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"Yokomichi Seinosuke" Blu-ray release trailer
Author: Ta Ta Jun
An ordinary Japanese anime audience and a moviegoer
Part 01
"Yokomichi Seinosuke":
Intertextual space-time of focus and reverberation
Shuichi Okita's Seinosuke Yokomichi (2013) has a complex multi-dimensional focus and echo. These focuses and echoes make up the film. If you are familiar with Shuichi Okita's works, it is not difficult to find that "Yokomichi Seinosuke" is a more alternative work in his creative career - two time and space spanning more than a decade, multiple character perspectives interspersed with each other, which is not available in his other films that are flat and straightforward.
However, in the game of "contesting" with the original author Shuichi Yoshida, Shuichi Okita found commonality with Shuichi Yoshida, making the movie "Seinosuke Yokomichi" his own work and making it a masterpiece that many people know about Shuichi Okita.
Poster of "Seinosuke Yokomichi"
The moment a relationship is built
Many of Yoshida's novels share a common Japanese cultural motif—Tokyo and The Place, the former expressed as a modern urban interpersonal relationship, the latter as a simple and rustic and nostalgic cultural space, both of which are often presented as multiple focuses on the story.
For example, in "Fury" (2014), a murder case is arranged on the stage of Tokyo, and the three suspects in the story do not know each other, each has its own story, and the story is staggered in Tokyo, a coastal town, okinawa; "Heisei Ape and Crab Battle Map" (2011) tells the story of mizuki who met mizuki from Nagasaki "Kamigyo" in search of a husband, and the people she met in Tokyo came from all walks of life and all over the country; and the story of "Yokomichi Seinosuke" (novel: 2009) is also from the local area in the 80s" A young man who studied in Shangkyo, he met a local lady in Tokyo who would later become his girlfriend, Shoko Sano, a "high-ranking prostitute" who hid her origins, Chiharu Katase, a "high-ranking prostitute" who hid her origins, and Kazuhira Kurashi and Akuzu, who joined the samba community with him.
Stills from "Seinosuke Yokomichi"
Yoshida's novel shows from the interpersonal relationships that local people come to Tokyo, and the local and Tokyo people representing two different regional cultures meet and meet each other, or the center of the event points to Tokyo, and because people from all over Japan are interconnected with each other, Tokyo has become the focus of the handover between people, just like its "polar concentration".
Tang Zhenzhao, a critic who studies Japanese subcultures, summarizes this handover in Yoshida's work as the meeting of strangers' eyes in big cities, "it can be unrelated to each other, it can be the beginning of a relationship, in short, it is full of different possibilities, which just contain curiosity about the other, and the back echoes the street full of unknown strangers." [1] Compared with the local countryside, the cities have more complex interpersonal relations and intelligence, and have unfreedoms that cannot be avoided from sight, and paradoxically, Tokyo is given illusions.
In addition, Yokomichi Seinosuke also sets two time and space, one is from the perspective of Shinosuke in the 80s, and the other is the current situation where seinosuke met friends during his college years. In the film, the first few shots depict the urban environment of Tokyo in the 1980s, and then "bring out" the appearance of the character of Seinosuke from the crowd of the city. In the minute-long depiction of The city of Tokyo in the 1980s, both the urban landscape and the humanities have laid a foundation for the entire film. Seinosuke, who is new to Tokyo, is at odds with the endless stream of city people who look around with large bags of luggage and don't seem to be used to the environment at all. This is a manifestation of the visualization of Yoshida's story: the contrast between the place and Tokyo, where people cast curious glances at strangers on the street.
If the moment of establishing a relationship with the city here is still Yoshida's pen and ink, then the author believes that the moment of okita-style relationship establishment is still a plot behind: Seinosuke successively met Kurasaki and Akuzu, who were the same graduates, and Nosuke and Akuzu met to visit the society to recruit a new society, and at this time, the Kuryu who met at this time made Akuzu cry, and the predecessors of the Samba Society "did not know each other" and sang and danced around this embarrassing trio. This episode is also where the soundtrack of the film first appears (starting with Seinosuke and Akuzu).
Observing Okita's films, you will find that he has stylistic rules for the place where the soundtrack first appeared: "Antarctic Cooker" (2009) The first time the soundtrack sounded was when the Antarctic expedition team first got together to eat in the film, as we all know, the plot of eating in East Asian movies has cultural significance, the dinner table and the food affair silently maintain an unspoken relationship, Okita Shuichi was deeply influenced by the film, Morita Yoshimitsu's "Family Game" (1983) Hints at the collapse of the family through a morbid dinner table scene; "To See the Waterfall" (2014) is the story of seven middle-aged and elderly women who are lost and killed in a group trip, and when they begin to make self-help plans and assign jobs after they are killed, it is the first opportunity for the soundtrack to sound, which is the beginning of these strangers to understand each other and penetrate each other's hearts; in "Children Don't Want to Understand" (2020), the male and female protagonists of high school students know each other because they find that each other has a common niche hobby. In the long shot of them descending from the roof of the teaching building, the transition from shyness to open-minded exchange of hobbies is only a matter of moments, which is also the first time the soundtrack of the work sounds.
