The Visual Representation of Time in the Œuvre of Kore-eda Hirokazu
Merel van Ommen
Abstract
The feature films by the contemporary Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu (Tokyo, 1962) represent time passing into oblivion and how protagonists try to stop or alter this process by means of memories and wishes. His work thus touches upon the important role the elusiveness of time has always had in Japanese culture and art (Burch). This analysis of Kore-eda’s fictional oeuvre (Maboroshi no Hikari, After Life, Distance, Nobody Knows, Hana Yori mo Naho, Still Walking, Air Doll, I Wish) is focused on the problem of how the abstract concept of time is represented visually by means of the conceptual metaphor theory.
Elaborating on the article ‘The Visual and Multimodal Representation of Time in Film, or How Time is Metaphorically Shaped in Space’ by Coëgnarts and Kravanja (Time), the conceptual metaphor TIME IS SPACE is divided in four ‘sub-metaphors’: TIME IS A MOVING ENTITY, TIME IS AN OBJECT, TIME IS A CHANGING ENTITY and TIME IS A PLACE. These four sub-metaphors, and their underlying filmic problems, are illustrated by means of the filmic solutions encompassed in Kore-eda’s oeuvre. In his work, time is captured by metaphoric representations at the ante-filmic as well as at the filmic level, for example by referring to the medium film itself and using different levels of movement relating to film. The case-study also provides some insights into the cultural differences and cognitive similarities between Western and Japanese visual time metaphors.
Résumé
Les longs métrages du cinéaste japonais contemporais Kore-eda Hirokazu (Tokyo, 1962) représentent le temps passant à l’oubli et comment des protagonistes essaient d’arrêter ou d’altérer ce processus par des souvenirs ou des désirs. Son œuvre concerne donc le rôle important que le temps insaisissable a toujours eu dans la culture et l’art japonais (Burch). La présente analyse des films de fiction de Kore-eda (Maboroshi no Hikari, After Life, Distance, Nobody Knows, Hana Yori mo Naho, Still Walking, Air Doll, I Wish) focalise sur le problème suivant en utlisant la théorie des métaphores conceptuelles : comment le concept abstrait du temps est-il représenté visuellement ?
En s’appuyant sur l’article The Visual and Multimodal Representation of Time in Film, or How Time is Metaphorically Shaped in Space de Coëgnarts et Kravanja (Time), l’auteur divise la métaphore conceptuelle LE TEMPS EST L’ESPACE en quatre sous-métaphores : LE TEMPS EST UNE ENTITÉ EN MOUVEMENT, LE TEMPS EST UN OBJET, LE TEMPS EST UNE ENTITÉ CHANGEANTE, et LE TEMPS EST UN ENDROIT. Ces quatre métaphores, ainsi que les problèmes filmiques sous-jacentes, sont illustrées par les solutions filmiques offertes par l’œuvre de Kore-Eda. Dans ses films, le temps est captivé par des représentations métaphoriques ante-filmiques ou filmiques, par exemple en faisant appel au médium lui-même et en utilisant différents niveaux de mouvement lié au cinéma.
La présente étude offre également des idées concernant les différences culturelles et les similitudes cognitives entre les métaphores visuelles occidentales et japonaises relatives au temps.
Keywords
Japanese cinema, Kore-eda, conceptual metaphor theory, time-space metaphor.
Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound... disembodied. Samura Koichi, quoted in Sans Soleil (Marker 1983). When referring to time, we often use ‘spatial’ concepts (TIME IS SPACE): the future lies ahead of us, while the past lies behind us (Alloway, Ramscar and Corley; Shinohara and Pardeshi). Metaphors present a solution for the need to catch abstract meaning in concrete manifests that can be perceived by the senses (Lakoff and Johnson Metaphors; Embodied Mind; Lakoff; Johnson; Nyíri; Coëgnarts and Kravanja Embodied Poetics). As Lakoff and Johnson argued in Metaphors We Live By, metaphors are not only interwoven with language, but also with human thinking: metaphors are primarily a matter of thought (of concepts), and only derivatively a matter of words (and other modalities).
