Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Memories
1995 · Katsuhiro Otomo · Memories on Sightlines
A salvage crew in heavy suits answers a distress beacon and floats into a derelict space station. Inside there are chandeliers. There are roses. Somewhere in the walls a soprano is singing Puccini. The men came to strip a wreck for parts, and they have walked into an opera house.
That image opens "Magnetic Rose," the first of the three short films that make up Memories. All three come from Katsuhiro Otomo's own manga, and he supervised the whole project, but he directed only the last one. Kōji Morimoto made the first, and Tensai Okamura made the second. The three share no characters and no continuity, and they don't try to look alike. That refusal is why it pays to read the film through Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze sorted cinema into kinds of images, defined by what a person on screen is able to do with what they see. Memories puts three of those kinds side by side, and each panel answers the question differently.
Start with the opera house. The station has been dressed as a European mansion and theater, and it plays holographic scenes from a diva's past. Morimoto cuts slowly, and he lets the present and these staged memories bleed into each other until the crew, and we with them, can't be sure which room is real. Deleuze called this the crystal-image: a picture in which the actual present and a virtual past reflect each other like two mirrors, so that you can't point to the original. The specific facet here is what he called crystal-decomposition. He used it for films, Visconti's above all, where a grand and ordered world keeps performing its old splendor while it rots from within. The station fits exactly. It is derelict and decaying, and it is still putting on the show.
Why does that lens help? Because it explains why "Magnetic Rose" scares us without needing a monster. In an ordinary thriller a threat appears and somebody acts against it. Here the threat is the past itself, and you cannot shoot a memory. Notice too how the segment was made. Its receding architecture leans on early computer-generated construction, while the people moving through it are hand-drawn cels. The rooms and the bodies are built by different means, and the crew walks through a space that answers to rules other than theirs. Morimoto's roving camera owes a clear debt to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which drifted weightlessly through ornate rooms to classical music. The salvage-crew-and-beacon engine comes from Alien. The core device, memory turned into a walkable hallucination of a lost love, comes from Tarkovsky's Solaris, along with its dilated pace. Yōko Kanno's score, threaded with Madama Butterfly, holds all of it together.
Then comes the whiplash. "Stink Bomb" is bright, ordinary Japan: a pharmaceutical lab, highways, cities. A hapless lab worker sets off for Tokyo with no idea of the disaster spreading in his wake. This is the regime Deleuze called the action-image, cinema's classical engine, in which a situation calls forth an act that changes it. Okamura borrows its most famous tool, the American parallel montage that D.W. Griffith perfected: cut between the threat and the responders, and tighten the cuts until the two lines converge in a last-minute rescue. The cross-cutting is all here. The oblivious man alternates with an ever more frantic command structure, and the cutting quickens as the catastrophe widens. But the machine has nothing to grab. The responders can't make the right move, because the man they are chasing doesn't know there is a situation at all. The comedy lives in that gap. Classical action cinema keeps running at full speed and keeps missing its mark.
"Cannon Fodder" is Otomo's own, and it is the strangest of the three. A vertical steampunk city is organized entirely around firing enormous guns. Every apartment, every school lesson, every civic ritual bends toward artillery. Otomo stages the whole short to read as one unbroken take. The camera glides from home to street to factory without an apparent cut.
Deleuze's word for a moving camera was the shot as mobile section. The idea is that when the camera moves, it isn't just changing angle. It is slicing through a larger whole and showing that whole change. Watch what Otomo does with this. The camera travels a long way, and the whole never changes. Wherever it goes, it finds the same function. Film theory has a famous argument behind this choice. André Bazin praised the long take because it respected the continuity of real space and let the viewer's eye roam freely. Otomo's take is drawn, so every inch of that continuity is fabricated, and the effect turns Bazin around. Without a cut there is no way out. The form plays out the story's total militarism.
The people match the camera. Father, boy, mother, functionaries: the animation flattens them into civic types, each body defined by its post. Deleuze, following Brecht, called this the gest: a posture that shows a social relation instead of a private feeling. These people's gestures belong to the cannon. Otomo got this world from two sources. One is the stratified machine-city of Lang's Metropolis, with workers as cogs. The other is his own Akira, whose rivet-by-rivet mechanical detail every panel of Memories inherits.
Read in order, the three films move outward, from one person's memories, through a bungled national emergency, to a whole society built for war. The format came from Robot Carnival, the 1987 omnibus in which one studio let separate directors loose on unconnected shorts, with Otomo supplying the framing. Memories raised that format to feature-caliber ambition. It also launched people. It was an early, high-profile calling card for Studio 4°C, the craft-first studio Morimoto co-founded, and it gave Okamura and Morimoto a stage for the careers that followed. Kanno's work here helped make her a leading anime composer.
The film's importance is easiest to see in its structure. Most features commit to one way of making images mean something. Memories lays three side by side, and the contrast makes each one visible. In the first panel a person can only look and remember. In the second, the whole apparatus of action fires and misses. In the third, a person can only perform a role. You feel the switch between regimes as a jolt in your own attention.
So when you watch, keep one question in mind: in this world, what can a person actually do with what they see? And keep the title in mind too. The first story is plainly about memory. In the other two, ask whose memories these are.
Concepts in play
- crystal-decomposition — Magnetic Rose: a decaying Gothic-Romantic station dressed as an opera house and mansion, still playing holographic scenes from a diva's past; patient editing blurs present reality and implanted memory so the crew can't tell what is real.
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Magnetic Rose's holographic memory-theater: present and staged past reflect each other until the actual and the virtual can't be told apart.
- American parallel montage — Stink Bomb cross-cuts the oblivious protagonist with the increasingly frantic command structure pursuing him, with the cutting tightening as the catastrophe widens, a convergent-rescue engine turned to satire.
- the shot as mobile section — Cannon Fodder is staged to read as a single unbroken take gliding through a vertical industrial city, with transitions folded into camera movement; the travel shows a whole wholly organized around artillery.
- the gest — Cannon Fodder reduces father, boy, mother and functionaries to civic types, flattening individual performance into ritual role so that posture shows the social relation to the guns.