Lesson Planning: Teaching basic film theory through Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

Same as I did with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight (and continue to do to Mad Men) only this time about Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.  The standard caveat applies. 

The formal elements of the opening five minutes of Nausicaä conspire to disorient the audience.  For example, the film opens with a medium close-up, i.e. one that captures the upper torso of a character in a manner that allows the audience to clearly read a character's face without making it seem, as close-ups often do, as if the camera (and with it, the audience) are violating that character's personal space.  In short, a medium close-up is designed to create a sense of comfortable intimacy between character and audience, e.g.

That's obviously a terrible example, because Miyazaki's deliberately flouting film convention in order to make Lord Yupa seem inscrutable.  The audience is disoriented because its members know how medium close-ups are conventionally employed (even though they might not know they do) and the violation of those conventions creates a little anxiety.  If Yupa were to remove that mask, the audience would experience a slight sense of relief because the shot now conforms to their expectations.  But if a director continues to confound them, the cumulative effect will create an uncomfortable audience, which is what Miyazaki wants:

First: in conventional terms, this shot sequence is backwards.  Establishing shots like the one above are intended to introduce the principle elements of a location and their spatial relation to each other.  They are typically framed as extreme long shots in deep focus (as it makes little sense to introduce an audience to a collection of unfocused blobs), and they typically appear before medium close-ups of the characters contained within it.  Reversing the typical shot sequence, as Miyazaki does here, results in the audience being surprised by the surroundings.  

This formal trick works even when those surroundings are less alien than they are here.  For example, imagine a medium close-up of a couple of men standing around outside:

Because the naturalistic lighting flatters their faces in the customary manner and the costume is conventional, the audience is taken aback when the director cuts to an establishing shot and sees this:

The Syfy show Caprica, from which these frames were taken, relies on the disconnect created by this reversal to discomfit an audience who already knows who (aliens) and where (another planet in the distant past) these folks are.  That the technique remains effective despite this knowledge demonstrates just how deeply intuitive audience understanding of filmic convention becomes over time.  

In sum: the formal elements of the film (the off-putting shot sequence) works in tandem with its content to produce a narrative moment that is more disturbing than it would be if either of these elements were doing all of the heavy lifting.  In rhetorical terms, that means an argument about Miyazaki wanting to unsettle his audience is more convincing because there are multiple bits of evidence (form and content) supporting it.  Moving on.  The next shot is a long shot:

Because a long shot almost shows the entire human body, it functions somewhat like an establishing shot because it provides information both about the character and his or her surroundings.  But notice what Miyazaki does here: by showing Lord Yupa approach the windmill from a distance in the establishing shot, the audience assumes but can not be positive that the door he stands before leads into it.  

To the already accumulating effects of the discomfort produced by the formal arrangement and foreign content Miyazaki adds a more basic uncertainty: should the audience trust their conventional interpretations of a film that seems committed to violating them?  Put differently: are the members of the audience competent enough viewers of film to accurately assess what is going on?  

The next panel tries to convince them they aren't:

This seems to be a point-of-view shot from Lord Yupa's perspective before the open door to the windmill.  Such, at least, would be the conventional interpretation.  Miyazaki has two choices now: he can completely flummox the audience and undermine its confidence completely by continuing in this vein or he can reassure them a bit because he knows he can easily confound them in the future.  He seems to do the latter: 

This is also a point-of-view shot and also from Lord Yupa's perspective, but it's also an extreme close-up.  The general effect of an extreme close-up is that the object zoomed in on is of great significance to the director.  The effect of an extreme close-up that is also a point-of-view shot is slightly different: because the audience is in the character's head, the object is important to the character.  It might be of little consequence in the overall scheme of the film, but it is important to the character who made it important by paying closer attention to it than anything else in the mise-en-scene.

