Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Sweet Home
1989 · Kiyoshi Kurosawa · Sweet Home on Sightlines
A shaft of light falls through a ruined Western-style house in the Japanese countryside. Dust hangs in it. A member of a television crew stands small in the frame, among cobwebs and broken floorboards, and the camera stays where it is. Something moves at the edge of the picture. In Sweet Home, the danger is usually beside you rather than in front of you. Sometimes it is your own shadow.
That image is the way into Kiyoshi Kurosawa's first studio horror film. A shadow comes loose from the person casting it and turns on them. Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, has a name for the tradition this comes from. He called it expressionism, after the German silent films of the 1920s. In those films light and darkness are forces fighting over the world, not just lighting. Things caught between them take on what he called a "non-organic life": a life that belongs to no living body. In Sweet Home that idea is spelled out. The ghost attacks through shadow. Darkness isn't where the monster hides. Darkness is the monster. Once you see it that way, the mansion's dust and deep shade stop being Gothic decoration. They are the field where the threat lives.
The story is a familiar one. A small crew goes to the abandoned mansion of Ichirō Mamiya, a dead painter, to film and restore his lost frescoes. They wake the spirit of his wife, who still grieves a child who died in the house thirty years before. Deleuze would place this firmly in what he called the movement-image, the classic mode of cinema, in which characters perceive a situation and act to change it. More precisely it is the synsign: a milieu so encompassing that it surrounds the characters and demands a response. The house is the situation. Everything the crew does is a reply to it.
The film gets stranger than its formula, though, because of what the crew has come to do. The frescoes lie under grime, and the job is to uncover them. As the images come back, so does the story of what happened in the house. The mansion is an archive, and the crew's profession (recording, restoring, making pictures) is the same act that wakes the haunting. Deleuze had a term for images that stop being simply seen and have to be deciphered, read like text. He called them lectosigns, and he kept the term for the modern cinema of the 1960s and after. Sweet Home is no modernist film. Still, the frescoes work the same way. You cannot just look at them. They have to be cleaned, studied and pieced together, and the reading is dangerous. Here a genre movie borrows a modern idea: the past survives as a picture on a wall, waiting for someone to read it.
Film theory sharpens the point. André Bazin, the French critic, argued that photography began in the old impulse to embalm the dead, to save a likeness from time. A TV crew pointing cameras at a dead painter's work is Bazin's dream on assignment. Sweet Home asks what happens when the preserved image refuses to stay preserved.
Now look at how Kurosawa frames the rooms. He likes wide, stable compositions that hold a figure small inside a decaying space, with doorways and corridors opening into black. Deleuze calls the space just past the frame the out-of-field. Here it is the relative kind, the room next door and the corridor beyond the light, which is near and unseen and full of threat. A still frame with motion at its edge makes you search the whole picture. Nobody tells you where to look, and that is where the dread comes from.
These habits point toward something Kurosawa would make his own. His later films are full of what Deleuze called any-space-whatever: deserted offices, laundromats and apartment blocks that no longer work as settings for action and become places to wait in. Sweet Home's mansion is still a genre house, a place where things happen. But the way rooms swallow people in it is an early sketch of the empty Tokyo of Kairo.
You can also see a tug-of-war. The commercial brief pushes the camera toward close-ups and full-view monsters, the affection-image of a face or body made to fill the screen. Dick Smith, the makeup artist of The Exorcist, supplied foam-latex bodies that melt and liquefy, in the 1980s school of Rick Baker and Tom Savini. Seen today, the film holds two ways of frightening side by side: the effects spectacle of its decade, and a fear built from staging and space that belonged to Kurosawa.
The lineage is easy to see. From The Haunting comes the house itself as the threat, framed in patient wide shots while a small party is picked off inside it. The Legend of Hell House supplies the team of specialists reconstructing a dead owner's history from what he left behind. The crew's frescoes rework that idea. The Shining taught it to shoot a large, empty Western-style interior and read the building's past off its walls. The Evil Dead gave it the template of a trapped group facing latex body horror. Most tellingly, Obayashi's House (1977) is the Japanese precedent: a dead woman's grief driving the set pieces against a group of visitors.
Its descendants are stranger and larger. Kurosawa carried the hostile shadow forward into the dark stains of Kairo, and grief that spreads like an infection into Cure and Retribution. Then there is the Famicom game Capcom made as a tie-in. Its premise came straight from the film, a crew in a deadly mansion, and the game is widely acknowledged as a direct ancestor of Resident Evil. A film hardly anyone has seen helped shape a part of popular culture that millions have played.
Few have seen it for a reason. The video release was re-edited without Kurosawa's agreement, and the quiet passages in the house are the ones most often said to have been cut back. He sued, lost, and spent years making direct-to-video genre films. Whatever version you find may have fewer silences than he wanted.
So watch for them anyway. Watch the edges of the wide shots, the doorways, the shadows that seem to sit wrong on the floor. Watch the walls, where the story is painted. Under the latex there is another film, the one Kurosawa would spend the next decade learning how to make.
Concepts in play
- expressionism (light–shadow, non-organic life) — The ghost attacks through shadow, and a person's own shadow becomes a separable, hostile thing. The mansion is shot through deep shadow, dust and shafts of light.
- the synsign / encompassing milieu — A standard haunted-house structure: a group enters a closed location for professional reasons and must answer a house that surrounds and presses on them.
- the lectosign (readable image) — The frescoes are hidden under grime and must be uncovered and restored, and they hold the story of the tragedy. The house works as an archive whose images have to be deciphered.
- relative out-of-field — Wide, stable compositions hold the frame still while something moves at its edge. Doorways and corridors lead off into darkness.
- any-space-whatever (in embryo) — Characters are held small inside rooms that seem to overwhelm them, an emptiness that points ahead to the deserted spaces and 'empty Tokyo' of Kairo, though here it is still a genre setting.
- affection-image (close-up / body spectacle) — The commercial brief pushes toward close-ups and explicit monster footage. Dick Smith's foam-latex bodies melt and liquefy, set against the film's restrained staging.