haruka doi
From He Was Here, and You Are Here (1985).
For our July membership feature we are delighted to introduce the work of Haruka Doi, a filmmaker and musician active in the 1980s and 1990s whose introspective and lyrical diary films scatter fragments of self-reflection through the prism of everyday spaces. The program includes a rare English-subtitled screening of her Torino International Youth Film Festival award-winning work He Was Here, and You Are Here (1985), as well as A Gentle Afternoon Nap (1989), a reposeful short featuring striking time-lapse imagery.
Doi’s filmmaking activities began when she was a student at Tokyo University of the Arts, when in fulfilment for a brief in one of her classes to “make a work with white cloth,” she recorded a film of white cloth fluttering in the wind with 8mm film. Her subsequent filmography has retained the same sense of fascinated observation with the play of the elements over passive surfaces, such as that of daylight on bare skin, clouds in the sky, or leaves shaken by a breeze.
Doi’s work also showcases cinema’s ability to animate the mundane, merging the inner world of imagination with an outer reality. In He Was Here and You Are Here, the speaker recounts her fixation on a figure from her past, while projecting images of ‘him’ onto various surfaces in her Tokyo apartment. The speaker’s memories reverberate within the domestic space, fusing with the visual structure of her daily life. In A Gentle Afternoon Nap, the quiet of a New York hotel room is stirred by images of natural phenomena, shot outdoors, which permeate the space through the technique of multiple exposure. As in He Was Here, this room, where two lovers seem to live in a world apart, is connected to the outside through cinematic images.
Doi ceased making films entirely in 1994 to focus on musical activities. Her cinematic output is therefore limited to around 10 works, standing as a record of her voice and vision over this decade-long period.
July Member’s Viewing
Haruka Doi, He Was Here, and You Are Here (中のあなた、今のあなた), 1985, 8 minutes, 8mm
Haruka Doi, A Gentle Afternoon Nap (やはらかな午后の昼寝), 1989, 7 minutes, 8mm
Become a member for just $5 a month to enjoy Haruka Doi’s works, and please share your thoughts with us on Twitter, Instagram or Letterboxd.
This Members Viewing program is supported, in part, by a grant from the Toshiba International Foundation.
The programs will be available for viewing on CCJ’s viewing platform.
program
He Was Here, and You Are Here (中のあなた、今のあなた), 1985, 8min, 8mm
A film created while Doi was a student at Tokyo University of the Arts. The work is in two parts, structured around a comparison between a former romantic interest (“the you inside me” or 中のあなた) and a current one (“you now” or 今のあなた).
According to Doi, the film was inspired by the sentence, “A white wall anywhere can be a screen.” The film begins with the image of a man running through a crowd of people over a pedestrian crossing, a scene which is then projected onto various white surfaces in the filmmaker’s apartment, such as a refrigerator, a plate, an egg, a wall, a toilet bowl, and her own stomach.
“The indoor scenes were filmed at the apartment in Itabashi in Tokyo where I lived at the time, which had no bath and shared toilets,” writes Doi on the work’s autobiographical foundation. “The image of the repeated scramble crossing is in front of Yoyogi Station on the JR line, where the preparatory school I attended when I was a teenager used to be. Every day, I spent my time studying for entrance exams, but the thought of suddenly meeting this longed-for boy at the crossroads fed my soul.”
The film won a prize at the Pia Film Festival 1986, as well as the Torino International Young Film Festival 8mm Overseas Division of the same year.
A Gentle Afternoon Nap (やはらかな午后の昼寝), 1989, 7min, 8mm
A work filmed in a room at the Washington Square Hotel in New York, created with the technique of multiple exposure. Scenes of a nude couple are overlaid with images of natural phenomena, such as blooming flowers and clouds in the sky.
“The scenes of the man and woman were in filmed in the hotel room where they were staying in New York. The summer sky and clouds were shot time-lapse on the roof of a building in Nakano-ku, Tokyo, where I lived at the time. I can’t remember where the cherry blossoms were filmed, but I remember I only saw the petals on the ground rather than the flowers themselves. Three motifs taken at different locations: the activities of men and women, the hot sunshine every summer, and the cherry blossoms that bloom and fall in spring. Things that are fleeting and disappearing, but at the same time, only exist at that moment.“
Haruka doi
Haruka Doi was born in 1962 in Kanagawa Prefecture. She graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts. Her filmmaking activities began when in a contemporary art class, she recorded a film of white cloth fluttering in the wind with 8mm film to fulfil a brief of "making a work with white cloth." Doi belonged to the university’s filmmaking society, where she made both solo and collaborative work and held screenings on campus.
While studying at Tokyo University of the Arts, Doi also attended the ninth term of Image Forum's Imaging Research Institute. He Was Here, and You Are Here (中のあなた、今のあなた), a work created as an assignment there, won a prize at the Pia Film Festival in 1986 and in the same year won the top prize in the Turin International Young Film Festival 8mm Overseas Division. Doi participated in regular screenings of "STUDIO SWI'TZ", a video group consisting of graduates of the Image Forum affiliated video research institute, and continued to create works at a pace of around one per year.
In 1989, she appeared as an actress in Akira Hoshino's feature film Senaka de Shinako. At the same time, she began making music: writing lyrics, composing songs and playing the guitar under the alias HALUKA (later HALUKA unit). Film screenings and live concerts were held at Gallery Cherubim in Ginza, Voyant Cinemathèque in Kyoto, Seibu Studio 200 in Ikebukuro, and Ikebukuro Bungeiza.
In 1994, Doi released her final film, Father, burned ( 父が、燃えた) at her solo video exhibition at Kunitachi Kino Kyuhe, which included a live performance as HALUKA. Since then, she has not produced any film or video works, and has devoted herself to her music activities.