Bullet Ballet · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

He comes home and his girlfriend is dead on the floor, and what the film fixes on is not her face. It's the pistol beside her. A Smith & Wesson Chief's Special she owned and never mentioned. Goda doesn't grieve in any shape you'd recognize. He goes shopping.

That's the engine. A television-commercial director in his thirties decides the way to understand what she did is to obtain the identical object, and spends eighty-seven minutes failing. He gets swindled. He tries to machine a gun out of scrap. He falls in with a gang of young nihilists who haunt the underpasses and station platforms. Bullet Ballet is a procedural about trying to acquire a plot device.

Which is where Deleuze earns his place here, not as decoration. His account of classical cinema is almost embarrassingly simple: a character perceives a situation, acts, and the act changes the situation. He calls that circuit the action-image, and the handgun is the most efficient tool ever devised for it, the object that converts a feeling into an event in a quarter of a second. Deleuze then describes what happens when the circuit fails: the crisis of the action-image, people who see perfectly well and can no longer respond adequately to what they see. In postwar European cinema that arrives as a spiritual condition. Tsukamoto makes it a supply problem. Japan's postwar Firearms and Swords Control Law puts handguns effectively out of civilian reach, and prop guns are restricted too, which means the crew was also working with a non-firing simulation. On both sides of the camera, everyone is handling an object whose meaning is entirely cinematic and whose function is entirely imagined. The film's subject and its production conditions are the same condition. That is Tsukamoto's specific invention: not a metaphor for impotence, but the literal, legal, procedural unavailability of the thing that makes movie actions happen.

So what fills the space where action used to be? Deleuze has a name for it. The impulse-image: cinema of drive rather than motive, appetite, compulsion, a body pulled by something older than its reasons. Its characteristic object is the fetish, which is not a symbol but a part-object, a fragment torn loose from the world and charged far past its size. The Chief's Special is exactly that. Goda is trying to reverse-engineer a dead woman's interior life out of a piece of hardware. It's an idiot's method. He does it anyway, for an hour and a half.

The impulse-image needs two worlds stacked on each other. There is the ordinary social surface, which here is the ad shoot with its fatuous choreography and artificial brightness — the job Tsukamoto actually held for years before quitting, played by Tsukamoto's own face. And underneath it the originary world, a savage zone of raw drive that the social surface was only ever a crust over: sodium underpasses, love-hotel blocks, the rectangular mouths of tunnels. Deleuze insists this kind of image runs one direction only. It's a line of slope, entropy with a plot. Nobody in this film is climbing.

Those spaces do something else too. Deleuze's any-space-whatever is a space that has quit being a setting: no longer a stage for action, just fragmented affect with no assigned use. Tsukamoto's Tokyo is a set of transitional non-places, corridors you pass through, which is the right architecture for a gang defined by having nowhere to arrive. He shoots it himself, handheld, wide lens at close range, so faces bulge at the edges of the frame and hallways stretch into tunnels. The city is photographed as pressurized interiors that happen to be outdoors. And when violence hits, it arrives as disconnection: a beating assembled from fragments too brief to parse, so you take the impact and never obtain a view of it. Space cut into shrapnel.

Then it stops. Between the seizures the film goes catatonic: long held shots of Goda alone with the gun, or alone with video images of the dead woman. Deleuze calls these pure optical situations, moments where nothing can be done and a person is reduced to looking. The agent becomes a seer. That alternation, catatonia and seizure, is the film's rhythm and an accurate chart of its protagonist's nervous system.

The look comes from 16mm blown up to 35, which coarsens grain into a boiling surface, clots the blacks, blooms the highlights, and lends the image a documentary illegitimacy a clean negative would have refused. Deleuze's word for the tradition this belongs to is expressionism: the light-and-shadow gradient in which things take on a non-organic life of their own. Tsukamoto has been arguing since Tetsuo that metal wants into the body. Here the metal is small, legal, and unobtainable, and the one time it speaks, Chū Ishikawa's track gives it an enormous amplified report in rooms not built to contain it.

Two more, because they are the film's best moments. Bergson's complaint about cinema was that it chops movement into equal, meaningless slices and fakes the flow; Deleuze accepted the charge and named the slices any-instant-whatever. Tsukamoto undercranks and step-prints until the slicing becomes visible. Motion stutters. Whip-pans smear into abstraction. Frame rate is played like a drum kit. He uses the machine's lie as percussion. And the recurring shot of a young woman standing in the path of an oncoming train is what Deleuze calls the movement of world: the body goes still and the world moves at it instead. That's the title. The choreography belongs to the bullet.

None of this comes from nowhere. The shoulder-carried, available-light shooting in live streets, with jump cuts placed inside a continuous action rather than between scenes, is Raoul Coutard's method on Breathless, rerun on 16mm in Tokyo with real passersby left in frame instead of the location being cleared. Letting city noise be the score is Tōru Takemitsu's move on Pale Flower — dice clatter, footsteps, traffic as the musical bed for a monochrome underworld picture — and Ishikawa's metal percussion sits on top of exactly that, traffic and rail hum and brakes. The pistol abstracted into a graphic object, the motive withheld, the promised genre beat repeatedly cut away from: Branded to Kill, which is the structural template for a man who gets a gun and cannot make it mean anything. Casting non-professionals out of a real subculture and shooting them in their own spaces, then rupturing the fiction with documentary grain, is ATG practice out of Funeral Parade of Roses. Making the illegal purchase and the solitary rehearsal into the actual dramatic engine is Taxi Driver, transposed onto a salaryman assembling a weapon he can barely fire. And the industrial roar mixed at the level of a score rather than an effect, made by one man on his own schedule with a crew you could count on two hands, is Eraserhead.

Forward, the film sits on a hinge. It is the last one Tsukamoto made purely in the 16mm idiom; Gemini and A Snake of June go to 35mm, then Haze and Kotoko go digital. It lands just before DV made self-shot, self-cut, one-person filmmaking cheap and general. He was doing by hand, on film, what a generation was about to do with camcorders, and the physical cost of that is legible in every frame.

What it did to the art: it took the revenge picture and removed the part that converts grief into plot, then found out that a genre film can run on drive alone. No arc, no resolution, no discharge. Just a man, an object, and a city that will not sell him the object.

The question the film leaves open is the one Goda never says out loud. He doesn't want to die, exactly. He wants the gun to tell him what she knew. Watch it again for the held shots rather than the bursts, and you'll see it arguing both sides at once: that an object cannot possibly hold a person's interior, and that he is going to keep pressing it to his head until it does.