As a result the metaphor is not tied up to any one form of representation, but can reveal itself as a visual metaphor (Kaplan; Forceville Advertisements; Identification; El Refaie). Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) can thus serve as a framework for research into transferable and transferred meaning in film. Borrowing insights from Coëgnarts’s and Kravanja’s ‘The Visual and Multimodal Representation of Time in Film, or How Time is Metaphorically Shaped in Space’ (and also Nyíri; Forceville Varda) the eight feature films of the contemporary Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu (Tokyo, 1962) are investigated as one case-study.
One of the crucial differences between Western and Japanese cinema concerning the representation of time, is related to the chronology of the story. Although the Japanese came into contact with camera and film through the West, the Japanese puppet theatre and the live narration of benshi – remained indifferent to the Western cinema codes of ‘illusionism’ for a while, according to Burch (76-81), probably due to the influence of the already existing narrative structures of emakimono (roll paintings).the Japanese – under the Therefore, the Japanese were not familiar with complicated narrative styles, while the Americans frequently use flash-backs, cross-cutting or the oscillation between present and past along the parallel and/or intersecting ‘time lines’ of various protagonists (cf. what Bordwell (61-62) calls the plot – as opposed to the story).
Kore-eda’s oeuvre that – in line with the important role that this topic has played in Japanese culture and art (Burch) – pursue the passing of time1. The eight chronologically told feature films all deal, in one way or
another, with time and its consequences: memory, recollection, change, modernity or attempts to reverse time (Sharp; Linssen Nobody Knows; Still Walking; Cacoulidis; Stevens) – without the use of formal flash-backs.
Obviously, it is possible to explain a narrative content during the presentation of a film, as film itself already contains the notion of time. Through the movement of a particular length of film reel through a projector in a particular amount of time, the spectator experiences a time span in which the narrative content is exposed. Furthermore, the metaphor TIME IS SPACE can be mobilised and conceptualised in four ways. The Japanese phenomenologist Takiura Shizuo, for example, argues in his essay ‘Is Time Real?’ (79): ‘As for myself, I believe that it is only motion or change of things that is real, and it may be possible to draw this conclusion mutatis mutandis from Husslerl’s theory of the constitution of time.’ The mappings of TIME IS SPACE (Gentner and Imai; Gentner, Imai and Boroditsky; Nyíri) are characterised by a dynamic relation (TIME IS A MOVING ENTITY), or a changing relation (TIME IS A CHANGING ENTITY).
According to CMT, the Source-Path-Goal (SPG) schema constitutes a central concept in cognition: it literally structures movement (Johnson; Coëgnarts and Kravanja Embodied Poetics). Image schemas are representations deriving from the experience of the spectator and are mirroring – in a conceptual way – the sensory experience being represented. We can apply this schema to the movement in Kore-eda’s oeuvre at the ante-filmic and filmic level.
The analysis further adds the metaphors TIME IS AN OBJECT and TIME IS A PLACE (Coëgnarts and Kravanja Time; Özçalışkan Crosslinguistic; Time). Film images will bring up these different subtypes that correspond with Japanese verbal metaphoric expressions2. Specific solutions for
the filmic “time problem” that revert to the basic assumptions of film are thereby presented.
1. Time is a Moving Entity
It seems logical to relate movement in film directly to the idea of the moving film strip, but the metaphoric solutions that Kore-eda introduces in his work concerning the “time problem”, must at first also be regarded on the level of the static snapshot. That is because a static image can also contain the suggestion of movement at the ante-filmic level and the passing of time. 3
I Wish, for example, opens with Koichi clearing his bedroom of dust. In the next establishing shot, the origin of all this dust becomes clear: a sizable plume of smoke is discharged from a volcano that is surrounded by an urban area. In the background, a clear blue sky with some fleecy clouds is visible. For a moment, it looks as if we are watching a picture postcard – a modern version of The Great Wave of Kanagawa (Hokusai). It seems as if nothing is moving.
1. In Japanese: ‘mono no aware’
2. Personal communication by Japanologist Luk Van Haute.
3. About the relationship between movement, on the one hand, and paintings and static compositions, on the other hand, see also Gombrich.
In contrast with the mountain, which is static (and timeless), the clouds and the obstinate volcano always contain a metaphoric transience, since their appearance suggests movement. When looking for example at an image of the sea, as shown for instance in Maboroshi, we get an indication of the duration of the content of time: the amount of time the water actually needs to swing, to heave and to splash. In the shot in I Wish (he seemingly continues the static shot of the landscape for some seconds) time breathes: the spectator gets the opportunity to actually expose the suggestion of movement from the plume of smoke, the clouds and the city.
