Like I mentioned recently in my text on films by Anjan Dutt or Steven Spielberg, this kind of very personal and often autobiographically inspired film (which cover almost all kind of films between mainstream, experimental cinema or documentary essays. Some examples among non-fiction films are are the Korean filmmaker Yang Yong-hi (who grew up in Japan) or the German filmmaker Andreas Goldstein, just to mention a few of them. In Masayume, Nao Yoshigai crosses quite a few options of filmmaking. Beside documentary essay and dance performances there is also an experimental approach and finally it is also a film which copes with grief. The baseline exposure is the death of Nao Yoshigai´s mother. To deal with her grief but also to escape the hustle and bustle of the every day life, she spends some time in a Zen temple. She tries to find herself again through meditation and rituals.
At the beginning we see the filmmaker stepping through a snowy, almost deserted landscape. She lies down in the snow. After this opening there arrives literally a thunderstorm of rapidly edited image sequences. After that, a monologue (of the filmmaker) can be heard. Than, we see a dance performance (the filmmaker is as well a dancer) Several persons are gathered about a sick woman, which lies on the floor. This performance is accompanied by sound effects like the one an increased rumbling stomach. Later the film turns into pure documentary observation: the ritualized meals, the preparing of the meals and dialogues between the Zen-priest and the filmmaker.
Masayume changes always between the different options of a non fiction film: recorded moments, performances and artistic alienated image,- and sound montages. This permanent over crossing of several aspects of filmmaking reminds me sometimes in the films by Vietnamese-American Trinh. T. Min-ha.
There are as well private films from her family. In one scene there is a little girl (most likely the filmmaker herself) just out of infancy. This girl eats cake with the typical clumsy movements of a toddler. Paradoxically, these personal moments are both, confiding something deeply personal to another person (in this case the audience) and at the same time something abstract. There must be a reason that private films,- and photos appear often more poetic than art photography. Again I have to think of Yang Yong-hi and her three documentary essays about her family story which she herself called “Home Movies” but which are in editing and in its contextualization of individual biography and history as well great works of art. In this sense, in Masayume there is a connection between the filmmaker´s search for an own cinematic language but as well an exploration of the different options life has still to offer.
In his laudatio for Terrence Malick´s The Tree of Life (for the occasion of the Fipresci award as the film of the year 2011), Adrian Martin describes that it “was always the potential of film to mix the smallest with the largest, the immediate with the longue durée of grand history.” Masayume moves between these two extreme poles of cinema but sometimes even with these other extreme poles of cinema, the documentaries of the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès. In Yoshigai´s film there are , for example a sequence which is a reconstruction of the digestion process. This process, of course- is without optical devices as invisible for the human eyes as the birth and death of the stars, atoms or processes of micro biology. In a way, this moment affects me like the psychedelic Stargate-sequence in Stanley Kubrick´s 2001: A Space Odyssey or the formation sequence in Terrence Malick´s The Tree of Life. Maybe, Masayume is as well a film about these two different desires of cinema: to record the visible world but as well the search for images for what the human eye alone can not see but only imagine.
I do not want to overuse the terms film and therapy nor does this film should be reduced on this aspect. But I think on this special and very complex interaction between creator and audience which takes place only in this special place we call film theater with its big screen as the only light in its darkness. Another key in this film are the dance performances. Dance is one of the oldest forms of human performances. It includes storytelling, communication, art, but sometimes, yes- even collective therapy.
It makes not much sense to put this film in any category. One should it take as what it is, an exciting, moving, inspiring and multi-layered cinematic journey and as well a very inspiring essay about the perception itself and last but not least an elegy about the loss oft the filmmaker´s mother.
Rüdiger Tomczak
Further screenings:
18.Feb, 10.30, Cubix 8
20.Feb, 15.30 Silent Green
22.Feb, 18.00 Delphi
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