Starting with my first film THUS A NOISE SPEAKS (2010), which concluded with the words “Surely we’ll remember it someday”, and followed by FLASH (2015), a short film that poses the question “What is the earliest memory I can recall?”, I have continued my exploration of human memory. In ARAGNE (2015), I found the intangible memory embedded in material coal ore and its excavation, and in CENOTE (2019), I sought to uncover the collectivity of memory across time in water; both films are set in underground locations. I think I sensed that by going underground, I might find clues to something elusive, memory itself.
In my latest film UNDERGROUND, I have deepened my exploration of memory. During the production process, with exploring its collective and mutually constructive nature or its relation to “time”, which is also something difficult to grasp, I asked myself why I wanted to preserve memories through the recording medium of film while interacting with other people. Humans will inevitably go extinct one day, and as long as we are human, you and I will surely die. Yet, I want to affirm that each and every one of us has lived here. Now I believe that this is why I seek to leave the film as a living trace.
In the underground, the device of film has, for a moment, made frozen time move again.
In this film, we refer to something whose role is to journey through the living traces of the ancient past, the present, and the distant future as the “shadow”. My aim was to use the shadow to connect the underground and the aboveground, the lost and the remaining, the living and the dead, thereby creating an image of “us”. Death, loss, and the things left behind… In the underground, where these signs can be felt, the device of film has, for a moment, made frozen time move again. Spaces that have been hidden, covered, or concealed are brought to light by the eyes of the living. The living in this film are not only we, the filmmakers involved, but also the audience gazing at the screen.
The living traces, gazed at through the film and exposed to light, become a collective memory. The strange phenomenon of “us” is renewed as the collective memory acquires a new layer. Hopefully, my film will renew “us”.
Kaori Oda
