Light and lightness in time and death: 'A Burning Star' (1996)
Documenting cremation, a Japanese filmmaker fills his father's death with light.
A Burning Star (Shōsei) (1996), dir. Kenji Onishi, Japan
I remember sitting one day, when I was a kid, in my room with the windows open, and the trees outside were so bright green, the sun was so strong, and the breeze was so light that this moment imprinted itself on me as the boiled-down image of spring. Later my mom and I got ice cream, and I see myself with the sun on my head and wind between my shirt and my skin. The whole memory has a feeling of air, white flowers, patience, grass, and delicacy. It anticipates the CD my mom would play when we couldn’t sleep, a recording of Pachelbel’s canon over ocean sounds.
This memory and the feeling it captures came back to me while I watched this week’s film, A Burning Star (1996). I watched it in the afternoon while my sheets were drying at the laundromat; I sat on the blank mattress, which I like to do because it makes my room so unusually light, like I took it off the apartment, hung it over the windowsill, and shook it out. The film opens with twenty minutes of dark interiors with sunlight wading through sheer curtains. We see the shadow of a cat’s ears and hear the phone ring and a person shuffle around; we are inside the filmmaker Kenji Onishi’s house as it stirs on the morning of his father’s cremation, but the light and quiet feel more like waking from an afternoon nap.
Light appears as soft patches, beams thrown through doorways, and stringy slices. Onishi films a woman adjusting a sign outside and a white cord tied to the sign traps the light so well it looks like a laser cutting through the screen. Then the woman pulls her coat closer around her; I can’t believe she’s cold, the flash-white cord and the fine edges of shadow make the scene look like summer! The scene reminds me that sunlight also changes with the seasons: sharp in July, soft in January, and flooding in April, it nudges time to pass and encourages our bodies to melt into it.
Sitting on my mattress in my weightless room, I felt a very rare feeling of time accompanying me. It was different from the slowness I get from meditation or practicing patience: that perception of time involves pushing back against the speed of daily life to better observe what I might otherwise overlook (it’s the same perception of time that we saw in Perfect Days last week). Here I didn’t feel so much that time slowed down, but that I moved in such harmony with it that the question of speed made no sense. Like when you sit on a train and another train out the window moves at the exact same time as yours; you feel the train’s movements, but seem to sit totally still.
Time never holds my hand this way; I always fear passing time, especially when I think about what I want to do before going to work or going to bed. I know this fear is bigger than how to use my free time: it pulls in my awareness that I will die one day, or that my loved ones will, and it colors the present with loss.
Onishi films his father’s cremation with a startling gentleness; behind the camera, he comes up close to his father’s lips as he lies in the casket and traces his body undressed before burning. Because no one in the film speaks, Onishi’s observations become emotionally ambiguous; he probes curiously, but not indifferently, as when he puts his hand up to the glass of the incinerator. Most of the film, like the body, just rests, evoking a sense of peace as the world passes through.
At the film’s climax, Onishi films his father’s body through the incinerator window and we see it disintegrate down to the skull. The fire fills the body with bright orange light, so bright that when Onishi zooms out, the little round window looks like the sun. Later, Onishi walks around in bright sunlight, then another image of the sun is so strong it blacks out the rest of the world before focus is reestablished and the rooftops fade into view. Thrown off his body, his father the burning star; Onishi bathes in that light that obscures the world before revealing it.
I struggle against passing time as I struggle with future death, but A Burning Star sits in time like water, spring breezes, and passing trains. Light coats us in our dead through our skin, in our lungs, and in our eyes. I wonder where the people and animals I love live now that they have died; I grip on to time because I know the living live in the present with me, where none of us is ever alone. But when I breathe? When I walk in the sun, or when it comes through the window in my room as my sheets dry, and there is ice cream waiting for me? Do they live there now, in the oven light when my boyfriend makes bread, or on summer’s hot sand, or careening through space? I love them, they love me still and so they keep me warm and weightless, and when enough time passes I will also decay and pour light on the world.
See other films from: 1990s | Japan
Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s entry. Thank you for reading!
Love, Tyler