By Rowena Aquino

The Chanoma Film Festival's presentation of Sharasoju came without the benefit of subtitles. Unfazed, APA explains how this absence opened the experience to new forms of visual pleasure.

In the act of watching a film in the theatre, we take for granted certain things that, at closer inspection, can spread doubt about who's actually watching whom or what. For example, the screen is located on one side of a wall, and where we place ourselves in order to look at the screen is in an upright position. Watching a film this way can be compared to the scenario of, say, having the screen located on the ceiling while in a reclined position. These aspects of screen location and viewing position are like cues for us to take and watch films in a certain way. As for the films themselves, I don't want to get into narrative forms or genre conventions, but if it's a foreign film and one is finally in front of the screen in a sitting position, there's an expectation of having to read words and images at the same time via subtitles. You prepare yourself in advance to confront the film in these overlapping, parallel terms over which you don't seem to have control to the point where it becomes automatic. When the lights go down and the first batch of subtitles appears on the screen at the same time as the images, a fluency in reading words and images happens – not too different from the fluency of driving that consists of multiple actions of looking at mirrors, stepping on the gas pedal and brake interchangeably, etc; this is driving. Reading subtitles and watching the images -- this is watching a foreign film. But what happens to this autopilot-style of watching a foreign film when, contrary to expectations, the words at the bottom of the screen that are the supposed gatekeepers of meaning don't appear?  

This is what I experienced at the screening of Kawase Naomi's Sharasoju (Shara, 2003), one of the films showcased at the Chanoma Film Festival at the end of October. I have to admit I went through a series of emotions that went beyond the world of the film: first, surprise. Then I thought that at some point the subtitles WILL appear; they MUST appear. It's just an aesthetic ploy to not have subtitles right away to disorient the spectator. Then, panic. Indecision: should I leave or stay and ‘watch' the film? Finally, acceptance. A different way of watching. We're adaptable beings, even when we're sitting in chairs and looking at one side of a wall, right? I don't want to make too big of a deal out of this or simplify it, but I had to elaborate the conditions of watching Sharasoju before talking about it because the two are inseparable. 

Unmoored by the absence of subtitles, I was forced to focus more intensely on watching the images, which I think, may be the best way to watch Sharasoju because it is so driven by the fragility and subtlety of the interaction between gestures, silence, movement, and space. The beginning of the film introduces what seems like a subjective point of view as it looks around a room, emerging slowly out of the room and house and then running after two boys through the streets and nearby cluster of trees in the city of Nara. The camera chases after these two boys for a sustained period of time until it stops abruptly on one of them, Shun. The other boy has disappeared. After this enigmatic prologue, the film re-introduces Shun five years later, now an adolescent.  

Life in Nara, it seems, is simple, quiet, with very little intrusions. However, the unexplained disappearance of the other boy, who was Shun's twin, has left an unsettling feeling of hollowness for Shun's family, despite Shun's mother's pregnancy. Communication is limited, or restrained; in fact, dialogue is minimal compared to the average film. Kawase instead lets the camera linger or track slowly on scenes inside Shun's darkened home, the family's vegetable garden, through the narrow walkways/alleys that seem so intricate as forms of communication that weigh heavily on each character's mind. Even more than simply lingering on the characters and places, there's a searching and questioning expressed by the camera that meets halfway Shun's search for his bearings, and his friend Yu's own struggle with her family situation – and not too far behind, my own position of making/finding meaning in the images. 

I have to admit, though, that having even a very elementary knowledge of Japanese allowed me to latch onto certain patches of the dialogue that, in retrospect, ended up being crucial to understanding the general plot of the film, which culminates in the town's annual festival celebration. But at a general level, I was confined to engaging with the film in visceral terms since there were no subtitles so that what is called a narrative, however amorphous it may be in this case, faded into the background. ‘Confined,' perhaps, is the wrong word since it would fail to explain the incredible surge of emotion that came over me during the much extended scene of the festival where Yu heads a procession of the townspeople clothed in yellow and whose faces are painted. Yu and the others perform a dance in the street, grounded by the heavy pounding of drums, as Shun, family members and others look on. The extended scenes of the dance build up such an intense rhythm of movement and sound; a sense of change in all the main characters' emotions emerges from this sequence where no words are exchanged. The equally intense rain that suddenly comes pounding down on everyone in the street doesn't stop the performance; it actually takes the sequence to its crescendo and as the rain is falling on faces, the sense of emotional change happening becomes even more palpable. Having been concentrating more so than usual on the everyday body movements and the faintest of facial expressions to glean the minimal amount of information of the film, the explosion of outward, physical movement and sound expressed a world of meaning, including the emergence of emotional renewal – Shun's mother (played by Kawase herself) giving birth in their home confirms this. 

This idea of emotional ‘renewal' crops up in all of the films in the Chanoma Film Festival's lineup this year. What makes Sharasoju stand out as far as representing a renewal of hope and sense of community and identity is that it ‘speaks' on the simplest, most primordial level of movement, which the absence of subtitles enhanced. My intention isn't to lock the meaning in subtitles or paint them as barriers to a ‘pure' understanding of the images. However, when I say ‘movement,' I mean motion that goes beyond the brevity of the subtitles, and also the spaces and silences between that constitute this motion – or better yet e-motion.

Published: Wednesday, November 15, 2006