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FARAWAY A VIDEO PROJECT IN THREE PARTS
GEOFF WEARY P.O.BOX 78 GLEBE, NSW 2073 PH: (W) 692 3115 (H) 305 763
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FARAWAY INTRODUCTION We are concerned with Japan. This concern is, however, from the beginning a problematising of interpretation. What is meant by this? There are difficulties in approaching a film, video or written text which attempts to comment on or define a foreign culture, particularly a non-Western one. In whose name and by what criteria are judgements made? Yet, this concern with speaking of or for another culture does not lead by necessity to a certain immobility or freezing of articulation on anything but one's own identity. Rather, it leads to the consideration for forming strategies which acknowledge the inev itable appropriations of a cultural heterogeneity in the dominating moves and closures of interpretative schemas. For this reason, in approaching this video work on Japan, we have attempted to acknowledge the absolute limitations of our presentation. The videos claim neither insight nor excavation; neither an essence nor kernel of truth about a Japanese population. We have attempted to avoid all interiority - of self, nation, community. This is neither the savage record of intersecting cultural trajectories ( as with an Australian artist and a Japanese psyche) nor an extended meditation on the ineffable haiku of Japanese aggression, love or wealth. While these romantic gestures and manoeuvers and seductive, we have tried rigorously to dispel their myth of interiority, a will to truth of cultural otherness. What, then, de we present if not some excavation of a sub stratum of Japanese culture? Initially it must be stressed that we present simply, and without elaborate construction ( and anticipating the problem of a naive reductive empiricism) what is or was there to be seen. These are documents, but not documentary. They are not narrativised, constructed sequences which unfold the story of understanding - from appearance to essence, from surface to structure. No such exposition occurs. Such techniques lead inevitably to the interior, to the heart of things,
6 bringing with them as support and supplement all protocol-s for the truth of things in consciousness. On the other hand, the document 1s inert; there is nothing beneath or inside it. It harbours no author or intentional consciousness. Simply, it is what is before us. In its opacity such a document refuses to murmur the truth of its cultural otherness or the origin of its appearance. This approach to documents is crucial in a number of respects. Firstly, it leads to a strategy which avoids interpretation as the uncovering of what lies beneath the images and sounds presented. Secondly, it suggests there is not a unity of structure but rather a dispersion of fragments for which the intentions of author or culture cannot be used as an adequate explanation. Thirdly, it suggests that these documents are themselves formative of subjects and objects of history, that they disperse subject positions and objects of enquiry, rather than themselves being the cultural object of an ideal national subject. This is not to say that what is presented here are certain facts or a datum level of things Japanese. Already the notions of facticity or data carry with them a propositional logic with fixed subject/object relations. This material, as statement, is attempting to present a heterogeneity, a dispersion of possible relations of subject to object, a function productive of a range of discursive forms - propositional, descriptive, romantic and so on. But it cannot be seen simply as phenomenological - as if the lived world was being presented in its savage reality and this alone precipitated a range of languages adequate to it. Every mediation is acknowledged here, not in what it alone has permitted us to see, but in how it has functioned. There is no question of a real being reproduced, but rather a question of what produces subjects who know, objects known, and concepts which fall between these two poles. presents three such documents, three sites of visibility : a shrine to Kamikaze pilots; a gathering of people to mourn a dead emperor; a stock exchange building in Tokyo. It would be a mistake to say that each was simply and objectively presented, as if the camera could guarantee some translation of event to image. Nor can we say they are subjectively presented, as if an intentionality had governed the very formality of their appearance.
Faraway
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FARAWAY PART ONE
INTRODUCTION
Part one of Faraway was videotaped at the Yasakuni War Shrine and Memorial in Tokyo. The original footage was shot on a VHS Camcorder set to automatic focus, the intention here being to create a layering effect between different surfaces and textures in the museum as the camera adjusts focus from one plane to another. This effect will be further enhanced by a variable slowing of the image. As with each of the three parts, it is intended to make a rough-cut from the original footage on VHS and then transfer the rough-cut to a one inch master, making possible a variable slow motion effect in the work. Some passages will have gradated slowness, while others will come close to real-time presentation. The soundtrack will be constructed from a number of suggestive elements, playing with the opposition natural/technological, and mirroring the layered effects of the image track. The border area of the video screen in this section will depict images of the ocean presented in real time. Sound of the ocean, sometimes distant and at other times close, will be heard as a base layer in the soundtrack.
