LOST FUTURES 007

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#004 EMBERS LOVE//STREAMS

# 0 07 E M B E R S Made by the acclaimed director of Love Letter and April Story, Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou is told through the eyes of Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara), an eighth-grader obsessed with the ethereal J-Pop idol Lily Chou-Chou, a character inspired by Canto-pop artist and actress Faye Wong and compared often to Bjork. Creating a fan-site through which a loyal coterie of 'Lilyphiles' trade gossip, information, and speculation, Yuichi takes increasing solace in this fictional world, using the strength of the community to overcome his crippling shyness and the harsh realities of the outside world, before meeting up with other devotees for real at a concert. All About Lily Chou-Chou began life first as a uncompleted novel before transforming into an interactive text maintained by Iwai on the lily-holic.com website and the interactive development of the project was crucial, enhancing the parallel narratives at play in a project that expands beyond the screen and blurs boundaries between the real and the imaginary.

Incorporating a hyperreal display of early digital video and an extraordinary use of rapturous music, All About Lily Chou-Chou offers sensory pleasure in abundance, whilst still intelligently addressing prescient themes of violence, bullying, and alienated adolescence. A vivid portrait of the disaffected Japanese youth of the time, it remains resonant long past its post-millennial context due to its innovative formal experimentation and its ahead-ofits-time vision of the explosive, often frightening power of the internet.

All About Lily Chou-Chou (Shunji Iwai | 2001 | Japan | 147’ )

All About Lily Chou-Chou (Shunji Iwai, 2001)

+ video introduction by Joanne McNeil

Screening as part of Japan 2020: Over 100 years of Japanese Cinema, a UK-wide film season supported by National Lottery and BFI Film Audience Network.

LOST FUTURES #007 Matt Turner x #BFIJAPAN 8.20pm, 10th November 2021 Prince Charles Cinema, London

All About Lily Chou-Chou (Shunji Iwai, 2001)

DIAL U P CO N NECTIO N S

by Joa n n e M c N eil Twenty years after the release of All About Lily Chou-Chou, I can’t think of a film that better depicts what first drew people to the internet, and certainly none that matches its expressive use of content-type header errors.

Director Shunji Iwai evokes the gaps and hesitancy in early internet communication through the depiction of character encoding across the screen. Posts on an online forum devoted to Lily ChouChou, a mysterious pop singer, first appear in a mojibake jumble of accented Latin characters.

We can hear the clack of an old keyboard and another tap to refresh. The BBS code is janky, and users must frantically reload the pages to decode text from garbled Western glyphs into Japanese characters.

The messages are intense and awkwardly poetic. “The shadows SHE releases into the Ether sublimate its wavelengths, transcend the spectrum, reach the transparent beyond. A permeating imagine of pain fills the gaps of serotonin,” writes one of the users. “The Ether heals my pain,” posts another.

Someone else types, “This sounds like a cult.” The opening

scene presents one of the users out in the physical world: a fourteen-year-old, alone in a bright field, wading through pristine grass that comes up to his waist. He’s still dressed in his school uniform, all mop-top hair and gangly posture, listening to a CD on his Discman. It seems that he’s hiding from someone and also that this time alone provides him some relief.

Bewitching music plays while the film skips back and forth from the boy in the grass to the brief bits of white text on a black background. We don’t see much of Lily in the film but learn about her through the music and the obsessive mythmaking by her fans in the BBS. They comment on her media appearances and share facts about her life, like that she was born on December 8, 1980, at the exact moment when John Lennon was shot.

Most of all, the users write about how her music makes them feel.

The “Ether” is a nebulous theme channeled by the superstar that her fanbase adopts to describe their connection to one another online, the ways her power creates a feeling of intimacy, and just her overall ethereal

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vibe. Lily is “the Ether personified,” someone posts. Their messages grow ecstatic as the film continues to cut back to the shot of the kid in the electric green grass. He’s soothing his troubles with Lily’s music. When he’s back at his computer, his aloof exterior will melt, and he will share emotionally charged messages with the BBS. The boy in the field is Philia, the site administrator of Lilyphilia. By day, he is known as Yūichi Hasumi. His family doesn’t have a lot of money, but he has a little computer station in the corner of their messy apartment. Voluble as he is when posting online, Yūichi scarcely speaks in the film. Some tender moments in his life offline happen wordlessly. After he is caught shoplifting, to the humiliated dismay of his pregnant mother, he finds her later and offers her a ride home on his bike. They say nothing, but she eagerly hops on his parcel shelf. It’s clear from her smile that he’s been forgiven.