It can be seen that for Okita Shuichi's films, the role of the first soundtrack is always to show the moment when the character establishes a relationship with others in the film, which is not like The first handover of sight like Shuichi Yoshida, but a moment when the superficial interpersonal relationship begins to truly know each other and has the possibility of the handover of the mental image world.
Stills from Woodpecker and Rain
In Contrast, in Woodpecker and Rain (2011), before katsuhiko Kishi, an old lumberjack, meets koichi Tanabe, a newcomer director who lacks self-confidence, his relationship with his son is at an impasse, and the next episode is the soundtrack where he helps Yukiichi and others who are in difficulty on the road while Katsuhiko drives his van down a country road, unaware that Koichi will establish a father-son relationship with him. That is to say, the moment when the work begins to establish a new relationship arises with the appearance of the soundtrack, and it is precisely before the first soundtrack appears that the other end of the relationship cuts off the communication.
In the same way, the plot of "Yokomichi Seinosuke" is the first time that the three of them have a communication that breaks through the superficial relationship, and this bad first meeting becomes the opportunity for Kushi to become a husband and wife with Akuzu in the future. When the first soundtrack sounds, it also connects the film's first time-space switch - more than a decade later, Kushin, who has raised a daughter, and his wife Akuzu recall Shinosuke, which is also a time focus in the film, focusing on the time when he met Shinosuke as a student in the 1980s. Since then, the film has continued to focus on this period of time with several characters who are more than a decade later.
As can be seen, Tokyo in the 1980s became a spatial and temporal focal point, with the former focusing on Tokyo's landmarks from various parts of Japan and the latter focusing on the lives of other characters more than a decade later. Coupled with the fact that the 1980s were Japan's booming bubble economy, it was a period of national memory that people yearned for, and the urban landscape at the beginning of the film also gave a utopian nature of nostalgia, compared with the relationship between Tokyo and the locality in the sense of space, Tokyo at this time also became a nostalgic home on the axis of time.
Delayed echoes
Commenting on Shuichi Yoshida's "Park Life" (2002), Mr. Tang Zhenzhao also pointed out: "The self-proclaimed line of sight interpretation of the bystander can have a completely different internal reaction in the gaze object, but we are living in the atmosphere of the interpretation of the same urban line of sight, and even can be said to be happy in it, which allows unlimited imagination, and there are also a lot of misreading and misinterpretation, but this is the rich essence of urban life." ”[2]
There is also an interesting "misreading" in "Yokomichi Seinosuke": when Shoko was interacting with Seinosuke, she once spoke to her father on behalf of Seinosuke, saying that he was the most promising person she had ever met, but more than ten years later, when Shoko recalled Seinosuke, she said that he was "an ordinary person". In the process of Shoko constantly changing her outlook on life, and when she jumps out of the situation to form a focused examination, Seinosuke becomes an ordinary person everywhere, and at this time, Seinosuke seems to have become someone else to her.
However, the time and space more than a decade later is not just a one-sided focus on the time and space of the 1980s, and the era in which Seinosuke lived was not hollow, but a consistent response to the future. In many stories, the questions that have become the legacy of the past in history can only be answered by the future, but in "Yokomichi Seinosuke", the past answers the question of the future, and Yokomichi Seinosuke and his friends are others.
Stills from "I Heard Kirishima Is Leaving"
Compare it to another Japanese film, "Hearing that Kirishima is retiring" (2012), which is mentioned because on the one hand, the age is close, and on the other hand, it also involves the action of "focusing". In "Kirishima", the key character Kirishima is absent from beginning to end, Kirishima is a beloved celebrity in the school, his image is established through the impression of people who know him, the work actually depicts the school except Kirishima group portrait, Kirishima became a hollow center of a campus relationship, is a symbol, but also a focused other.
But the Seinosuke of Yokomichi Isnosuke is not hollow, even if he only "lives" in the eighties in the work, he is also the focus of the other, and through the experience of other characters more than a decade later, the audience gradually learns the fact that Seinosuke died at the age of 35 to save people, but he is still not hollow, and he made various external echoes of future events in his life in this time and space of the eighties.
