune disease that affected her mobility. She was unable to walk without assistance, and she would likely need to be on medication to manage it for the foreseeable future. 

Over the past few years, I’ve seen my life transform into something I didn’t recognize over and over again. It's made me appreciate TV shows that transform themselves over the course of their lives. There’s something comforting about seeing a show reinvent itself, especially after being forced to do so myself.  

Take Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which found itself in a similar predicament as Community in its penultimate season. The sixth season of the supernatural teen drama following young vampire slayer Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) was hated by many fans for its darker tone and subject matter. Buffy, having died and been resurrected, struggles to adjust to being alive again. Throughout the season, she is depressed and suicidal. She admits that she wishes her friends never brought her back to life because she had finally found peace in death. It’s not a stretch to read seasons five and six of Community as a kind of death and rebirth. The season five premiere is even called “Repilot,” functioning as a soft reboot. Both Community and Buffy find 

themselves reckoning with what happens when stories outlive their natural ending. These shows are faced with an existential question: how do we go on now? 

It’s worth pointing out that the changes in the later seasons of Community reflected behind-the-scenes events. Creator Dan Harmon was fired after season three and rehired after the widely panned fourth season. At the same time, the show was “hemorrhaging” key cast members, as Abed puts it in the finale (“Emotional Consequences” 00:04:27). Chevy Chase, Yvette Nicole Brown, and Donald Glover all left at various points in season five. NBC canceled the show after that season, and it moved to Yahoo for its sixth and final season (Adalian). Network switch-ups also influenced Buffy in season six; the series moved from the WB to UPN over budget issues (“Sold!”). TV, more than any other medium, is marred by the fingerprints of real life. Actors get pregnant, showrunners leave, global pandemics strike—and TV shows must adapt. The nature of television makes it nearly impossible for any show to remain perfect, to serve the ideals of story above all else. 

Of course, the ugly economic reality of TV is that story often isn’t the main priority. As Brian Phillips points out, “[TV shows are] designed to keep growing, to keep inventing new stuff until they reach the outer limits of profitability or their creators’ patience.” Networks are happy to run successful shows for as long as they keep making money, and I’m sure even the most idealistic creatives appreciate having a steady job. So shows find ways to prolong themselves past their natural ending. “The carousel never stops turning,” as Meredith Grey’s (Ellen Pompeo) mother tells her in an early episode of Grey’s Anatomy, “You can’t get off” (“Bring the Pain” 00:38:12). What she meant as a metaphor for life becomes an even better metaphor for Grey’s itself, and indeed television in general. The characters aren’t allowed to move on, as long as the show keeps running. The community college students can’t graduate; the vampire slayer can’t die a hero’s death. Meredith Grey can never get off the damn carousel. Movies are clean, complete, finished products. TV sprawls. It evolves. It adapts to its environment. In the case of Community, Grey’s, and Buffy, their transformations each seem to signal that the show could not continue on as it had. It has to become something new. 

The model of the long-running TV show is now a thing of the past. In the age of streaming, TV shows have shorter and shorter runs. A Ringer article found that the average length of a TV season in 2017 was nine episodes, a sharp decline from the once-standard 22 (Lindbergh). Streaming shows have shorter overall lifespans as well, with most shows only lasting about three seasons (Herman). Under this new model, an entire series can now be condensed into the length of one season of Grey’s. Many would argue this is a good thing—less ‘filler,’ less room to meander. But television’s ability to evolve over time is one of its most unique and narratively rich features. I don’t think we should be willing to write it off so easily. 

I get that we’re all tired of living in a capitalist hellscape where the needs of story are always subservient to those of profit, but I also think it’s possible, with a little imagination, to see the economic realities of the old television model as a feature and not a bug. Sure, there are some shows that I’m happy to see wrapped up in a tight three seasons that have been planned out from the start. But I think there’s value in the sprawl. 

In season twelve of Grey’s Anatomy, long after I had written it off, the show put out one of my all-time favorite episodes,“The Sound of Silence.” In this episode, Meredith is brutally attacked by a patient who’s in a fugue state. She temporarily loses her hearing and has to have her jaw wired shut. We spend much of the episode locked in Meredith’s perspective, unable to hear or speak, forced to observe her friends and family from afar as she slowly recovers from her injuries. It’s a moving episode even as a standalone, but it’s also a poignant encapsulation of the trauma and grief of the previous two seasons of Grey’s. In season eleven, Meredith’s husband, Derek (Patrick Demsey), dies. He was the latest in a long line of series regulars who departed the show, but arguably had the most impactful exit. Meredith and Derek’s romance had been a part of the show’s DNA since the pilot. It was hard to imagine how the show could survive this loss. Is Grey’s still Grey’s without Derek? Or without Cristina (Sandra Oh), Meredith’s best friend who left at the end of season ten (of 20). Or any of the other major characters who left? How many limbs could the show lose before it was too far gone to save?

