Conversation with Kaori Oda

Nowhen:

I really enjoyed watching your film. It is at the same time very delicate with it’s dreamy atmosphere, but also has this heavy topic of trauma. The way of treating it is very soft. Especially the use of and emphasis on light and shadow was interesting – it starts with a black screen, then shows projected images, and then a white screen. So you have it reflected in the form of the film as well as in the topic. And I was wondering what interests you in outlining the dichotomy of light and shadow in the film medium, which is, basically, made of light and shadow.

Kaori Oda:

Let me think. Well, it was necessary for us to think about lighting. Yes, we are shooting mostly underground, in 16 mm, so if you are not lighting the space, you don’t see anything, because it’s completely dark. How you light the space will make the face of the space, you know, like lighting from below will make it scary. It’s applied to the space as well. We think about lighting before the shooting, we discuss a lot what we are getting from the space, from the story of the space and how we can put it on the film, meaning how we light, how we illuminate the space. In that sense, that was a really good training for us, how we think of light and space. Shadow was the concept from the beginning. Because we called the character ‘shadow’, it makes sense. And that character is something that connects every kind of underground space in Japan, because we are shooting many, various kind of underground spaces in Japan in the film. So it’s not only one cave, one ‘Gama’, but many different caves. Of course we shot the Gama in Okinawa and Sapporo, which is in Hokkaido and many others all over Japan, but we were trying to make it look like one big underground layer, with “Shadow” as a wonder link.

Nowhen:

Interesting. There also was this aspect of realness, of really being at the place where it happened. There also is this archeological moment where they search in the ground and they find some bones in the soil of the cave. Would you say this also relates to your film practice – finding traces?

Kaori Oda:

Sure, yes. As a filmmaker, that’s my mission, to try to capture those kind of living traces, or the remains from the past. We’re trying to capture it inside the film and show it to the audience so we can pass on the memories from the past. To overpass it, to leave it behind, also to bring it to the next generation.

Nowhen:

Interesting. There are different symbolic layers in the film. I thought it also worked on a meta level, and was reflecting on film itself. There’s this scene in the cinema, but also this whole topic of light and darkness. Did you also think about this in the process?

Oda:

We didn’t have a script. It was like this – we went to one location, did the research and location hunting, with staff, with crew, and then we shot. We repeated this kind of process. But after the shooting, I edited the footage so we know what we have. Then we are going to the next location, and then I edit again. So by doing this repeating, we know where we go next. So we didn’t know we would shoot cinema as a location, as a space, but because this idea came to our mind, that the shadow has to be on the ground somehow, as a person who is living present days like nowadays, and what she does is daily life: making soup, doing exercise, going to cinema. By going to cinema, it could also imply the cinema as a cave. That’s how it came to me the idea.

Nowhen:

That’s a very beautiful association. Like I mentioned earlier, there were these different layers and I think there were a lot of allusions on the subconscious. Was this also a main part of your idea about the film?

Oda:

Not only with this project, but yes, all of my films. I aim to approach our subconscious. That’s my interest in my filmmaking, my big motif and theme, and if we approach to this unconsciousness, and could capture somehow, this space by going on the ground physically. I don’t know if you have to be physical, but we will make a new layer of this unconsciousness, which is constructed by those voices that are usually hidden or difficult to hear, difficult to get.

Nowhen:

Speaking of the unconscious, memory is also very important for your film I would say. Would you like to say something about this? Because there was, on the one hand, this more concrete remembering of this specific trauma, but also as if it was reflecting on memory itself in a more general term.

Oda:

Before making this feature film Underground, we made a middle length film called Gamma. It was only the Okinawan part, and it featured storytelling of Gama like Mr. Matsunaga himself. So this was more about context, like narrative, story, but Underground is about memory, in a long time span. I don’t know if we succeeded or not, but we tried to make it from the Big Bang to the distant future. And this Okinawa part, it’s this present part.

Nowhen:

Was it also situated in the middle, like the Okinawa part, like the cave you shot in, like the actual Gama was also in the middle, and now also in the film?

Oda:

Yes.

Nowhen:

Interesting. What I found very interesting was the scene at the beach, with the stones and it is as if the stones bring back the sound of the planes, the sound of the past.

Oda:

It happened by chance. We didn’t plan it like that, but we knew this was a beach that US military landed to Okinawa, and we knew the military base was beside the beach, but we didn’t know the aircraft would be going over our head, wow, okay, it was by chance. It’s a coral reef. So she does make sound. And then that was, that was it for the shot. But because the jet was going over our head, I thought she would stop, because that was really loud and scary, but she didn’t stop making the sound, and it was a kind of symbolic gesture for me, because this jet is the symbol. The aircraft is a symbol of war and virus, and this sound is coming from this.

Nowhen:

Interesting, because it seemed very planned. Also the timing was really quite right.

Oda:

We didn’t touch the sound that was like this.

Nowhen:

I had to think in this moment about something almost proved like, but more with sound like, like an auditive cause, little cause for memory coming back.

Oda:

I think you’re right, because we are talking about memory from the past, but that is connecting to the ground we live on now. Yes, the jet going over our head means the battle is not finished. I mean, it is finished when the World War Two finished, but it’s not finished. Imperialism. We are not colonized by us, but we are.

Nowhen:

Yes, it goes on. It was very interesting what role nature played in the film, because it was like you mentioned, and it was also very obvious and striking to me, that this beach where you said that they landed, actually that the stones really looked like bones. So there are everywhere traces of it. You’re

examining the traces that there are, that still there. Did filming feel like an examination of how it still is visible, this trauma, these traces.

Oda:

What I’m trying to do is by preserving those traces and memories, because it’s almost oral history that we are trying to capture, we capture really small voices, If we don’t capture them in medium like film,

it will disappear. The storyteller is not a person who experienced World War Two. He also got the memories from someone who was in the war. So I’m trying to be like him from his storytelling, yes, and because we all die. In the end, he would die, and we would die, but film will remain. So those memories will be there with the film. I don’t know how it’s gonna be, how the world is gonna be after we died, but if we are preserving this kind of memory, we can say we are like that in the past. And yeah, that’s what I tried to do.

Nowhen:

Yes, it’s beautiful. There was this scene where you had, like the shadow hand writing on the tree trunk, like with the hands. And so this was also very symbolic to me, because it inscribed something in material, in the nature. Would you like to say something about this?

Oda:

Because we wanted to do something with unconsciousness and also corrective memory and human being. Being is one of us. Where, when I, when we say, us, we are including trees, earth, those micro creatures. We start from it. I don’t know the name in English, and I don’t know how we form in the future. Everything included, I wanted to say us, because we are treating this time span of ours, because in Japanese, we like WA. It means we put Cogito because we didn’t have right word in English. But somehow, what the sound? What is?

Nowhen:

I had to think that this might have been more like a like a personal associate. Idea I had in this moment was, I think, Russian. It also touched a little bit like philosophical questions about being, about existence, ontology so that, for example Descartes who said, for example, like or like about the question, what makes us alive, what proves that we are really existent.

Oda:

No, people ask me these kind of questions, it’s interesting. People ask me about Platon, the allegory of cave. I haven’t read it.

Nowhen:

I also had this association. So you have been asked this often?

Oda:

Someone asked me this once before.

Nowhen:

What do you think about it? When people interpret these theories into your films?

Oda:

I like it.