1
– We both like the same things. We’re parent and child. Are you filming again? Give it a rest! Stop shooting me all the time!
– Why?
– Good memories, I suppose. I won’t die easily. I’ll live until 100. I want to see your kids, see them at sports festivals. There’s no limit to my wanting. I’ll inherit the years of my brothers who died young. You are too close. Stop her, will you? Stop filming me all the time.
“You are too close.” Home movies are often personal and always intimate, and Katatsumori (1994), like filmmaker Naomi Kawase herself, presses close to her grandmother. What this film has at its disposal, above all else, it seems, is Naomi and her grandmother’s words of kindness – their affection for one another. And, if you listen less carefully, you might (mis)hear, “you, too, are close.” Like her grandmother’s brothers who died young. Like cinema.
Naomi considers her grandmother to be her mother, her guardian, and she, in turn, knows that this is how it is: “We both like the same things. We’re parent and child.” Tightly framed, Katatsumori seems to be drawn to cheeks, the curves that the fingers and eyes caress. The film gauges the limits of intimacy, exposing where motherhood ends and childhood begins. Or, rather, exposing what lies in-between, by positioning itself in the middle of things (of bodies, subjectivities, affects).
To become unseen by a mother, writes Carol Mavor, is to descend into the untranslatable.1
2
Naomi Kawase (b. 1969, Nara, Japan) studied at the Osaka School of Photography and co-founded the Nara International Film Festival in 2010. Her more recent work – including The Mourning Forest (Mogari no mori, 2007), Still the Water (Futatsume no mado, 2014), and Radiance (Hikari, 2017) – has flourished at Cannes, while her autobiographical home movies from the mid-nineties and early noughties have found a modest audience online. They are now part of an ever-expanding archive of independent films on YouTube.
Katatsumori (1994), See Heaven (Ten, mitake, 1995) and Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth (Kya ka ra ba a, 2001) are tucked away in between vlogs and live streams, as though they, too, cannot bear the weight of the projection screen. What these home movies have in common, it seems, is a limitless yet inconclusive interest in memory, including its capacity to preserve and forget both childhood and the ageing body.
Naomi Kawase and her grandmother exist in the palm of my hand – her home movies require time and space, but my phone is too precise and mathematical for their indefinite cadence and unfixed tonality. (Their tenderness seems to be as expansive as Youtube’s video archive). Maybe the projection screen and my phone are not opposites, to paraphrase Carol Mavor, but rather each other’s lining – both incapable of housing the fine texture of home movies.
3
– I never knew what it was like to live with the man who was my father. In that case, where is my family? So I thought.
– Naomi, I don’t know how to ask you this… do you love me? Do you still love me as much as I love you? You never say so, but…
Does Naomi get too close, touching her grandmother’s ageing cheeks with both the tip of her fingers and the optical lens of her 8mm video camera? (Or do home movies always brush the margins of a tender-hearted form of being-too-close-with-others?)
Throughout her work, Naomi speaks to her grandmother-mother with softness, as though scared that she, too, will disappear – like the man she calls her father. She hasn’t forgotten her father and finds his address and phone number via the Japanese family register while filming for Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth. When she calls him he asks: “Where do you live now?”, “How did you find me?”, “How did you get my number?”, “How old are you?”
4
There is no limit to her grandmother’s desire to be close to her, and yet Naomi is too close. The result of this proximity is disastrous for neither Naomi nor her grandmother, for, here, “you are too close” oscillates with “you are not close enough”. Both are close, seeing and seen, and yet maintain the between of parent and child, the inevitable distance between bodies, between hand and cheek.
Perhaps the gesture of Naomi’s left hand tells her grandmother what she cannot utter. Her hand is neither grasped nor clenched; her fingers the gentlest limit-points of her body. (Touch, here, punctuates the maternal, and echoes a sequence from No Home Movie [2015], during which Chantal Akerman seems to brush her film camera against the screen of her laptop – pressing close to the pixelated image of her mother. She, too, is both too close and not close enough.)
The home movie is an exploration of distance. Jean-Luc Nancy writes in his Corpus: “Two bodies can’t occupy the same place simultaneously. Therefore you and I are not simultaneously in the place where I write, where you read, where I speak, where you listen. No contact without displacement.”2
Eighteen minutes into Katatsumori, Naomi lets go of her camera, if only to be filmed herself. Her grandmother comes closer and closer to her, mimicking how Naomi has framed and reframed her grandmother throughout the home movie. Now, Naomi swaps places with her grandmother – as a video-body – while the latter moves and films her, perhaps too closely. Naomi and her grandmother both film and let themselves be filmed (caressed, and caressing) – from a thin yet palpable distance.
1 Carol Mavor, Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans Soleil, and Hiroshima Mon Amour, 2012, Duke University Press. 2 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, 2008, New York: Fordham University Press
Sander Hölsgens is a filmmaker and writer working on affect, the colour blue, and dust.