Much of the success of the film hinges on Lily, who we must imagine as a mesmerizing talent like Kate Bush or Björk, someone who might inspire teenagers to exchange such raw and enthralled messages. She’s performed

by Salyu, a Japanese singer who was a newcomer at the time, and she’s really that good. The soundtrack, by frequent Iwai collaborator Takeshi Kobayashi, blends Debussy and glam rock hooks softened by Salyu’s crystalline vocals.

Lily is not much older than these teenagers and also a resident of their island country, but she seems to exist eons and galaxies away; someplace at least as dreamy as the virtual world where the youth connect.

All About Lily Chou-Chou didn’t undergo a conventional adaptation process.

Before there was a script, there was an “internet novel” composed by an online community. Users, mostly youths themselves, could submit ideas and interact with the characters Iwai created for the BBS. The director demonstrates an intuitive sense of how a slippery online identity ekes its way into physical space.

A great example of this happens at the start of Vampire (2011), Iwai’s Englishlanguage debut, as two characters, “Pluto” and “Jellyfish,” awkwardly meet IRL. They seem skeptical and trusting of each other in equal measure. Pluto lists some of his least favorite users on the forum where they met, and Jellyfish shares that those are all her alt-accounts, happy to own her petty deceit.

In Lily Chou-Chou, the solace of the teens’ online community contrasts with the brutality of their face-to-face interactions. Online, as anonymous users, they reap all the rewards of companionship and sharing feelings without the risks of being seen—and seen as vulnerable. The texts from the BBS weave through the film so seamlessly that watching it now—in the age of smartphones—it might be easy to forget that these are jumps in time. The messages are used to animate scenes of Yūichi on his own, whether in the field, at his computer or browsing a record store. Yūichi’s internet life is anchored to his computer, but

he listens to the music every chance he gets, and he thinks about the internet when he’s away from it.

Other than Philia/Yūichi, it is unclear until the end which characters in the film match the users in the BBS. Offline enemies might unknowingly form bonds in the “Ether.” Yūichi and other characters are subjected to aggravated bullying, including sexual assault and coercion. While not unrealistic, the graphic depiction of their cruelty is hard to watch. As the film progresses and Yūichi becomes complicit with unforgivable acts by his schoolmates, the BBS seems less like a sanctuary of healing than a numbing force. Perhaps his care for Lily—an icon; ultimately, a stranger—should be siphoned to the people around him, who, like him, suffer alone in the world. But such is real life.

Each of Lily’s songs on the soundtrack is beautiful. In powerful scenes, we see the characters on headphones, seemingly guided by her to access intense emotional states. They don’t quite have one another, but they share the trance that comes from hearing one’s favorite song in a moment of pain.

The internet is different now, but Lily and her “Ether” continue to dazzle listeners.

I looked up the song “Arabesque” on YouTube to accompany me as I wrote this essay. On its page, there are comments that sound like messages from the Lilyphilia BBS. Some of these comments have been posted in just the past year. “One of the most beautiful thing i’ve heard in my life,” someone comments.

In another comment, a user writes, “god let me this song forever in Heaven .it calm me down when i’m fusing or when i’m high on drugs, , at the first time ,, i couldn’t describe the emotion i was into so deep , this marked deeply in my soul.”

This essay was originally commissioned by Filmmaker Magazine, published as part of Joanne McNeil's column 'Speculations', which looks at Science-Fiction in art, film, and culture. It is reprodced here with the permission of the author and the outlet.

All About Lily Chou-Chou (Shunji Iwai, 2001) 7

All About Lily Chou-Chou (Shunji Iwai, 2001)

All About Lily Chou-Chou (Shunji Iwai, 2001)

PERFECT H U MILIATIO N

by Tyle r Sim e o n e When I think about the early 2000s, one element quickly elbows itself to the forefront of my memory: middle school. It was an embarrassing time of semi-adulthood that saw me sporting a lot of cargo shorts, letting my hair flow down to my shoulders, and dating my first girlfriend.

