The name of Kiyoshi Kurosawa is synonymous with a certain style of Japanese horror, and yet no one is synonymous with him; Kurosawa is one of the most distinct filmmakers active today, and one of the prime auteurs that have defined 90s and 2000s Japanese cinema. Take your pick of masterpieces – the hypnotic procedural Cure (1997), the anxiety-inducing internet fable Pulse (2001), or the supposedly more subdued, yet still equally chilling Tokyo Sonata (2008) could all fit most lists of the greatest films of all time. Tales of dread and uncertainty, tensions lurking beneath placid surfaces, the world of the dead and of the supernatural blurring into reality, haunting sounds, memories, and appearances, Kurosawa’s films are calculated devices that leave you needing to turn and check behind twice, just to make sure there’s no dark force trying to catch up to you, too. While horror has been the genre to bring him most recognition, the director has never been a stranger to a multitude of other ventures, including television or V-Cinema and other less prestigious genres (like pink films) which helped him start out as a filmmaker in the 80s.

Horror, in fact, has been a rarer sight from the director in more recent years  – his Silver Lion winner Wife of a Spy, 2020 was a spy drama. Yet his return with Chime, a 45-minute film which premiered in the Berlinale Special programme and is set to be released digitally through the Japanese platform Roadsted, sounds the bells of chilling promise. Kurosawa is also set to release, later in the year, a remake of his 1998 film Hebi no Michi / Serpent’s Path, and another feature, Cloud (a story about a young man trying to resell dubiously obtained goods featuring the stellar Masaki Suda).

A master’s work is always great work even when it’s not his best: despite its short runtime Chime is able to capture all that makes Kurosawa’s films an absolute mesmerizing experience, reeling you in with graceful glides through ominous kitchens, dysfunctional families, desperate artists and thick, accumulating dread. The peace in a culinary school is upset by a foreboding chime initially heard by only one of the students, Tashiro (Seiichi Kohinata). “Half of my brain has been replaced with a machine,” he says, oddly but very assuredly. As this imbalance spreads to the teaching chef, Matsuoka (Mutsuo Yoshioka), so does violence, always alternating between powerful outbursts and almost unphased, controlled cold-heartedness; there’s a chilly, metallic feeling in the air, as if the knives laying down on counters are constantly pressed on the back of your neck.

I sat with Kurosawa to discuss Chime, its format but also the director’s profound belief in the power of sound over the image – a most jovial encounter that got him flustered when I made him aware of the fact that his professor and mentor, film critic Shigehiko Hasumi, mentioned him alongside the likes of Abbas Kiarostami, Pedro Costa, Wim Wenders and even Jean-Luc Godard. Much like how the chef in Chime is both an artist and a teacher, throughout our conversation there also transpired Kurosawa the professor, stricken with an erudite love for cinema: he even catches himself quoting Hitchcock.

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There are many debates nowadays about the so-called appropriate length of a film, or about whether cinema can also come in shorter forms, too. With Chime being rather short for a feature (45 minutes), do you have any definition for cinema “needing” to be short or long?

Well, that’s very difficult to answer, but it’s an interesting question. First you have to ask yourself if there is an adequate length for a film – I would say there is. If I may boldly say so, 100 minutes is just the right length. It’s difficult to explain why it’s like that. The simple answer is that, if you look at the history of cinema, you will find what was considered the first complete form of a movie in the 1930s, in the US – when film also started having sound and color. Some may say otherwise, and there are longer and shorter films, of course, but I think that the films that were made during that period of time in the US are working as the standard, and I think that we have been following that model ever since.

If you take, for example, a film which is two hours long, it may seem a bit too long for some people, you know. But you can have many scenes packed into this one movie, and that could turn out very well – or it could turn out very bad and people will think it’s like a boring movie. If you take a 45-min movie, it may seem a bit short. It may not be enough. But you can make it very compact, and put what is the essence of the story in this very short period of time. So, I think that when people say two hours are a bit too long it is because we still have this standard of the Hollywood movie.

Do you think there is any experimentation with this standard? I think there are quite a few filmmakers nowadays who are making very long films, or who are playing with the length of a film, including, for example, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, one of your former students and now collaborators. Is there any widening of a certain definition for cinema?

That’s true, but, in terms of length, I don’t really think things have changed. Take Abel Gance’s Napoléon, which goes back to 1927 and is extremely long. 5 hours and a half long. And then, at the other end, you have things like the earliest films, the Lumière films, which are less than a minute long. There’s always been great variation. Filmmakers have always been experimenting with the length of movies. I don’t think there are many great changes in terms of the outcome of a film.

But I would say that the way we are making films has changed profoundly, especially with the advent of the digital format.

