Monday, March 12, 7:00pm
UNC Charlotte main campus, Student Union
Theater
Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2001/119 min.
Japanese with English Subtitles
During the 1990s, Japan experienced a boom in horror cinema that became popular
throughout the world, and made an enormous impact on Hollywood (where many of
these horror films were remade for American audiences). Much of this cinema drew on
traditional motifs from Japanese ghost stories while at the same time, addressing
contemporary issues in Japanese society. As films like Ringu indicate, the ever
increasing and rapid spread of new technologies has consistently been one of the
issues horror films have confronted. Among the towering accomplishments of the genre
is Pulse, a film that takes up the internet in ways distinct from the many American films
that engage with new technologies. The director, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, while known for his
horror films, is also one of the best filmmakers to emerge out of Japan in the past few
decades full stop. Kurosawa is too complex a thinker and filmmaker to simply demonize
the internet in a simple fashion. Instead, he looks at the ways that the internet affects us
in how we engage with it at microlevels, the sense rather than the mechanics of internet
technology. It is undoubtedly partly for this reason that while the film is not recent, and
technology constantly changes, it remains extremely relevant and unnerving. But
another reason that the film remains worth watching is because of Kurosawa’s
filmmaking prowess—his meticulous attention to all aspects of the image within the
frame, his fanatic sound design, and sharply observed sense of space. The entire world
he creates and puts to film is littered with dark corners and passing shadows, the kind of
thing we might catch out of the corner of our eyes. There is always something creepy
and unsettling that is often difficult to name or put our fingers on. It will never let us go.
Made possible by a Popp Martin Student Union Theater Programming Grant awarded to the UNC Charlotte Japanese Reading Club
Introduction by Phil Kaffen, Assistant Professor, Languages and Culture Studies, UNC
Charlotte. Discussion will follow screening.