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FARAWAY PART ONE duration 8-10 minutes At first sight, the image does not resemble a cadaver, but it' could be that the strangeness of a cadaver is also the strangeness of the image. MAURICE BLANCHOT II
ALL OF YOU COME BACK DEAD"
The first images of Faraway are of the ocean at sunrise. The ocean is pictured in real time. The sounds of waves are heard as the ocean images form a border around the depiction of an avenue. This is the entrance to the Y asakuni War Shrine and Museum in Tokyo. Two immense tori gates span rows of winter clad trees and stone carved monuments. As with most other national, political, cultural or religious institutions, the museum is situated in close proximity to the Imperial Palace. The museum is set in grounds opposite the shrine. Here the war dead are venerated in both religious and secular fashion. The museum itself is a relatively small structure housing artefacts from the various wars in which Japan has fought over the past hundred years. Nothing in the language of the building speaks of heroic endeavour. Rather, its voice is one of sadness and loss. It is pedesterian, unassuming, plain. Images of the avenue, shrine and museum are depicted. Time has been slowed and set in contrast to the real time sequences of the ocean waters bordering the video frame, leading finally to an enigmatic corpus of photographic portraits housed inside the museum. These black and white images are of the hundreds of kamikaze or suicide pilots who sacrificed themselves in the latter stages of the second world war. Now, at the end of Show a , the reign of Emperor Hirohito, this strange and poignant display is the public remains of a spectacular death episode, the divine wind of Showa's summit of empire.
9 The portraits are behind glass, framed, set in place, protected, locked in a transparent tomb. This must be understood as the very condition of the image in general - a transparency which throws some light on an anonymous and impersonal flow of beings. A certain 'there is' of the image is fixed between an anticipation and a recapitulation, between a future unfolding and a past already determinable, a principle of temporality. This principle of temporality is developed in three homologous scenes. Firstly; there is the divine wind itself "all of you come back dead" - the event of suicide. Secondly, there are the museum portraits of the facial gaze, the image as mortal remains. Thirdly, there is the image's double, the video work which separates the present moment (the moment of viewing) from the document itself. Each portrait carries with it the identification of the pilot and some few small artefacts, family photographs, personal correspondence and farewell poems. Sometimes these very young faces smile out of the frame. The photographs are placed in close proximity to one another and vary dramatically from faded, almost invisible forms, to images of high quality and permanence. Frames are often crudely made while some are constructed from expensive timbers. The camera scans these portraits in varying degrees of movement, holding on a face, an artefact or text, and then shifting to another sequence. As the camera moves, it shifts from one focal plane to another, from the glass surface to the photograph, to the artefact. The video image is thus constantly adjusting between layers of focus. At times, portraits are set behind replicas of fighter planes, suspended from wire, thus presenting a fragmented composition of propellar, glass reflection and portrait. Ocean waves define the borders of these slowed composite images. This play on focus is between a certain plane of expression and one of content. Crucial here is neither one plane nor the other but the translation or translatability between one and the other the momentary lack of focus which is itself the present moment falling between expression and its content, a past and its future, an anticipation and its recapitulation. The museum devoted to suicide presents a complex play of the mortality of remains and the closeness, impossible separation and transparent partition between image and death. In the event
10 of viewing the tape we are caught in the interweaving ·of a recapitulation of a past and the anticipation of that past's future. The rupture in temporality of slowing the image movement is a tear across this weave, to present a moment, an instant without past or future. The soundtrack's soft aural focus hovers between the natural and the technological. As the image track is concerned with an oscillation between planes of focus so the audio track defines movement betwee� sounds. Here sound registers waiver between the sound of the ocean, sounds caught in the museum during the recording process, fragments of archival war sound and the thudding sound of the camera's automatic focus recorded on the in-built microphone of the Camcorder. These sounds will be blended into a suggestive metaphoric soundtrack. Finally, the photographic portraits give wa y to representations of suicide planes. A full-scale replica 'cherry blossom' is seen from a number of points of view. Behind the plane, in a small diaorama, model 'cherry blossoms' are suspended from wires in battle formation, caught at this moment of descent on to the U.S. Pacific Fleet far below. All of this is set against a brilliant, hand painted sunrise which now fills the entire frame. Sounds of the ocean fall away. All of you, come back dead.
