“Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.” (The butterfly dream, Choang-Tsu).

On 19 February 1964, in his sixth class of his eleventh seminar, Lacan brings the butterfly dream of Choang-Tsu, a famous Taoist, in play to explore the difference between the eye and the gaze. Before delving in Choang-Tsu’s dream, Lacan reminds his audience that the gaze, in a waking state, is elided – an elision of the fact that it looks and shows. In a dream, on the other hand, the images show, yet the subject can slide away from its confrontation, from its alienating effect.

For Lacan, Choang-Tsu’s butterfly is the gaze, this beautiful stain that causes the Taoist, upon waking, to briefly question his identity. With Neu Mirrors, Keishi Kondo (New Religion (2022)) radicalizes the truth of Taoist’s dream in accordance with Lacan’s fable of the Praying mantis to deliver a highly effective and disturbing horror experience.

Kondo’s narrative visualizes the descent of Mizuki (Saori) into what is quite simply a mirror palace. Yet, she is not merely caught within such field of reflected egos, but is slowly confronted with the presence of an object, the gaze, that usually animates – as veiled, as absence – the field of the imagery.

Every man and woman Mizuki encounters within the apartment transforms into a mirror, reflecting a different ego. As these encounters concatenate, the gaze slowly manifest itself, increasingly destabilizing Mizuki’s ego. The gaze erases the boundaries that allow a subject to designate himself with his own name and, thus, situate himself within the social field, with respect to the Other’s desire.

Analysing Keishi Kondo’s composition, it is immediately evident that he is competent in wielding the primary tool to support a horror experience: atmosphere. In Nue Mirrors, Kondo’s operations on the visual fabric and the aural dimension are dictated by the signifier ‘unheimlich’ – by letting strangeness blossom into the familiar. He plays with colour-tints and lighting, littering his composition with many fleeting visually pleasing moments, inverts shots, and decorates his smooth composition with grim and ominous musical pieces (Cine-note 1). This atmospheric play ultimately culminates in a highly disturbing visual finale, in the materializing of a flowering butterfly-like stain that deeply distresses the spectator.  

By utilizing long takes and slow dynamic movement, Kondo continuously confronts the spectator with what disturbs the familiar and the evocative way he concatenates his imagery renders him unable to position himself with respect to the unheimlich imagery. The spectator is not merely sucked into the ominous atmosphere, but is subjected to the frame as gaze, to a visual frame that invites the subject to question the Other’s as well as his own desire. The riddle that structures Neu Mirrors is not about anyone identity but about the white photobook full of mourning portraits and the desire that animates its circulation.   

With Nue Mirrors, Keishi Kondo offers the spectator an unsettling illustration of the Lacanian gaze. He does not only masterfully utilize atmosphere to entice and unsettle the spectator, but also elegantly invites him into a mirror-like narrative that slowly guides him to a confrontation with what usually remains absent from the visual field: the stain, the gaze, that, when present, radically complicates the relationship between the Other’s and the subject’s desire. Has a new master of horror appeared on the horizon? Only time will tell.

 

Notes

Cine-note 1: The fluidly of the composition is, in part, due to Kondo’s use of cross-fades.

Narra-note 1: As the narrative unfolds, the position of the gaze with respect to the spectator shifts. While, at first, the gaze only materializes for Mizuki, the finale sequence, by virtue of putting the spectator in the shoes of Mizuki, subjects the spectator to this gaze, this flowering stain.