A Study On The Narrative Characteristics Of Tetsuya Nakashima’s Films

The films directed by Tetsuya Nakashima are all characterized by his distinctive personal features and a unique but bold style,demonstrating his spirit in pioneering film techniques.Theories should progress in parallel with practices,and there is already an abundance of studies on the director Tetsuya Nakashima in the field of film theory,most of which put the emphasis on Nakashima’s distinctive audiovisual language.When mentioning Nakashima,it reminds of his magnificent and rich audiovisual techniques,which seem to have become the main feature of his films,but the research value of Nagashima’s films extends far beyond that,as the narrative features of his films are also well-conceived and profound,which can be observed in the telling of some complicated stories.Since Nakashima has a disdain for lockstep and conservatism,he will not repeat the same narrative pattern in subsequent films even it has proved successful in a previous one.Consequently,his narrative techniques are complex and varied,but the consistency of his aesthetic principles can also be found in the narratives of many of his films.By discussing the narrative characteristics of Tetsuya Nakajima’s films,this article is engaged with the analysis of the narrative structure,narrative perspective,and the suspense and sudden turns of the narrative to study the employment of narrative techniques and conceptual arrangements behind his stories.His skills in structuring complex stories and controlling the audience’s sentiments are largely attributable to this,so it is both academically and practically valuable to study the narrative characteristics of Tetsuya Nakashima’s films.This article mainly adopts case study and literature research method to watch and analyze his films,and through summarizing the existing literature,it is found that the narrative structure of his early works,which is important for understanding the evolution of the narrative characteristics of Tetsuya Nakashima’s films,only receives scarce research concerns.Therefore,this article is committed to conducting a corresponding analysis in detail,focusing on the commonalities of his particular narrative structure in his later and more widely known works,such as his common play-within-a-play structure and the narrative strategies used in breaking the film’s time and space.The narrative perspectives of Nakashima’s films are complex and varied,and related academic studies have defined them from different perspectives,such as "multiple voices",self narrative,and narrative monologues,etc.This article adopts the division method of inner focus,outer focus and zero focus to summarize the narrative perspectives of several of his films to avoid logical confusion caused by multi-dimensional research.The narrative suspense and sudden turn in Nakashima’s films are common narrative devices in his works,especially the sudden turn of his plots,which is as strong and impressive as the audiovisual language of his films,and the related research gap has yet to be filled,which will be discussed in detail in this article.