But most importantly, I—along with my friends and peers—spent those years engaged in two processes of highly curated identityformation: While growing into myself and crafting an image to survive the humiliations of tween-hood, I was also constructing a version of me meant specifically for public consumption online. In that time of identity in flux, I started investigating my sexuality; I watched porn for the first time; I cut my hair short in an act of radical self-possession; and three days before my thirteenth birthday, I agonized over what my first Facebook profile picture would be, something earnest but cool enough to represent me. Growing up at the dawn of Internet hyper-connectivity, I quickly learned that search for identity was often complicated by the intrusion of technology. For kids like myself, these new forms of communication permitted artifice and image optimization on an unprecedented scale while also granting near infinite access to the self-curated images of those around us; this technology of fragmentation and union is the paradox of the information age.

The kids of Japan were experiencing the exact same thing on the other side of the world. Enter All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001), Shunji Iwai’s troubling film about adolescence in the nascence of the Internet.

The film depicts the fractured relationship between Yūichi (Hayato Ichihara) and Shūsuke (Shūgo Oshinari), two middle school students who, embroiled in the violence of youth, find their solace in the music of Björk-like singer Lily Chou-Chou. Under the respective aliases “Philia” and “Blue Cat,” Yūichi and Shūsuke unknowingly reconnect online behind the anonymity of their keyboards, waxing poetic about the “ether” from which Lily’s music is conjured and their equal desires to find peace in the material world. Simultaneously, Shūsuke and his cronies inflict horrific acts of physical suffering on Yūichi and his classmates, including piano prodigy Kuno (Ayumi Itō) and melancholic Tsuda (Aoi Yū). Replicating the accelerating intermediality—or fusion of media forms—of the Internet’s boom years, the film makes use of

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mixed media including text, music, and video. Through the interaction of these forms and the tension within the relationships of Yūichi and Shūsuke’s real-life and online identities, All About Lily Chou-Chou portrays coming-of-age in the early 2000s as an often-violent play between interpersonal connection and rupture, all facilitated by the technology that revolutionized the ways in which we understand ourselves and one another.

Let’s start with the most assertive of these media forms: text. The text that flashes on-screen is most often a transcript from the Lily fan forum that Yūichi administers as Philia, like conversations about her new releases, existential adolescent musings, and the occasional cry for help. Each bit of text is attributed to anonymous writers, with aliases like “Bear” or “Ice.” As the preferred and most personal form of communication across a mostly wordless performance on the part of Ichihara, the forum’s text offers a lifeline of connection between Yūichi and his kindred Lily fans—Shūsuke included—despite the barrier of anonymity. This paradox, by which the forum’s contributors develop intensely intimate relationships without ever meeting offline, manifests itself visually in the text’s intrusion on-screen. The film presents several breathtaking views of the suburban Japanese landscape, full of vibrant green rice fields and long dirt roads hedged in by towering electrical lines. These landscapes, however, are fragmented by the intrusion of text, which abruptly cuts to black mid-tracking shot. By preventing the viewer from lingering on the beauty of the natural world that the characters physically inhabit, the on-screen text represents the disjuncture inherent in forms of virtual communication. Thus, the paradox is reinforced: Technology as a fragmentation on the visual plane but a method of connection and intimacy on the narrative.

The subject of these forum conversations is, of course, Lily herself, emphasizing the bonding capacity of music in a text-based relationship.

Music thus occupies a central role in the film’s observations on adolescence in the Internet age, appearing both in contemporary styles in the form of Lily’s songs (performed by Salyu) and more classical elements like the piano suites of Claude Debussy. Debussy, as one of the first composers of the ether, is said to be a direct influence on Lily herself—and Kuno is an admirer of both, spending hours practicing Debussy’s “Arabesque” on the school piano while also first introducing Shūsuke to Lily’s music before the events of the film.As stylistically diverging composers, Lily and Debussy mirror the paradox of Internet relationships in the interplay between contemporary and classical

art. In other words, just as Yūichi’s online friendships house both old and new forms of relationship- and identity-formation, so too does the music of Lily and Debussy in their pairing as old and new musical styles.