Grey’s didn’t figure it out immediately. Much of what follows Cristina’s and Derek’s departures is frustrating and uneven. But in “The Sound of Silence,” they hit the nail on the head by connecting Meredith’s physical trauma from the attack to her unprocessed grief for Derek. After many long weeks of recovery Meredith grows frustrated. She lashes out at her friends physically since she can’t do so verbally. Finally, Meredith’s mentor and father figure Richard perceptively concludes that her anger is not just a reaction to the attack but rather a manifestation of her grief for Derek. He tells her that forgiveness is the first step to healing, coaxing her “to forgive Derek for dying too soon. To forgive [herself] for hating him for dying too soon” (“The Sound of Silence” 00:34:17). After her talk with Richard, Meredith agrees to meet her attacker, who has no memory of the event. When she reaches a hand out to forgive him, we understand that she’s healing a lot more than her immediate wounds. It’s a brilliant episode. And it never would have existed if the show had ended at its peak. 

Loss is inevitable in any long-running TV show. But with loss comes the potential for reinvention. It is only after Buffy sinks into the depths of despair that she can (literally) crawl out of them towards the light, as she does in the season six finale. And while Jeff’s arc in the later seasons of Community is dark and unsettling at times, it’s also an honest portrayal of grief—the kind of grief that comes not after a loss, but after a major life change. I’ve become well acquainted with this type of grief over the past few years, and I’ve come to appreciate television’s unique capacity for telling stories about grief. The best TV shows are those that don’t fight against the external circumstances dictating their evolution, but rather use them to craft resonant stories. This process is often messy, and there will inevitably be some episodes or even whole seasons that miss the mark. But I can’t help but admire a storytelling medium that reflects the messiness of real life.

Viewers may want to see a story unfold the way it’s been planned out from beginning to end, but life doesn’t follow a set plan. Our stories should reflect that. I don’t watch Grey’s anymore, but I’m kind of glad it’s still chugging along, on its fifth or sixth or twelfth life by now. While I once begged ABC to put me and Meredith Grey out of our misery and just end the show already, I now appreciate (from afar) its refusal to die. It’s a reminder of the lesson that Jeff and Buffy have to learn in their final seasons: life is worth living, even if it doesn’t look the way you thought it would.

Works Cited

Adalian, Josef. “Community Moving to Yahoo for Sixth Season.” Vulture, Vox Media, June 30, 2014, www.vulture.com/2014/06/community-moving-to-yahoo-for-sixth-season.html.

“Basic Email Security.” Community, created by Dan Harmon, season 6, episode 6, Yahoo! Screen, 2015.

“Bring the Pain.” Grey’s Anatomy, created by Shonda Rhimes, season 2, episode 5, ABC, 2005.

“Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television.” Community, created by Dan Harmon, season 6, episode 13, Yahoo! Screen, 2015.

“G.I. Jeff.” Community, created by Dan Harmon, season 5, episode 11, NBC, 2014.

Heritage, Stuart. “US TV shows are ending earlier than usual, and that’s a great thing.” The Guardian, Guardian News & Media, May 15, 2023, www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/may/15/tv-shows-ending-succession-barry-marvelous-mrs-maisel.

Herman, Alison. “The Life Span of Streaming TV Series Is Shrinking.” The Ringer, SB Nation, August 11, 2020, www.theringer.com/tv/2020/8/11/21363234/high-fidelity-canceled-streaming-tv-series-life-span.

Khan, Fawzia. “10 TV Shows That Overstayed Their Welcome.” CBR, Jan 28, 2023,  www.cbr.com/tv-shows-ran-too-long/.

Lindbergh, Ben. “Mourning the Loss of the Long TV Season.” The Ringer, SB Nation, August 4, 2017, www.theringer.com/tv/2017/8/4/16094348/inefficiency-week-mourning-the-lost-long-tv-season.

Nicholson, Tom. “Why It’s a Relief That ‘Succession’ Is Ending After Season 4.” Esquire, Hearst UK, February 24, 2023, www.esquire.com/uk/culture/a43062535/why-its-a-relief-that-succession-is-ending-after-season-4/.

