Pulse · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse is above all a film of any-space-whatever: Tokyo's apartments, server rooms, and warehouses are framed by cinematographer Junichiro Hayashi in wide, near-static shots that surrender entire zones of the image to shadow and vacancy, stripping each location of its social adhesive until rooms feel quarantined from one another and the city from itself. Into these voids Kurosawa introduces not monsters but opsigns & sonsigns — his ghosts exist as pure optical events, smudged presences glimpsed on dial-up screens or in doorway dark, stripped of threat or motive, presenting only the bare fact of their unending solitude. When Michi watches a colleague walk into a wall and dissolve, no confrontation follows, no causal system activates; the scene returns only the shock of looking. That refusal of sensory-motor response is Pulse's central argument: this is a time-image film, its characters condemned to the position of the seer — they witness loneliness spreading like contagion through the wired city and find themselves, frame by frame, unable to act against it, only able to observe their own slow withdrawal. The dual-strand narrative withholds causal linkage between its two groups of young Tokyoites, keeping the epidemic below the threshold of rational explanation. The clearest genealogy runs through L'Eclisse (1962): Antonioni pioneered the charged empty cityscape as existential diagnosis, giving the depopulated modern frame itself the capacity to register isolation — Kurosawa imports that compositional logic and rewires it for the internet age, where the circuits promising connection have simply routed the dead's eternal aloneness into every screen.