The Compulsive Landscape: Eri Saito & Masanobu Nakamura
CCJ presents the work of filmmakers Eri Saito & Masanobu Nakamura as part of our Meander Program, curated by Mia Parnall.
The program is $12 for non-members, $6 for members.
Eri Saito, Shake: dreaming body. 2018, 3min 38sec, b&w, silent. Masanobu Nakamura, Flying Image. 1989, 11min, colour, 16mm.
This program is part of CCJ’s Meander, a section of the site dedicated to forging links between artists represented by CCJ and work from contemporary artists that lie outside CCJ’s core mission either geographically or historically. These programs will highlight crossovers in media and technique, shared thematic concerns, and resonances in mood between artists working within these disparate contexts. How do the experimental aims of these films vary? What does each artist aim to wring from the world through cinema? How can we compare the two to examine the legacy of twentieth-century underground cinema on artists today, and at the same time to illuminate the relevance of their work to our own times?
PROGRAM
Eri Saito, Shake: dreaming body. 2018, 3min 38sec, b&w, silent, 8mm.
Masanobu Nakamura, Flying Image. 1989, 11min, colour, 16mm.
Eri Saito, mistake, blockade, fancy, panky. 2020, 4min 43sec, b&w, 5.1ch, 8mm.
Masanobu Nakamura, The Emptiness That Is Close to Me. 1994, 22min, colour, 8mm.
Masanobu Nakamura is described as a ‘post-underground’ filmmaker. Though his best-known works, produced from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, coincided with the height of underground filmmaking in Japan, they represent a diversion from its stylistic qualities and political aims. Many of Nakamura’s films are rather lonely evocations of urban life and the fantasies and neuroses of the urban subject as it traverses the half-physical, half-psychic space of the city: on trains, through arcades, into bedrooms, absorbing and regurgitating images of schoolgirls, shop mannequins, industrial architecture.
Eri Saito is an artist working primarily with film and installation, graduating from Wako University in 2015, whose work also explores relationships between the subject, space, and the senses. Composed of echoes, impressions, and tentative gestures, her work follows bodies engaged in exploring, often by haptic means, the parameters of physical spaces. A concern with the structural analysis of perception places Saito’s work in dialogue with the lineage of experimental film in Japan; yet its uniquely oneiric qualities resonate with Nakamura specifically. Working several decades apart, both filmmakers are concerned with the hybridity of space that cinema can represent.
This program presents two films from both Saito and Nakamura, each of which explore the process of bodies orienting themselves within landscapes. Central to this experimental onus is the medium of analogue film and its direct index of physical presence. The sensuous nature of film drives Saito’s Shake: dreaming body (2018), in which a woman navigates a forest clearing by means of touch, following fine strings that connect trees together: here film is the thread, the reverberative medium, that grounds us as spectators within captured reality. In Nakamura’s The Emptiness That Is Close To Me (1994), film functions as a witness to the transitory marginalia of everyday life, establishing ground within a world that is constantly moving. These works are as much studies of human subjects as of analogue film itself, as a lonely witness fascinated by its own autonomous capacity to perceive and record reality.
Film at once orients us within a time and place, but can also produce effects of subjective disorientation. Like the human mind, its sensitivity renders it prone to dissolution. Saito and Nakamura are united by their use of flicker, where film’s continuous succession of frames, and the illusion of reality it produces, splinters into a sequence of still images not connected by temporal continuity. This allows the spectator the feeling of being several places at once, experiencing multiple disparate, but sutured, realities. In Saito’s mistake, blockade, fancy, panky (2020), these sequences appear structural, almost cubist in nature–- an attempt to construct a fuller reality than that which the monocular lens of the camera can transmit. The redemption of reality becomes a compulsive aim, the film’s technical acrobatics perhaps a bid to escape consciousness of its own illusoriness, its own two-dimensionality.
For Nakamura, it is a psychosexual paranoia that ruptures the continuity of film. In Flying Image (1989), erotic images erupt through the surface of a landscape, forming a flicker between two realities, one external and sensed; one presumably imagined, psychic, internal. Flicker is a technique often associated with collective experience; for example, in the hallucinatory films of Paul Sharits, or the psychedelic pop nightclub projections of Keiichi Tanaami. Yet for both Nakamura and Saito, it becomes something intensely private and inward, figuring an intrusion of interiority on the plane of reality. The compound image it creates proposes that reality and interiority are not like parallel streams, but rather two sides of a membrane that the multivalence of human perception and experience makes porous.
The films in this program are acts of wilful disorientation: experiments in film’s ability to capture, but also to lose, its subject matter. Nakamura’s camera is a cipher for a body lost in Tokyo’s ocean of images; his films haunted by phantasmatic bodies that are lost in the sense of absent – unreal, fetishised, feminine bodies in a continual state of flight, that his films fail to ever really capture. Yet in Saito’s films, this feminine body is itself a vessel for haunting. It is lost in the sense of disoriented, a ‘dreaming’ subject disconnected from the physical reality in which we watch it wander. Her films give the sense of a body probing blindly into an unknown future, using old tools. It will be these errant subjects and errant images, however, that will generate these future landscapes in the very act of searching for them.
With special thanks to Akihiro Suzuki.
More Masanobu Nakamura films available to watch on ART SALOON. https://art-saloon.site/
Eri Saito is a Japanese visual artist living and working in Tokyo. Born 1991 in Fukushima. Graduated from Wako University, Department of Arts, Faculty of Representational studies, in 2015. Focusing on video, she creates works themed on such invisible and uncertain dynamics as memory and cognition. Her recent exhibitions include ”WVlog: personal” (Art Center Ongoing, Tokyo, 2022), “Until It Gets Dark” (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 2021), “Glory of 2020” (Yumi Adachi Contemporary / Awoba Soh, Tokyo, 2020), and “1GB” (Spiral Hall, Tokyo, 2020). Video works have been shown at occasions including the 40th edition of the International Festival of Films on Art [Le FIFA], (Montreal, Canada, 2022), Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2022 (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo, 2022), Image Forum Festival 2020 (Theatre Image Forum, Tokyo, 2020) and “The Movie Theater Floating on the Sea” (Kanagawa, 2019).
Masanobu Nakamura was born in Shizuoka in 1949. After joining a film society at his university he spontaneously purchased an 8mm camera, and completed his first film, Disorder (1969), without any filmmaking expertise, learning by doing. Another Life (1976), which employs the technique of re-shooting filmed images on screen, was highly praised by Toshio Matsumoto and others, and he gained attention as an innovative new presence in experimental film.
He participated in the 100 Feet Film Festival, showing the 16mm works Bizarre Disease 1 (1977) and Commemorative Photo (1978). Takahiko Iimura arranged for Nakamura’s Summer is Gone (1978) to be screened overseas.
In the 1980s, Nakamura prolifically released experimental and provocative 16mm films. In 1985 he made Preview using a home video camera, and went on to make other films in various formats including 8mm, 16mm, and video. After premiering the controversial 142-minute For the Films That Are To Be Buried Alive (1989), which blends 8mm and 16mm, he began exploring new modes of landscape theory. He created works dealing with landscape and memory using 8mm film and Hi8 video, concluding with The Ghost of Memories (1997).
Mia Parnall lives and works in Tokyo, and is a graduate of the film studies MA at King’s College London, where she completed a dissertation on 1960s cinema in Japan and the writings of Georges Bataille. She has worked with CCJ since 2021.