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FARAWAY PART TWO
INTRODUCTION Part two of Faraway was videotaped at the Imperial Palace, Tokyo, on the day of the death of the Emperor Hirohito - the 7th January, 1989 - and one week later, on the 18th January, inside the Imperial Palace grounds. On both days it rained heavily. Part two of Faraway is divided into two sections, each being set against a black border on the edge of the video screen. This border acts as a bridging device between both parts and functions as a symbol of death and mourning. Section one depicts images and sounds from the periphery of the Imperial Palace - news crews positioned at points of entry, black limousines entering and leaving, and finally, a surging crowd moving toward and then beyond the camera. As the image track's time base is manipulated, so the soundtrack will combine sounds of the past and the present. Television and radio sounds, particularly the radio sounds of U.S. military broadcasts, will be on the soundtrack. These sounds will weave in and out of a base layer sound resembling rain or the scratching sound of an old 78rpm record. An effect of sound heard at a distance, both in time and space, will be presented. Section two was videotaped inside the Imperial Palace near the great reception hall containing the earthly remains of the Emperor Hirohito. Crowds are seen bowing towards the coffin, a suspended photographic portrait above. Rain heard on the soundtrack is manifested in images of watery reflections of the crowd, in the latter moments of the tape. The screen goes to black. An announcement is made.
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FARAWAY PART TWO duration 8-10 minutes After weeks of clear skies it rains suddenly. The video screen is darkened, sounds resembling voices from radio and television are heard far off in the distance. The blackness of the screen becomes a border, and a crowd gathers in the forecourt to the Imperial Palace, Tokyo. Hirohito has died. The major media networks have already prepared hours of special programmes devoted to the Emperor, his life and times. During this period of mourning, lasting at least three days, there were to be no commercials, no commercially sponsored condolences, no songs, comedies, drama or sport. Programmes were to be suitably chosen to acknowledge the Emperor's passing. Black ties were to be worn by men. Hirohito was variously presented as a young man in military uniform on a white horse and later, after Hiroshima, in civilian clother, a somewhat diminutive figure, with his defeated people. The first images of this section depict a vast shrouded space in the centre of Tokyo. It is the circle of the Imperial Palace. Black limousines are seen coming and going; news crews occupy all points of entry into the inner area; the Imperial moat casts watery reflections of the office blocks of the Marounuchi financial district on the eastern side of the palace. It is mid-winter. Time has been slowed in the tape, to suggest that some event of significance is about to take place. The distant sound of radio and television are meshed with the sounds of rain and a scratched record. The scene shifts now to a closer view of the turrets of the palace and then across into the crowd moving slowly forward. The imagery is grainy and soft. After weeks of winter sunlight it rains heavily.