As someone who has also directed many episodes for television, and with Chime planned to be later released through the platform Roadsted, do you feel that other forms, like television, have become closer to film? Or do you feel that streaming services have changed how we understand cinema or how audiences react to cinema?

I think there are many different influences, but I don’t think I have any very original opinion on this. I can only say something very optimistic. Of course, there are many platforms coming up, but people are still going to the cinemas, they’re willing to go watch the movies there with hundreds of other people. It’s not very different from how it used to be. There’s always that feeling of sadness or being scared after a film that makes you want to come back and watch it again. This experience itself hasn’t changed that much, and as long as it is not going to change, I would say that cinema will exist also in the future. But if there are no more cinemas, no more movie theaters to go to, and if the time comes when everyone prefers watching a film on the smartphone or on YouTube, then the definition of cinema will also change completely.

When I first read about Chime and this idea of a sound that becomes an obsession, or that sound is an integral part of the story, I thought that, in a way, it’s something that can act like an overarching theme in your filmography, like a summary of your relationship with sound, in general.

Thank you for seeing it that way. But, I’m sorry, I’m not really coming up with new ideas. That’s the trouble. [jokingly]

Images are weak. There’s a surprisingly low amount of information that they contain. I’m not particularly confident in the power of images at all. I’m always jealous of how free and luxurious sound is compared to the image. I think sound really has this broad capacity for expressing many things which the image may not be able to.

Inevitably, I thought about Shigehiko Hasumi’s writings on sound, particularly about one essay, Fiction and the ‘Unrepresentable’: All Movies are but Variants on the Silent Film, where he discusses sound becoming a truly important aspect very late in the history of cinema. He talks of a certain hierarchy between sound and image, where sound has been historically disregarded as a very ancillary tool, and there’s always been a primacy of the image. In the case of your films, sound is, indeed, a composite part, and not an auxiliary one. So, I would be curious to ask about the hierarchy between sound and image in your own films.

I haven’t read the text, but I think it refers to Jean-Luc Godard’s films, right? Of course, his first films are from the 60s, but he has been focusing on sound and its importance in film since back then. He is, in this way, a pioneer in the field.

It does refer to Godard, in part, but it also places you alongside him, and a few other filmmakers, like Pedro Costa, Abbas Kiarostami and Shinji Aoyama, to comment on sound achieving some greater, perhaps truer, kind of liberation in the early 2000s, with the digital format allowing for new possibilities of recording and interacting with sound.

I’m very happy to hear about this… Thank you for letting me know. These are all very great directors, whom I know Mr. Hasumi really admires. I am incredibly grateful to be mentioned alongside them.

Now, returning to your question about a hierarchy… well, for me… It’s a weird way to put it, but the image is actually more boring than you think. If you do something very extravagant with it, it can suddenly turn interesting, but you need big budgets for that, studios, FX, actors, a great set. If you shoot something very ordinary, on a street with an actor, the audience might find it boring. Images are weak. There’s a surprisingly low amount of information that they contain. I’m not particularly confident in the power of images at all.

I’m always jealous of how free and luxurious sound is compared to the image. I think sound really has this broad capacity for expressing many things which the image may not be able to, because, through images, you can only show what’s there, there’s only so much you can add. Maybe I’m believing too much, but sound is truly a very luxurious thing. You can do so much with it, you can play with all sorts of possibilities, whether to create something realistic or non-realistic.

Sound is more powerful. So, in terms of a hierarchy, sound is definitely on a higher level than the image. But with my films, I am not trying to surpass the image with sound. I want to add sound in such a way that it enriches the image, the visual part, but without going beyond it, surpassing it. If I go beyond it, then the image has no meaning at all. I would say this is the way that I am making films, I always want to use sound in order to make the most of the images. Maybe what I’m saying is a bit complicated, but I think it’s an honest way of thinking. 

There is one close-up in Chime, that is just brilliant, where the main character is screaming without you being able to see what he is looking at. I think people usually refer to you as a director who works in very distant shots. But your filmography is filled with incredible close-ups – this particular one also reminded me of the moment in Cure (1997) after Takabe (Koji Yakusho) discovers his wife. I also think you have an amazing ability for picking out actors who do really well in close-ups. What weight does a close-up hold in your films?

People do say that I have a lot of long shots in my films, but I don’t think this is the case. There are long shots, close-ups and middle shots, too, right? Maybe it’s a weird case where people are just used to watching things with many close-ups, like TV shows, so my films appear like they are using too many long shots. What I think I’m doing is just about average, I would say. I’m not particularly conscious about shooting in a specific size.

