Audition is a Japanese film centered around a widower who decides to date again (with the hopes to marry)- only to find out that the woman he chooses is interested in torturing him.
The opening scene is black with the sound of footsteps, only to be replaced with an image not soon after the sound - of someone looking down as they walk.
I really liked this, because it made me think back to our readings about the relationship between sound and image and how sound can produce image. We knew someone was walking by the sound we heard, not by the image - which wasn't available initially.
Takashi places the main character, Aoyama, in the center of the screen when he's alone or speaking and to the left of anyone who might be accompanying him (his friend, his son etc.). What's interesting about this is that he enforces the 180 rule during these shots, he shifts from one side, to the other, to the front, and far away. Maintaining this order in almost all of the shots (Aoyama to the left, whomever else to the right).
The lighting is mostly natural yellows or artificial blues. The blues are really evident when his son is walking down the hospital corridor at the beginning - the blue light shines overhead, while yellow shines on his body. Aoyama's face is usually placed in dramatic light, which helps to convey his inner struggle over his wife's death and how uncertain he feels about finding someone to "take her place."
After she turns out the light, there is a distinctive change in atmosphere
Takashi uses close ups to break scenes, or to shift from place to place. He uses flowers in the beginning to allow flashes to the hospital room where Ryoko was dying, as her son was walking down the hall. He uses a fish he caught, to break up the scene where they were out fishing and when his son told him he should re-marry. He uses hands, objects, and faces to break up scenes - providing close ups.
One if the woman auditioning
There always seems to be a light over Aoyama's head when he is home. When he sits down at dinner with his son, when he's doing the dishes, and when he's looking through audition photos. It is always stationed to shine right on him, and no-one or nothing else.
There are times when Takashi will place female voices that extend into another scene, or he uses the female voices on the radio and provides abstracted images of carlights covered in rain or elevator doors. I think that this helps the audience to better understand how Aoyama sees women, in the sense that after his wife died - they became elusive to him. Something he could only see and admire but never really grasp.
Takashi uses doors and wide open spaces a lot to break up scenes and to provide foreground and background images. When Aoyama is talking to his son at dinner, we see them at the table from the living room, a wide open wall leads into the dining room, and to the right we see another open door leading to the kitchen. What's interesting is that all of these spaces have different lighting, the kitchen lights are turned off which leaves a cold ominous feeling as the son walks into the kitchen, the dining room has one light over head, and the living room has a small light to the far left. Both emitting yellow florescent light.
When the characters are outside Takashi includes a lot of land. When Aoyama was out fishing standing on rocks on a coast, he frequently broke the scene by shifting the perspective as though we were looking at the main character from the sea. In this shot he broke up the composition into three equal parts, water, land and sky.
There is dialogue in the film, and it seems necessary that most of it comes from Aoyama, who is after all the main character. It's important that we understand what kind of a man he is prior to him going through with finding another wife.
There is a scene or two where the camera shakes a bit when doing a close up of Aoyama when he's speaking. Most notably a scene when he's discussing what characteristics the woman should have while getting a drink at a hotel bar.
Once Aoyama understands what she's after, the light becomes bolder the yellows become bigger and brighter and the blues become pressing and overwhelming. Which demonstrates the sudden change in atmosphere for the characters, when the mundane and "normal" starts to become surreal and strange. For example: He goes to meet the music instructor at an abandoned building only to find him in a wheelchair next to the crackling of a fire, with orange lights. Another, is when he tries to find Asami and ends up at an old abandoned tilted bar, where one of the men who lives in the complex begins telling him of the murder that took place there years ago - and he starts to see a tongue writhing on the floor making a slapping sound.
In the scene with the tongue, he uses the slapping to bring them main character back to the present instead of cutting to a close up.
Takashi also repeats a few edits, like the bottle of alcohol when he reaches for it, and the conversation Aoyama and Asami have when he finally calls her back and they meet in a small diner. But each scene offers something new, we find out more about Asami's tragic past in this scene and farther along when they are at a different diner (which we saw in sequence earlier in the film)- when she starts to reveal more about her mother's abuse and her music instructor's torture.
