American Cinematographer - March 2009 - (Page 24) Top: The interior of the family’s home was created as a set, and cinematographer Akiko Ashizawa, JSC often chose voyeuristic angles impeded by various “distractions” — chairs, wooden beams, window frames and other structural elements — within the frame. “By including all those intrusions, we hoped to portray the family within the society, as well as the individuals within the family, in new ways,” she says. Middle: Sasaki reacts badly when his older son (Yû Koyanagi) seeks his permission to join the military, forcing his wife (Kyôko Koizumi) to play peacekeeper. Bottom: Sasaki is eventually forced to accept a janitorial job at a mall. prefer to go with a shot in which each part achieves 80 percent. When Kurosawa edits, he usually chooses the first take because by the time we get to the second take, it is too perfect, too prepared; that makes the cast and crew nervous, but he has a way of [making the most of] that initial energy.” Kurosawa lauds Ashizawa’s versatility as a cinematographer. “The high quality of her work can roughly be broken down into two parts,” he observes via e-mail. “She has a natural talent when it comes to creating a balanced composition; instead of just going along with my taste, she counters it by creating a fragile balance, and I find that impressive. The second part is her extraordinary sense of color. I’m relatively conservative about color, and I think Ashizawa possesses a sense that is possibly more radical. So I am always excited to start shooting right between her instinct for balance and her radicalism.” The filmmakers spent much of their prep time searching for a house in Tokyo that would suit the middle-class Sasaki family. They finally settled on a humble, two-story structure next to some active railroad tracks. “The old neighborhood we chose is not in the throes of modernization, but it is not safe from it, either,” says Ashizawa. “The placement of the house next to train tracks, as well as the electrical wires surrounding it, is not unusual in Japan. Instead of treating the surroundings as an encumbrance, we saw them as positive contributions and even emphasized them. We used locations in both eastern and western Tokyo and combined them to create a surrealist atmosphere that could exist anywhere, but in actuality does not.” The house interior was created on set, after the filmmakers carefully considered design, color and texture; these elements were exploited by Ashizawa in her inventive framing. “The camera was placed where we could ‘peek’ at the family,” she says. “We placed it on the very edges of window frames, the dish cabinet, the handles of the staircase, and even behind bars and 24 March 2009
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