1.1. Time-moving Metaphor
The metaphor TIME IS A MOVING ENTITY makes use of a static image. Time can also be metaphorically represented within a collection of moving images. The relationship between movement (embodiment), on the one hand, and time, on the other hand, can be categorized in three different levels of movement that are at play when dealing with the problem of expressing time in film. First of all: the objective of physical movement of the entities at the ante-filmic level. Second: the movement of the camera that may or may not negotiate with the objective motion of the moving entities before the camera. And third: The “movement” in the viewer (cf. Freedberg and Gallese; Gallese and Guerra).
There is a conflict within metaphoric speech about time. On the one side, they say in Japan that time “flies like an arrow”, on the other side they talk about “being on the road to a better future”. These different approaches of time are indicated respectively with time- and ego-moving metaphor in the conceptual metaphor theory (Clark; Lakoff and Johnson Metaphors; Lakoff; Gentner and Imai; Gentner, Imai and Boroditsky; Nyíri). In the time-moving metaphor, it is time that moves along the stationary ego as an active entity.
1.1.1. The Movement on the Ante-filmic Level: The Moving Landscape
A possible solution for the representation of the time-moving metaphor is (by) using transitions in time, either corresponding with the movement of the camera or not. The oeuvre of Kore-eda neither contains flash-forwards nor flashbacks in the narrow sense.
However, there is a sole flashback in I Wish. Koichi and his younger brother Ryunosuke moved each to another city after their parent’s divorce. The two children decide to bridge their physical distance once and for all by making a wish when two ‘magical’ high-speed trains cross one another. First, there is a close-up of Koichi’s face, the cheering of his little friends in the background. Then, a shot from bird’s-eye view in which two high-speed trains threaten to cross. Then follows the noise of an approaching vehicle. Suddenly, a shot of a child’s drawing of a volcano appears: lurid red lava flies off the screen like an expressionist painting. In the following shots, for a long-drawn moment, the spectator dives into Koichi’s realm of thought: granddad’s home-made sponge cake, a finger sounding out the wind direction, whirling volcanic ashes, laundry snapping on the clothesline and pictures – in fact, solidified reflections of solidified time – of family memories from the past: the transition back in time coincides exactly with the movement of the trains.
time problem, can be explained further with a quote from the Australian philosopher J.J.C. Smart (483): “Sometimes, again, we think of ourselves as stationary, watching time go by just as we may stand on a bridge and watch leaves and sticks flow down the stream underneath us. (…) Thus instead of speaking of our advance through time we often speak of the flow of time.” The insights of Smart concerning the moving river can be applied to the time-moving metaphor: time flows by, just like a river. The metaphor in this form is also applicable to other movements of nature and to the mechanic movement of the thundering passing of trains in Maboroshi, I Wish and Still Walking, the passing cyclists in Maboroshi, Nobody Knows and I Wish, the crossing airplanes in Nobody Knows, and the metros whizzing by in Air Doll and Nobody Knows. These movements, invariably present in Kore-eda’s oeuvre, imply in fact the same transience and turbulence of the meandering river.
The time-moving metaphor endows a rather “passive” role to the observer (in this case the protagonist) in relation to time. In Nobody Knows, a true account about four children who were abandoned in Tokyo, this passive role is stratified. When Akira and his little sister are foraging through the city long past bedtime, they linger for a moment to watch passing aeroplanes and a train that passes them over a high crossover. Their lingering contrasts with the movement of the aeroplane and the train, and the movement of the tremendous sky above makes them subordinate to this movement.
Also Maboroshi possibly shows an expressive time-moving metaphor. When Ikuo, just before his suicide, gets off his bike to stare at the chain of light splendour that a driving train leaves behind in the darkness, he becomes an observer: time swishes past him. Later on in the movie, he will fall victim to the seductiveness of the Maborishi-light (‘delusional light’) of the train, and commit suicide.
