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.

afterlife

Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda's Afterlife (1999) places the dead in an institutional way-station, where they must decided upon a memory from their life which they wish to live on with into the afterlife; Koreeda seems to claim, through the time (the film takes place over a week)given to these rich descriptions of the memories in the film, that aesthetic details constitute lived reality--and perhaps make the living worth it, but he also places the film's more profound question marks on those who can't decide, the employees of the institute. Koreeda's technique is interesting--not only does the stoic institution nonetheless suggest a layered warmth found unexpectedly in the often snow-filled outer courtyard--since the material for the film comes from actual interviews, not with the dead, but with individuals to whom he posed the question of what memory they would live on in. The purpose of this film--tough to say--what Koreeda seems to address and thus to "do" is the question of death, via the idea that in order for death to count, your life memory must also count in some way. Although it is not immediately apparent, the film seems to address youth--even though there are also many aged people who have died, the youthful figures in the film are shocking since we often forget that their aliveness is their deadness, and in a way, their memories serve to frame the poignancy of the elder memories, as well.

Some thoughts on my project: I was intrigued with the idea in Antigone that "death longs," and I thought that in a way, Afterlife addresses the problem of how timelessness is always a problem of time. The film is not one that takes "action" in any direct way, but I am interested in thinking about how even such a "timeless" film can also address political and social issues. Another way of phrasing this is that i am interested in thinking about how death can come to be a social issue...

A few links:

• on the IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0165078/
• interview with Kore-Eda: http://www.indiewire.com/people/int_Kore-Eda_Hirokaz_2A6E7.html