Idea #116 - Manipulating Time and Space

12 years since his passing, and still, audiences and celebrated artists alike, look up to Satoshi Kon as one of the most gifted directors to have ever existed. Lingering somewhere between reality and fantasy, Kon’s storytelling was a play of time and space, like a fever dream.

Today we watched how he manipulated time and space to play in his favour. His signature editing was primarily experimental scene transitions and radical jump cuts, sometimes through time, sometimes across space, and sometimes both. This element went well with the fundamental theme of all of his movies - modern people coping with the multiple lives they lead.

To draw a more easily comprehensible idea of Satoshi Kon’s brilliant editing - the first four minutes of Paprika has five dream sequences, each inter-connected by a match cut, while the first fifteen minutes of Inception has four interconnected dreams and a single match cut! Complimenting his approach was the spontaneity of his narration that started on one note and ended on an entirely different tangent altogether, only to later come back for a justification through another insignificant detail.

There is a reason directors like Darren Aronofsky and Christopher Nolan resorted to Kon’s work when inspiration did not strike them, and his work is proof of the genius artist that he was. Despite his short-lived career, Satoshi Kon revolutionised Japanese anime, and his work continues to be cherished years after his demise.

Written and Curated by Arya Kastwar