Yet when these songs appear in the film generates a further paradox.

For Yūichi and Kuno, Lily and Debussy respectively represent a safe haven from the violence of adolescence; Yūichi spends his most introspective moments listening to Lily in a vast rice field while Kuno drifts “Arabesque” across the piano keys, bathed in the light of the school music room. These are some of the film’s most beautiful and solitary moments, insulating the characters and keeping the suffering out of earshot. However, the songs of Lily and Debussy are also used as the soundtracks to Yūichi and Kuno’s most painful humiliations. In an early sequence, Yūichi is set upon by Shūsuke and his gang, stripped in an auto dump, and forced to masturbate in front of them—all while Lily’s “Experiment of Love” plays in the background. As for Kuno, she is ambushed by Shūsuke’s friends in an abandoned factory, raped, and has her head shaved to the dulcet sounds of a Debussy suite. Like the creative and destructive capacities of the Internet, the music of All About Lily Chou-Chou develops a quality simultaneously comforting and tragic, perhaps alluding to the indifference of media forms to the contexts in which they are often implemented.

Turning to its use of video, the film’s occasional preference for grainy, handheld footage over clear widescreen emphasizes the DIY nature of early Internet media and the pitfalls of such a democratization. Yūichi and Shūsuke’s eventful vacation to Okinawa before their falling-out serves as one example, as does Kuno’s assault sequence that is filmed with a handheld camera from the perspective of her assailants. Sure enough, Tsuda’s storyline revolves around her blackmail into sex work by Shūsuke, who holds compromising videos over her head. Here, another double-edged sword: the proliferation of web-based methods of distribution encouraged by the Internet gives broad access to the creation of art while also permitting violence that is sustainable and hypercirculative—think, for example, the emergence of revenge porn.

With the maxim of “if you put it online, it’s there forever” in mind, this creates a near infinite cycle of humiliation and entrapment, which ultimately pushes Tsuda to her final act of self-repossession; she

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commits suicide by jumping from an electrical tower while Shūsuke, transported by the music, writes “I’m flying!” in the Lily forum.

In its use of text, music, and video to replicate the accelerated intermediality of the early 2000s, All About Lily Chou-Chou exposes the simultaneous atomization and convergence of a virtually connected society. As an exploration of youth in such an era, it charts the development of a new social archetype: the Internet loner, epitomized by Yūichi. Unsuccessful in his search for community in the material world, Yūichi takes to online forums to replicate a sense of interpersonal connection. The term “loner” contradicts itself in this context because the Internet loner is far from alone, using virtual space to build intimate relationships where he can spill all his deepest emotions and desires. But these relationships are equally furtive, blocked from a more totalizing connection by the anonymity of screen names, the distance of geography, and the dependence on technology for their continued existence. In this way, Yūichi, Shūsuke, and their Lily-obsessed comrades are together in their alone-ness, piercing the bubble of their bedroom solitude to forge genuine—if not elusive—forms of intimacy. Whether by correlation or causation, this online intimacy is paired with a real-world brutality, encouraging a further retreat into the safety of the Internet in an unending cycle of self-preservation and dual identity-formation. This is the landscape that the kids of the early 2000s were forced to navigate, a world built on the paradoxical foundation of fragmentation and connection inherent in new virtual forms of social relations. The result is a film steeped in both the nostalgia of simpler times and the pains of being young, complicated by the safety and elusiveness of Internet identity and besieged by the violent reaction of a generation dispossessed. As one client of the salon run by Yūichi’s mother quite simply puts it: “Kids these days are very scary.”

This essay was originally commissioned by Flipscreen under the title 'Perfect Humiliation: ‘All About Lily Chou-Chou’ (2001), Adolescence, and the Dawn of the Internet Loner'. It is reproduced here with the permission of the author and the outlet.

To See The Next Part of the Dream (Parannoul, 2021)

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All About Lily Chou-Chou (Shunji Iwai, 2001)

P O S T C A R D S F R O M LILY P HILE S

by Va rio u s "Twenty years ago I wasn't born yet. Two days later I will be born. My birthday is close to the release date. The filming location was local. I went to school every day across that bridge, and I think this movie is part of my life."

