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Creepy
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Co-author: Cristina Álvarez López
Proximity
Hubert Niogret, in his review of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy in Positif (July/August 2017), suggests: “There is always, in this
director’s work, a particular view of social behaviour in this country of Japan
where rules are numerous – above all when it comes to politeness, and the civil
exchanges between individuals”.
Niogret also notes that, beyond the V-cinema period
(1994-1998) of relatively cheap, quickly made films within the genres of
horror, fantasy and ghost tales, Kurosawa’s more recent works tend to introduce
their supernatural elements (when these exist) only gradually and indirectly.
Indeed, both the TV series Penance (2012) and Creepy stress, at least at the outset, a particular quality of quasi-soap opera
banality – in their settings, situations and everyday behaviours. That is,
until other, darker currents make their presence felt.
In Proximity (2017), our audiovisual essay on Creepy that is now available on Vol. 2 of our Audiovisual Essay Collection, we isolate one element of its rich fabric: the subtle but sure violation of those
daily “rules of politeness”, and how they set the fiction in motion. Kurosawa
finds the perfect bridge between such conventions of everyday life and the more
horrific and melodramatic events that are to follow: when the codes of civil
exchange are blurred or confused, the possibility of a malevolent
trance-hypnosis enters, transforming everything.
Shigehiko Hasumi has praised the work of his former
student, in the course of an unrecorded conversation, by claiming: “Kiyoshi
Kurosawa always finds the right distance from which the camera can observe the
scene”. This means more than that the direction is always economical and lucid.
Rather, the camera expresses the deepest logic of
events by either mimicking or violating the reigning social conventions of
distance or proximity between people. The more that the everyday world comes
off its axis, the more elaborate and expressionistic his style becomes. Creepy offers, in this regard, a true
lesson in cinema.
© Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin July 2017 |
