An Honest Ghost

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 film The Revenge: A Visit from Fate begins with a family gunned down in their home by the yakuza. There are roughly two ways most directors would shoot this: the more conventional would be to ramp up the tension and chaos by cutting between gunman and terrified family—perhaps having the killers face the camera as they pull the trigger, for maximum vividity. The other approach would be to privilege a longer master shot, cutting rarely, if at all, so as to present the execution with a cold objectivity that would emphasize its brutality. Kurosawa does neither. A split second before the first shot is fired, he cuts to a view from outside the house; we can see through the windows, but the figures are mostly obscured. By the time we’ve adjusted to this strange perspective, the murders are over.

In Kurosawa’s films, familiar cinematic actions–a shooting, a death–take on a quality that is at once dry, plain, abruptly material, and spectral. Displaced, adrift, unreal. Among Marx’s coinages in Capital, we find a term to describe this quality: “gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit”—“phantom-like objectivity” (or, in the new translation, “ghostly objecthood”).^[1] This was among his more colorful attempts to characterize the unusual nature of value in capitalist society, which seems to inhere in every commodity insofar as it can be bought or sold—so must be “real”—but which cannot be identified as an attribute of any object per se; something into which “not an atom of matter enters”. And Kurosawa, too, gives us an objectivity rooted in the materials of this world, yet somehow entirely spectral in character, as if displaced from those same materials. Here, I would suggest that the suitability of Marx’s phrase to that quality of Kurosawa’s filmmaking is less of a coincidence than it may seem, and that his most recent film, Cloud, exemplifies this further than any previous.

Cloud is about a factory worker, Ryosuke, making money on the side as an online reseller. As his business grows, he quits his job and becomes more audacious, selling goods that may well be counterfeit, and hoarding collectible items in order to artificially inflate their value. At the same time, Ryosuke attracts increasingly sinister attention from anonymous buyers who feel conned by his business practices. Though he decamps to a countryside property away from Tokyo, he cannot shake his pursuers, and things come to a head when a group of them band together to seek revenge.

With this film, Kurosawa returns to the problem of social relations in the internet age, the subject of his much-loved Pulse (2001), which remains the high-water mark of the information technology horror story. That film was about the conversion of living humans into ghosts in the shadow world of the digital. Cloud takes up similar themes at a point more than two decades later, when digital existence has become totally integrated into the social and economic lives of most people in the world. Phantom selves are confined no longer to the household desktop and its mysterious dial-up ritual, but walk alongside us in the open air; we inhabit them on the bus or when we’re bored at work, and they increasingly constitute the essential part of our existence in the eyes of banks, corporations and governments. The abstraction of the individual, or rather its sedimentation across virtual domains, is now long past novelty.

Kurosawa therefore approaches his theme from the other side, having his digital ghosts take substantial form. Having given the first half of Cloud the structure of a haunted-house film—typically ominous happenings escalate, figures seeming to lurk just outside the frame—he in the end refuses to relocate us from the intramundane; this is a world where beings of flesh reveal themselves more uncanny than phantoms, where no supernatural supplement is required because human relations are themselves spectral. Spectral because they are not only mediated but constituted by virtuality, and spectral because, as Marx says, in the world of the commodity they have taken on “the phantasmagoric form of a relation among things.”^[2] This double-departure from the physical and the sensuous in the realm of concrete human relations renders a cinematic metaphor like the phantom unnecessary, because its entwining of the phantasmagoric and the real already obtains in reality. Althusser remarked that the artist Leonardo Cremonini was “[n]ot an abstract painter, ‘painting’ an absent, pure possibility in a new form and matter, but a painter of the real abstract, ‘painting’, in a sense we have to define, real relations (as relations they are necessarily abstract) between ‘men’ and their 'things', or rather, to give the term its stronger sense, between 'things' and their ‘men’.”^[3] Where Cremonini reached these relations in abstracting the forms of human and object, Kurosawa reflects it in the formal choices he makes: the way he frames shots, directs his actors, and assembles his scenes. This is how he renders the “objecthood” (or “concreteness”, as we might translate Marx’s term) of what the camera records into something “phantom-like”.

Everything we are shown in the first minutes of Cloud represents a turning away from the social and the disposal of time implied by sociality: from Ryosuke’s terse acquisition of his goods from the warehouse of an elderly couple whose business has collapsed; to his blank stare at the computer screen that allows him to track his business in real time without any need for face-to-face interaction; to his hasty refusal to accept a promotion to “junior leader” at his factory job, which will take time out of his side hustle. Everywhere, human engagement is an impediment to commerce, and must therefore be minimized. We are introduced to Ryosuke’s girlfriend Akiko in a scene where he is in his home-office, searching online for sought-after video games to buy in bulk. Akiko enters, and a moment of intimacy interrupts the crucial instant; once she has gone, Ryosuke turns back to his screen and finds that the items in question have sold out. This scene, staged with mock suspense, turns the employment of time into a zero-sum conflict between the social and the economic.

After Ryosuke quits his job, a scene in which he returns to his apartment and tells Akiko of his plan to move out of Tokyo and expand the business begins with a shot that lasts about a minute and a half. It is worth describing in some detail. Ryosuke enters, and the camera whip-pans to Akiko, standing in the hall in front of the door to his office, who remarks that he is back early and she hasn’t started making dinner. Ryosuke goes into his office, not stopping to greet his girlfriend, and the camera pans left to follow him; it is positioned to show us the doorway into the office and some of the wall to its left. He tells Akiko he has quit the factory, and as he justifies his decision he enters the bedroom adjacent. After panning to show us this, the camera is back at the doorway of the office as Akiko initially dismisses the idea before leaving the frame to the left to enter the kitchen. Now, something strange happens. The camera moves, not towards either character, but slightly forward to the right, such that the office’s interior fills the frame. While this is happening, we neither see nor hear Ryosuke or Akiko. Ryosuke then enters the frame from the right and tells Akiko to quit her job. As their conversation continues, Akiko goes into the office. Ryosuke, standing just inside the doorway, puts his hand on a shelving unit beside him, such that his girlfriend’s head is framed in the space between his head and his forearm. At this moment, Ryosuke declares that he has a plan. Akiko returns to the kitchen, and the camera follows Ryosuke as he slowly enters and stands behind her at the stove. “It’ll change our lives,” he says. Kurosawa now finally cuts to a new angle.