When the characters talk about Seinosuke more than a decade later, we can find that these characters have not been in contact with Seinosuke for a long time, including their former girlfriend Shoko. For them, the Seinosuke of the eighties is vague. However, the film does not present a vague Shinosuke, who is given a vivid life as if he were living all around us. As a countryman in "Kamiyo", Senosuke is full of curiosity in the other environment of Tokyo. Therefore, the back-and-forth focus and external echo form an intertextuality of the other in the film.
Moreover, the "past" such a time and space originally contained unrealistic nostalgia, but the eighties of "Yokomichi Seinosuke" are far from stopping at nostalgia, and it is precisely because this time and space are full of vitality that we can form an echo that allows us to look at all this objectively.
Therefore, the author believes that the time and space of the 1980s in yokozunosuke is not so much the "past" as the living "present", and the time and space more than ten years after which this "present" responds is the "future". It is precisely because it is "now" and not "past" that it is possible to become a postponement of "future". This also forms the narrative charm of "Yokomichi Seinosuke": focus and echo put the audience in a highly objective perspective, the questions thrown out by the "future" are solved by the "present"; the misreading of the "future" people, and the "present" Shinosuke provides the audience with the real answers in his life. "Now" is postponed.
For example, in the first half of the film, we learn of Seinosuke's death from Chiharu's point of view, and we also learn that he became a photographer, and the mystery of the photographer's identity is solved later in the film: in the 1980s, Seinosuke met a neighbor who took him into the world of photography. For example, after Shoko re-evaluates Seinosuke as an ordinary person in the film, Shoko, who is taking a taxi, sees the road she walked with Seinosuke in the car and recalls the time with Seinosuke. Shuichi Okita's treatment of this scene is to put the two time and space in a set of shots, and Shoko seems to see herself following Seinosuke on the road through the car window - the corresponding plot here is that Shoko when she was a student was just discharged from the hospital due to a leg injury, and Seinosuke wanted to have fun with Shoko.
At this time (originally "now"), Seinosuke and Shoko in the 1980s really became a kind of past, but for Shoko, did Seinosuke really fade its charm? However, the past days come alive like "now" and respond to the present with a delayed gesture: it is still a precious time, and Seinosuke is still a person worth remembering. At that time, Seinosuke and Shoko had long been part of the urban landscape, and personal memories influenced the presentation of urban culture.
Of course, the first soundtrack in the film that accompanies the beginning of the exchange also responds to the focus of later people's memories.
Go and see the waterfall
In the film, the last echo of "now" to "future" is the final long shot: after Seinosuke Yokomichi drops off Shoko who is going to study in France at the bus stop, he happily holds up his camera to photograph everything he sees on the street, accompanied by the sound of this shot, which is what Seinosuke's mother said to Shoko in a letter more than a decade later.
"If you have time, please come to the cold room to gather and talk about Shinosuke!"
This scene has made drastic changes to the original. In the original, Seinosuke takes Shoko to the airport, and the plot he shoots on the street is something that happens one day after that, and Yoshida arranges the plot of his separation from his friends at the end of Theosuke's story, as well as a revealing depiction of his future death in a tram accident. Compared with the tragic ending of the original work, the ending of the film is full of Okita Shuichi's optimism, which is not only the end of various focuses in the film, responding to the final puzzle left by the "future", but also the last and fiercest emotional outpouring of Okita As a film writer in this work.
Before going into detail about the end of "Seinosuke Yokomichi", I think that we can first use the work "To See the Waterfall" to analyze the consistent film structure of Okita Shuichi, because the work is Shuichi Okita's return to the original point, not only the original script, but also the structure is simple and clear, only telling the story of two days and one night, it is a film that is very suitable for analyzing the authorship of Shuichi Okita. As mentioned earlier, this is a comedy of seven middle-aged and elderly women surviving in the wild, and their destination is already pointed out from the first line of the movie: some fantastic waterfall.
At the end of the film, the women find signposts to go back, but they do not choose to go back immediately, but "come and go" to see the "fantastic waterfall". In fact, the waterfall is not so "dreamy", but it is enough for these women to get their wish.
Stills from "Go to see the waterfall"
Here, the waterfall becomes an end point in the movie, this end point is not much detached from the daily life, just a waterfall, is the common daily condensation, is synonymous with the daily life. And "To See the Waterfall" is the most simple Okita Shuichi work, from the title has already hinted at the purpose and the end, from the first line to lift the end point out, "to see the waterfall" (滝を見にいく) The title itself has shown a simple posture, because waterfalls can be seen everywhere, and the purpose of "going to see the waterfall" does not constitute a miracle. The end of Shuichi Okita's films is always to lead the everyday to the everyday, and he will not let the spectacle of impermanence become the end of these lives.