But thank you for your comment about the actors – I am really happy to hear this. With Chime, there are not many close-ups of the lead actor, but it was very important for me that we shoot those close-ups at the very most important moments, and that they should be very characteristic, very unique. You never know how it’s going to turn out, but I always have 100% confidence in the lead actors who I choose that they are able to express these emotions, and that their own uniqueness is going to shine in every scene, be it a long shot or a close-up.

The way this close-up from Chime unfolds brings to mind another aspect that you can trace in most of your work, which is the relationship between being able and not being able to see, as an audience. As I was mentioning, we don’t have access to what the character is reacting to. Cinema is sometimes obsessed by the idea of visibility – how do you understand this relationship between seeing and not seeing, in general?

It’s something that I always keep in mind when making films. Once you start shooting, if you look through the camera, you may be able to realize that you cannot actually see many things. You see only what’s within the frame of the camera, and you don’t see what’s on the right or left or up and down. It is impossible to see everything, so you have to make a choice about what you are shooting. You have to focus on one or two things. Some things you can show, some you can’t, it also depends on time and money – but you know, that’s just how the way of making a movie goes. But when I can only shoot two things, what do I choose? Normally, everyone would maybe think that you have to show the most important thing that happens in the scene. [But that’s not it].

In Chime, there’s a scene where a character is stabbing one of the students with a knife. There you have the choice to show it explicitly, or to not show it at all, and have it suggested or implied after it has happened. I decided to show it really explicitly, to take on this challenge, and it was not very easy, because, of course, it’s also time and money consuming. In the scene that you mentioned, with the close-up, we decided not to explicitly show this ‘ghost’, because it was more impactful not to see it. You only see the close-up of the main character, and him being in shock.

It is the things that we can’t see that create this deep fear within the audience, and within people generally, because even if we can’t see, we can imagine them. I think that this is something which is very important for movies, to work with this kind of techniques and fears

I think this is something that happens in many of your films – the very violent things that we do see are never as scary as the things that we never see. 

It’s exactly as you’re saying. It is the things that we can’t see that create this deep fear within the audience, and within people generally, because even if we can’t see, we can imagine them. I think that this is something which is very important for movies, to work with this kind of techniques and fears. But if you follow a certain style, where you never show anything until the end of the movie, there is the danger that the audience figures that out. People may get detached or be unimpressed by this kind of film. The strategy that I am following is that I sometimes show things explicitly, and other times not, so that the audience is left in the dark and many things are left to their imagination. And, also, so that people can be very surprised when I show something very explicitly. I think this is what keeps people interested in a movie.

…Sorry. I think I just caught myself saying something that Alfred Hitchcock has also once said. About “suspense” and “surprise”.

Another thing that you may share with Hitchcock is how you can see things without really seeing them, or that, when you watch them a second time, they may appear completely different. Seeing something may also not mean that it’s necessarily real or true. There’s a scene in Chime where there’s a trail of blood, and when you watch the policeman investigating the crime, you’re thinking, “is he not seeing this?!”.

With the policeman, we thought a lot about how to handle him in the story. You see the blood and, because of his job, you assume he’s also supposed to notice that there is a blood trail. You assume he’s supposed to somehow figure out that something’s off. But you never really know whether he really doesn’t have any clue, or whether he’s just pretending not to have any clue and has already figured out what’s happening. This was all intentional, to also shroud the police in a kind of mystery. You never know what anyone is thinking.

But, you know, in terms of what you can or cannot see, there’s sometimes the simpler justification. Going back to the scene with the stabbing, I actually wanted to film it in a very realistic way, with a lot of liquid blood flowing, but we didn’t get permission, because this culinary school that we filmed in is a real place, and they didn’t agree. We added the blood in CGI, or in other instances, we used something like a plastic plate. Sorry, choices are sometimes also like this.

One last thing that I am really curious about is the main character, who is a chef – is he, also, a metaphor for a filmmaker? At the beginning, when he’s a teacher, you can see he is an artist who has respect for his art. And then, later on, when he has to interview for jobs, he’s a clear sell-out. I really like this part where he says he has a refined palate but he’s happy to give it up to cook whatever for the customers. He sounds desperate; should we pity him? 

I don’t think there’s reason to pity him. But there is some personal influence playing into this main character in particular. I also used to teach as a professor [at the Tokyo University of the Arts], while I was working at the same time as a director. And I was always torn apart between teaching and being an artist. Because it’s very, very difficult to teach students and at the same time also make your own films. So, this came from my personal experience. 

Dora Leu

Graduated with a BA in film directing and a MA in film studies from UNATC; she's also studied history of art. Also collaborates with the Acoperisul de Sticla film magazine and is a former coordinator of FILM MENU. She's dedicated herself to '60-'70s Japanese cinema and Irish post-punk music bands. Still keeps a picture of Leslie Cheung in her wallet.