1.2. Ego-moving Metaphor
In the ego-moving metaphor, the opposite happens (Clarke; Lakoff and Johnson Metaphors; Gentner and Imai; Lakoff; Gentner, Imai and Boroditsky; Nyíri). Time in this metaphor is like a landscape in which events are positioned, on the one hand close-by versus far away, and on the other hand, in front or on the left (future) versus in the back or on the right (past).4 The ego now moves through the
time-landscape as if travelling.
1.2.1. Movement on the Ante-filmic Level: The Moving Protagonist
The static camera versus the moving protagonist is a filmic solution to the problem of the representation of the ego-moving metaphor: after all, each moving protagonist already bears a notion of time in him/ her, through the distance that is bridged in space.
One of the first scenes in Still Walking starts with the static shot of the surgery of the aged physician Yokoyama. An old man wearing a panama hat on his head and holding a walking cane in his hand, strides out of the shadow of the window-door (SOURCE). We hear the voice of the lady (GOAL) next door and the sweeping sound of her broom, but she is not yet visible on the screen. The reaction shot of 4. In the West the past and future is perceived on a timeline with past on the left and future on the right (Santiago, Lupiañez, Pérez and Funes).
the lady next door – fitting to the pace of the old man (PATH) – is still in coming.
Moreover, in Kore-eda’s static film frames, men move along the horizon to suggest movement in time. For example by making the protagonist walk along winding roads, on bridges or on hills – upon which the different indications of time (past, present and future) are placed as fixed positions.
When the protagonist detaches himself, through movement along the horizon, away from the eye of the camera that is left behind, it becomes smaller, and its movement seems to stabilise in unison with time. Long shots therefore imply a different experience of time than close-ups. The splendour of public spaces, like the city and natural environments, is emphasised by shots from a ‘godlike’ view. When the moving protagonists are then captured in a reflective panoramic shot, like in the images of nature from Hana Yori mo Naho, Distance or Maboroshi no Hiraki, or in the “from a skyscraper”-perspective filmed city images in Nobody Knows, I Wish or Air Doll, this individual movement of the protagonist ‘disappears’ into the grand surroundings with their own movements, like swirling water, clouds drifting past, waving foliage or hurrying city-dwellers. A contrast is made between the intimacy of domestic life – filmed level with the floor as a sitting protagonist (cf. the western point-of-view, often on an upright level) – and its relatively hurried passing of time.
1.2.3. Movement on the Ante-filmic Level: The Time-structuring Protagonist
The ego-moving metaphor can express itself not only in movement, but also in action. For example, in Distance, Nobody Knows, Still Walking and Hana Yori mo Naho, there is an emphasis on the daily rituals of people. These rituals all seem to stem from the human need to structure time: after all, we speak of “dinner time”, “bed time”, and “time to rise” as fixed positions in a day. In Still Walking, where grown-up children return to their parental house to commemorate their deceased brother, it is clear that the family has spent one day together: breakfast, lunch and dinner are prepared, they take a bath, brush their teeth after they went for a stroll during the day. The film is continuously working up to such anchor moments: there is an endless scraping of carrots, slicing of winter radish, peeling of beans and debate about the best recipe for maize tempura. Few things are as essential and fleeting as food, but its preparation is recorded in close-up, until dinnertime arrives.
1.2.4. Movement of the Camera: The Accompanying Camera
Another solution for the representation of the ego-moving metaphor is a camera that (partly) follows the moving protagonist through the different temporal locations (Coëgnarts and Kravanja Time). In I Wish, a group of children runs onto a hill, holding a fluttering banner in the sky like a trophy with their wishes for the future. The jolting camera follows the children closely. Then, suddenly, a static shot from a mountain follows: a panoramic landscape with a crisscross of rails and viaducts, captured in a silvery grey mist. Only the heads of the children appear for just a moment: they move from left to right, stand still for a moment to watch the view, subsequently continuing their mission. The spectator on the other hand is ‘captured’ for a few more second in the static moment of the landscape.
time is represented as a person travelling through a landscape with fixed time locations, a memory can be presented as a trip made to the past, and a desire as a trip to the future. By way of illustration, I Wish can be compared with Nobody Knows. In I Wish, the two little brothers take control of their future: the protagonists, accompanied by their friends, travel through time by means of a high-speed train. Instead of letting events take over, they want to enforce them. The shot aimed at the front of the train emphasises speed and purpose regarding the future. At the same time, an image aimed at what lies behind the train, reminds us of the past.
