ABSTRACT
This essay offers an account of After Life's early cinematic relations, which, recast some entrenched ways of understanding early cinema, including the "cinema of attractions". The memory recreations in After Life underscore an excess in early cinema, that poly-sensory excess a feature of the medium since its beginnings, they also speak to a condition of dearth that, relates to early cinema. The connection between the elderly woman's cine-memory of falling cherry blossoms and Falling Leaves, indeed, presents itself for reasons that go far beyond a mere conjunction of low-budget environmental effects. The film in many ways feels connected to Kore-eda's early work as a documentarian, to the series of searching, socially trenchant non-fiction films that he originally made for broadcast on Japanese television. Kore-eda anticipates scholars like Vivian Sobchack who have attempted to rethink a reigning ocularcentrism in film studies.