Why this unusual moment in the middle of this extended shot, an unexplained gap in the conversation between the couple the camera taking in the empty office? It’s reasonable to surmise that a viewer will register automatically the oddness of this silent interval, emphasized through its effective “spatialization” by the office, whose pregnant emptiness corresponds to the lack of speech. The editor of a conventional movie would look for some coverage to cut in here, to reduce the gap, and its absence is palpable to anyone inculcated with the usual unconscious filmic expectations. But there are more levels active here. Because of the previous scene in the office, we can understand this room as a site of commerce within the domestic environment, and the relationship between commerce and domesticity as an antagonistic one. As such, by having it fill the frame in this moment, we have the offscreen couple—Ryosuke to the right and Akiko to the left—literally separated by this empty commercialized space upon which we are forced, in this oddly dilated instant, to dwell. Further, because of the aforedescribed series of scenes, we have been primed to conceive of time, and specifically the time of social intercourse, in relation to the smooth operation of business. That social time is economized makes the time of the shot resonate economically; temporal expenditure is to be included in the company accounts, as it were. Ryosuke is making an investment in the weight of the command he is about to communicate to his girlfriend, and when he chooses to re-enter the shot and close the visual-aural gap, the moment can be taken as equivalent—on a larger scale—to his pressing “Buy Now” on the merchandise in the interrupted earlier scene. Any edit would fudge the transaction. And so when Kurosawa then frames Akiko encompassed by the figure of Ryosuke looming in the doorway— the kind of visual representation of power relations Hitchcock relished—this tableau, which is not subtle, must also bear the weight of the divergence in relations here. Akiko relates to Ryosuke as an object of affection, while Ryosuke relates to Akiko, not as a mere tool, but as something worse: an object of affection strictly insofar as affection can be planed down to slot frictionlessly into economic operativity. In the same way that relations of value under capitalism can be at once phantasmagorical and absolutely material, the gap in this shot functions both as an unaccountable excrescence—the uncanny, with all its opacity and impenetrability—and as an element of the formal system through which the film dramatizes the colonizing of human social relations by thingly economic ones.

More than merely the general alienation of living under capitalism—which has proved an easy subject in the twenty-first century—Kurosawa photographs the invisible gap between actions and meanings when the two are perpetually riven by abstractions that assume a more powerful social agency than the concrete sensuous qualities of the world. But never before has he been so clear about specifying the root of this abstraction in the peculiar form of relations that characterizes capitalism, and that special object at its center—money—which effects the emptying of all content from the objects of the world, for their universal comprehension as exchangeable commodities. As Christopher J. Arthur puts it, in suitably gothic prose:

If we treat value as the spiritual essence of the capitalist economy, its range of incarnations all centre on a single origin, namely money, the transubstantiated Eucharist of value; ʻthe spectreʼ is this hollow armour, at once mute metal and possessor of the magical power to make extremes embrace. The spirit is made metal and stalks among us. The spectre interpellates all commodities as its avatars, an uncanny identity of discernibles, a spectral phenomenology. This negative presence, posited thus, fills itself out through emptying them of all natural being, and forming for itself a spectral body, a body of spectres. In capitalism all is always ʻanother thingʼ than what it is.^[4]

No filmmaker was better prepared to explore the world commanded by this spectre than the one who had gone furthest in making phantoms into real objects and real objects into phantoms, in showing what is as something other than itself. If there has been a shift in Kurosawa’s career, it has been away from the more overtly destabilizing rhythms and interrupted cadences of his earlier work towards a strangeness that emerges from the total integration of elements; syncopation developing into an impassive concertedness. The transition to digital cinematography has contributed towards this sense. Kurosawa once favored a painterly dinginess offered by 35mm, but he has largely avoided attempting to emulate this in the more clinical medium of high-definition digital. Greys and dirty blues, metals and plastics, dominate much of Cloud, which presents a drained and dismal world without pushing dreariness into its own form of stylization. But in the very last minutes of the film, Kurosawa goes out on an aesthetic limb that is, I think, unprecedented in his work, adopting one of the most familiar and notoriously artificial techniques of classic cinema, rear projection, to place his characters in an environment of sheer unreality. As infernal clouds drift across each other, one of them intones: “So this is how you get into Hell.” At the moment of its conclusion, Cloud reveals itself to be neither the ghost story it seemed to begin as nor the action thriller it had developed into, but an adaptation of one of our civilization’s most inexhaustible tales: Faust.

Rear projection is much older than cinema. Beginning in the late eighteenth century and reaching a peak of immense popularity in the nineteenth—the era of early industrialization—rear projection, in the form of the magic lantern, was used to display moving images of demons, monsters and ghosts, in evening presentations called phantasmagorias. When Marx wrote of a “phantasmagoric form,” this was the reference he was conjuring. His metaphor therefore linked the dark illusions of cinema’s prehistory to the dark operations capitalism was carrying out on the relations between men. With Kurosawa’s film, the metaphor comes full circle. The cinema of homo economicus ends where it began: in a hell of our own making.