This ‘time travel’ is represented as something very real. Still Walking starts, for example, with a long train journey (PATH), taking son Ryota to his parental home (SOURCE - GOAL) and thus into the memory landscape of his youth; in Distance, a long walk takes surviving relatives to the location of the death of their loved ones, and a train journey takes inflatable doll Nozomi in Air Doll to the love doll factory (LIFE IS A JOURNEY). What is striking about these journeys is that, by the end of the story, all protagonists go back to the place where they started: “They seem to be aware that memories can be aroused, and that one can dream of the future, but that doesn’t mean that the universe has to change with them5.” (interview Kore-eda, A-Film).
1.3. Everything-moves Metaphor
The distinction between the ego-moving and the time-moving metaphor applied by Coëgnarts and Kravanja in relation to Western cinema deserves a fusion between both metaphors, when considering Kore-eda’s oeuvre. This categorisation primarily emphasises humankind indirectly and it constructs a division between time and humankind. After all, time moves along the protagonist or the protagonist travels along time. Approaching the analysis of Japanese cinema solely from this point of view is not advisable, as both Barthes (145-146) and Burch (10) stipulate that Japanese culture rejects the anthropocentric. Consequently, focusing too much on the metaphoric power of the human body is somewhat out of place. By moving the camera, the protagonist and the surroundings, the division between ego and time seems to break. In such a sequence, the hierarchy between the passive human being versus active time on the one hand, and, the active human being versus passive time on the other hand, evaporates. It is all part of the same swirling universe: ‘ukiyo-e6’. Also, when the central protagonists let themselves be
moved in a mechanical vehicle along temporal locations, the time-moving metaphor and the ego-moving metaphor actually fuse together. The idea that the moving protagonist is part of the moving of time is represented in scenes in which, by means of composition, metaphoric parallels are drawn between the movement and the ego and the (mechanic or natural) movement of the environment and/or camera. For example in I Wish, children run through the landscape in the configuration of a train (PERSON IS TRAIN). Parallel to their movement, the river flows and we see rails with cables in the background.
5. This insight seems to fit closely to the Buddhist idea of Karma: we are free in the moment, but conditioned by the past.
2. Time is an Object
Time can be represented as an object – as in the expression “lost time”. Kore-eda’s oeuvre refers explicitly to the medium of film and regularly shows the materialism of film. Just like time, film lacks the tangible subtlety of the real object.
On the one hand, it is possible for film to capture everything in front of the camera into the smallest detail. As such, film can be regarded as a documentary. In After life for example, the deceased must formulate their most treasured memories. These moments of happiness are then staged by the employees of the transitional station and filmed. For the protagonists, film is capturing time – freezing time – making it possible to bring time back into being, every moment.
On the other hand, a filmstrip is always in movement, subject to wear, and therefore not able to hold on to the image. According to LaFleur (164), the scene in Maboroshi, where Ikuo gets off his bicycle to admire a passing train, is a reference to the act of watching, wherein the seduction of film is put level with the allure of a passing train (TRAIN IS FILM). The train thundering past, with its translucent windows, reminds one of a celluloid filmstrip passing before the eye of the spectator during the film experience and contains a passive notion of time (time-moving metaphor).
The metaphor TIME IS FILM can suggest “movement” to the viewer: the activation of an embodied mirroring mechanism that is encompassing both the objective movement of the entities before the camera and the objective movement of the camera itself. As Gallese and Guerra (183) argue: “Film enables us to study one of the many possible fictional worlds we inhabit (..), between the prosaic world we inhabit in our daily occupations and the imaginary worlds of artistic fiction.”
3. Time is a Changing Entity
It is also the incessant stream of changeability and blending (cf. ukiyo-e) in which time presents itself to humankind. Time thus acquires a more spatial protagonist in the sequence of day and night, the change in the weather, the seasonal variation, the process of ageing or the growth of the human body. To visualise these changes, Kore-eda applies two possible solutions: uninterrupted shooting as well as editing, making time leaps possible.
3.1. Change and the Uninterrupted Shot
Processes of change are in general slow, but Maboroshi and Air Doll offer filmic solutions without interfering with time. The funeral procession in Maboroshi is shot from bird’s-eye perspective. As the group is slowly moving forward within the film frame, suddenly, snow comes spitting down. Slowly, the size of the snowflakes and the speed of their fall increases: time passes by.
