Interview Excerpt
Excerpt from the interview film historian and curator Alejandro Bachmann did with me for Found Footage Magazine, Issue 10.
Alejandro Bachmann: Flicker is definitely something that draws attention to the act of seeing, to the act I am involved in as I watch a film. And when watching Sounding Glass, especially toward the last minutes, as the film flickers between different images, I become aware of how seeing something is always also connected to the act of wanting to identify something, to see something clearly and know what it is I am looking at—because the film somehow plays with this, draws me into this. I am somehow thrown back upon myself…
Sylvia Schedelbauer: The motif of the ocean—water—features in every film of mine, directly or indirectly, usually as metaphor, sometimes as a compositional structure, an editing mode, or in the way images flow, even form a deluge. This will be obvious in all the flicker films, and perhaps less obvious in Memories, yet it is there, too, implicit in the fact that my father had to cross an ocean to get to the Japanese archipelago. Living in close proximity to the ocean is always palpable in Tokyo, in countless ways. I clearly remember one lunch, alone with my mother; I must have been 19 years old. My mom had made my favorite dish, grilled blue mackerel, a fish only found in the tropical and subtropical waters of the Pacific. Savoring the food, I thought of my impending move to Germany, a country I had never lived in and that felt alien to me. I asked her: “But how can I ever live apart from the ocean?” While I said “ocean,” what I really meant was the Pacific. There was a deep sense of identification with the landscape and of reassurance that the ocean was right there, with all the pleasures and dangers it posed, beyond food, flora, fauna, landscape, climate, even humidity (Tokyo is subtropical). It was the bright colors, high temperatures, and complex textures of light and water that I loved so deeply and simply could not imagine living without. Germany is not landlocked and does have some access to the North Atlantic, but it couldn’t be more different from everything I loved about living right on the Pacific.
In her most recent monograph, film scholar and critic Erika Balsom takes Sigmund Freud’s notion of the oceanic feeling as a point of departure to “idiosyncratically drift” through a history of cinema, relating that “in the great magnitude of the oceans […] resides a vast and fluid archive traversing nature and culture.”1 I devoured the book in one reading, which compellingly curates and discusses films around five maritime themes (contingency, water, labor, migration, and circulation), and it made me want to know more about the oceanic feeling itself. In a recent essay, Jackie Wang traces the roots of the oceanic feeling across religion, philosophy and psychology for the purpose of elaborating a project of communist affect. According to Wang, all interpretations of the oceanic have theorized the distinct experience of a temporary disintegration of ego, an unsettling of the boundaries of the self. One of the most famous circumscriptions is presented as a quote: it is “a feeling of indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.”2 Beyond Wang’s theoretical analysis of the term, what resonates with me are her following three notions: that the oceanic can be a point of departure for new socialities and political models that do not rely on discrete selves, and that it can be a source of creative and social inspiration. Last but not least, I find the possibility of inducing an oceanic feeling intriguing.
When I introduce my flicker films at a screening, I tell audiences to try not to decipher images. I tell them to watch the films by looking at the center of the screen with a soft gaze, not unlike when daydreaming. To try not to grasp the images, but to let them come to you. To try not to understand what you are seeing with your cognitive faculties, but to experience them immersively. I developed this approach after thinking about film scholar Linda Williams’ work on body genres, which include porn, horror, comedy, and melodrama: films that elicit physical reactions and involuntary reflexes on the part of the audience.3 I came to see experimental films as a body genre of sorts, as many films rely on a poetic understanding —a knowing by way of feeling4— and work in similar ways of eliciting an affective and physical response on the part of the viewer. I think that flicker films take this to an extreme, and this works best in a cinema space, with a captive audience, exposed to the (sometimes) overwhelming, visceral encounter of loud images and sounds. With each flicker film I made I focused on different themes, but in each film I always intercut images of a human with nature. I deliberately explored this in Sea of Vapors (2014), in which images of a woman and landscape are intricately intertwined. Concepts of simultaneities were important. Sea of Vapors is at once fast/slow, here/there, then/now, and most importantly, introspective/extrospective—the woman in my film is looking in at the same time that she is looking out. I finally have the words to describe that the figure on screen is feeling oceanic.