13 There is no question of asking what attracts this mass,· what goes on in their minds, what is happening. A living god has succumbed to a very public and ordinary death. Rather, we question how this event may be reported, recorded, presented with every gesture to the irony, gravity and complexity of the end of Showa . The ends of Showa - enlightened peace - quest for empire in the East, modernity in the East, an emperor devoting himself to the life sciences, an emperor accused of war crimes, the massing of a population in labour, in aggression, in mourning. This attraction to the palace grounds at first appears to be without meaning or interpretation. There is nothing more nor less than a gravity which attracts. We can make too much of the gaze of the faces of such a population - vacant stares, unfocused, as if real focus of purpose or meaning is signed or guaranteed by this. We are on the outside of this event in at least three ways. There is a foreigner, an artist, in the crowd making a videotape - already framing, selecting, stylising, absolutely other to an emperor, population or Japan. There are images of a crowd, anonymous, gathered on a black day, without an indication of purpose or direction. There is, as well, the absolute loss and otherness of Hirohito, a corpse, without life. The crowd moves slowly forward to a point beyond the camera. They are of all ages - men, women and children. Their colours are soft, muted tones, many wear black. They move across the frame at different points of intersection. Sometimes a face fills the frame, becoming a featureless expanse of colour; at other times the camera follows the path. of a single individual as it moves ever forward to and beyond the camera. A very old scratchy recording of a Japanese song is heard far off in the distance, and then it comes close. This song is a recording from the early years of Show a (1929). The movement of the crowd is slowed to match the music's rhythm. This vocal register, the familiarity of the genre, the untranslatability of the voice, the noise of the disk as the machinery of translating a technology of vocal reproduction, all of this suggests an absolute remoteness of the time of recording to the present moment of reception - two planes of absolute separation. The poor, scratchy quality of the recording and the grain of the voice generates for the listener, perhaps even more so for the Japanese listener, a poignant sense of loss.
14 The camera moves restlessly through the crowd, tracking across the watery skyline, moving back into a mobile sea of faces. The record falls silent. Slow moving images of the crowd come almost to a stasis. The black border contracts inwards as a face, looking directly into the camera fills the frame. A scratching rain is heard somewhere in the distance. What happens at a moment before stock is taken or history sealed in events, before loss is accounted for in explanation or interpretation? What, in other words, is a gesture, an inciting, a simple movement of attraction to the event, before meaning is made of it, the simple making present to oneself so that one may overcome any threatening absence of self? Hirohito is dead. The border closes; the videoscreen is black. The Imperial Palace, a space of total seclusion, entirely shrouded from public view by an artificial landscape, is now unconcealed. Long columns of mourners are seen streaming through a gateway leading to an inner precinct of the palace. The silence is broken by loudspeakers marshalling this crowd into the sacred space. Behind bullet-proof glass, a framed portrait of the Emperor gazes out towards the gathered mass. Hirohito's earthly body lies in a brocaded casket directly below the icon. The rain pours on the crowd standing before the portrait and casket; hands clap in Shinto gesture. Mourners bow and move on. The tape now approximates real time and the sound track registers the rain and atmospherics recorded at the palace itself. Yet these sounds are treated to give a continued impression of aural distance. The final images depict the watery reflections of the crowd, fragments of muted colour and form, placed before the image of a mortal god. A voice is heard through the sounds of the rain - a voice of absolute otherness, of absolute exteriority to this event: "U.S. Forces, Japan wishes to report that His Imperial Majesty, the Emperor of Japan has died. Details will be broadcast as they become available. This is FEN News, Tokyo." Recorded from U.S. military radio, 7/1/89/ Tokyo. Silence
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FARAWAY PART THREE
INTRODUCTION Part three has been videotaped in the Shinjuku, Ginza and Nihimbashi districts of Tokyo and at the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Emphasis in Part Three is placed on the relationship between an exterior, the cityscape of Tokyo, and an interior, that of the stock exchange. A series of doubling effects are activated as the work, dealing with the present, considers the future. Thus the borders to the screen define an eclectic post-modern skyline in relation to the classical style of the exchange's interior. The vestibule to the exchange, a quiet, orderly space is contrasted to the intensity and activity of the exchange's trading floor. As in Part One, the camera has been set to automatic focus, scanning in close-up the details of surface and texture, adjusting from one plane of focus to another. Images of the city on the border of the frame have been taped so as to present a dawn to dusk sequence running the duration of the work. This is in contrast to the variable speed principle of depicting the exchange's interior 1n close-up and wide angle. A subtle blend of city and exchange sounds will work with this image track, as for example with the sounds of massed voices coming closer and retreating, mixing the sound of elevator bells and footsteps with loudspeaker announcements from department store entrances in the Shinjuku rush-hour.
