I Have No Memory of My Direction: films by midi onodera
Midi Onodera, I have no memory of my direction (2005)
From November 21 - December 5, we are delighted to present a feature-length work, I have no memory of my direction (2005), along with a series of shorts by Japanese-Canadian filmmaker Midi Onodera. This screening follows the focus of our Community of Images programming, which centers on the activities of Japanese artists in North America. In this iteration, we invite our viewers to explore another point of view–that of a Canadian artist looking toward Japan.
This screening is part of our Meander program, a series that explores works that lie outside of CCJ’s core historical and geographic focus (Japan from 1950s-1980s), but illuminate the technical, art historical or cultural narratives of which our core mission is a part.
The screening features the first Japanese-subtitled version of the feature-length work, I have no memory of my direction (2005). At once narrative, essay film and experimental travelogue, this work explores the layered relationship of the artist to her grandmother’s birthplace of Japan.
11月21日から12月5日まで日系カナダ人の映像作家Midi Onoderaさんの作品をオンライン上映します。日本語字幕がついている作品もありますので、ぜひこの機会にアクセスください。
PROGRAM:
Ville - quelle ville?, 1984, 4 mins
Nobody Knows, 2002, 3 mins *日本語字幕付き
SLIGHTSEER, 2001, 3 mins
I have no memory of my direction, 2005, 77 mins *日本語字幕付き
The special screening is available to all, priced at $8 for CCJ members and $12 for non-members.
Please share your thoughts on the films with us via Twitter, Instagram or Letterboxd.
The programs will be available for viewing on CCJ’s viewing platform.
introduction
Through a prolific body of work since the early 1980s, Midi Onodera has explored how changing technologies of memory and communication shape our relations with others, with place, and with our own identity. Based in Toronto, her earlier films are often poetic meditations on urban life and social ironies, such as TEN CENTS A DANCE - PARALLAX (1985), which explored the mediated interactions of contemporary dating and was revolutionary for its portrayal of gay, lesbian and straight relationships alongside one another. Her first theatrical feature, Skin Deep (1995), also portrayed gay and transgender characters in a metafictional film about tattooing.
I have no memory of my direction (2005)
Ten years later, Onodera made a second feature entitled I have no memory of my direction (2005), an experimental travelogue composed on her first visit to Japan. Her grandmother had migrated from Japan in the early twentieth century, but neither herself nor her parents, themselves Nisei citizens of Canada, had ever travelled there. (1) While Onodera's real father was suffering from Alzheimer's, and knowing little about his side of the family, I have no memory of my direction follows an invisible protagonist who is asked by her grandmother, an employee at the Mitsukoshi department store, to act as "the guardian of her fathers' memories." This mandate sparks a journey through both a real and virtual Japan in pursuit of familiar faces, landmarks, and traces of belonging, and more broadly, a search for meaning in images. Onodera's spoken narration draws the footage from her travels into this dreamlike fiction, as referentiality and identification settle spontaneously on the people and places her camera captures.
The film owes as much to the personae of her family history as to Chris Marker's 1982 Sans Soleil, a foundational film about memory and displacement that Onodera claims to have used as a "road map" for her own. The two corresponded before his death in 2012, and her work inherits the French filmmaker’s affinity for symbols, patterns and play. As it stalks the territory trod by Marker twenty years earlier, I have no memory of my direction becomes a rich and complex intertext that bespeaks to the layered relationship of an artist to a country from which she is both separated and linked; a tribute to the telepathic memory bank of cinephilia.
SLIGHTSEER (2001)
The 2005 feature is accompanied in this program by a selection of shorts also related to the interaction of identity, perspective and place. Ville - quelle ville? (1984), an early work by Onodera, explores the specificity of subjective experience within the cookie-cutter predictability of urban life. In Nobody Knows (2002), another film-poem, we see Onodera's virtuosity in constructing a prismatic, complex sense of her surroundings using experimental cameras. Lastly, SLIGHTSEER (2001) explores different configurations of the gaze - as window, mirror, and lens - to present a commentary on the nature of vision and its other, blindness.