- Ukigumo

"I spent my life on indie films, but after that, I moved away from that dream, and now I haven't been able to choose a job for my life for a long time. I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do, but rather I might have avoided it. What can I do? The feeling of participating in this society, being useful, and living for someone may be a little far away. There is a limit to what I can do in society. I think that dreaming, such as a movie, may mean finding a way to expand the society, or more broadly, the world."

- Anon

"Suddenly, Lily's song is playing from my computer and is rekindling. It's been 20 years since then. It's new, but I visited for the first time. I am very happy that the world of that time still exists here and in me.

The indescribable emotions I felt at that time are still in me and I think they are very important. Things you don't want to lose."

- Hifumi

"I watched this film when I was 18, the college entrance exam was just around the corner and I was still confused about the future. Lily Chou-Chou maximized my worries, I wanted to be a musician like her.

A few years later, I finally decided not to worry about the future anymore, and started writing new music which helped me a lot."

""No words can describe my feeling after watching this movie. It is the ether of hope, the ether of despair, and the ether of eternity !!!"

- Layer_12

- Parannoul

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"I first saw All About Lily Chou-Chou in 2004 and could not sleep after finishing the film. The image of the green rice field, the painful fate of the characters, and the ethereal soundtrack continually resonated in my mind. I got up and wrote my thoughts about this movie (about 4 pages) and posted it on an internet forum. The next day, many users in the forum complimented my writing like “such a good review” or “your language is so touching”. Therefore, I kept writing and decided to become a film critic despite my bachelor's degree in Economics. I have been doing this job for 17 years and I’m still curious whether it’s a wrong decision.

All About Lily Chou-Chou has been involved with my life in many ways. When I first traveled to Japan in 2013, I desperately looked for the rice field that appeared in the film (I had to walk almost 4 km from the train station!). One month after the trip, I saw a woman who used a rice field picture from All About Lily Chou-Chou as her smartphone wallpaper in a convenience store. I decided to say hi and we chatted about the film for an hour. We exchanged our contact, kept talking, went on a date, and finally became a couple.

Coincidentally, my girlfriend was a Thai-Japanese translator and worked with Yu Aoi (who plays Shiori Tsuda in All About Lily Chou-Chou) when she came to Bangkok for shooting an advertisement. She told Aoi about my journey to the rice field. The actress was surprised and said she felt so grateful that people still remember the film.

Unfortunately, I broke up with my girlfriend two years ago. It’s such a bitter end and we don’t talk to each other anymore. She may completely forget me but I’m quite sure that she still uses that All About Lily Chou-Chou rice field picture as her smartphone wallpaper. And for me, I still think of this film from time to time. "

- KanchatR

"There is a good reason to come here. I know ether.

One person cries. Towards what you can't see. I just cry. Open your big mouth. Cry. Of course no one comforts me. Because I'm always alone. But I always have ether. That's enough. That's enough."

- Eureka

"Dream as if you will Live Forever, And Live as if you'll die today."

- Pursuit

"I guess I also want to be like a melody, live inside the music and let every piece of myself get carried away by the waves directly into the sound.'

- Artemis 21

"I wanted to mark my existence… To not feel like a lifeless ghost… With virtual people with the same interest as mine. Recently things have been tough, I'm exhausted, I've started High School, as a sophomore (If I'm not wrong, I'm not from EUA, 10 grade) And the change has been terrible. I'm always thinking of quitting school or even ending my own existence. I don't have any hopes for my future… And I'm afraid that I'm going to lose my few friends, my source of motivation, I think it was my mistake."

- BloodyFrog420

It's peculiar how this film sticks with you. It sticks with you because it's all emotion and mood and intensity. And so the film likewise sticks with me the emotions and moods and intensities of who I was when I'd watched it. The haziness of that time of my life, and the high-strung state I was in then. And the light in those days - the days of an English summer lit, rather, with the luminescence of my laptop screen as I turned out the brightness of the sun with roller blinds imprinted with African elephants. Of the film, I remember its violence, passion, loneliness, heartbreak, and I remember its palette of paleness, greys and beige, and its drifting pace and softness like falling snowflakes. As I now look back, I realise this is a film I remember with neither my body nor my mind, but a deeper intensity within. This is how All About Lily Chou-Chou sticks with me.

