|
|
 |
Director, Script, Photography, Editing, Producer: Kawaguchi Hajime Sound: Uotsu Hidetoshi Cast: Kobayashi Kazumasa, Kawaguchi Akiko Source: Kawaguchi Hajime, Media Arts Studies, Department of Informatique Design, Tohoku University of Art & Design 200 Kamisakurada, Yamagata 990-2421 JAPAN Phone: 81-236-27-2162 / Fax: 81-236-27-2145 e-mail: kaw@cg.tuad.ac.jp JAPAN / 1997 / Japanese with English subtitles / Color / Video / 30 min |
| André Bazin may have prized the technologically recorded image for its
ontological realism, but it is, in the end, only a text, a set
of signs that always exists in interconnection with other signifying
systems. Kawaguchi Hajime, an instructor at Yamagata's Tohoku
University of Art and Design, uses his video camera to record
everyday events and the people around him. None of this, however,
bears any meaning until he begins joining it with other texts:
first the coded manipulations of slow motion and freeze frames
which draw out the protagonists, and second, the writing superimposed
on the image that, read in voice over by both human and mechanical
voices, begins to generate a story. This interconnecting of texts
overlaps with an intermingling of individuals, creating a surprising
and effective narrative about Kawaguchi that seems to accord well
with the dominant current of personal film. But just how real
is this narration of texts? In Kawaguchi's clever critique of
personal film, as the texts multiply, so does the "I" at their
center, undermining the subject which both speaks the text and
supposedly authenticates its division between reality and fiction. --Aaron Gerow |