The next shot is equally odd: 

If the skull were a face instead of a skull, this would be a shot/reverse shot because the frames show one head (or skull) looking to the left, then another head looking to the right in a familiar conversational sequence.  The left-right dynamic is so typical of continuity editing that there even appears to be an eyeline match between Lord Yupa and something that no longer has eyes.  The creepiness is partly the result of the editing: when eye contact is established between things with eyes and things without, our in-the-narrative-moment-brain sees a skull but our trained-by-convention-brain sees an eyeline match.  Our discomfort is not simply because the skull represents death but because half of our brain is attempting to reanimate the dead.

After a few more moments in what is most likely the windmill, Miyazaki cuts to this close-up of a bug:

Because that's a close-up, right?  It can't be a medium or medium long shot, because if it were ... and here is where I'll stop transcribing for online consumption, as I want to work through the following sequence with my students in class tomorrow and don't want to cheat them out of the experience of figuring it out for themselves.  But feel to discuss how he plays with angles and perspectives in the comments if you so desire.  Have at it:

Comments

[NickS]

*This discussion of the film* started with Scott inviting us to look at a number of still shots. I'm not going around the Internet, finding random discussions of Nausicaa, and insisting that they must start with her appearance. I'm not even giving a complete reading of the film. I'm continuing this conversation, which started with those stills

I'm glad that you said this before I started typing up a longer comment, because I had been going to complain that you did seem to be insisting a little bit too strongly on the centrality of this point. (e.g., "The overriding point isn't that Nausicaa is bad because of this. You could make an argument that it's good, but your argument has to pass through understanding why it's problematic." or "Miyazaki is being treated here as a classic auteur, and it's very difficult to justify stereotype in that framework."). I agree that it's a point worth discussing in halfway complete discussion of the text, but I'm not sure that I'd agree that any argument about the film has to pass through this conversation. But, I believe that you aren't making that strong an argument, and your most recent comment seems to support that.

As long as we're talking about the mythological resonances of sex and death in Nausicaa, however, I dug up a link to Miyazaki's introduction to the comic (emphasis mine):

I have been fascinated by [Nausicaa] ever since I first read about her in Japanese translation of a small dictionary of Greek mythology by Bernard Evslin. Later when I actually read the story of The Odyssey, I was disappointed not to find the same splendor in her there as I had found in Evslin's book. So, as far as I am concerned, Nausicaa is still the girl Evslin described at length in his paperback. I can tell that he was particularly fond of Nausicaa, as he devoted three pages to her in his small dictionary but gave only one page to both Zeus and Achilles.

Nausicaa - a beautiful and fanciful girl, quick on her feet. She loved playing the harp and singing more than the attentions of her suitors or pursuing earthly comforts. She took delight in nature and had an especially receptive personality. It was she who, unafraid, saved Odysseus when he drifted ashore covered with blood and then nursed his wounds.

Nausicaa reminded me of a Japanese heroine . . . called the "princess that loved insects." ... Unfortunately, unlike Nausicaa, the "princess that loved insects" never had an Odysseus wash up on her shores, nor songs to sing, nor other lands to wander to, to escape society's restrictions. If she had met the great voyager, however, I'm sure she would have experienced the same illumination from the man covered with blood.

I think this supports your contention that Miyazaki was conscious both of creating a character who's interests in the world were not sexual, as traditional conceived, but also that that the appeal that the character had in the imagination has a distinct erotic element. And, of course, it seems telling that he would describe the mythological Nausicaa's primary attachment as being to a "man covered with blood."

[NickS]

How does a film-maker manage our expectations? Miyazaki sets up expectations and then subverts them . . .

I have to say, Bill, that while I'm extremely fond of Nausicaa that wouldn't be the defense that I would make of it. My sense of the handful of Miyazaki movies that I've seen is that they frequently show wonderful creativity in the details while being completely obvious in their overall arc (Spirited Away, I'm looking at you). Of course that combination is common in material designed to appeal to children who, presumably, haven't become jaded with the familiar plot templates.

Again, though, I don't have a specific sense of the movie. I watched it after reading the comics and, therefore, didn't pay close attention to the specific logic and details of the movie.