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FARAWAY PART THREE duration 8-10 minutes It is a clear cold, morning in late January, 1989, in Tokyo. Hirohito is dead and the new era of Heisei - achieving peace - has begun. Images of the metropolis are presented. The streets are typically crowded; the Shutto expressway above them cuts its way through the city. The office towers of Shinjuku and its narrow side streets are presented, as are the towers of the commercial districts of Kanda and Ikebukero. The wide boulevards of the Ginza lead into the Nihombashi district as we encounter the fragmented outline of an imposing building wedged in a very narrow street between the multi-layered expressway and the Nihombashi Gawa river. .The architectural characteristics of the building are unusual for Tokyo - austere, hard, granite-clad; the giant classicism of international late modernism. This is the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Images of the exterior of the building receed to form a border around a rectangular centre which then depicts the interior of the exchange. The entrance widens into a vast space of polished marble, fluted columns and long corridors. Two imposing bronze sculptures, in the style of a 1920's Soviet neo-Realism, are positioned on either side of the main reception area. At another entrance, on the opposite side of the building, there is a large gold painted frieze, of emblematic images of a youthful, striving Japan of the future.
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17 The camera scans these images, slowed down, as the e�terior of the building is seen on the border areas in real time. We observe the symmetrical lines of the interior, as shadows fall across textured surfaces and anonymous figures criss-cross the frame with urgent, determined footsteps. The sounds of elevator bells, the echo of footsteps and the noise of conversation are the only disruptions to this quiet atmosphere. Up a flight of escalators we enter another circular space lit with neon. Border images change to depict the cool surfaces of a post-modern architectural landscape in Tokyo. The light falling on these buildings changes from morning to afternoon. The neon sign at the entrance to the exchange's circular space reads "Stock Exchanges of the World". The camera slowly pans across the sign and then moves into the circular interior. Revealed is an arrangement of video monitors indicating the activities of the free market economies in the major trading centres of the West. An audience is able to scan the interior spaces of the major stock exchanges of the globe. This televisual locus fixes the spectator, not in the position of a dominating gaze, but rather in the relatively insecure position of subject to an architectural construction of observation. For it is not the individual who observes but a perverse logic of geography which demands the observer recognise that here is the centre of the West's financial artifice. In this vestibule the individual is made aware that the world revolves about this point, that all exchange has its moment of transmission here. Or, rather, not here, but further on, at the very centre of the building. The cacophony of the video soundtracks anticipates certain events. Tokyo's elegant skyline is viewed in late afternoon light. At the centre of the building we see the floor of the exchange. It is an enormous space, crowded with several thousand blue-suited clerks and exchange employees, caught in the frenetic battle of finance. Bodies sway in waves as overhead monitors produce endless streams of investment information. The roar from the exchange floor is muffled by thick plate glass separating it from the observation deck, and is overtaken by the soft voices of young women who work as guides for the hundreds who come here each day to observe the spectacle. Borders of the video screen depict Shinjuku's glittering office towers at sunset. Young Japanese children are seen on the observation deck, gazing below; they come here to learn the highly coded body language of exchange used on the trading floor below. These
18 youngsters play with a metallic tutor as guide to the signage of transactions. It is located in the exhibition gallery on the same level. Here high-tech games of finance augment their instruction. A small boy looks up, wide-eyed, at the metallic instructor as it deftly displays its programmed hand gestures. The boy observes a camera positioned behind the machine. He stares at the instructor and then back towards the observing camera. Standing before the camera he parodies the hand gestures of the machine, finally bowing and walking away. An image of the empty space remains. The sounds of the exchange fall away. The edge-frame images of the office towers of Tokyo now fill the screen. It is early evening in Shunjuku. Sounds of pachinko parlors and street atmospherics replace those of the exchange. Images of neon intertwine those of rush hour in the metropolis. Vast crowds stream from office blocks, making their way to the Underground. The towers of Shinjuku are silhouetted against the night sky. Shinjuku is transformed into a huge mobile and alluring consumer and entertainment machine. Its citizens are participating in the circular game of work and play - between capital and desire, between reality and pleasure principles. It is between these poles that Tokyo's libidinal economy oscillates. The god of the divine wind seems now to bear little guilt, pathetic loss or national shame. There is no return to mourning, only the horizon of economic wealth, a nation burgeoning with sunrise technologies, rising sun industries, the flowering of prosperity, without loss, without an end.
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