In honor of my presentation on Innocence at SFRA 2017 yesterday, some screenshots from the amazing, beautiful, haunting film.
Just a few shots of the title sequence where Oshii cites both his earlier sequence in Ghost in the Shell and rearticulates cyborg/gynoid bodies as Hans Bellmer’s Dolls brought to life. Bellmer was active in 1920s Berlin, where he began his doll project as a rejection of the fascism of the Nazi Party - the strangely ball-jointed and oddly articulated bodies were sexualized, mutated, and mutating forms.
Oshii became fascinated with Bellmer’s dolls and constructed the gynoids in Innocence with the same strange articulation. The first image above is drawn straight from Bellmer’s (see the last photograph), with two dolls floating in a sea of primoridal creation. The second exposes/links these doll productions to technologies of reproduction that are central to the film’s exploration of cyborg and posthuman/doll life. The final shot is of the cover of Hans Bellmer’s book as it appears in the anime - this is the cover of the Japanese edition of Bellmer’s book, although the text inside the pages is shown later in Korean.
Steven Brown, in Tokyo Cyberpunk, does a detailed analysis of the relationship between Oshii’s gynoids and Bellmer’s dolls - reading them as “attractive and repulsive, erotic and grotesque” objects of Oshii’s exploration of mechanic desire.