Mount Fuji seen from a moving train

This is a poetic and animated meditation inspired by two trips to Japan, in 2003 and 2018. In both cases, I brought back images and sounds as well as recordings of my performances, most notably one with the dancer-choreographer Teita Iwabushi, which constitutes one of the threads of the film. There is no story as such, but a formal construction, with both sound and image, based on a stylistic and technical multidisciplinary approach that connects dance, calligraphy, and scratching on film. The continuity is built on a series of lines of tension: scratched on film animation / live sound recorded in public places; the sound of a language you don’t understand / the immanent emotional power of the spoken word; contemporary life / remembrance of traditions; the fluidity of the passing of time / the remembrance of the historical disasters (such as the atomic bomb in Nagasaki and the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima) when Japanese society caught a glimpse of the specter of annihilation and could demonstrate its resilience. The film was actually completed on the tenth anniversary of Fukushima.

In a way, the film attempts to answer a fictional question: what can be seen of Japan when Mount Fuji is invisible, lost in the clouds? An evocation of a paradoxical invisibility.