An American filmmaker and film theorist Noël Burch in his book To the Distant Observer (1979) explained how Japanese cinema culture developed by utilizing its cultural foundations that were correlated with its artistic, aesthetic, and philosophical traditions. This creates a considerable gap between Japanese and American cinema in general so many think that analyzing Japanese cinema is not the same as analyzing classical American cinema. Today, all of these classic theories partly crumble in the analysis of what is referred to in film studies as Transnational Cinema.
Neo Sora’s The Chicken (2020), produced by Jackson Kiyoshi Segars, annoys me when it brings me into the class struggles of modern American society from an Asian, especially Japanese perspective in strange and disturbing ways. This is inseparable from the background of the director and producer who are both of Japanese descent and live in America in describing the gentrification and “violence” aspects that surround their residence.
It’s interesting for me to talk about gentrification from the perspective of cinema like The Chicken because: first, post-globalization gentrification is happening in almost all parts of the world today including in Indonesia, which has given birth to a lot of cultural mixing and has resulted in the production of new information because of it. Second, gentrification is often related to the deprivation of living space rights in urban areas which is indirectly correlated with “violence” that occurs in the community due to the emergence of stigma and separation between certain social classes and races in the region.
So a new question arises, how does Neo Sora’s The Chicken describe gentrification, especially if the film itself is a product of gentrification? But before discussing The Chicken, we should be able to see the Japanese way of thinking in their own cinema culture.
Transnational Cinema and The Rise of Globalizations
After World War II, Japanese cinema was recognized as one of the new movements in film studies because of its uniqueness, and cinematic style which is very essential in describing their “nationality” as a representation of national identity that still exists and moves independently outside of western influence. So many people think that Japanese cinema is a “National” cinema for them, starting from the technique to the local/locality issues raised. In short, America is generally more focused on action and plot, while Japan tends to emphasize aspects of atmosphere and mood[1]. Meanwhile, the term Transnational Cinema has only emerged in film studies since the early 2000s because of globalization which simultaneously expands the influence of consumerism culture, and capitalism, to the third cinema which shifts the cinema tradition into a market product commodity. Referring to film academics, Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (2006) most Transnational Cinema is a counter-hegemonic response from filmmakers from ex-colonial and third-world countries[2].
Globalization is the main cause of exchanges not only covering production and markets, but also the fusion of issues between global communities and the mixing standards of cinema itself. Which eventually led to the dissolution of the boundaries between American cinema and other countries. It was these transactions that initiated gentrification, starting in New York in the 1980s and spreading around the world since the opening of the free global market in the late 1990s. Actually, gentrification from the government perspective is a manifestation of the “social mix” which is considered capable of alleviating poverty. With this logic it actually makes sense, opening up their territory to white-collar workers, followed by a demand that will be filled by blue-collar workers. But in reality, it doesn’t work that way and of course, this gentrification presents many problems for each region. Especially social inequality due to immigrants, unequal access to public services and health facilities to social conflicts.
Social mixing and social conflict also occur in various spheres of public discussion, including through cinema, and this is not a new thing in film studies. If we look back at film history, many cinema works have adapted issues of public space, such as Bicycle Thieves (1948), Breathless (1961), Mean Streets (1973), and Chungking Express (1994). The emergence of new directors like Wes Anderson in the early 2000s also contributed to this discussion of gentrification. The American directors who are immigrants from other countries are no exception, such as Neo Sora and Jackson Segars with their film, The Chicken (2020).
And with the background of Transnational Cinema, and how globalization has removed the boundaries of public and personal space. We can see that The Chicken is not just a response to the gentrification that occurs around the filmmaker as an outsider in the region, but it is also a cause and effect of the Japanese cinema tradition that collides with globalization itself.
The Chicken and Basic Problem of Gentrification
The Chicken tells the story of Kei who visits his brother, Hiro a Japanese immigrant living in America. While Kei tries to get acquainted with his brother’s way of life in America. Unconsciously they are trapped in violent situations, ranging from killing animals to failing to save their own neighbors. What they eventually realize was that everything was very structured even though the events seemed random. The right method to analyze the phenomenon in this film is to use the “Rashomon Effect“. Random occurrences and tendencies to “thinking, knowing and remembering”. This is one of the important legacies of Japanese cinema by Akira Kurosawa in his film Rashomon (1950), an adaptation of the short story with the same title by Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1922). Scientifically in his journal Karl G. Heider (1988)[3] referred to this phenomenon as the effect of perceptual subjectivity on memory, where observers of an event can produce substantially different but equally plausible reports about it.