In my single frame edits, every still frame has a dual existence; one image is always altered and different from itself, fading in and out of its own duality. But more importantly, every still image also crossfades with another still image (a different motif) which, respectively, also exists twice. As the editing style progresses, more image couplets are stacked on top of each other, and what a viewer sees, literally, is an entangled, interconnected multiplicity of images—appearing only in relation with others in abstract formulations, continually different from themselves. The boundaries between images are collapsed, they bleed into each other, and transitions between sequences crossfade in a way that doesn’t allow the viewer to see when a shot begins and ends. Doing away with the clear-cut strobe of structurally alternating images that are separate from each other, all sequences begin to appear in rippling, rolling, or surging waves. Viewers have responded to my flicker films with euphoria, fully embracing the experience, which some have called psychedelic5 or internal illumination6. I can’t speak for others, but will say that for me, flicker films can induce—even if only for short sips of time—an oceanic feeling.
Through discussion of diverse films, Erika Balsom considers how the deeply mythologized site of the ocean activates forms of relationality that prompt one to think beyond the individual, beyond a singular territory, and beyond the binary between nature and culture.7 Balsom’s approach to the ocean as a political, connecting space resonates very much, and has me (re)turn to traditional East Asian concepts of nature.
In her delineation of nature, histories of its conceptions, and engagement toward climate practices, environmental humanist Regina M. Bichler begins with a poem by Japanese scholar Motoori Norinaga: “If people ask about the heart of [the people of Japan], it is the blossoms of mountain cherry reflecting the rising sun.” To Norinaga, images of natural phenomena express a notion of cultural identity, and Bichler goes on to cite multiple Western and Japanese sources to relate the widespread assumption that the Euro-American imaginary of human and nature is a dualistic one, with a conceptual divide between a superior human realm and an inferior realm of nature; while the traditional East Asian image of nature, in contrast, is described as holistic, comprising both humans and the non‑human environment on an equal status.8 I’d say that I’ve incorporated both Western and Japanese notions of nature in my films, to varying degrees.
Back to Wang, she writes that some thinkers have disavowed the oceanic feeling, that it can, at best, illuminate the “transparent network that covers the world” and sensitize us to the way that “everything lives, moves, everything corresponds.”9 While the very Western conceptions of the oceanic feeling are said to have been partially inspired by Eastern religions, to me, the oceanic clearly resonates with the idea of a substanceless non-self from Buddhism, which encourages practitioners to make an end to the “usually-unconsciousness-and-automated quest”10 to understand the sense-of-self as a thing, instead of as a process. Cultivating a sense of awareness by interrelating the sense of self is not just a fundamental aspect of religion, but also of social fabric in Japanese culture. As the philosophical psychologist Shogo Tanaka references in a compelling paper, the Westerner’s self is “bounded” and “impermeable,” but the Easterner’s self is “connected” and “fluid.”11
Endnotes to this section:
1 Erika Balsom, An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea. New Plymouth: Govett-Brewsters, 2018, p 14.
2 Jackie Wang, ‘Oceanic Feeling and Communist Affect,’ Friendship as a Form of Life, 2017, p. 23.
3 I first became aware of Linda Williams’ work reading her book Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
4 Cultural anthropologist Omar Kasmani relates affect as a knowing by way of feeling in ‘Thin Attachments: Writing Berlin in Scenes of Daily Loves,’ Capacious, Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 2019, p. 35.
5 Ekkehard Knörer, Oberhausen. Berlin: Cargo Film Medien Kultur, Vol 46, 2020 p. 16.
6 José Emilio González Calvillo, ‘Las raíces de nuestras conexiones,’ Correspondencias | Cine y pensamiento.
7 Balsom, op. cit., p. 11.
8 Regina M. Bichler, ‘Harm and Harmony—Concepts of Nature and Environmental Practice in Japan,’ Histories, 3, 2023, pp. 62–63.
9 Wang quotes Gérard de Nerval. Wang, op. cit., p. 21.
10 Jin Y. Park, Buddhisms and Deconstructions. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, p. 78.
11 Tanaka reflects that the Japanese constitution of the self is “based on interaction with the environment and its identity is also underpinned by the more-or-less constant circumstances that enable the habitual actions of everyday life.” He claims that a “kind of synchrony-stressed embodied interaction is the basis of the ‘interdependent’ and ‘collective’ character of the self in Japanese culture, since it brings a sense of unity among the interactants.” But he also writes that synchrony is “merely an idealized form of interpersonal communication.” Dissonance, discordance and incongruity produce a sense of individuality, and difference is expressed through embodied interactions. He urges us to consider complexities and think beyond coarse stereotypes of “individual vs. collective,” “independent vs. interdependent,” and “East and West.” Shogo Tanaka, ‘Reconsidering the Self in Japanese Culture from an Embodied Perspective,’ 2021, pp. 36-38. Tokyo: Tokai University
To read the full interview, please purchase the 10th issue of Found Footage Magazine here.