The Temporality of “Contingency” in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Cinema

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s cinema is deeply informed by ontological concerns, with the question of contingency occupying a central position in his work. Contingency has long been a crucial problem in contemporary philosophy. In Heidegger’s thought, contingency can be understood as one of the fundamental modes of human existence, articulated through Dasein’s thrownness into the world and its being-ahead-of-itself in care. Sartre, in his reflections on freedom and contingency, emphasizes that while freedom opens onto the realm of possibility, the sudden irruption of contingency within concrete situations renders such freedom almost unbearably light. In Hamaguchi’s films, contingency is not merely represented but generated. Narrative contingencies give rise to ontological contingencies, exposing characters to their own freedom within situations they cannot fully foresee. At the same time, bead-like chains of contingent events form a dynamic series, constantly regenerating themselves through encounters and collisions. Within this process, the cinematic flow performs a random oscillation between being and nothingness, allowing images to leap unpredictably across thresholds of meaning.