"...once the system's complete, it'll function on its own and become permanent."

Unbelievable. I need to watch it again, but certainty one of the seminal films of the 21st Century. Indeed a very digital ghost story, one which encourages us to reflect on the new spaces which have been created or transformed since 2000. People interact with computer screens, televisions...but rarely ever phones. Perhaps because there is no screen (or wasn't really in 2001) for a telephone? It's very interesting and telling that the movie's near-climax (only because the movie takes a sudden, very unexpected shift following which I'm still struggling to make sense out of) is in an abandoned factory, an analogue space, and one where ghosts exist in.…

I think the first thing I said to my friend Alex Enquist as I left the theater was that this was “the most Bordwellian movie ever made.” I don’t think the film has that much to say about our relationship to technology – it’s more of a gimmick to get the plot going (essentially Swimfan but never annoyingly so), but so perfectly constructed, where each shot leads into the next shot. Kurosawa jumps 180 degree lines, re-organizes the space of a scene via shots that feel unnecessary and bring us out of the action on screen, and then suddenly it becomes obvious as new information emerges into the frame. This can either be for horror (aka ghoooooooossssssts) or even comedy…

Kurosawa’s Pulse operates on so many levels it’s tough to keep track of. That being said, it is essential to note that this is not a film about the sociological dangers of the internet, or what have you. Rather, it is a film about the degradation of human systems—especially those regarding not only communication but representation—and the means through which loneliness and alienation may proliferate as a virus in the wake of such breakdown. The fact that the internet is the system breaking down here is, as the film itself overtly makes clear, arbitrary. I’m only making a point to clarify this because I think it’s essential to the film’s thematic concerns to understand that the central hauntings here do…

Expressionist shadows can suggest a number of things: what they do for Abel Ferrara, looming quietly throughout his criminal and spiritual urbanscapes, is not what they did for F. W. Murnau's silent, sometimes ironic (The Last Laugh) art. But they almost always, by nature, present themselves to us as the mythic darkness just beyond or behind something real. And while it's usually tempting to understand them through some moral equivalency, sometimes a filmmaker can instruct us to see them as something new, or at least as something else.

When characters die in this film, which happens frequently -- this is an existentialist, near-apocalyptic ghost story in which many people, known and unknown to the viewer, will die -- there are…

La contamination de l’espace et de la psyché :

A la fin des années 90, le gouvernement Japonais met en place la loi sur la prévention du suicide (1996), durant cette décennie le taux de suicide à drastiquement augmenté, dépassant en 1998 la barre des 30 millions. L’art voué à refléter n’a pu s’empêcher de traiter de ce sujet-là. Parmi les oeuvres directement concernés nous pouvons citer Suicide club de Sono Sion (2001) et la même année Kairo de Kiyoshi Kurosawa. S’il est plus difficile de cerner le genre des films de Sono Sion, Kurosawa lui à décidé de traiter ce sujet par le biais de l’horreur. Et c’est par l’horreur que Kurosawa nous confronte aux problèmes qu’il relève.

Kairo…

"Maybe.. he suddenly just wanted to die. I get that way sometimes. It's so easy to hang yourself."

Yo this movie has the big dread. Makes you want to destroy every bit of technology in your life and thoroughly light every surface in your immediate area in case something is hiding just out of sight.

Pulse is quite good as a time capsule for Japanese culture and the dawn of the internet age. "Techno-horror" has always been appealing to me, but no movie I've seen so far has hit the mark as well as this film does when it comes to exploring technology and an unique way of telling horror stories, and avoids the more modern trope of "Phone Bad".…

A escolha moral em Pulse

por Pedro Henrique Ferreira

Olhemos rapidamente a decupagem do preâmbulo de Pulse (Kairo, 2001) – o encontro entre uma mulher e um homem que desconhecemos, dentro de um navio perdido no meio de uma tempestade. Ele traz de dentro da cabine uma corda até se deparar com ela, que olha as nuvens negras do horizonte em uma composição planimétrica. Os dois são enquadrados de costas em distâncias diferentes, parados, estabelecendo uma profundidade de campo.

Temos então um contra-plano que revela sua expressão cansada.

Retornamos à imagem dela, com o surgimento da voz em off do narrador a dizer: “Tudo começou um dia, sem aviso prévio, assim…”.

A voz invade a última imagem da cena enquanto…