Onodera has been the recipient of various grants and awards in Canada and abroad, including from Canada Council of the Arts, Hamburg International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival and San Francisco International Film Festival. In 2022, she held a solo screening and lecture at Tokyo’s Image Forum entitled "My Queer Eye: A Brief Personal History of Lesbian, Gay and Trans Filmmaking in Canada." She has also spoken at various institutions across Japan, including universities in Nagoya and Niigata. Many of her more recent projects are available on YouTube.
We include an interview with Midi and curator Mia Parnall.
Interview with Midi Onodera
This interview was conducted on Nov 10 2023, and has been edited for the sake of space and clarity.
MP: Hi Midi, thank you so much for joining us today. I wanted to start at the beginning, by asking: what drew you to filmmaking initially?
MO: I think I've always been very attracted to the screen and to the moving image. I remember sneaking down in the middle of the night to watch television while the rest of my family slept. At the time I was growing up, we had a lot of television stations that would show old Hollywood movies. It was a huge education for me. I just loved it, it just felt like they were sort of pathways or windows into other people's lives that I had no idea existed.
Then when I was in high school, I took a film studies course, and we had the option of either writing an essay at the end of the term or making a film. At that time, the Toronto BoE had access to Super-8 cameras, although they didn't have any editing equipment. Myself and a few other of my friends decided to make a film, and I never looked back.
MP: It's incredible, that you absorbed the grammar of classic Hollywood film so early in your life…
MO: I'm not sure if it was apparent, because my first film was called "Reality Illusion," a fairly experimental work [laughs]. I'm not sure where that came from. It didn't resemble the things I was watching on television, that's for sure.
MP: I want to come back to your relationship to experimental aesthetics later on, but after that initial film, what was it like developing your career in Toronto? How was Toronto [in the 1980s] as an environment for young filmmakers? A lot of your early works are really embedded in that kind of urban landscape, too.
MO: Well, I was born in Toronto, so, you know, it's my hometown. I wasn't really exposed to experimental film until I went to art college. I went to the Ontario College of Art and Design, where one of my film professors was part of a collective called The Funnel: an experimental, artist-run center for production, exhibition and distribution of artists' films. I got a job there right after school. It was a government program, and I think I made, like, $100 a week, or something unbelievably low. That was back in the early '80s. But it was such a formative time for me, because The Funnel was the only experimental film center in Toronto, and we were lucky enough to have artists such as Jack Smith, Kenneth Anger, Scott and Beth B, Leslie Thornton, Barbara Hammer - all these seminal filmmakers - come and show their work. And since I was the equipment coordinator, I had to coordinate all their screenings and take care of the projection and everything like that, so it was an amazing opportunity to talk to these artists. That was probably the most fun, the most precious moment in time, that I could spend.
MP: Was there any particular screening that made a special impact on you?
MO: I mean, there were so many. I loved Kenneth Anger's work, so seeing him in the flesh and hearing him talk was just incredible. We also hosted Ondine, from Warhol's Factory days, and that was really interesting. But I really gravitated towards artists like Leslie Thornton, Valie Export, and Scott and Beth B, who were making alternative "new narratives," as we called them. There was a sort of feminist "new narrative" period around that time, which was a complete departure from the structuralist movement that was sort of overbearing.
MP: Many of your films since the 1980s do seem to be linked by an interest in narrative as well. Often, they feature characters who are exploring their identity and sense of self in dialogue with their physical surroundings. Your 2005 work, I have no memory of my direction, was an interesting take on this. Could tell me more about the inception of the work, and about the character's relationship to your personal and family history?
MO: I made I have no memory of my direction 10 years after another film called Skin Deep, a theatrical feature I made with a conventional narrative structure. That film was very different from all my other works, because I was trying to subvert that commercial structure of narrative feature filmmaking, and to try and create an alternative world from within a very conventional narrative structure. But it was much more challenging than I imagined, because I had to deal with all the commercial elements as opposed to just the art-driven elements of making a movie. So, that film almost killed me [laughs]. It was just so financially and psychologically challenging that I felt after making it that I would probably never make another film again. Everything about that process was fraught for me. It took me a while to get over that. When I made I have no memory of my direction it was 10 years after making that feature, and I really didn't want to take the same path as I did with that, so I decided that I would do it all myself - shoot it, edit it, everything.
