The Sublimation of Anti-Drama: Psychological Externalization, Anti-Climax, and Everyday Ethics in the Cinema of Hirokazu Kore-eda
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.62177/chst.v2i4.792Keywords:
Hirokazu Kore-eda, Anti-drama, Psychological Externalization, Anti-climax, Off-Screen Space, Ambient Sound, Materiality, Everyday Ethics, Postdramatic AestheticsAbstract
This paper explores the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s anti-dramatic cinema through the theoretical frameworks of Jacques Lacan’s concept of desire and lack, Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the time-image, André Bazin’s realism, Hans-Thies Lehmann’s postdramatic theatre, and Jane Bennett’s vital materialism. In contrast to the affective excess of global melodrama, Kore-eda’s films externalize interior psychological states through ambient sound, anti-climactic narrative structures, off-screen space, and the emotional agency of objects. These formal strategies transform cinematic affect into an ethical experience of reflection rather than catharsis. The article argues that Kore-eda’s work redefines emotional engagement in contemporary Japanese cinema by turning the viewer from empathy to contemplation—what may be termed a post-emotional ethics of the everyday. Through close readings of Still Walking (2008), After the Storm (2016), Shoplifters (2018), and Air Doll (2009), this study shows how the refusal of climax and the prominence of silence generate a cinema of absence that speaks through the mundane.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Yifan Zhang
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
DATE
Accepted: 2025-10-30
Published: 2025-11-06
