Matsumoto’s experimental short untethers our connections to any sense of reality and animates the spiritual realm that its central demonic figure inhabits
The most terrifying moment in film history has to be one of the very first legends the medium has to offer. When the Lumière Brothers screened their early motion picture L’Arrivée d’un Train à La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train) in 1896, people were still developing an understanding of what a “movie” was. The 46-second film simply shows a steam engine entering a French train station, but, as the story goes, the audience screamed and ran away when they saw a train coming straight towards them. They assumed the screen was a portal welcoming the locomotive on through, that this new technology may have the ability to cause physical harm.
No one today would possibly call the Lumières’ short a horror movie without that context. It is simply an early camera capturing a moment, a documented instance of a train arriving that doubles as an exhibition of the fashion of the time. But it certainly teased the radical possibilities of the motion picture. Though we know that the physical portal between camera and audience cannot be opened, flat images that haunt our reflexive fears make up the corridor that cinematic horror exists in. The films that dare to bend the perception of reality and stretch images the furthest lead us to the most mind-warping experiences.
Japanese filmmaker Toshio Matsumoto (1932-2017) spent his career testing the limits of the medium. Beginning as a documentarian, his works quickly evolved with visual and stylistic experimentation. His 1969 feature film Funeral Parade of Roses is his most famous work. Loosely based on Oedipus Rex, it focuses on a community of transgender and queer characters working in gay clubs and exploring the underground culture of ’60s Tokyo. Throughout the film, Matsumoto includes experimental/avant-garde flourishes, but they never feel like tacked-on showmanship. They instead blend unreality into the underground, with manipulated inserts, subliminal flashes, and a narrative that loops back on itself.
Matsumoto also taught experimental film and became the dean at the Kyoto Institute of Art and Design. His numerous short films find him at his most adventurous, and they are heralded for their distinctive style of visual transformation. He can take a central image of a building, an oceanfront skyline, the Mona Lisa — a toilet! — and morph an entirely familiar object into something beyond recognition. The way he manipulates objects by distorting color, size, and fragments of individual images shows his ability to see more than what lies in front of him. With a camera in hand, he could change the familiar into something previously unseen.
Matsumoto’s 1975 short film Ātman uses a radical approach to photographing the many angles of a single, seated entity. The film offers no chance for viewers to gain their bearings. Its first moments are erratic cuts between closeups and medium shots that function like obliterated zooms as the camera whips forward and back, all while circling the demon at the film’s core. We feel the subliminal flashes of the face before it ever settles on the screen. We see horns and white hair, sharp teeth, and a jagged profile. The first frames start from the front, move counter-clockwise, and relentlessly circle the motionless figure. The speed of the circular motion remains fairly consistent, but the zooms do not adhere to any regularity. Though Matsumoto shot on an intricate, pre-planned elliptical path, the film embodies chaos of motion and perspective.
Ātman is a film of contrasts. The subject is a person seated in a river valley wearing a Hannya mask and a robe; the demoniacal features of the mask cast a stark opposition to the idyllic natural setting in the background. Depending on the angle they’re viewed from, Hannya masks, used in Noh theater, can either look furious or playful and represent a vengeful female spirit — a woman who was abandoned by her lover and the jealousy turned her into a demon. This one looks full of mischief, with a sinister glint in its eyes. The camera’s motion feels erratic but entirely focused, and the subject’s stillness anticipates some form of climactic action or gesture that never arrives. The photography is beautiful; the motion is nauseating. All the while, the soundtrack alternates between a synthesizer score by Toshi Ichayanagi, which blares like sonar sent through an industrial grinder, and sudden cuts to near silence. If the film aims to overwhelm the senses with all these conflicting ideas, it achieves that with ease.
Shot on an infrared 16mm camera, the color palette flashes between unnatural and impossible interpretations of the valley with stark reds and greens. Each go-around plays with color; some use strobing white flashes at each cut, some toil with darkness, others maintain a consistent scheme. For a few brief moments, the colors invert and the mask flips to red. If the mask held any innocence in green, the red demolishes that notion — a pulsating sense of evil emerges. The shifting palette becomes an oversaturated landscape beyond our comfort zones; Matsumoto untethers our connections to any sense of reality and animates the spiritual realm this mythical being inhabits.