When one grows older, it seems as if time accelerates, supposedly as one retains fewer memories. Events become less impressive as the chance of having lived through a similar event increases. This phenomenon is captured in one shot in Air Doll. The plastic blow-up doll, inflated to life, moves slowly through the streets of Tokyo and gapes in admiration at mundane things such as a mountain of refuge. In the background we see Japanese businessmen pass by hastily: the mountain of refuge doesn’t make an
impression on them (any more).
3.2. Change and Editing
Time is captured by disclosing time leaps through changes of the human body, natural phenomena, wear of items, modernity and changes in everyday rituals. In Nobody Knows, the eldest son Akira – played by the then fourteen-year old Yagira Yuya – takes over the parental role when his mother disappears. During the shooting in 2002 and 2003, the actor went through a growth spurt. Also in Nobody Knows, he outgrows his shoes, his voice breaks and he acquires facial hair. The nails and hairs of Akira’s little brothers and sisters grow – as do the grown-ups’ – through (TIME IS A CHANGING BODY).
Time is also perceived in terms of numbers, such as the numbers on a clock and the numbers in dates – a construction of adults. The children in Nobody Knows, however, experience the passing of time through wax crayons shrinking to stumps, sketching paper running low and red nail polish flaking off. A well-thumbed children’s drawing for mother implies that also the mother’s memories are susceptible to wear. The daily rituals that structure time cannot be maintained. Laundry is no longer put away in the cupboard, litter is accumulating, money runs out and nobody cooks anymore. The chaotic despair that slowly (almost in real-time) arises, underlines that the children are losing control. Through editing, the changing of seasons can also be used to underline the passing of time: when all seasons have passed, as in Nobody Knows and Hana Yori mo Naho, the spectator knows that one year has gone by7. Finally,
change can be expressed through social or technical developments. In Still Walking, the train is an old-fashioned means of transportation (in contrast with Tokyo Story by Ozu [1953], where the train was seen as a symbol of modernity). Son Ryota and his wife set out on the long train journey to their parental home, but his sister and her partner manage to underline the datedness of the train with the speed and ingenuity of their shiny SUV (Linssen Still Walking). All novelties – even the one of the high-speed train breaking the speed record in I Wish – are fleeting.
4. Time is a Place
Finally, TIME IS A PLACE is also a metaphor that represents time through a static relation: time as a position on a timeline. Nobody Knows, Air Doll and Still Walking contain ‘filmic still lifes’ that drastically strip the film of movement (and the passing of time). In a shot of a few seconds, a lifeless (or immortal) tableau of, for example, shoes, toys or souvenirs is captured. In contrast with clouds and the sea, these objects are timeless. The still lifes are, as it were, locations outside the diegesis and make time falter8. Strictly speaking, this brings the dynamics of film back to the statics of photography and there
seems to be a conflict between the idea that technical innovations control filmic style (Bordwell) and the convention of movement in films.
7. “Existence in an Ozu film means that everyone inhales the air of a clear, sunny day (…) In Ozu’s films there are no referential seasonal metaphors, no seasons to produce narrative.” (Hasumi 23)
8. Such “still lives” also appear in the work of Ozu, Naruse and Shimizu (Burch 128). What Lévi-Strauss had called the poignancy of things implied the faculty of communion with things, of entering into them, of being them for a moment.
In Distance, time is a place in the Japanese collective memory. The film is based on the Aum-sect who, in 1995, launched a poison attack on the metro in Tokyo, an event that is indelibly printed in the memory of the Japanese people. The opening scene begins with a radio news report stating that this day is exactly three years after the attacks; it is March 20, 1998. Finally, the association TIME IS PLACE can also be effected through editing. Steps or hills, for example in Still Walking, Nobody Knows and Hana Yori mo Naho become recognisable locations in time. Regardless of the temporal circumstances, the steps or hills are treaded on by protagonists: they become anchor points in time.
5. Conclusion
The analysis of conceptual metaphors of time is a search for the embodied meaning of the invisible, the expressive or the poetic. The conceptual metaphor TIME IS SPACE is, in line with the article “The Visual and Multimodal Representation of Time in Film” by Coëgnarts and Kravanja, divided into four ‘sub-metaphors’: TIME IS A MOVING ENTITY, TIME IS AN OBJECT, TIME IS A CHANGING ENTITY and TIME IS A PLACE. These four sub-metaphors and their underlying filmic problems have been illustrated using the filmic solutions in the oeuvre of Kore-eda.
