OCTOBER 2007

256. Nora inu (Stray Dog)

Kurosawa (1949)

Telling lingerings on sights and sounds where the human factor has just vanished: a mechanical toy set in motion by children who only a moment ago wandered from the range of the eye; a torn white dress, still bearing the signs of the body from which it was stripped, the body so suddenly, violently pulled off-screen; confessional writings whose author has made his tracks right before they are read by his pursuers; a gun or a song made invisible once they are heard. It’s like the History that Kurosawa’s camera frames in all but words: effects that surpass by far the designs of those involved in the events that caused them—the theft of a pistol or a War Without Mercy—acts or Acts whose dramatis personae vanished in a sudden flash and whose half-life, no matter how long after, makes us feel like they have hardly left.