‘Just Choose One’: Memory And Time In Kore-Eda's Wandafuru Raifu [Afterlife] (1998)1

Director: Kore-eda Hirokazu

Distributor: Artistic License Films

‘Let us not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that's gone.’

A feature shared by cinema and psychoanalysis is the capacity that each has to utilise its own peculiar language and technical tools in order to reflect upon itself. For instance, psychoanalysis could use its understanding of the concept of ‘unconscious resistance’ to make sense of its reluctance to consider the importance of discoveries made by other disciplines; or refer to the ‘idealised transference’ in order to interpret the structure and functioning of psychoanalytic training institutes. For its part, cinema, not unlike theatre and literature, also has the means to represent some of its concerns in a self-reflective fashion. This applies, for instance, to Wandafuru raifu [Afterlife] (1998), the Japanese film written, directed and edited by Kore-eda Hirokazu, which portrays cinema as a universal container of the past in the shape of recorded memories composed of light and shadow.

The original kernel of inspiration for Afterlife derives from Kore-eda's experiences as a 6-year-old, bewildered by his grandfather's diminished capacity to recognise anyone or to recollect anything. ‘As a child’, Kore-eda offers in an interview, ‘I comprehended little of what I saw, but I remember thinking that people forgot everything when they died. I now understand how critical memories are to our identity, to a sense of self’ (1998, Artistic License Films). Catalysed by the desire to explore these issues in more depth, Kore-eda travelled throughout Japan interviewing more than five hundred people about their most treasured memories, suggesting this would be what they will be keeping for ever after death. ‘Just choose one’, he told them. The eloquence of their responses so impressed him that he ultimately incorporated some of the actual interviewees and their stories into the final cut, integrating them w