July 19th, 1997 was the turning point for Hideaki Anno. It was the day that The End of Evangelion, the feature-length conclusion (at one point, at least) to his short-lived but cult favorite anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, hit theaters in Japan. It’s also the day that Love & Pop (1998) is set, Anno’s first live-action feature. I haven’t seen Evangelion in any of its iterations, but I’m not sure how useful that line of thinking would be for understanding Love & Pop. If anything, the use of July 19th appears to be Anno marking a shift in his own work. While Evangelion would be a world he’d return to again and again in subsequent decades (and the cameras were acquired for a behind-the-scenes documentary on End), Love & Pop and its free-from MiniDV musings suggests a precipice for a new kind of cinema.
While the first two minutes settles the audience in via whiplash—rapid-fire cutting from fish-eyed POV angles from literally anywhere a Handycam can hide—the most interesting of these comes from setting the tiny camera atop a model train. On our way out of the premiere of the new 2K restoration that played this past weekend at New York City’s Japan Society, one of my friends remarked on multiple sequences later in the film where the camera must’ve been set atop the miniature tracks again, where corner turns take on a highly specific, robotic movement. It’s noteworthy, too, that while Love & Pop feels visually unfettered, Anno still often works within self-imposed confines, one of the oldest of which in cinema is the train track that begot the dolly. What the miniature train lines do when driving the MiniDV camera is introduce a new sense of scale to the world not otherwise observable. It’s not the grandiosity of images of transcontinentals running along the Rockies while passengers wave from their carriages, it’s instead Anno transforming the small rooms of the domestic sphere or the intimate movements of a hand into what feel like the largest things ever. His film form reflects visually the teenage emotion that’s at the heart of the story psychologically.
Love & Pop follows a teenage girl, Hiromi (Asumi Miwa), throughout a day where she starts embroiling herself in the world of paid dating to make some quick cash. While initially it’s a way to take advantage of perverted and pushy men, the encounters take on increasingly weight that makes the summation of yen seem more paltry. While she can try to game-the-game, the results never land in her favor; these men are too grotesque, too shockingly dehumanizing, too misogynistic—there’s an untenability of relations on a broader cultural level when these guys are walking around. Anno plays up his own disgust through the moment in Love & Pop—the men aren’t just abrasive to the characters, they’re abrasive to the audiences who experience the actions on screen from what’s effectively a first-person perspective even when the camera isn’t performing that in a direct way.
The first thing that springs to mind when thinking of Anno’s (justified) hostility towards his own audience is the great Japanese avant-garde polymath Shūji Terayama, maybe most perfectly comparable with his short film Laura (1974) where the subjects flip the audience’s gaze back on itself for ridicule. But there’re also echoes of Terayama’s radical masterpiece Throw Away Your Books, Rally In the Streets (1971), another anarchic piece of wide-angle fantasia. I think both filmmakers highlight a feeling of creative freedom not in spite of but because of the limitations of the mediums that they work within. Love & Pop constantly brings attention to its own boxy aspect ratio—cutting in text at the sides, or squeezing and pulling images so that they become columns or rows rather than full pictures.
The most incredible effect of all, though, is the cut to 35mm footage for the end credits, a durational tracking shot where the camera is pushed just ahead of the film’s four main girls as they stride through a low canal. There’s still a fuzziness to this sequence, despite its high quality negative, which suggests that the master for the feature was done on analog video. Some restorations would push for this shot to be touched up from the 35mm rather than its SD master, but this one keeps the fuzz, as it does the rough edges of 1990s video or the dirt on the lens—it’s as essential as anything in the movie itself, further evidence of its own making, of the dreams that were brought to life and the life captured in front of the camera.