[Bill Benzon]

NickS: Each movie has it's little points. The overall arc may be obvious in the sense that convention dictates a type of ending we know from the beginning. In the case Nausicaä, if you hadn't read the manga, you wouldn't have know whether or not she lives or not. It could have gone either way. And, though Miyazaki let her live, put a metaphysical question mark over the whole film. As I explained above, he created a mismatch between what actually happened and what had been prophesied.

Spirited Away is a very different film. But it too has a twist at the end. The car is covered with dust and a few leaves. Just how long were they on the other side of the river? What really happened?

[tomemos]

Bill, I love Spirited Away, but the ending in which the dream/spirit world is apparently noncontiguous with the real world is perfectly conventional—I mean, Wizard of Oz? Alice in Wonderland? Again, ignoring lines of influence and similarity between works seems uncritical; whether a shot-by-shot viewpoint is to blame, I don't know.

[NickS]

Bill, thanks for responding. I had worried that I was being too dismissive in my previous comment. Let me try to re-phrase my thoughts. I think that there are, very generally speaking, a couple of ways in which a creative work may chose to use iconography which is familiar and heavily culturally weighted.

1) It can use it as a cheat, in lieu of developing a plot or characters that can sustain interest on their own, a work can approximate emotional depth by borrowing familiar symbols. Many bad movies or songs would fall into this category.

2) It can be concerned with faithfully bringing the familiar tropes to life. At some point in this conversation, I was thinking about children's literature which I enjoyed greatly, but which seems almost purely interested in re-enforcing (or re-creating) familiar myths and I thought of Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. I like them, so I'm not trying to start a fight, but I think it's fair to say that it invests creative energy into the mythology, without trying to problemtize it at all.

3) Using familiar archetypes or symbols, in an unfamiliar context; playing with and against the familiar expectation and associations.*

I think that, when we're talking about the ways in which the symbolism of "nurturing femininity" occurs in Nausicaa that it is much closer to (2) than (3). I don't think it's falls into category (1) at all -- I don't think Miyazaki is using it as a cheat, to make us care about the character, or as a substitute for original creative work. As the various quotations that we've found have shown, he was self-conscious about that element of the work. But I am inclined to see him as, ultimately, embracing that archetype and trying to honestly earn the emotional power that comes with it. He's not purely schematic, and Nausicaa is way more than just a stereotype, but I don't think he's trying to subvert the archetype.

Again, there are certainly instances of him playing against the expectations, but I wouldn't say that the viewer is every asked to abandon those expectations, or really presented with a conflict between the familiar theme and the specific story being told.

* I just thought of a good example of (3). Consider this anecdote from The Soccer War

About what happened to my friend Pedro Morote, a Peruvian. As a young boy Pedro declared war on the upper classes and faught in a partisan unit led by his friend the poet Javier Heraud. In May 1963, they walked into an ambush in Puerto Maldonado and Herraud, then twenty-one, tried to escape across a river when he was shot dead by the police. Pedro managed to get away and went into hiding. When the army latr seized power, times changed, and Pedro re-emerged in the struggle against the upper classes as an agricultural reform activist. We drove together to the most out-of-the-way Indian villages, where Pedro was distributing land to the poverty-stricken and benighted peasants. One day, on his return from one of the expeditions, Pedro learned that a friend of his had died and left him a considerable sum of money. In an instant everything changed. The partisan and reformer opened one of the most expensive and elegant nightspots in Lima, aimed at the upper-class market. Whoever turned up there -- it was called La Palisada -- could see a thick-set, stocky brown-haired man in a dinner jacket circulating among the tables, alert, contended (business was good) and accommodating. This was Pedro. He had put on a lot of weight but he was brisk and strong. As he drifted through the room he was humming something under his breath. It is doubtful that any of the elegant clients knew that Pedro was singing the verses of his friend and leader Javeier Heraud, who had died in an ambush so long ago.

Reading that I feel like, not only does the story fail to conform to our expectations of what might happen in the life of a former partisan, but also that were Kapuscinski not Pedro's friend that he wouldn't have told the story with that much uncertainty. It would be easy to frame that story as Pedro becoming a sell-out and abandoning his ideals, but Kapuscinski clearly seems to think that the actual situation is both more complicated and unknowable, to anybody other than Pedro.