- Jenna__Ng

"I think I’ve just realised why I love that film so much. I practically am Yuichi! I have his internet problem, I have his desperate yearning for something to believe in, his occult leanings (I’m a quasi-Thelemite, quasi-pagan, with inflections of yet more belief systems), and, most of all, I can empathise intensely with life reduced to going through motions – life after committing something terrible. I’m currently experiencing the shockwaves of a dreadful moral error (on my part, that is), and feel like a robot. I deserve it, of course, but I shan’t mope. I’m not wholly certain I deserve the solace I derive from Lily, but it’s something to help me stick it out another day, and the next day, and the next."

- HikkiJulian

"Its the only film i've seen that demonstrates the depression and pain teens suffer, theres a lot of movies about violence and bullying but this was the first one that made me feel so much pain.

And also made me nostalgic, i used to (and still do sometimes) spend a lot of time in forums about music and other fandoms and the messages between the characters felt so real, idk."

- TheChurchGuy

These messages are a mix of (auto) translated posts written by users of the original "Lilyholic" BBS message board (which remains active today), snippets taken from the /LilyChouChou Reddit, and messages sent directly to me from "real" people around the world.

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All About Lily Chou-Chou (Shunji Iwai, 2001) 25

FIVE Q UESTIO N S with dir e cto r S h u nji Iwai How did you come to make a film about a pop star? What interested you about the relationship between fans and artists? The film seems very prescient in how fan culture has developed since.

There was a murder case in 1980s where a boy who thought about killing a famous idol was arrested for killing the family members of the idol first. It was a cruel case, but at that time I felt thtat the way his life mixed with his surroundings and the environment provided by the mass media was quite modern. Later, I came to realize it was nothing new to us. We, humans have been this way since long ago. Watching football games every week won’t change one’s life. It’s a waste of time. Yet we spend more time on those things. The same is true with playing video games and watching the news. Things happen in the world that won’t affect one’s life much, but still we spend considerable time on such unnecessary things each and every day. Back then, I felt this phenomenon was by no means a small issue to humanity. I still feel the same.

Why did you decide to make a film about the internet? What interested you about forums, chatrooms, and other ways of communicating with people at this early stage of the internet's emergence?

I was writing a script for a film at that time but it didn’t work out. I abandoned the project and decided to publish the story that was written up to that point as a novel. Then I came up with an idea of writing it on BBS on the internet. The serial started out involving general viewers, and the words of many fans came to shape the artist “Lily Chou-Chou” who did not exist in the real world. I was able to make this story into a film through this process.

What look did you want to achieve with the unique cinematography of this film? It was an early use of digital cameras and must have been quite experimental and unpredictable at the time? What were your influences for the film’s visuals?

Back then, it was common to have home video cameras, and disposable instant cameras made out of paper were popular. I saw realities in the pictures taken by inexperienced amateurs that were different from the ones taken by

professionals. I wanted to produce such visuals. For example, for the lighting of night scenes, I tried to shoot using a stroboscope. For this, I referred to pictures taken by amateurs who could not control the stroboscope properly.

It is brave to show teenage life in such a dark and depressing way. Why is this such a sad film? Do you think this is the reason why the film connects with so many people, or is something else?

The fun times I spent with my classmates were precious, but I also had a time when I was isolated in the classroom and had to endure a lonely life.

That was when I felt like everything except from the classroom and home were spaces were I was all by myself. That is the root of my becoming a writer, and so I think hard days are not necessarily all about misfortune.

There is a view you can see only because you are in that situation. That’s what I wanted to produce. I think such a view is something that everyone must be seeing somewhere… like somehow always remembering the sky you looked up on the day when you were treated unreasonably by others.

Do you think it is different being a teenager now compared to 20 years ago when this film was made, and compared to when you were a teenager 25 years before? What things are always the same?

The ways that we obtain, share, and circulate information have changed drastically. Bullying continues to be a problem in Japan. I think it will not be solved unless the school system itself is changed.

All About Lily Chou-Chou (Shunji Iwai, 2001) 27

007 - EMBERS LOST FUTURES x #BFIJapan Special Thanks to: Asuka, Hannah, Ian, Joanne, Manon, Ollie, Paul, Shunji, Sonali, Tyler, Will.