Amusement Ride (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2019) (Patreon)

Q: What's a 'structural film'?

A: That's easy! Everybody knows what a structural film is! It's when engineers design an airplane or a bridge, and they build a model to find out if it will fall apart too soon. The film shows where all the stresses are!

(Owen Land, On the Marriage Broker Joke...)

Although not really a maker of structural films per se, Tomonari Nishikawa is a dedicated formalist whose work employs a poetics derived in part from the structuralist lexicon. And his newest film is indeed a close examination of structural properties, the beams, rivets, and girders that form the internal skeleton of the Cosmo Clock 21 Ferris Wheel in Yokohama. Using a kind of gestural looping approach, Amusement Rise situates itself in a seat on the ride and looks deep into the center of the machine, traveling up, in truncated rolling shots.

That's to say, Amusement Ride only seems to move in one direction, since Nishikawa's clipped editing only provides the upward gestures (or takes the downward shots and includes them upside down -- a distinct possibility). This takes the ordinary, vernacular movements of the Ferris Wheel and defamiliarizes them, turns them into criss-crossed metallic "flips" of a Rolodex. In a way, Amusement Ride differs from many of Nishikawa's recent films, such as Ten Mornings Ten Evenings and One Horizon, 45 7 Broadway, or Shibuya-Tokyo, in that it doesn't foreground technique so dramatically. It is more about direct perception that process.

The film begins and ends with red leader which seems to indicate the start and end of the "ride," and we do see and hear passengers on the Ferris Wheel, even though it is the mechanics of the apparatus that are Nishikawa's main focus. More than once while watching I thought about the recent structural documentary Manakamana, with its unbroken shots of cable car rides and the people onboard. Amusement Ride is a bit like that film's miniaturized unconscious, the interstitial moments between the individual journeys when any mode of transport is left to its own device(s).