Eyes gazing at the media were covered by a torrent of unbearable and catastrophic images of the Tohoku Kanto earthquake and tsunami, said to have occurred once in a thousand years, on 11 March 2011, and the subsequent hydrogen explosion at the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Even those who were not affected by the disaster certainly suffered a great audiovisual shock, as well as physical traces in some cases. As a Tokyo resident, I was unaffected, but still suffered from 'earthquake sickness' to the extent that my fix shots still looked shaky a week or so later, probably due to the aftershocks. Ironically, in the first year of digital terrestrial broadcasting, TV stations continued to show images of the tsunami's muddy waters, the wreckage of destroyed houses, boats left on their roofs by the waves and shelters in higher resolution than 35mm film which Eric Rohmer often condemned as "too beautiful". Eventually, as the situation moved from the visible to the invisible - from destruction to radiation - the amount diminished. The images of the tsunami were not of much interest to the people involved, as it sometimes takes an unbelievable amount of time for people and objects that were taken by the tsunami to be found again, and the continuous staring and following of events from the invisible to the visible over a long period of time is of interest only to those involved or a very small number of people. However, it is clear to anyone that the vast amount of time before the images emerge into view plays an important role in determining whether or not a disaster has occurred, and even more important is the vast amount of time after the disaster until it becomes clear what the effects will be on the people and land exposed to the radiation. But there is a difference between researchers, who can read endless lists of data and graphs, many of which are represented by numbers, and ordinary people, who grow weary of them. And it will take a great deal more time for everyone to grasp the totality of the damage. In the meantime, those of us caught between the visible and invisible horrors seem to be left with no choice but to turn our backs and shut ourselves away, or else to forget. But is this really the case?

The images that anchor reality are created in a complex relationship with reality itself. By discovering this process and distance, it may be possible to see the truth beyond the image, as a variety of bodies emerging from an accumulation of different contexts. For example, Claude Chabrol, who died recently, said in one interview that Fritz Lang, contrary to Ernst Lubitsch, excluded the world outside the frame (*). However, when reviewing the screen of Fritz Lang's films now, it seems that he is saying that the movement of people in the screen, which is rigorously constructed to exclude the very world outside the frame, is so unnatural that the exclusion of the world outside the frame is in itself the creation of "this unnatural fiction". For example, in Hangmen Also Die (1943), when Czaka (Gene Lockhart) is revealed to be a spy at a meeting with his friends, one man attempts to subdue him as he escapes by hammerthrowing like a wrestler doing to rope. And in The Cloak and Dagger (1946), Gary Cooper is pinned with the face claw, a professional wrestling move to the face in a fight with an enemy Natzi spy. Those scenes that at first glance would be laughable as an impossible depiction of a serious fight, but because of the ridiculousness with which they are precisely framed and composed, the action, which is the height of 'unnatural', is The film reveals the fiction of the depiction itself, while retaining the ghastliness that occurs when an action is forced to become a painting. It is, as a result, like the cut in Robert Bresson's L'Argent (1983), staged to show off-screen space, where the protagonist is confronted with the use of counterfeit money, turns the tables and pushes the waiter away, with only his hand precisely in the frame. Fritz Lang's films, which worked from the silent film era to Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuze (1961), were lamented at the time by Bertolt Brecht, who collaborated on the screenplay for Hangmen Also Die, as being "too Hollywood", and the film Hangmen Also Die was not shot as Brecht intended. But the film is still shocking today because it reveals the struggle between the perfection of shot-making at the time of production and the passing of time, which can only be recognised in an age when images are no longer only seen in the cinema, but everywhere and analyzed.