What’s interesting about this film is how Jackson Segars (the producer) and Neo Sora (the director) try to describe the involvement of the immigrant background in each character with the social causes caused by the clash of culture, social, and economic in their region. This was clarified by Jackson when we met through zoom, where he describes how gentrification actually breeds “violence” directly and indirectly in American public spaces. Which is actually experienced by many regions, but in different cases and triggers.
Although departing from the need for equality, in fact, Gentrification ends with inequality. That’s why in the study of gentrification, violence can be rooted in people’s distrust of other communities or societies against existing social or political institutions. And this is where skepticism was born in the social structure of society in today’s generation of globalization. Like what happened in Indonesia with the Aceh Free Movement (1976)[4] and racial violence against Chinese-Indonesian citizens (1998)[5]. Which to this day has left a legacy of distrust in state institutions and between societies.
So I can imagine how the diaspora experienced by Japanese-American filmmakers affects the usage of the Rashomon Effect as the root of the cinema model applied in Neo Sora’s The Chicken. It will be very relevant considering Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon is present as a post-war Japanese cinema, and Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story is also present as a representation of Japan’s openness from its isolation. These two events are important events in Japanese culture because from there they must find their new identity as a nation in a new global current. And for the record, Naoya Shiga the writer of the short story An Afternoon on November 3rd which is the origin story of Neo Sora’s The Chicken is from the same generation as Ryunosuke Akutagawa.
Jackson and Neo tried to compile all diaspora dilemmas in the scope of gentrification through The Chicken with some simple events that we may often see and experience every day. Even though they often seem to use very personal dialogue between characters, what they actually face are events that disturb humanity. From casual chats about personal, American culture, to the failure to save their neighbors.
For example, when Kei asked Hiro what to do when he saw a neighbor in pain on the roadside in front of his house through their apartment window. Hiro, who seemed indifferent, tried to refuse to help and was sure that someone else had called an ambulance first, because to him “that’s how Americans usually are”. In the end, they called an ambulance but instead had to see their own neighbor almost dying firsthand. Because maybe they thought if they had acted sooner earlier, the death could have been prevented. On the other hand, the neighbor also refused to be helped by the medical personnel who came to help him.
The symbol of a chicken and his pregnant wife. Where he no longer dares to slaughter chickens for her breakfast which is actually good for mothers who are pregnant because chicken meat can help 50% of the daily protein needs of pregnant women per day. But even though he had avoided it, his wife still had amniotic fluid mixed with blood which was not normal and could be a sign of a miscarriage.
And as is always present through films with the Rashomon Effect method, films will always be closed by skepticism about today and the future. And indeed skepticism exists in today’s diaspora phenomenon, but when we dig deeper into the Rashomon Effect method in Japanese cinema style, we can see something important about morality itself. Even if it is far away from his own motherland.
The writer is one of four participants that were selected for Minikino Hybrid Internship for Film Festival Writers (March-September 2022).
[1] Marcos P., & Morita N. (2020). Japan and the “Transnational Cinema”, Basel: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute.
[2] Ezra, Elizabeth, and Rowden, Terry. (2006). General Introduction: What is Transnational Cinema? In Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader. Edited by Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden. London: Routledge, pp. 1–12.
[3] Heider, Karl. (1988). Rashomon Effect: When The Ethnographers Disagree. In American Anthropologist New Series, Vol 90. No. 1. New Jersey: Wiley
[4] Ikramatoun S. Mirza F. & Amin K. (2018). GAM and Social Transformation; from A Rebellion into Political Movement. In Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 292. Amsterdam: Atlantis Press.
[5] Eunike, Mutiara. Pohlman, Annie. Louis, Winnifred. (2022). Revisiting the May 1998 Riots in Indonesia: Civilians and Their Untold Memories. In Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, Vol. 4. California: SAGE Publishing.
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