[Bill Benzon]

Tomemos: I'm not claiming that, in Spirited Away, Miyazaki invented the convention of a discontinuous dream world. What he did do is give his characters a little puzzle. They don't remember what happened to them, but they do see that a day or two has passed and they don't know what happened. So what do they make of that apparent gap in their experience? Or, more precisely, the parents clearly don't remember what happened. But Chihiro, we don't know.

NickS: I'm not sure what you're getting at. It seems to me that there are two different issues concerning conventions and expectations. One of them has to do with the relationship between a given work and other works and what audiences bring with them into the theatre (or to the book). If we really want to explore this issue with respect to Nausicaä then we've got a number of things to think about. First, the film was made for a Japanese audience in the early 1980s. What did they bring to the film? A good many of them, of course, had read the manga, so they knew quite a bit about the story and its world when they qued up to by tickets. Since then, of course, other audiences have seen the film, and their background of expectations will be different in some respects.

The other issue about expectations concerns what happens on a moment to moment basis as we watch the film and as our emotions become engaged with the characters and their actions. We may know, in a general way, what's going to happen. And viewers who'd seen read the manga first would have had more specific knowledge. But that knowledge is abstract. Once you've become immersed in the action, you want certain things to happen, fear that other things are going to happen, and so forth. So, even if you know — from having read the manga — that Nausicaä is NOT among friends when she and Asbel escape to Pegit, you're still going to be a bit shocked when the Pegite king orders that Nausicaä be taken prisoner.

Now, it's one thing to observe, from a distance, that the opposite parties in a way both think of themselves as being good and right and of the enemey as being evil and wrong. Miyazaki gives us that situation in Nausicaä, but he doesn't just present it as an abstract geopolitical configuration examined from a distance. He puts us in the middle of the situation, leads us to think of one group as bad, the Tolmekians, and the other group as good, the Pegites. Once he's done that, THEN he springs his little narrative trap and reveals that that Pegites are no different from the Tolmekians. When he does that, the once of again we've got to fear for Nausicaä. She no longer has a clear shot at a happy ending.

[Bill Benzon]

Rich: You're capable of seeing the stills, reading the various quotes from critical reception and authorial interviews -- some of which you turn up yourself -- and still insist that "Nausicaa is not on erotic display". That's different than insisting that it in some sense works within this piece, that you've considered the feminism 101 objection and rejected it. It's just a denial of what's in the piece.

If you look through the various comments I've made here, you'll see that they're not entirely mutually consistent. For the I apologize. I'm making this up as I go along.

But you'll also see that, quite early on, I acknowledged an erotic element in those early shots. But I didn't and don't see how one can, on the basis of no more than those early shots, say very much in a definitive way about what that implies for Nausicaä. At 10 or so minutes into the film we don't know much about what's going on, what situations she will face (and the others) and what she'll do.

I am, however, quite familiar with the film and, on that basis, I've judged that Miyazaki is not involved in destructive gender typing. I've tried to indicate the larger scope in my comments.

[NickS]

NickS: I'm not sure what you're getting at.

I'm saying that I think that Rich is correct that it is important to ask the question, "in what ways are gendered archetypes present in the film?"

Personally, I agree with you that:

I've judged that Miyazaki is not involved in destructive gender typing

But I think that supporting that statement requires making an argument and that the argument involved wouldn't be that Miyazaki isn't using gendered stereotypes, but that he isn't using them in a negative way.

For that matter I think Nausicaa is, contra Rich, a feminist work (albeit not particularly complex or ambitious in its feminism), but I also think I would need to make an argument for that. The simple fact that it is about a powerful female character who saves the world is not enough, by itself, to demonstrate that it's a feminist story.