But in today's age of visual excess, the images of spectacle are so repetitive and saturated, as in the worst examples of images of earthquakes and wars, that they make viewers feel besieged and trapped so that they cannot escape from them, and then after a while, even though many lives have been lost After a while, people forget about it as if it never happened, even though many lives were lost. Even if the spectacle is a spectacle that criticizes the spectacle, as long as we cite the images, we participate in its excesses. So we must dodge, playing the acrobatics of approaching the spectacle and moving away from it at the same time, so as not to be caught in the image. This is exactly what contemporary filmmakers are trying to do.
For example, in Jean-Luc Godard's Eloge d'amour (2001), in a black-and-white night-and-day scene in which Edgar (Bruno Putzulu) talks to a woman (Cécile Camp) he met two years ago, thinking to have her play the heroine of his film, the man and woman in dialogue seem to almost disappear in the landscape The man and woman in dialogue seem to almost disappear in the landscape of the film. There are several screens in which the two are seen together. However, their expressions are not visible, as in the silhouette of a man and a woman in a parked car in the darkness of the night, or when they stand side by side with their backs to each other in the distance on the Ségan island, where the Renault factory can be seen. The conversation continues, but at what appears to be the central part of the dialogue, the man asks, for example, "What do you do when the other person doesn't agree? That's another story ... but we won't start that story ..." and "My mother committed suicide and I was born three years before 1968," the woman says, and Camera leaves them, pans through the darkness, and we hear the soundtrack to Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1930) and captures a boat proceeding down the Seine. When the woman asks the man what he thought of the Americans, who appear later in the color film, he replies, "You were right. Their voices are sometimes drowned out by the sound of cars driving offscreen, and the subtitles are cut off. shot captures the backs of this man and woman standing side by side under a bridge, from a distance. Throughout the entire film, the lead actor, Bruno Putzlu, is most often seen from the far end of the screen or from behind. When the characters are speaking important parts of the dialogue, the person speaking is not on the screen. There is either a landscape, a person not speaking there, or a black screen. Since the early days of Charlotte and Her Jules, Godard had, up to that time, used the technique of placing the person to be seen, which was often the woman, in the center of the screen while another person circled around her to capture both microscopic and large movements at the same time in his films of couples. In Eloge d'amour, however, the figure is placed at the back of the screen and does not stand out. In the scene where the woman answers the phone to the caller, she is positioned at the back of the darkened room, and her presence is never overwhelming, unlike in the scene with Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini's Angst (1954). That is not to say that Godard is trying to say that there is nothing to see in this film at all; with Eloge d'amour, Godard does not give us the luxury of surrendering to the separation of image and sound and savoring voice, music, and rhythm in the way that Marguerite Duras does. In the conversation scene between the protagonist and his grandfather after the death of the woman at the end of the first part, the two are shown only in sound, the book in the case, the hand, the man saying, "The cab is that way," and the core of the conversation is spoken when the screen is black. The film is a powerful critique of the easy media approach to spectacle and a challenge from the filmmaker to the audience as to what to show and when not to show it.

The Principle Uncertainty(2002) by Manoel de Oliveira and its sequel Magic Mirror (2005), which has yet to be released in Japan. In these two works, based on the original works of Agustina Bessa Luís, which were filmed after Oliveira's visually sumptuous Abraham Valley (1993), we can also see a battle between what is shown and what is not shown, and between approaching and moving away. The heroine (Leonor Baldaque) in The Principle Uncertainty is supposed to be plotting and murdering her way to riches, but we never see any of these events. Instead of seeing the heroine and her accomplices busy plotting and killing, we only see scenes of weddings, funerals, festivals, dinners, conversations at rituals like prayers, and the occasional violin heard in the nightscape seen from the window of a train. In Magic Mirror, too, a wealthy lady (Leonor Silveira) who believes in the Virgin Mary sees “miracles” at the water's edge and at the moment of death, but the former is something that we wouldn't even use in a B-grade sci-fi movie, with the flickering sunlight reflected in the river water accompanied by some cheesy synthesizer music , while the latter is a film in which the unremarkable footage of a moving camera filming the city of Venice from an elevated angle is shown on a room mirror, accompanied by the narration voice of Duarte d'Almeida (João Benard da Costa, the director of the Cinemateca Portuguesa) and the music is regretted for his passing. These images are not at all intended to make the audience believe in the miracles seen by the heroine. If it were a big-budget Hollywood movie, they would probably go to great lengths to use elaborate computer graphics to make the audience believe in the images, but Oliveira doesn't believe in such images in the first place. On the contrary, he is someone who tries to dismantle plausibility, and this is clearly demonstrated in Battle of Alcácer Quibir in Non, ou a vain gloria de mandar (1990), where he himself reveals that it is a blatant fabrication. The light reflections in the Magic Mirror and the scenery of Venice reflected in the mirror are just temporary images representing a miracle (or even whether it was a miracle or not) that the heroine alone could see, but not the audience. From the audience's perspective, it is impossible to reach the truth. Like the numerous rituals that unfold in The Principle Uncertainty, it stands in front of the audience's gaze, which hopes for a realistic reproduction of the miracle , and to ask the audience to see the function of the fiction itself rather than the story = information or the way of speaking. Oliveira, who asks the audience to master a sophisticated way of looking, is no less than Godard. In fact, considering that he is much older, he can only be called a master director to be respected.

