Ghost in the Shell, Cut No. 334, Solegraph Edition

HIROMASA OGURA (B. 1954)
Ghost in the Shell, Cut No. 334, Solegraph Edition
numbered and signed by the artist (lower edge)
solegraph high-grade fine-art print on Radiant White 270 g/m² archival cotton paper
sheet: 16 1/2 x 23 3/8 inches (42 x 59.4 cm)
image: 10 5/8 x 15 inches (27 x 38 cm)
original background painted in poster colour on paper in 1995. this is one of 25 numbered examples. solegraph edition produced by Yamada Photo Process, Toyama, published by Riekeles Gallery in 2023. supplied unframed.

Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell (1995) is a milestone of science fiction, set in 2029 in the fictional New Port City and modelled largely on Hong Kong — a place where, for Oshii, old waterways and new high-rises stood for the flow of information that turns a city into a gigantic data space. This Solegraph edition reproduces Cut No. 334, part of the sequence in which Major Kusanagi wanders through the city exploring the space around her and searching for meaning inside herself. The sequence runs from cut no. 314 to cut no. 346, about three minutes and ten seconds at the midpoint of both the running time and the story, and Oshii likes to place such passages at the centre of his films. Because it is shown almost entirely from the protagonist's point of view, the backgrounds take the starring role and are rendered accordingly. During the sequence day turns into night and rain sets in, which gives it a dream-like quality; the first part, the old town in daylight, was painted by Shūichi Kusamori, and from this cut onwards Hiromasa Ogura took over the final production backgrounds.

A print of this kind shows something the film never did. At the edges of Ogura's paintings, the first broad and forceful brushstrokes remain visible — an underpainting called jinuri, the foundation on which the background is built. In his work it can be read as a metamorphosis: coarse strokes at the margin, condensing towards the centre into finer lines and layered colour until a skyscraper stands there, shimmering in pale light. The tension between the abstract force of the first strokes and the surgical precision of the finished passages is where his mastery lies, and in the cinema the frame cropped all of that away.