Therefore, I think that the "waterfall" can be used as an image of the end point in Shuichi Okita's films: in "Antarctic Chef", this "waterfall" is a bowl of ramen that the expedition team members devoured, because their previous storage of ramen has long been eaten, and the previous ramen can not be boiled soft because of the low pressure of the Antarctic air pressure, and for the members who have a homesickness, ramen represents Japan, because ramen has a long history of japanese folk food culture; in "Woodpecker and Rain", this "waterfall" It was a heavy rain, which made the filming team unable to carry out the shooting task, but it became an opportunity for Koichi to break through himself and make a life decision; in "Mohican Returns to His Hometown" (2016), this "waterfall" is the wedding of the son that the father has always expected to see, and this wedding is also the end of his life - the work revolves around the terminally ill father and the son of the Mohican head; in "The Child Doesn't Want to Understand", this "waterfall" is the heroine Miwa's cry, Because Miwa's crying was as if she had been stolen by her absent biological father, she was always unable to control her laughter on some occasions, which made her look like a strange child, and she cried out in front of her mother until she went to see her biological father return.
Stills from "Kids Don't Want to Understand"
So what is the daily composition of the "waterfall" of "Yokomichi Seinosuke", that long shot? In short, it is the "echo" mentioned above.
When Seinosuke sent Shoko abroad, Shoko made a pact with him: the first roll of film photos taken by Seinosuke must be shown to her first. More than a decade later, Shoko finally received photographs from Seinosuke's mother from the first volume of film at that time, but most of these photos were almost nothing: Kurasaki and Akuzu's babies, sakura, wild cats, the back of a woman riding a bicycle, a yawning film policeman, etc., and of course, Seinosuke's own photographs, many of which were failed to focus and overexposed.
From the long shot, the audience learns that Seinosuke only took pictures of the everyday things he saw on the way after sending Shoko away, and because he could not hold the camera on the road and because he was a beginner, he produced so many failed photos. Undoubtedly, under one lens, as if the emotions exploded, these "echoes" correspond to the "focus" of each previous photo.
The author believes that this is related to one of the elements of Shuichi Okita - the imaging medium.
Stills from "Antarctic Cooker"
The imaging medium is another imagery that often appears in Shuichi Okita's films. In "Antarctic Chef", before the male protagonist Jun Nishimura went to the South Pole and after returning from the South Pole, he had a fixed camera shot with his daughter watching cartoons played on TV.
Coincidentally, in "Don't Let The Child Know", Okita Shuichi arranges for a female protagonist to watch a fixed camera shot of the anime playing on TV at home at the beginning of the movie, and at this time, the father (actually the stepfather) who returns home sees his daughter watching the cartoon and dances in the film, and he also jumps with his daughter (this section is not in the original manga). In both films, the television that plays the image connects the relationship between father and daughter, and informs the audience through the camera about these changes in the state of father and daughter.
In addition, "Antarctic Chef" has another place about imaging: the daughter came to an event where she could have a video conversation with the Antarctic expedition team in Japan (the expedition team could not see the status of the event venue, but the venue could see the team members through the camera on the expedition side), and the daughter asked her father questions as a stranger, hoping to silently understand her father's life in Antarctica. At this time, the father that the daughter sees is the imaging on the screen, and the father who is the imaging has long crossed the fiction of the medium for the daughter and has become an incomparably real and missed distant place.
There is a similar scene in "Yokomichi Seinosuke", where Seinosuke watches himself fainting from heat stroke during a samba performance at his friend Kato's home, an act that makes Kato think that Seinosuke is an interesting person, so much so that more than a decade later Kato recalls that he can't help but smile, calling him an exception in college life.
Therefore, the same as the imaging of the photograph also assumes an incomparable significance. Although the plot of Seinosuke taking pictures is an adaptation of the original work, the photographs printed with imaging and the act of taking pictures were reshaped in The hands of Shuichi Okita, making this long shot a "waterfall" as the end point. This "waterfall" is not simply a dramatic unfolding of puzzles, but also the last time in the film to show the delay of "now" to "future", a reconfirmation of the multiple internal and external echoes in the film - this long shot responds to the film's everyone who knows Yodo Shinosuke focus on him, focus on the cityscape of Tokyo in the 1980s, and also carries countless times in his life.
exegesis:
[1] Tang Zhenzhao, Book Review: Urban Vision of "Park Life", Wen Wei Po, Published: April 28, 2014, Published at http://paper.wenweipo.com/2014/04/28/BK1404280003.htm;
[2] Same as [1].
Original title: "The first half laughs to incontinence, the second half cries until the voice is lost, to the ordinary beautiful youth"