Namhee HAN (Rikkyo University/University of Chicago)
“Visible or Invisible: Postwar Vision in Kurosawa Akira’s High and Low (1963)”

Kurosawa Akira’s High and Low (天国と地獄, 1963) was released during the drastic transformation of postwar Japan, which was preparing to host the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Working against the ongoing historical task of promoting Tokyo as a “clean and bright” metropolis, the detective thriller High and Low is set in Yokohama, a city that borders an international trading port where hierarchical relationships among geopolitics, class, and gender have the potential to cause substantial social tension. In an attempt to shift critical attention on Kurosawa from his auteur status to his film text, this paper examines widescreen aesthetics explored in High and Low to challenge the viewer’s vision of postwar Japan as well as cinematic image. By closely analyzing the film text, it demonstrates how the film both maps and blurs boundaries between visible and invisible dimensions of postwar urban space. The paper consists of two parts. The first introduces Kurosawa’s widescreen filmmaking practices and the issue of visibility in early widescreen cinema. It examines Kurosawa’s signature film style of deep staging and telephoto lens images to argue for specificity in his widescreen filmmaking. The second part discusses how widescreen aesthetics cinematically articulates dynamics and tensions of visibility and invisibility in postwar urban spaces. It analyzes the ways in which each character, Gondo, the detectives, and kidnapper, experiences and perceives urban Yokohama, paying attention to horizontal camera movements and a telephoto lens that consciously engage with wide screen space. By conducting these analyses, I will argue that the heterogeneous vision High and Low presents ultimately encourages the viewer to critically question the “official” vision of early 1960s Japan.



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