Originally, the idea of even exploring Japan took place because after Skin Deep I was writing another feature called Dead Love, and that took place in a fictitious amusement park in Japan. It dealt with the idea that there's these forgotten years of Christ's life in the Bible, and that according to this folk legend, he actually went to Japan and married a Japanese woman. That was the original spark of I have no memory of my direction. Then I thought, I'm not going to make this film, but there's still something there that I want to explore. Then I was able to get an Arts Council Grant to go to Japan and travel and kind of figure out what I was doing. And I decided to use Chris Markers' Sans Soleil as my road map. I think there's a line in I have no memory of my direction, "I had a map of a dog and a cat in my bag," and that was it. I visited some of the landmarks in Sans Soleil and it took off from there. Making the film was a very organic process.
MP: Can you speak a little more about that process using a film, Sans Soleil, as a map?
MO: I remember watching Sans Soleil over and over and over again, and writing down things that I thought were moments or places in the film that I could capture. For instance, there's the statue of Hachiko, which is very popular in Tokyo. And then, there's the Gotokuji [cat] temple. Little places like that that I had found in his film, and revisited when I was there. With Hachiko for instance, I really dissected that story and tried to find more information about the dog. It was just happenstance that I happened to discover that Hachiko was at the Tokyo Science Museum at Ueno Park. He's not there anymore, at least the last time I went.
Stuffed Hachiko in I have no memory of my direction (2005).
MP: I loved that episode, how this popular legend becomes the catalyst for a very personal form of fabulation. There's a sense that your trip is being governed by this mysterious force, like a dream logic, but I imagine as you've said it was the result of a great amount of preparation.
MO: It was a lot of research beforehand, but some days I would get up very early in the morning and just head somewhere, and then I'd just sort of figure it out as I went and be as open as possible to what I was seeing and experiencing. There are a lot of different tangents that the film goes off into.
Simultaneously, what was happening in my own life was that my father was back home [in Toronto] and had Alzheimer's - he was losing his memory. I had a very complicated relationship with my father. I knew that I didn't want to be in the city to see him. So instead, I travelled all these miles away to try and find him. My father was a photographer in his early life, and that brought in the element of photography and capturing images. It's hard to believe now in 2023, but back when I was shooting the film it was just a brand new feature out on cell phones that they could have cameras… It was the early days of that technology. I found that very interesting, how we were on the cusp of the big change from the very deliberate act of taking out your camera and photographing something, to it being an incredibly casual activity done multiple times in a day.
MP: There is such a fascination in the film with the limits of media to capture things. I think you say at one point that you "need to find the right instrument to hypnotise your dreams." It seems like while photography or filmmaking is one of these instruments, another is language. Could you speak a bit more about the role of language in that film?
MO: I think that I'm fascinated with language because I can only speak English. I'm terrible at languages. But I'm fascinated with them. I feel like because of my inability to speak anything other than English, I have to take a very different approach with other languages and really, have to see the pauses between the words rather than the words themselves. So that has always I think been fascinating for me. And in I have no memory of my direction, I was starting to use a different film language - working with toy cameras and unconventional modes of recording images. For example, I used a lot of footage from the Nintendo GameBoy camera. That was a Nintendo system that had a very short life at the end of the 1990s, and I still love that camera, the way that it looks. Although it was originally marketed as a still camera, I sort of changed it into a moving image camera. It's a highly pixellated image, it's very sort of grainy, like 16-bit video.
MP: I wanted to press you on your interest in toy cameras and other experimental media. Your work addresses a lot of philosophical questions, but it also has such a sense of playfulness and experimentation. What draws you to these alternative media and image-making technologies?
MO: Well, after I made my feature Skin Deep, I was so, sort of, anti-commercial filmmaking. I wondered if there was any way for me to return to the joy of filmmaking - the same kind of joy I felt when I picked up my first Super 8 camera and started shooting. And around that time there started to be more toy cameras available for children. It's hard to think back all those years, but around the late 1990s/ early 2000s there was practically a new toy camera coming out every week. I just started madly collecting them. I just have so many toy cameras [laughs].
