Cityscapes often allow for storytelling by externalising mindscapes
One striking example of this style occurs during a battle in a museum, where a tank trying to kill the Major sprays bullets on a wall depicting an evolutionary tree. Up the tree the bullets strike, eventually stopping short of “hominis” at the peak. This shot can be understood in several ways, but one of the more obvious interpretations is a reinforcement of the proposition that machines will put an end to traditional methods of evolution.
Many of the questions that are raised in GITS —- the nature of identity and its connection to memory, the evolutionary trajectory of man, the progress of technology — have been debated by philosophers and theologians for millennia, not least in Arthur Koestler’s book The Ghost in the Machine (Hutchinson, 1967), which was the inspiration for the original manga by Masamune Shirow, first published in 1989.
But while GITS is based on the manga, there is a great difference in tone between the film and its source material. Indeed, admirers of the film who then turn to the comic for more of the same may well come away disappointed. For while the manga does discuss philosophical, technological, and political ideas, it is a much more light-hearted affair. The enigmatic moodiness of the film, so reminiscent of film noir, owes more to European cinema — Oshii has often mentioned directors such as Jean-Luc Godard as being a major influence, in addition to films such as Metropolis and that most quintessential of cyberpunk films: Blade Runner.
Nor is GITS unique in this respect; Oshii’s 1983-1984 mini-series Dallos, often cited as the first direct-to-video animation in history, tells a futuristic story in which oppressed colonists on the moon use terrorism and work stoppages to obtain freedom — a plot derived from Gillo Pontecorvo’s famous film The Battle of Algiers (1966).
But Oshii’s own impact on Western cinema has not been insubstantial. When the Wachowski brothers were pitching The Matrix (1999), they screened GITS to their producer in order to indicate the kind of film they wanted to create.
The Matrix trilogy, in addition to containing many visual references to GITS, similarly ends on an equivocal note in which the simplistic classification of humans as “good” and machines as “bad” is eroded. The Wachowskis in turn influenced Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (Kenji Kamiyama, 2002-2005), a TV series which also featured input by Oshii, and which explored further many of the themes found in the original film.
In 2004, Oshii released a sequel titled Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, a visually impressive but convoluted extension of some of the ideas in the original film. In 2008 he re-released GITS with new computer graphics, a remixed soundtrack, and the trimming of some scenes, but this did little to improve a work that required no fixing, and the film is best seen in its untampered form.
Recently, Hollywood has become interested in the GITS franchise, with the recent release of a live-action remake. This production is partly due to Steven Spielberg, who acquired the rights to remaking GITS some years ago and who declared it to be one of his favourite stories. Unfortunately, with dialogue that could have been written by a computer program, the remake is a thematically simple tale bereft of the philosophical and technological questing that made the original film a provocative work of art. A more promising development is the recent announcement of a new animated installment in the GITS series with Kenji Kamiyama at the helm.
In a 1967 interview with Sight & Sound, Fritz Lang seemingly dismissed his own Metropolis of four decades earlier, and expressed scepticism about the possibility of saying anything new on the subject of man-machine interaction: “All right, so man has to live with the machine. Is that a message today? He still has to live with himself first.” Unfortunately, Lang did not live long enough to witness GITS’s obliteration of the man-machine dichotomy via the depiction of a future in which living with the machine and living with oneself are identical.
Unlike much other sci-fi, GITS postulates that so-called AI (artificial intelligence) is not artificial at all, but merely another type of life-form. Would Lang have agreed with James Cameron, the director of intelligent sci-fi films as Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), and The Terminator (1984), who described GITS as “the first truly adult animation film to reach a level of literary and visual excellence”?
While this accolade should arguably go to Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988), GITS is no less profound and striking in its ideas and imagery, and despite the profusion of comics, novels, sequels, remakes, and television series that comprise the Ghost in the Shell franchise, the original film stands apart as a milestone in cinema history.
The author is an antiquarian and freelance writer
Published in Dawn, EOS, April 16th, 2017