After Nobuko, another film in which Shimizu explores education and how it affects the students and the teachers. Introspection Tower is set at a reformatory for delinquent children at a remote location somewhere in the Japanese countryside. The kids are being taught self-reliance and independence rather than being punished in a more traditional way. They have to make their own beds, cook for themselves, go to class, perform some kind of manual labor in the afternoon and make sure of their water supply. As the principal points out at the beginning of the film, the reformatory is a small “society” in itself, in which every individual has his own task and everyone works toward the common good. Of course, this is only the theory. The kids skip school, steal from each other, fight and try to escape. Shimizu shows us these episodes and what consequences they have for the children and the teachers involved.
As is often the case with Shimizu, there is no real goal-driven narrative. The film is comprised of several vignettes and after every major turn in the story, we fade out and jump to another anecdote. This creates a rhythm to the narrative and the visuals but also makes us realize how frustrating education can be at times. Some of the students, for example, try to escape several times during the movie. But they don’t learn anything by getting caught. They simply stubbornly try anew. In one excellent scene, a husband and a wife working at the school discuss how difficult it can be to keep believing that they can touch these kids eventually. “I choose to believe that my work can still make a difference”, says the husband. But the kids challenge them time and time again, and Shimizu has no scruples showing this to us, even if it means that the narrative can get a little repetitive at times.
We spend a lot of time alone with the kids but there is little to no attempt to try to explain their behavior by reading psychological tea-leaves. As in Children in the Wind, Shimizu lets the children simply be children. Akira Kurosawa always saw children as a symbol of innocence. Shimizu however, just like Ozu it should be remarked, had a more ambivalent view. In his films, there is a clear sense that he is dedicated to the children’s cause but he also shows the darker sides of childhood: the lying, the fighting, the deceiving, and, yes, the cruelty. Thus, Introspection Tower has a frank and somewhat crude view of childhood, but the director also shows us what these young delinquents are able to achieve if they are given a purpose. To remedy water shortage at the school well, it is decided that water should be redirected from a local pond to the school. All the children chip in, they dig a riverbed and succeed in the end, and several kids who were nothing but trouble before are released from the school because they were reformed during the labor. One could see this as a kind of Spartan-marxist manifesto campaigning for delinquent child labor, or at the very least as an argument for blind dedication to a cause imposed by the powers that be (which paved the way to fascism and such). I read it more like an inspirational moral that still holds true today. Like the British rapper Scroobius Pip would say: “the system might fail you, but don’t fail yourself. Just get better.”
Introspection Tower is without a doubt the most successful directorial effort by Shimizu I have seen to date. His fascination with camera movement and how it relates to moving characters within the frame allows for some magnificent tracking shots. Rarely does he rely on close-ups (they are more of the “psychological close-up” variety). Rather, Shimizu observes everything from afar in long shots framed by vegetation, and uses his camera to follow certain characters for a time, often times leaving them and picking up on others as the story demands it, all in one elaborate camera movement. Sometimes, his camera almost takes a life of its own, like in the very first scene where we get a typical backward “walk-and-talk” tracking shot with a group of people moving towards the camera. But after a while, the characters make a right turn while the camera keeps tracking back and following the road that makes a left turn. Another variety is to have characters move towards an immobile camera, and jump cutting back on a vertical axis, dividing the characters’ movements into Deleuzian chunks that add up to one continuous motion.
While Shimizu’s long shots and cantilevered tracking shots make full use of the wide open countryside, his interiors are much more organized than in previous films. Geometrical forms prevail inside and create a clear contrast to the luscious exteriors. Shimizu uses a moving camera for outside shots, and pretty rigorous 180 degree reverse shots for interiors, highlighting how differently the children experience both worlds: they challenge limits outside and are reprimanded inside. The vertical axis that was so prominent in Nobuko is less dominant in Introspection Tower, but still a strong organizing tool of Shimizu’s frames.
All in all, a major achievement by the director.
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