Furi
Kuri
Film
Comment Vol.38 No.6, New York, 2002
In
Japan, silence is not only golden, it's deafening. Back in the day, John Cage's
importation of Zen tenets led him to centrally position silence within his
own compositional methods. His wispy utterances appear comforting when compared
to many other artistic transpositions of the minimalist practice emanating
from Japan. Japanese folk music, for example, is honored as a paradigm of spiritual
quiet, while radical assertions of Occidental Silence drawn from post-modern
angles have been misinterpreted or dismissed by orthodox Nippophiles.
Cineastes
might recall the warm clickity-clack of a distant train
in the cinema of Ozu and Mizoguchi. But that yearning
domestic melancholy vanished from the Japanese soundtrack
into the chasm gouged by Kurosawa's Shakespearean chambara.
Typically post-war, his soundtracks alternate between
gasps of silence, spurts of blood, slices of resonance,
and deep passages of nothingness. Come the Sixties electronics
explosion, the sonar field of Japanese life had profoundly
transformed their soundtracks into something more akin
to Stockhausen than Korngold. It is hard to not hear
this J-Pop noise in the transistorized cinema of Suzuki,
Wakamatsu, Imamura.
Today,
those vibrations of inverted silences, screaming pauses
and razor-thin detonations are heard in much contemporary
cinema and music from Japan. Sonically, a difference
governs their qualifications of sound, music and silence
- so fundamentally misaligning them to Judeo-Christian
Eurocentric thought that misperception of Japanese music
and soundtracks is understandable. But not acceptable.
The
six-part OVA (original video animation?a straight to
DVD genre) Furi Kuri (Kazuya Tsurumaki, 01) may be the
deepest end of the noise pool to dive into and familiarize
oneself with this "difference." Furi Kuri is hard to
describe without resorting to flip cult movie adlines,
suffice to say this anime continues the ungainly equation
of debilitating teen angst mixed with outrageous machinic
interaction that drove Gainax and Company IG's previous
work, the outstanding 26-part anime TV series Neon Genesis
Evangelion (Hideaki Anno, 97). Yet while NGE revisits
the boy-with-robot lineage, Furi Kuri features a boy
who sprouts robots from his own head. Literally. One
of them becomes a mechanical externalization of his inner
power and then periodically swallows the boy to transform
into a mystical mecha-power. While this sounds like Cronenberg
territory, Furi Kuri is closer to the nightmare world
of films like The 5,000 Fingers of Doctor T where children
are trapped in realms so violently realized they convey
the subjective terror of being young: equally unable
to control one's world or oneself.
Sociology
is the cheapest of cinematic divining rods, but it must
be noted that the spectre of teen suicide in contemporary
Japan has peculiarly fuelled many fantastic film, anime
and manga scenarios for at least a decade now. Furi Kuri
accepts this terrain as home ground and builds a sci-fi
project formally unclassifiable and deliberately self-problematized.
Yet apart from its astounding animation artistry and
densely compacted scripting, Furi Kuri is notable for
its equally radical use of music and sound design.
Like
listening to John Hughes teen movies and MTV at the same
time, Furi Kuri frenetically percolates with post-grunge
power pop, J-style. Songs by Little Busters, Running
High, The Pillows, Happy Bivouac and more are mixed high,
hard, and happily, generating a freshness in mixing not
heard since Hughes' vilified pop-tracking. The largely
instrumental song-score is gloriously radiophonic in
its saturation and density. Of note is the way the energy
of the wall-to-wall tracks is integrated into the drama
and its many mood swings. And in seeming oppostion to
this hyper-compression and fat rendering of pop noise,
the tactile presence of amp hums, drum tunings, and vocal
sibilance is gorgeously foregrounded. Recalling the production
work of indie rock stalwart Steve Albini's Shellac recordings,
the music sounds sparklingly raw and urgently alive.
This
palpable presence of electrified life carries over into
Furi Kuri's sound design. Quality DVD playback is required
for the most tactile aspects of the soundtrack: the digital
recording of nothing. One continually hears mics left
on to record the hum of unseen technology (fridge compressors,
subway rumbles, stairwell echoes, etc.), generating careful
placement and modulation of the sonic grain of emptiness
which filters urban and suburban Japan. Fluro tubes at
3 am, aircon exhaust emissions, and yes: that same train
in the distance from Ozu and Mizoguchi. For Furi Kuri
is as thorough a recording of the Japanese psyche today
as the sonic portraits generated by the afore-mentioned
Japanese directors. Do not be fooled by Furi Kuri's audiovisual
pop sheen. It is a sign of the noise that is Japan: imperceptible
through Cage and Zen, but discernible to those attuned
to amplified silence.
