Profile

Oeuvre

1995 Maborosi [幻の光]	2013 Like Father, Like Son [そして父になる]
1998 After Life [ワンダフルライフ]	2015 Our Little Sister [海街diary]
2001 Distance [DISTANCE]	2016 After the Storm [海よりもまだ深く]
2004 Nobody Knows [誰も知らない]	2017 The Third Murder [三度目の殺人 ]
2006 Hana [花よりもなほ]	2018 Shoplifters [万引き家族]
2008 Still Walking [歩いても 歩いても]	2019 The Truth [La Vérité]
2009 Air Doll [空気人形]	2022 Broker [브로커]
2011 I Wish [奇跡]	2023 Monster

Background and his turn to cinema

Hirokazu Kore-eda is, to utilize his own words, part of the generation that was brought up by television, by consuming TV dramas and documentaries. His mother, who was a cinephile, introduced him to classic film (Hitchcock, Ingrid Bergman, Rossellini) from an early age.

Kore-eda entered Waseda’s faculty of letters, Arts and Sciences with the intention of becoming a novelist. However, in part due to the fact that the programme’s heavy emphasis on English and Chinese which did not align with his interests, Kore-eda happily skipped classes to visit cinemas and delve in the work of Yasujirō Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, and Federico Fellini.

Despite fostering his interest in film during his university years – slowly saying goodbye to the dream of becoming a novelist, he did not make his own 8mm films nor join the university’s film circle. He simply persued his interest by reading screenplays and discovering, all on his own, the classics of cinema.

After graduating, the realisation that entering the film-studio system would be very difficult, he decided to enter the world of television by joining TV Man Union as an assistent director. These years, which he devoted to making documentary film, confronted him with a shocking, yet also liberating truth: the fact that the division between documentary and fiction is artificial. Or, put it very Lacanian, he realized that truth always has a structure of fiction.

Themes

We argue that human realist Hirokazu Kore-eda, within his oeuvre, explores a field of loss, human bonds, and childhood, as determined by the dimension of time. The dimension of temporality, rather then being made explicit, organizes the flow of Kore-eda’s visual compositions. The dimension of mono-no-aware, the nostalgic sadness concerning the ephemerality of life, create an implicit frame which amplifies the narrative exploration of other themes.

Within Kore-eda’s oeuvre, loss is revealed as an ordinary reality, as an unavoidable consequence of the passing of time. One could even argue that Kore-eda always seeks to explore the way subjects deal with loss – the mundane loss due to the fleeting nature of time, loss inflicted by the emergence of the real (e.g. death), or the loss enforced by the sudden perforation of the societal Other. While Kore-eda explores the dimension of loss and its link with memory, the fantasmatic constructions we make concerning our past, most explicitly in Maborosi (1995) and After Life (1998), the interplay between loss and memory is implicitly present within all of his movies.

While the director, considerd by many as the modern master of the shōmin-geki, always seeks to reveal the beauty within the mundane, he also invites the spectator to perceive the subtle emotional undercurrents swirling under the fantasmatic surface of domestic harmony, undercurrents animating the emergence of subjective speech. Kore-eda grants us a glance at the subjectivity of his characters, exposing, without any moral judgement, the flawed nature of his characters. While Kore-eda does not judge his characters, most of his films do deliver an implicit societal critital message, showing how the subject can be a victim of the societal field that surrounds him, whether it is the machinery of (the letter of) the law, the failure of societal systems, or the structuring presence of capitalism.

Kore-eda shows, within his oeuvre, that he fully understands that the field of domestic harmony is fantasmatic – a fiction supported by a variety of subjects. This realization allows him to question the true fabric of family bonds and the use of symbolic signifiers within the familial context. With great precision, he shows that the birth of the parental bond is function of the act and signifier of the caregiver and not of the symbolic signifier of the birth-certicifate – the official inscription of the biological tie. To emphasize this point, he often focuses on children in his oeuvre. Going beyond the dimension of sentimentality, Kore-eda reveals that, despite them being subjected to the parental Other and the societal Other – burdened by parental failure, they also actively respond to this Other.

Cinematographical style

Koreeda’s compositional style can be considered simple, yet this simplicity, rooted in his past in documentary film, aims to turn the gaze of the camera – and, thus, the spectator – into an non-intrusive observing instance – we witness from a distance and do not intrude as life flows on.

Within his composition, Hirokazu Koreeda favours static moments, restrained pan-shots, minimal camera movement, and long takes. With these compositional choices, he does not merely create a subdued completative visual rhythm – letting the audience feel time passing by, but also give his cast the time and space to infuse a sense of genuinity into the emotions of the characters they portray.

The contemplative quality of Koreeda’s compositions, moreover, enables him to infuse a sense of mono no aware [物の哀れ] – the bittersweet awareness or appreciation of the impermancence of things – into the atmosphere of his films. We are, in a certain sense, made aware of the passing of time. A grammatical operation that Koreeda often utilizes to enhance the palpable quality of the passage of time is the observational ellipsis, the fluid elision of certain narrative moments within the visual fabric. The observer cannot always be present, events happen, yet outside his gaze.

To end this short overview of Koreeda’s visual style, we want to highlight that domestic interiors – kitchens, living rooms, … etc. – often play an important visual role within his narratives. By inserting frames within frames within his compositions, he does not create depth, but also evocatively highlights the radical difference between characters and the emotional distance between them. Yet, at the same time, by taking his time to explore how people share spaces, Koreeda also shows how, despite this difference, a fiction of tender togetherness is created.