Kochuu:
Japanese Architecture/Influence &
Origin
by Jesper Wachtmeister, Director
First Run/Icarus Films, Brooklyn NY, 2006
VHS, 53 minutes, color
Sales, $390
Distributors website: http://www.frif.com.
MA:
A Japanese Concept
by Takahiko iimura
Takahiko iimura Media Arts Institute,
Tokyo, 2005
DVD, 60 minutes
ISBN 4-901181-21-1
Website: http://iimura@gol.com; http://www.takaiimura.com.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University
mosher@svsu.edu
One would expect the designers of any
vehicle for extended outer space travel
to consult Japanese architects and artists
in the design process. That many of them
make use of limitations of space and time
is demonstrated in two recent videos.
Jesper Wachtmeister's documentary is Kochuu:
Japanese Architecture/Influence &
Origin. Kochuu means "in the jar",
the small space that an architect in Japan
is given to work with. These spaces may
be urban residences, modular mini-offices,
or garden teahouses, accessible only through
a low, small entrance. Furniture is often
minimal, and kneeling on tatami mats is
the visitor's expected posture.
Recent buildings like the Naoshima Contemporary
Art Museum honor their relationship to
the natural environment, offering a permeability
of light and sightlines. Their sheltered
indoors maintain sweeping garden views,
an aesthetic handed down from earlier
times. Many Scandinavian architects studied
traditional Japanese forms and admit an
influence of the Imperial Katsura Palace
or the massive wooden Todai-Ji Buddhist
temple. The movie demonstrates this influence
through a series of buildings, interspersed
with architects comments. Its argument
and its examples jump around so between
Japan and Scandinavia that the viewer
is sometimes unsure of where the building
currently onscreen exists. Yet the architects
interviewed have thoughtful comments on
aspects of Japanese architecture that
are informative and thought-provoking
to people who inhabit buildings anywhere.
And it is those thoughtful comments that
pose a problem. This reviewer doesn't
speak Japanese, nor does he speak any
Scandinavian languages, and such a viewer
is distracted from giving undivided attention
to the fine buildings shown, provocative
buildings attentively caressed outside
and inside by the moving camera. The viewer
is occupied reading little white subtitles
at the bottom of the screen. This is one
documentary video that would benefit from
translation of the thoughts of all these
worthy architects into English, and any
other single language of the nation in
which it is shown.
Architectural space is a concern of Takahiko
iimura, especially in the first of his
four films exploring Ma, a concept where
"space and time are one." Ma: Space
in the Garden of Ryon-ji, the major
film of the disc, is a 1989 16mm color
film shot in the sixteenth century Kyoto
Buddhist temple, whose garden contains
15 stones arranged in a rectangle. The
movie is made up of long and evenly paced
dolly shots on a computer-controlled motorized
dolly rolling past the stones. The view
of the stones is given no more time than
the bed of white crushed rock and stained
back walls behind them, except when the
camera briefly zooms in slowly on several
of the large picturesque stones. The footage
is punctuated with poetic intertitles
by Arata Isozaki. The soundtrack evokes
an echoing tap on a barrel, drip of water
into a pool or puddle. I remember the
frustration of a Japanese professor with
a group of American university undergraduates
and tourists who wouldn't sit still long
enough to listen to "a very Japanese"
sound of water dripping in the shed we
sat. At the end of the film we hear a
bit of chanting by monks at prayer. The
Making of <MA> in Ryon-Ji, a
10 minute documentary showing the nuts
and bolts of iimura's filmmaking, includes
assistants setting up lighting with proper
gels. It is definitely of use to its co-producer,
the Osaka University of the Arts.
MA: the Stones Have Moved presents
iimura's 2004 collaboration with the Kala
Institute of Berkeley, California, creating
a computer animation that alludes to a
Japanese one-stroke drawing style. It
assembles creeping sketches of the stones,
sequenced in a jerky manner that lacks
the fluidity of the original video in
Ryon-ji. My wife compared it to a snail
crawling across the screen. We are given
an occasional glimpse of the source video's
stones and at those moments appreciate
the orchestration of color, light, and
texture in the original designers of the
Ryon-ji garden. The continuous chunky
and clunky line is most interesting when
it reduces the stain marks of the temple's
garden wall to fugitive and fragmented,
vine-like and almost figurative verticals.
Lacking any soundtrack at all, I was imagining
Jelly Roll Morton's ragtime orchestra
providing one. Not until the cinemateques
of the 1960s were silent films projected
without musical and/or vocal accompaniment.
MA (Intervals), from 1977, is iimura's
most conceptually reductive and sensually
austere work here. The screen appears
either black, black with a white scratched
line, white, white with a black scratched
line, for intervals of one, two or three
seconds. The lines are reminiscent of
Barnett Newman's "zip" on his paintings
in the 1950s and 1960s. The soundtrack
is made up of taps or intervals of white
noise chatter. This reviewer felt sated
long before the film's 10 (30 in some
public showings) minutes had elapsed.
iimura then continued inquiry into seriality
in video projects through the late nineteen
seventies and early eighties.