Shiho Kano

By folding repeated journeys along the same route on different dates and times into a single instance, this work expresses both the repetitive routines of daily life and the minute variations they produce.

This work is one film of the omnibus ‘Seeing’. About ‘Seeing’: “Filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio, a pioneer of experimental film in Japan and an advocate of Neo-Documentarism since the 1960s, conceived and structured this omnibus film, directed by six experimental filmmakers. Based on the theme of ‘seeing’, proposed by Matsumoto, the six directors approach the subject from varying individual perspective and develop their own unique images. The film addresses fundamental questions: What does it mean to ‘see’ things, and What does it mean to ‘make films’?” (from the official catalog of Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2009)

“This work was commissioned by the Kuma Museum of Art (Ehime Prefecture). It revolves around scenery in Ehime Prefecture and Matsuyama-born film director Itami Mansaku. It begins in Shinonome, the setting of a short story by poet Nakamura Kusatao which is thought to be a depiction of his friendship with Mansaku, and follows Mansaku as he return to Matsuyama from Kyoto where he has become a film director and visits Omogo and Ishizuchi.” (from the catalog of Image Forum Festival 2010)

A studio contains only the camera in a corner of the room. The filmmaker is absent. While rotating, the camera alternates between close-ups and wide angle shots of the studio.

Numinous tracings of beautiful light on the sea, augmented by the artifice of video.

The camera examines an old book about cinema through a small hole similar to a camera obscura. The camera repeats a zoom in/out, analogous to the movement of turning pages, but the text remains illegible. (S.K.)

A letter no one can read, a character whose face cannot be seen, a room without dimensions…remnants of a narrative that have lost their way, tenuously connected with each other by the flashes between the shots.

When we are in the dark, we can see only the sign of the space. The moment the light comes into the room, we can see another space. This space is the incorporated like smoke construction that is composed of the dark, light and time.

In a somber room, there's a flower at a far window. A hidden movement in this video transforms with the course of time into turns and reverses of the inside and the outside of the room, day and night or light and darkness. However, the flower, the pivot of the movement, collapses its own exsistance as one could hardly tell even the color. Here we loose the core we rely on.

The leaf is floating slowly in the dark with the song on the radio out of tune. (S.K.)

Human eye adjusts the brightness of the light automatically, but Camera eye can control the brightness freely. Camera eye can see the darkness in the light of day, and can turn the dusk into the morning sunshine. When the white room is getting darker and lighter, you surely witness that's form is sublimated.

While the spot of water soaked into the tablecloth has disappeared holly -7min 30sec-, the spot repeats contracting and expanding like a surf. Technically, I recomposed the arrangement of time by editing, and piled scenes several times. In this film, the physical and real time of evaporation coexists with the operated time in the film, The aftertaste and the blank are also important matters for this film.

Action of the character in the film is expressed by monochromatic still pictures, in fine, time is in cut state. Though color scenes inserted in the film have flowing time, we can't easily recognize that the scene is moving, because of the fixed shoot. I expressed the fixed time of still pictures, and the eternity and the timelessness, in this film. (The eternal flow of time in fixed scene, or time which is kept stopping.)

You can see the woman sitting still and the landscape in turn. In this film, the character is not the heroine, and is equated with the landscape. As the subject is equated with the existence of a film too, the difference of time each having is presented in this film.