Afterlife: death and fhe bureaucratic subject (sample Prospecuts)

In the film “Afterlife,” Kore’eda presents a stark, institutional setting
for the usually mystical representations of our life after death. This
paper will offer a close examination of the film in an effort to answer
the following questions: why did Kore’eda choose to use “real” people and
their memories to include in his otherwise “imaginary” or “staged” version
of the afterworld? What is the significance of choosing to represent those
in “limbo” as the employees of the institute? How does the institutional
setting relate to the Japanese bureaucratic culture? I plan on exploring the question of how the film Afterlife relates to bureaucracy in contemporary Japan. I am also interested in the artistic appeal of the film--Kore'eda is renowned as a lyrical, poetic director who has developed a simple everyday "realism" in his films. Research on the genre of contemporary filmic "realism" has turned up little on Kore'eda, but some of the qualities that are described I find useful. For example, Teresa de Lauretis, a professor of film and media studies at UC Santa Cruz, claims that contemporary cinema is marked by its "realistic" qualties. She argues that this counteracts the recent (and bad) popularized sentiment of most contemporary films. In his review of the film in a Tokyo newpaper, a man relates this lack of sentimentality to death. He writes, "the film very accurately portrays the calm, stoic relation that Japanese people have towards death." My essay will explore these ideas. In order to do this, my paper will: 1) describe Kore'eda's notion of the afterlife, as seen in key scenes from the film; 2) explore contemporary notions of death and afterlife in modern Japan; 3) analyze the bureaucratic personalities of the workers of the institute; 4) explore the relation between death and bureacracy in contemporary Japan. I hope to explore the concept of death and afterlife, to show how death comes to be defined as a rebirth through choice and how afterlife is a repeated experience, governed by affect or emotion.