Phillips, Brian. “In Praise of the TV Shows That Just Won’t Really End.” The Ringer, SB Nation, May 26, 2023, www.theringer.com/tv/2023/5/26/23736151/series-finales-spinoffs-bonus-episodes-ted-lasso-walking-dead.

“Repilot.” Community, created by Dan Harmon, season 5, episode 1, NBC, 2014.

“Sold! Buffy Moves to UPN.” ABC News, April 24, 2001, www.abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=106281&page=1.

“The Sound of Silence.” Grey’s Anatomy, created by Shonda Rhimes, season 12, episode 9, ABC, 2016.

“Wedding Videography.” Community, created by Dan Harmon, season 6, episode 12, Yahoo! Screen, 2015.

A Contextual Analysis of Kurosawa’s High and Low

By Fabrizio Marsano, Edited by Bea Heard

On March 1st, 1963, Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (Tengoku To-Jigoku) was released in Japan to general critical acclaim that only grew over time. Nowadays, it is widely regarded as one of the master director’s best works, and is consistently placed among the greatest films in cinematic history. It has been studied by countless scholars over the past fifty years, and influenced the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas. Inarguably, High and Low is a timeless masterpiece.

The film stars Kurosawa’s recurring collaborator, the legendary Toshiro Mifune (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo), as Kingo Gondo, a wealthy shoemaking businessman. For the first hour of screentime, Gondo is faced with a moral dilemma: sacrifice his fortune to rescue his chauffeur’s kidnapped child. However, after Gondo agrees to the ransom, High and Low takes a drastic turn. It becomes a detective story as the police hunt down the kidnapper, who is ultimately captured and confronted by Gondo on death row.

Unsurprisingly, given this is a Kurosawa film, High and Low’s story covers a massive range of themes and ethical complexities. These include class struggle, post-war Japanese industrialization, corporate greed, and humanist morality. The plot and its underlying themes are masterfully furthered by the film’s numerous stylistic technical devices, which critics ever increased to appreciate as time went by. As Charles Higham puts it: “His [Kurosawa’s] mastery of the cinema’s technical resources is used to support an austere and rigorous examination of human weaknesses and aspirations” (Higham 739). This paper will serve as an exploration of the cultural influences that shaped High and Low, as well as how they are reflected in the film’s formal elements.

Part 1: Akira Kurosawa & A Changing Japanese Society

In order to analyze High and Low, it is necessary to understand both the context of post-war Japan as well as Kurosawa’s own life. This is because the film (and Kurosawa’s whole filmography) is strongly tied to the sociopolitical context of a constantly changing Japanese society. Kurosawa “came from a family of former samurai – samurai existed in the living memory of his parents” (Wild 11). However, he himself was too late to experience Bushido culture firsthand. He was born in 1910, about 42 years after “feudal warlordism came to an end...” (Wild 11) and since “Japan became a market economy, a process that had an enormous impact upon the political and social structure of the country” (Wild 11). In fact, Kurosawa lived much of his early life in Tokyo, an ever-growing industrial city, and only experienced the countryside whenever he visited his grandparents in Akita, a place he was always drawn to.

Consequently, the dichotomy between the modern city and the natural environment of the countryside that dominated Kurosawa’s early life had a significant impact on his works. Family ties to a traditional feudal Japan explain his love for adapting stories into samurai settings. Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985), for example, are samurai film versions of Shakespeare’s Macbeth and King Lear, respectively. However, it is not only a feudal Japan setting that Kurosawa transposes European and Western literature to. Ikiru (1952) is inspired by Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych, and High and Low itself is an adaptation of Ed McBain’s King’s Ransom. Both of these films change the setting to a post-war Tokyo, and their characters contain humanistic moral values about honor, courage, etc., that parallel the Bushido ways of the samurai. Overall, Kurosawa seemed to accept Japanese modernity as a reality, yet still believed in the existence and rule of the traditional Japanese code of honor.

Additionally, it was during Kurosawa’s childhood and teenage years that he was first introduced to the filmmakers and writers that heavily influenced his career. “Between the ages of nine and nineteen, Kurosawa saw hundreds of films ... ranging from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari ... to the likes of Tartuffe, Metropolis and Battleship Potemkin” (Wild 15). His brother Heigo also played a significant role in his artistic formation. He was “responsible for introducing Kurosawa to the novels of Maxim Gorky and Fyodor Dostoevsky” (Wild 13), whose influence sparked his early interest in humanist beliefs. Heigo also introduced him to “the films of John Ford, Fritz Lang and Sergei Eisenstein” (Wild 13). Many consider Kurosawa as the most “westernized” Japanese director, and it is precisely his love for people like Ford, Lang, and Orson Welles that inspired him to use similar stylistic techniques on his films.