[Rich Puchalsky]

NickS, it depends on what you think "destructive gender typing" is. The phrase doesn't show a good understanding of what's going on because, actually, I'm not making a straightforward feminist critique. "Destructive gender typing" in the way that Bill seems to be using it is associated with a feminist critique that asserts that depicting Nausicaa in this way is, at its root, bad for society because it reinforces stereotypical gender roles. (For instance, tomemos previously mentioned the Barbie that chirped "math is hard".) I'm doing two things: first, encountering the usual resistance to an admission that what's there is there. (Try asking a fanboy why the women in superhero comics dress as they do sometime.) If we can finally agree that Nausicaa really is on erotic display, then I'm saying that it's probably destructive in the sense that it's bad for the work, not in the sense that it's bad for society.

Why is it bad for the work? Once again, authorial readings don't control a work, but once again, geez, here's the exchange about it that Bill quoted from an interview shortly after it came out:

"Nausicaä, the girl, is so attractive.

Miyazaki: Nausicaä’s breasts are rather large, aren’t they?

— Yes. [laughs]

Miyazaki: That’s not so she’ll be able to breast-feed her babies in the future or make love to a man who will steal her hear away. I think her bosom has to be large so she can embrace all those poor old men and women in the castle when they are dying."

If it's not to much to ask people to actually read this, look at what's going on here. The interviewer says that N. is attractive. Miyazaki doesn't even ask what he or she means, he brings up her breast size. Then Miyazaki offers a competing theory to the basic feminist 101 / genre implication "he drew her that way to attract male interest and because it's an anime stereotype originally designed to attract male interest." Let's take his competing theory as valid, for the sake of argument. Is this a good theory to base a major part of a work of art around? No, it really isn't. It's kind of ... silly, is the best word I can find for it.

What is Miyazaki really saying? Obviously anyone with arms can embrace people, no matter what their breast size. What he seems to be calling on is a motherliness that's supposed to be implied at a very basic level. He makes sure to say that this isn't literal motherliness, it's not so that she'll breast-feed babies. But really her active role is tied up in surrogate mothering: her critical moment comes when she protects a baby, something I pointed out from near the beginning of this thread, back at the start in those comments where Bill is saying that I wasn't reading anything but the first ten minutes of the film.

Is this "a major part of the work", as I imply above? Well, because of the plot, I think it is. Not so major that any discussion of the film has to include it. But Miyazaki is letting traditional themes of female desirability and nurturance as leading to regeneration do a lot of the work of his movie. His bit about her embracing the dying pretty much becomes: she embraces the dying world. If you don't think that this weakens the movie, then it still has an important place somewhere.

[Bill Benzon]

. . . it's probably destructive in the sense that it's bad for the work, not in the sense that it's bad for society.

OK.

But Miyazaki is letting traditional themes of female desirability and nurturance as leading to regeneration do a lot of the work of his movie.

And? Isn’t nurturance important in life? Don’t those themes do a lot of work in lots of works of art?

His bit about her embracing the dying pretty much becomes: she embraces the dying world.

How about simply that she embraces the world that’s there, whatever its condition.

Caveat: What follows is stuff I’m making up at the moment. I might not believe it tomorrow. I don’t believe it now, nor do I disbelieve it. I’m just throwing it out there for consideration.

While you’re thinking along these lines, think a bit more about the relationship between Nausicaä and the ohmu. First, the scene at the end of the film isn’t the first time she’s protected a baby ohmu. In the middle of the film there’s a flashback to her early childhood. She attempts to hide a very much younger baby ohmu from her father, but, much to her distress, she fails. Second, while she and her countrymen (plus Kushana) are floating in the underground nest of the ohmu, the ohmu surround their plane and then wrap their feelers around her. This goes on for a few seconds, and then they unwrap and, as they’re swimming away, she calls out to them something like “wait, you mean the Pegite pilot has landed?” Somehow they’d communicated with her. Third, while she’s rescuing the baby ohmu at the end, she gets shot. The baby extends its feelers into her wounds and (partially?) heals her. Fourth, at the very end, after the ohmu have trampled her, though finally stopping short of trampling the people of the valley, they bring her back to life.

