NEKO-MIMI (Jun Kurosawa, 1993) (Patreon)

BY REQUEST: Kevin Wall

We all have our aesthetic biases. It's unavoidable. The only thing a conscientious critic can do is keep trying to engage with works that fall in our blind spots. As I've written elsewhere, some of my very favorite films and filmmakers are ones I used to have a lot of trouble with. You never know if and when something is going to click.

Having said that, I have always had trouble with Japanese avant-garde film. Not all of it, of course. I like a lot of Takashi Ito's films, and some of Toshio Matsumoto's. But very often there is a performative aspect to these films that focuses on ritual and semi-religious activity, no doubt drawing on the long history of Japanese cultural creation. It often manifests as a set of transgressive gestures, violation of the body, or the flouting of social and sexual mores. This is the same reason I mostly don't appreciate Viennese Aktionism, or the films of Jodorowsky. The effort to épater les bourgeois is admirable in its context, but leaves me with very little to hang onto. As far as the sex-and-death strand of Japanese filmmaking, I find that it fares much better with a narrative context to moor it (e.g., Oshima, Wakamatsu, Terayama).

Before watching NEKO-MIMI, I took a look at twelve of Kurosawa's short films. I appreciated them quite a bit more, and not just because they weren't ninety minutes. Earlier in his career, Kurosawa was interested in light and color effects, the disjunctive power of montage, and the collision between the cinematic and the painterly. His films COMPOSITION and SKY'S GONE OUT were particularly impressive, landing in an unlikely zone between Ernie Gehr and Bruce Baillie. However, Kurosawa weds every one of his films to an irksome drone-and-grind soundtrack that, for me, undercut the strength of his visual schemes. The sound just feels tacked on, which is all the more curious given that Kurosawa composes it himself.

Ironically, the Metal Machine Music-style soundtrack of NEKO-MIMI is its strongest aspect, which at times makes the film feel like a collection of images designed to support the composition. There is a loose structure to the film, almost like a stripped-down ritualistic narrative. The film starts with a series of lines from Beckett's Endgame, and then becomes mostly nonverbal. Four performers are in a warehouse, being almost absentmindedly creative. They carve shapes, stack things, suspend one another from ropes, have candles strewn about, and move among a set of knives dangling from the roof. (I'll freely admit that "daddy, would you like some sausage?" came immediately to mind.) Kurosawa sometimes colors these scenes with bright gels, which provide the most seductive element of the film, aesthetically speaking.

Enter a new performer, who I believe is named Micari, the stoic muse seen in some of Kurosawa's later shorts. Like the relationship between Nico and Philippe Garrel, the Kurosawa / Micari films give the impression of an artist using visual language to make a woman into a sort of earthly goddess. But here, she harshes the vibe of the other performers, going so far as to dance in a classical manner, with the others seated in chairs as her audience. This reestablishment of the traditional perfomer / audience dialectic is ultimately intolerable.

The others tie her to a water tower. They bind her to a gurney swinging from the ceiling. And eventually she seems to be banished. However, in the final moments of NEKO-MIMI, the others venture outside, walking in tandem through the forest and bobbing in the lake. Did their unwanted encounter with Micari prod these self-absorbed creatives to touch grass? Hard to say. I will say, however, that the frequent, random inserts of a scalpel and forceps poking at a cow's eye is, like so 1929. Oh well, maybe NEKO-MIMI will click for me in fifteen years.