They're consumer items, so if you like the way something looks, you have to buy, like, 5 of them because they'll most likely break. I just loved it, I just fell in love with the moving image all over again, and that sort of started me making a movie a day. It started inspiring me to create these small video doodles or 'vidoodles' as I call them. I still love toy cameras, I still love playing with them. There's an immediacy, they’re so easy to use. It's so welcoming to accidents. It's everything that commercial filmmaking is not. I don't feel like artists should ever feel dictated by technology. We have to find the right technology to tell our stories, whether it be toys, or whether it be 8K cameras. We should never feel that the technology comes first. That should always be, you know, the second thing that you think of. ●
program
Ville - quelle ville? 1984, 4 min. Super 8 film.
An early work by Onodera, this cine-poem shot in her native Toronto reflects a satirical view of city life, commonplace and redundant. Urban life is portrayed as a series of rituals: coming of age in an environment shaped by generations, obscured by the constant barrage of everyday life. The film randomly touches upon key events familiar to everyone in North America, a melting pot of human experiences. As in any city there is an aspect of alienation, here displayed through the eyes of a young woman caught in the web of her own daily existence.
Nobody Knows, 2002, 3:15 min. Lomographic Supersampler & Intel Digital camera, video (director/ writer). *日本語字幕付き
A short poetic video exploring the inner thoughts of a solitary young woman. Shot in 2 toy camera formats, the Lomographic 35mm Supersampler and the Intel Play Digital Movie Creator, Nobody Knows embraces alternative photography in both the celluloid and the digital realms.
SLIGHTSEER, 2001, 3:20 min. Braille and English titles, super 8 film, DV video, Tyco and Trendmasters video (director/writer).
A work exploring the nature of vision, framed within two circular ‘windows’ that mimic the apparatus of binocular vision. The film is accompanied by a string of observations on eyes, blindness and acts of looking.
I have no memory of my direction, 2005, 77 min. Digital video, film, super 8, Lomographic Supersampler, Barbie Wireless Videocam, Intel Digital camera, Tyco & Trendmaster toy video cameras (director/writer). *日本語字幕付き
I have no memory of my direction unfolds through a Canadian-born Japanese woman’s voice-over as she dreams her way though Japan. Ostensibly searching for an emotional connection with her aging father, the woman contemplates her own inherited culture and familial touchstones. Her North American pop culture sensibility fuses with a distorted Japanese perspective to create a surreal interpretation of a “Japan of the imagination.” This fictional landscape is peppered with invented Japanese myths, ruminations on memory loss, the temporal space of digital photography and the ghosts of inherited imagination.
midi onodera
Midi Onodera is an award-winning filmmaker and media artist who has been making films and videos for more than 35 years. She has produced over 25 independent shorts, ranging from 16mm film to digital video to toy camera formats. In 2018 she received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts. Skin Deep (1995), her theatrical feature, screened internationally at festivals including the Rotterdam International Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. Her film The Displaced View (1988) was nominated for Best Documentary at the Gemini Awards.
Her experimental narrative project ALPHAGIRLS (2002) was the first Canadian interactive performance art DVD, and since 2006 she has made over 500 vidoodles (defined as bite-sized 30-second to 2-minute video doodles). From 2006–07 she published one a day for 365 days and has since released a video project each year, addressing themes of language, media, politics and everyday life. In 2017 she published an interactive narrative developed from her experience in Afghanistan as a Canadian Forces Artist in 2010.
Onodera’s work is held in collections around the world, and she has given lectures and workshops at galleries and institutions across North America and Japan. She currently teaches and continues to work on experimental media projects in Toronto.
mia parnall
Mia Parnall is an independent programmer with an interest in new medias, landscape, travel and ecology in film. She holds an MA in Film from King’s College London and has worked with CCJ for over two years, programming the work of Mari Terashima, Haruka Doi, Masanobu Nakamura and others.