Of course, there are also a number of examples of films that, in the process of heading towards 'truth', suddenly reveal the limitations of their own representations as they stand in the way of the viewer's gaze. For example, Noriaki Tsuchimoto's masterpiece Umitori - Robbing of the Sea: Shimokita Peninsula (1984),–– which is probably not considered to be one of his best works––,the film shows the feelings and thoughts of the people involved in the fishing industry, as they express their various positions and opinions regarding the construction of the Mutsu nuclear ship home port, and through this we get a glimpse of the strategy used by the government to divide the local population over the issue of land expropriation. At a union meeting, the phrase “abandonment of fishing rights” is uttered at a union meeting, and the text is shown in close-up, and then a map is shown, the conflict and individual relationships that should be immediately apparent in the usual works dealing with Minamata, such as those between Chisso and the patients, become something that is rather difficult for the audience to follow and is something that is subtly in flux. This prevents the easy emotional identification that ordinary documentaries invite, and the audience can only bear witness to the way the words isolate each speaker. And even the sea, which in Minamata was so radiant with the subjects of the film despite the pollution, feels like a barrier to the viewer's gaze in this film, no matter how much it is layered with elaborate techniques such as aerial photography and high-speed filming. Some filmmakers who are obsessed with their subject may try to create a villain, or try to distance themselves as outsiders to the area and ridicule the conflict, but Noriaki Tsuchimoto does not do this, but instead shows the limitations faced by the images as guides by simply layering the images. Or the numerous old photographs that appear in Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Elegy (1993). The outlines are unclear, the details are fading, and even if the audience strain their eyes or the camera moves in closer, it is impossible to discern what the people in the photographs are doing. The film does not talk about it, and there is no narration added. However, even if you don't know who they are or what they are doing, they were definitely there... Perhaps this is the thought that can be found in the deliberately used degraded video quality fragments of Godard's “Film History Special Edition: Selected Moments” (2005) , it is a thought that shows the possibility and limitations of video as it is to capture the traces of the movements of people who have become even minute particles that are disappearing and cannot be reproduced.

For example, Jean-Claude Rousseau's The Valley Close (1995) is one of the most important filmmakers of our time, because it presents fragments of a valley, mountains, rooms, lightning, and roads that were apparently shot on a daily basis without any intention of making a film out of them, and which were never reconstructed into anything, seemingly unconnected valleys, mountains, rooms, lightning, and roads, which were filmed in an everyday manner without any particular aim of creating a work, are presented in the frame together with sounds that also fail to synchronize but appeal to the imagination in a surprising way, and it is for this reason that we can say that there is a vision that is evoked. The valleys and other landscapes are composed as a space with depth that captures multiple movements and rhythms, with foreground and background, and the sounds are heard as if filling that space from afar. In other words, these landscapes and objects are images and sounds that constantly evoke the off-screen. As a contemporary artist who loves Ozu, Rousseau reconstructs the daily life of an elderly man played by himself in his latest masterpiece, De Son Appartement (2007). It is a fragment of everyday life made up of details: the movements of his hands as he smokes and drinks whiskey, opens the mail, plays the piano, tries and fails to fix a broken tap... the movements of his feet as he dances the tango, and the hand that turns the pages of Racine's Berenice and the voice that recites it. What differentiates Rousseau from the likes of Eugène Green and José Luis Guerín, who are also influenced by Bresson, is that his work is derived from Rousseau's experience of living in New York at a time when artists such as Andy Warhol were active, just as Philippe Garrel did, but it is thoroughly free of the old-fashioned sense of security that fragments of images give the audience the impression that they make up the whole of the story/information. And Rousseau composes the connection from the sounds that surround it, such as the ringing of a telephone, the sound of a glass breaking, and the sound of metal falling into a bathtub, to the atmosphere of the room and the atmosphere outside, as if it were a single piece of music. The fact that the “outside” of fragments of visual media is not always visible was something that the two filmmakers Rossellini and Bresson had already made clear in their post-war works, but television always erases the “outside” and gives the illusion that everything is visible and can be grasped. Conversely, the spread of this illusion caused by the spread of television made people share this illusion, and it drove the works of directors such as Rossellini and Bresson into a position where they were impossible to produce, and it also drove people who inherited their style out of the market. In other words, although cinema fell from its position as king of entertainment and was relegated to the back of the pack as the seventh art, the films that I mentioned here that contemporary cinema has the ability to give the audience a perspective that dissects the visual media, which is becoming increasingly excessive due to the self-referential nature of the images and sounds themselves. It not only analyzes and criticizes images and sound, but also suggests new possibilities. In other words, contemporary film like those films I mentioned here is one of the things that should be seen and thought about most in our time, when images and sound have become the tools of our age.

(*)Conversations avec Claude Chabrol, François Guérif, editions payot, octobre 2011

(published on The Chuo Review n.276, 2011)