Furthermore, even though Kurosawa had already experienced WWI and the industrializing movement of the early 20th century Japan, there was yet another crucial period that drastically changed his world: the Second World War. September 2nd, 1945 marked the end of Japanese imperialism: “Japan’s unconditional surrender served to effect a complete change in the ideological outlook of the people from totalitarianism to democracy” (Takashima 91). The war left the country in ruins, almost everyone was starving, and millions were forced to return from Japan’s liberated colonies to the mainland. When General MacArthur announced the political changes for economic reconstruction, they “brought about a great confusion in their [the Japanese people’s] social consciousness” (Takashima 92). Thus, out of this void of political ideology came yet another dichotomy: capitalism vs. socialism.

As productivity began to recover in Japan, there was a massive disparity in the distribution of national income. There was despair “among the masses concerning the shortage of their daily necessaries, especially basic necessities such as clothing, food, and housing ... the masses unanimously complain against the heavy burden of taxation and its unjust distribution ... such efforts seem to be intensifying the conflict between the rich and the poor” (Takashima 99). Additionally, prior to the war, Kurosawa “joined the Proletarian Artists’ League and between 1929 and 1932 threw himself into the role of political activist” (Wild 20). Hence, accounting for both Marxist influences and for the socioeconomic issues of post war Japan, the relevance of class struggle in Kurosawa’s films cannot be overstated. High and Low’s plot is strictly based around the conflict between the poor masses and the rich elite.

All of the aspects discussed above, both about Japan and Kurosawa, are required to interpret High and Low in the most meaningful and contextual way possible. Influences of traditional Japan in an industrialized society, inspirations from filmmakers and writers,and the socioeconomic aftermath of WWII are all strongly present throughout the film. Thus, armed with such insight, the analysis of High and Low can proceed.

Part 2: Stylistic Analysis of High and Low

In this section, High and Low will be examined through four stylistic aspects: cinematography, mise en scène, editing, and music. The reason for this is because Kurosawa is primarily a technical director, driven by the visual and aural elements of cinema. “He [Kurosawa] once told Donald Richie that if he could have expressed the meaning of a scene in words, he would not have had to film it” (Prince 35).

16:30, High and Low, Akira Kurosawa (1963)

Firstly, the focus will be on the cinematography. Throughout High and Low, Kurosawa’s meticulously fluid camera movements combined with deep focus help to both drive the plot and establish emotional and social relationships between the characters. This is especially noticeable during the first hour of the film, where the action takes place almost entirely within the hilltop mansion. For example, when Gondo reveals he has indebted all his estate (16:30), the camera follows Kagawa and Kawanishi as their shock forces them to sit down on the sofa alongside him. The shot lowers to Gondo’s eye level, sitting behind them like a mummer, which emphasizes their financial dependence on Gondo, both as a wealthy husband and as an elite businessman.

38:39, High and Low, Akira Kurosawa (1963)

On the other hand, fluidity is also achieved by the extremely slow movement, if not stillness, of the camera. Consider the events at 38:39. Here, deep focus and an immobile camera are used to show the multiple characters in frame staring at the floor, reflecting. Kagawa is speaking in the center-background, focusing the viewer’s attention on her dialogue (à la Citizen Kane). A few seconds later, Gondo walks into the shot, and suddenly the characters and the camera start moving. In this sequence, Gondo’s power as a wealthy man is emphasized in his capacity to interrupt such stillness. The audience is illuded into thinking the transition arose naturally from his and the other characters’ movements, whereas in reality it is a product of Gondo’s socioeconomic influence.

26:43, High and Low, Akira Kurosawa (1963)

Secondly, cinematography must work in tandem with the mis en scène to address the film’s topics. For instance, take the frame composition using deep focus at 26:43. Two detectives judgingly stare at Gondo, who has walked away in guilt for refusing to pay the ransom. Opposite him stands Aoki, ashamed and grieving for his son, while Kagawa sadly looks away and is close to the policemen. In this frame, Japanese class struggle is evident. Aoki, a mere chauffeur, cannot pay the ransom, so he feels shame and frustration for having to ask his boss to do it. While Gondo, a rich elite, is morally torn over whether to save his fortune or the life of an innocent child.