As the manipulation of the images crescendos, the music and sound effects follow and enter the range of white noise. This only makes the first sudden drop to silence more startling. With the camera still and the music gone, the wind momentarily becomes the only sound and motion. The demon, centered on screen, looks toward the camera and teases the impending chaos, much like when the front end of a roller coaster finally crests over a peak before it descends. The frame is then washed out in a nuclear white before the cycle resumes.
The most unsettling portion is when instead of using cut-zooms, Matsumoto includes individual photographs that each last onscreen for two seconds. The mask remains staring forward, but I swear the eyes follow the camera. Each successive image lasts a shorter duration and after it swings around a few times, the perfect circle rotation ends and the fast-spinning zooms return. We now have more familiarity with the demon, however it’s not until 3:45 in that we actually see a centered, focused, closeup shot of the face. The jagged teeth feel especially exaggerated with black lips outlining them, which make the shadows inside the mouth even darker. The eyes, so perfectly circular, collapse into black holes. That tall forehead and high hairline look stretched by the protrusion of horns. The presentation feels like a series of photos from a crime scene when they’re flashed long enough to be understood, but not long enough to be absorbed. The frozen images create a sinister feel, as if capturing something not meant to be engaged with — the demon in repose.
But among all this sensory overload, it is the demon’s stillness that is most unnerving. Horror viewers are trained to expect jumps, action, and the unexpected, but when there is no climactic release, we remain in wait with no end to the tension. The demon doesn’t so much as cock its head to the side. Its motions are constricted to its white hair being tossed by the wind. And still, the hairs on your neck stand up and remain so even after Ātman’s 12 minutes are over.
Matsumoto entered the film with a strict shooting path and was able to reshoot portions because his measured plans were so meticulous. While the film bears the feeling of rambunctious experimentation — like someone wanting to figure out every feature of a new camera — it becomes a disorienting lesson in perspective. All these colors, images, and the swirled sense of motion morph into a roaming portrait of a fixed locale. And, based on his shooting plans, Matsumoto saw the film unfold before he ever looked through that lens.
Ātman gives only snapshots, and the en media res presentation only adds to the mystery of what we’re watching. The word “Ātman” is a Sanskrit term relating to the “true self” inside a person, a soul or spirit. By photographing every possible ground angle of an outward-appearing demon, perhaps Matsumoto is asking how we should interpret the inherent duality of the Hannya mask — especially since the mask represents a woman so overcome by jealousy that she physically morphs into a new being.
Fever dreams are an overused horror descriptor, but this film is the pinnacle of what a lingering nightmare can feel like. Imagine this playing in your head while sick — the accelerating motion, that face staring into the void, the green mask morphing into a blur — and think of the desperate gasping upon being shocked back awake. But those eyes are stuck in the mind’s eye from hundreds of different angles. The all-encompassing perspectives provide an unsettling field of vision that only provides a few clear, straightaway looks at the mask itself. We are left with impressions of evil, and the anticipation of what it aims to accomplish. And rather than build up to a horrific climax, the spectacle becomes the transformation of the image itself — a hypnotic experience rooted in contrasting stasis with wild camera work. The film becomes about the process of creating motion and conjuring an evil presence from a series of still images.
The story of early filmgoers running from the Lumière Brothers’ train is the stuff of legend, a brilliant embellishment that surely helped sell a few reels of film along the way. Like so many forward-thinking works of art, their power fades as the radical ideas they reached for become common practice. But something about Ātman still feels unnatural. The technical aspects could be replicated with simple phone filters today, but there’s a precision to it that transcends technological advancement. Each frame is tantamount to watching an artist applying brush strokes. If the fear of the train coming through the screen was enough to send viewers scrambling, then the manipulated motion in Ātman should leave them in a trance, wondering why that seated demon is now nightmare fodder, despite never moving anything more than a few hairs. Both of these short films exhibit the power of moving images, but whereas viewers feared that the train was on a collision course with their screen, Ātman works a path into our heads, takes a seat, and refuses to leave. When those zooms begin to thrust, it is both hard to watch and impossible to look away. The effect is both enchanting and damning.
Watch Ātman below:
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