Kore-eda’s films embody time passing into oblivion and how protagonists try to stop or alter this process by means of memories and wishes. The case-study tried to contribute to conceptual metaphor theory’s claim that metaphors are not just a matter of language, but primarily a matter of thought. It also illustrates the cultural differences and cognitive similarities between Western and Japanese visual time metaphors.
This observation occurs on the level of what happens in front of the camera – the travelling person with his or her changing body, the changing landscape and the expression of mechanical vehicles whizzing by – and on the level of the movement of the camera that may or may not negotiate with the objective motion of the moving entities before the camera. The camera is then an observer of time-travelling entities yet not slavishly registering or anthropocentric.
And third: Kore-eda’s oeuvre also embodies the “movement” in the viewer. For example, it confronts the viewer with the transitory nature of film by showing the substance of the moving filmstrip, the ante-filmic and the filmic. It merges the varying layers of time metaphors into one passing universe: everything moves. It proves that time, in all its layers and tension, is more than just a narrative instrument. His films are not only about art, beauty and taste, but, as Johnson stipulates, rather about the way human beings construct and experience meanings in space, as well as the bodily origins underlying this process. Further analysis of filmic metaphors in a variation of cultural contexts should be encouraged, in spite of the inherent risk of using a tight analytical perspective, causing the loss of “something”. Therefore, an analysis should honour the aesthetics of this oeuvre and correspond with the “unattainable” work of Kore-eda, which also prevails in Japan: “To place adjectives would be so rude as leaving price tags on purchases.” (Sans Soleil Marker [1983]).
Filmography
Kore-eda, H. (Director), Gozu, N. (Producer), Miyamoto, T. (Novel Writer), and Ogita, Y (Screenplay Writer). (1995). Maboroshi no Hikari. [Motion Picture]. Japan: Shochiku.
Kore-eda, H. (Writer/Director), Akieda, M., and Sato, S. (Producers). (1998). After Life (orig. Wandâfuru raifu). [Motion Picture]. Japan: Bandai.
Kore-eda, H. (Writer/Director), and Akieda, M. (Producer). (2001). Distance. [Motion Picture]. Japan: Shochiku.
Kore-eda, H. (Writer/Director/Producer). (2004). Nobody Knows (orig. Dare mo shiranai). [Motion Picture]. Japan: Cinequanon.
Kore-eda, H. (Writer/Director), Enoki, N., Sato, S., and Taguchi, H. (Producers). (2006). Hana (orig. Hana Yori Mo Naho). [Motion Picture]. Japan: Asmik Ace Entertainment.
Kore-eda, H. (Writer/Director), Kato, Y., Kôno, S., Yasuda, M. and Taguchi, H. (Producers). (2008). Still Walking (orig. Aruitemo aruitemo). [Motion Picture]. Japan: Shochiku.
Kore-eda, H. (Writer Screenplay/Director/Producer), Goda, Y. (Manga Writer), Uratani, T. (Producer). (2009). Air Doll (orig. Kûki ningyô). [Motion Picture]. Japan: Asmik Ace Entertainment. Kore-eda, H. (Writer/Director/Producer). (2011). I Wish (orig. Kiseki). [Motion Picture]. Japan: Gaga
Communications.
Marker, C. (Writer/Director). (1983). Sunless (orig. Sans Soleil). [Motion Picture]. France: Argos Films Ozu, Y (Writer/Director), Noda, K. (Writer),& Yamamoto, T. (Producer). (1953). Tokyo Story (orig.
Tôkyô monogatari). [Motion Picture]. Japan: Artificial Eye Film Company, Ltd.
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Merel van Ommen studied Sociology and received a master’s degree in Communication Science (2011, cum laude) from the Radboud University Nijmegen as well as Film studies & Visual Culture (2012, great distinction) from the University of Antwerp. She is currently a junior-lecturer and junior-researcher at the Communication Science department (Radboud University Nijmegen). She is also working as a television- and film journalist for several Flemish and Dutch magazines.