1:05:00, High and Low, Akira Kurosawa (1963)

Another example occurs at 1:05:00. Takeuchi is disappointed that society sees Gondo as a selfless hero for saving Shinichi; he cannot accept the triumph of Bushido-influenced humanist morality over evil. Upset, he uses binoculars to stare directly up at Gondo’s mansion from his shanty. Metaphorically, he is in a distant hell, while Gondo lives in heaven (thus, the title High and Low). Additionally, the dichotomy between the countryside and the industrialized city is also present in the frame. Gondo’s mansion is surrounded by nature and under the sunlight, while Takeuchi lives in a dark ghetto. Kurosawa is “excited by violent extremes of human and phenomenal nature because they express ‘what is most alive’ ... Ford’s love of nature ... are reflected and enlarged” (Higham 739) in his films. Thus, High and Low depicts the Japanese proletariat as a victim of industrialization, deprived from the freedom that nature represents in Kurosawa and John Ford’s eyes.

Thirdly, the film’s editing also contributes significantly to the fluid development of the plot. “Kurosawa’s signature visual device is the wipe-cut ... it has a unifying effect even while it takes all the depth from the image” (Russel 9). In High and Low, the wipe is seen, for example, when Gondo goes to sleep at 34:07. It is a slow transition, yet it releases the tension that has been built up on screen. It marks the extended passage of time, and gives the audience an emotionally free moment (brief as it may be) to process what they just saw during the first half an hour of the film.

On the other hand, abrupt cuts are implemented during the flashbacks of the police investigation. Unlike the wipe, these startle the audience and bring their attention to the screen rather than away from it. The reason for this is that the crime investigation scenes are very information heavy, filled with small details that will be relevant later. However, direct cuts are not always abrupt in High and Low. As with the cinematography, Kurosawa also implements editing in relation to the movement of people/objects. When the policemen crawl out below the table at 47:53, the camera cuts in the middle of their movement to Gondo staring at the window, again symbolizing his social dominance over the crawling lower-class detectives. This rhythmic montage also keeps the pace of the story, and so the audience remains engaged with both the film’s characters and themes.

Finally, the music serves to give depth to High and Low’s atmosphere. When it comes to a Kurosawa film, “the sound track is never a mere accompaniment to the images, but is woven in with them” (Higham 739). This can be seen in High and Low’s case when, for example, Takeuchi walks along the vagabond alleyway near the end of the film. There is a slow, cryptic music that engages the audience’s curiosity about what is he going to do next. Before that, when he leaves the nightclub, a mixture of jazz and drums gives both excitement and coolness to his character as he loses himself in the crowds. The music directly changes the tonality and pace of the film, based on the mood that Kurosawa wants to set.

Conclusion

To summarize, Kurosawa’s masterful use of stylistic technical devices significantly furthered High and Low’s plot and underlying themes. In order to recognize such achievements, one must first understand both the context of Akira Kurosawa’s life (prior to 1963), as well as the history of early-mid 20th century Japan. Most notably, the influence of Japan’s post-WWII reconstruction and working class suffering had a deep impact on the film, as well as Kurosawa’s own Shinto beliefs concerning honor and morality. It is almost certain that the average viewer of High and Low will easily recognize its brilliance. However, the viewer who is aware of these cultural influences can access entirely new dimensions of meaning that are present in the film. Historical context is enough to dramatically change the viewing experience not just of High and Low, but of any movie with a long-lasting impact, and that fact alone makes it worth studying.

Works Cited

High and Low. Directed by Akira Kurosawa, Toho, 1 Mar. 1963.

Higham, Charles. “Kurosawa’s Humanism.” The Kenyon Review, vol. 27, no. 4, 1965, pp. 737– 42. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4334603. Accessed 2 Dec. 2022.

Russell, Catherine. “Men with Swords and Men with Suits: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa.” Cinéaste, vol. 28, no. 1, 2002, pp. 4–13. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41689542. Accessed 3 Dec. 2022.

Tezuka, Yoshiharu. Japanese Cinema Goes Global: Filmworkers’ Journeys. Hong Kong University Press, 2012. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1xwffc. Accessed 3 Dec. 2022.

Takashima, Zenya. “THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE PEOPLE IN POST-WAR JAPAN.” The Annals of the Hitotsubashi Academy, vol. 1, no. 2, 1951, pp. 91–103. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43750602. Accessed 2 Dec. 2022.

Prince, Stephen. The Warrior’s Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa - Revised and Expanded Edition. Princeton University Press, 1991. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv10crg39.