On the ‘surface’ we’ve got Nausicaä and all the humans over here and the omhu and all the insects over there. But when you look ‘deeper,’ Nausicaä and the ohmu seem to function as two manifestations of the same ‘force’ or ‘thing.’ I’m saying that, not in terms of the physics/biology/psychology of the world Miyazaki’s created, but in terms of how Miyazaki deploys that world. I suppose we could say that the connection is on a symbolic level, but I don’t like the word ‘symbolic.’ It’s overworked and doesn’t mean much of anything.

Whatever you call it, we’re in that religious zone that Miyazaki finds so problematic. Here’s Miyazaki taking once again (p. 394 from the book, Starting Point: 1979-1996):

If you assume that there is a God, you can explain everything to the world. But I can’t do that. Still, in Nausicaä I wound up entering a zone that I didn’t particularly want to enter, about humans and life and so forth.

I can more or less understand the world from the perspective of human conflicts and contradictions, but there’s a part of me dissatisfied by that sort of explanation alone. So that means there’s nothing that I can say with much conviction about anything at all.

I started to get dizzy just thinking about what I would do if addressed as “mama” [!!!] by something with the destructive power of the kyoshinhei [giant warriors]. So Nausicaä’s confusion is also my own confusion.

I’ve been told that one line of criticism that’s been developed around the film is that, in effect, this religious zone is a cop out on Miyazaki’s part. I don’t know whether it is or it isn’t. I’ve not thought it through. But if that’s the line of thought you’re taking, Rich, you’ve got company.

[NickS]

then I'm saying that it's probably destructive in the sense that it's bad for the work, not in the sense that it's bad for society.

Okay, that makes sense, and I hadn't quite realized that was the distinction that you were making (I took the comment in which you referenced F!ck for forest as arguing that it was bad for society, but I can also read it as the former).

My first impulse, upon reading that line, was to immediately agree that it's a weakness in the work. My second thought, upon reflection, is that I'm not so sure. If I think about how the work would read if Nausicaa was presented as a more realistic young girl I don't think you could tell that story.

In general I think that "comic book" style art and conventions allow for some good story-telling that would be difficult to do without them (in addition to the far more common case in which those conventions provide an excuse for mindless stories). See, for example, this thread in which I argue (in a disjointed manner) for my affection for some of the classic Marvel plots/characters.

In the case of Nausicaa, I think that it benefits from one part of the bargain that the comic/anime conventions create between reader and author -- the explicit sense of, "the characters may suffer, but they will be able to take it."

If we thought of Nausicaa as a psychologically realistic 12 year old, it could be a really hard story to watch and not, I think an improvement. I think it is actually good for the story that we understand pretty early that she is, more or less, a super-hero and that we aren't supposed to think of her as an actual existing adolescent.

All of which isn't to say that the comic/anime conventions are the best possible aesthetic conventions or even that the primary reason that those conventions are widely adopted is that they are creatively necessary, but they do allow certain successful narratives which wouldn't be possible without the use of those conventions.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Well, I'm fine with people thinking either that it is or isn't a strength of the work, or rejecting that false duality in favor of something else, as long as they acknowledge that there's something going on there. That my sense of where it crosses the border from "something that indisputably there in the work" (Nausicaa being on erotic display, and being featured as a nurturer/mother) and something that depends on individual readings of the work (i.e. what you make of those things). There can't be any single, correct reading of a work, so that just comes down to different people making points more or less well.

My personal preference is not to turn up a stereotyped theme like "women are great nurturers!" in a contemporary work. Bill may be right that that theme does a lot in lots of works of art, but that's not a recommendation for it, not if you have a basically modernist aesthetic.

Parenthetically, is the Nausicaa of the film -- the one in those stills at the top -- really supposed to be 12? wiki doesn't tell her age. If so, yeah, that's a rather basic ick factor. But I quickly googled it and most people seem to think she's 16, which is more believable.

[NickS]

Parenthetically, is the Nausicaa of the film -- the one in those stills at the top -- really supposed to be 12? wiki doesn't tell her age. If so, yeah, that's a rather basic ick factor. But I quickly googled it and most people seem to think she's 16, which is more believable.

No, you are correct, that was my brain pulling something out of a random pocket. I believe that I was thinking of a different "mature beyond her years" child hero but I couldn't tell you who it was.