Notes #6 - The search for filmic objectivity

(Erosu Purasu Gyakusatsu, 1969)

"You must play too, because you can't dominate it. You must attach, dis-attach, and transform one and another: «Eros» and «Massacre». The spectator is the local of application. The spectator is the plus (+)." - Pascal Bonitzer in Cahiers du Cinema

Spectator is, definitely, the local of application in the thematic concerns of Eros Plus Massacre. When Mariko Okada points to the screen, she is not only remembering us that what we are about to see is a construction, a film after all, but she is also declaring that the spectator is about to participate in an aesthetic process beyond fiction. A process which can't be made whithout him. There is, in fact, an undeniable longing for objectivity in Kiju Yoshida's chaotic construction. The main ideia is that the spectator builds the film, that he must create to the point in which his subjectivity is destroyed, in order to turn himself a vehicle for the film and not its end. Thus, cinema itself operates in a strange way: it needs necessarily ambivalent participation, echoing in this postulate the same essence as philosophy. Cinema is not a house, it is a construction site.