Music as Anamorphic Spot: The Radio Broadcast in Tengoku to Jigoku (‘High and Low,’ dir. A. Kurosawa, 1963)

Tengoku to Jigoku (High and Low) is a crime thriller in which a wealthy, conscientious, hard-working shoe manufacturer (Mifune Toshiro) is the victim of a hideous crime: his chauffeur’s son is kidnapped in mistake for his own. The kidnapper (Yamazaki Tsutomu) acknowledges the mistake but wants the money nevertheless, thus forcing the entire family – including, of course, the chauffeur himself — into a moral dilemma. The time is the early sixties, as Japan prepares for the Olympic Games, ready to showcase its economic miracle and technological successes. The setting, significantly, is Yokohama, near Tokyo, then still a troubled industrial city struggling to emerge from a ruinous recent past.

This lecture will examine the role of sound and music in the film’s representation of the urban fabric of Yokohama and the resulting use of cinema as a means of historical preservation of sounds (or sonic environments). As my analysis draws to a close, I will pay special attention to the radio broadcast of Schubert’s music that marks the appearance of the film’s anti-hero (the kidnapper). Far from being merely a static pointer, a cerebral, gratuitous musical reference, the broadcast is inextricably tied to the presentation of the character. While paving the way for a different interpretation of the film, my analysis of this crucial passage will also indicate in what ways the study of music and sound as an element of setting may contribute to a new understanding of the role of symbols in the context of narratives.

Lecturer information: Giorgio Biancorosso grew up in Italy and was educated in the UK and the US. After obtaining a Ph.D. in Musicology at Princeton University, in 2001-2003 he was a Mellon Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. He is now an Assistant Professor in Music and a Member of the Film Culture Project at The University of Hong Kong, where he teaches courses in Music History, Aesthetics, and Film Theory and Criticism. Recent publications include: “Ludwig’s Wagner and Visconti’s Ludwig,” in Wagner and Cinema, (Indiana University Press); “The Harpist in the Closet: Film Music as Epistemological Joke,” in Music and the Moving Image 2 (3); and the essay “Sound” in The Routledge Companion to Film and Philosophy. Biancorosso is completing a book called Musical Aesthetics through Cinema, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2010. He is also active as a journalist and writes monthly columns on the arts in China and the Asia Pacific for the Hong Kong Magazine Muse. In the Spring of 2010, Biancorosso will be Visiting Professor in Music and Film Studies at National Taiwan University (NTU), Taipei.

Co-Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Department of Music.