by Alex Fields. Translation by Monika Uchiyama.
Ultra Dogme is proud to present the first English-language interview with Shinya Isobe, four of whose films, dance (2009), EDEN (2011), For rest (2017) and 13 (2020), are streaming from now through the 29th of December as part of the final Movie Club program of the year.
Communicating over email, Alex Fields conversed with Isobe about a wide range of subjects, from the gradual development of his experimental approach to time and cinema to the dynamic presence of sound in his work.
Special thanks to Monika Uchiyama for her speedy and scrupulous work in translating Isobe’s answers from Japanese.
Alex Fields: Let’s start with basic background. I understand from your website that you originally went to school to study narrative film but weren’t satisfied with that form. What were your frustrations with dramatic or narrative film and what was your first exposure to experimental film?
Shinya Isobe: I started studying film at an art school called Tokyo Zokei University. I majored in narrative film, but at the time many of the professors and instructors were experimental filmmakers. We were also allowed to take classes across various disciplines regardless of our major, so I learned a lot about experimental film. Student film productions weren’t constrained to particular categories, so many of the films were made very freely. It was in that environment that I began making films that were like a hybrid of narrative and experimental film.
At the time, I was questioning what exactly it means to tell a story through film. It’s difficult to shoot images freely using the conventional approach to narrative filmmaking where the script serves as a blueprint. When translating a script into a film, while there are shots produced that are indispensable, many are also unnecessary. I felt there was a master-servant relationship between text and image imposing significant constraints on the image. And so I began exploring ways for narrative to exist in film distinct from expressive methods typical of narrative filmmaking.
I went straight to graduate school after college, but completed these programs without establishing a definitive methodology within myself, and I struggled tremendously after that. Realizing that I couldn’t resolve this on my own, I sought help by enrolling in a night school at Image Forum, a cinema in Tokyo, and there I began to seriously study experimental film.
Did you make narrative films of your own before starting working in a more experimental mode? Was it a gradual evolution in your work or was there a sharp break where you decided to move in a different direction?
Before experimental films, I was making narrative films based on scripts. But as mentioned earlier, these were made using very experimental techniques, so they might be classified as experimental films—techniques like combining images and words, similar to La Jetée (1962).
While the concept of narrative remained a constant for me, I knew that I needed to consciously pursue my own style, which is why I began attending the Image Forum Institute of Moving Image. It was a major turning point for me. I made dance and EDEN while enrolled there.
What were the first experimental films or filmmakers that you loved which influenced you toward making that sort of work?
I wouldn’t say I’ve been influenced by any specific work or artist. I felt immense potential in the genre and field of experimental film.
You could say that I have been influenced by all of the works that serve as a kind of textbook for Japanese experimental filmmakers, which include films by Shuji Terayama, Toshio Matsumoto, Junichi Okuyama, Takashi Ito, Hiroshi Yamazaki, etc.
Both of those films that you made at the Image Forum—dance and EDEN—explore how a camera or cinematic time can see places on different scales of perception from our usual human experience. You mention La Jetée, which of course is also overtly concerned with time and photography, as are your later films. Is time a conscious conceptual or theoretical preoccupation for you or is it something you found yourself exploring because of formal choices you made?
I’m very interested in time on a conceptual level. There is time that can be scientifically observed, but humans also experience time on a sensory level that connects to memory and emotion. When we look toward non-human beings, we can imagine a temporality that humans can’t experience. These kinds of uncertain and conceptual notions of time are fascinating to me.
Film is an art form that can directly engage with time. While time and film interact in many ways, time-lapse and multiple exposure techniques are methods that I frequently use. Moving images are born from light and time as materials. This is especially palpable when shooting on film.
I aim to fuse conceptual and cinematic time to produce a unique temporality that exists solely within the work.
When you say “non-human beings” and “a temporality that humans can’t experience” it makes me think of these explicitly anti-anthropocentric strains that are popular in contemporary academic theory–object-oriented ontology, or the new materialism or whatever you want to call it. Those ideas have manifestations in avant-garde film in the work of for example Deborah Stratman. Were you thinking about any of that there when planning these works?
I wasn’t thinking of these things when planning these works. I do think that my work has an anti-anthropocentric perspective, but it coexists with an intensely personal perspective. I value seeing them as interconnected rather than as separate.
Your work has played with time lapse techniques from the beginning but later films like For Rest and especially 13 obviously took a very long time just to shoot because of their very nature, I think five years in the latter case. When did you start planning those long term projects and how did the long durations of their execution affect the eventual results or your thinking about them?
This has to do with my filmmaking style. I never start with a clear theme or concept. Instead, I discover them during the process of filming. I adopt a very improvisational approach, building the film’s content by accumulating these discoveries. In my films, shooting could be said to be an act of discovering the theme. I didn’t intend for For rest or 13 to be shot over long periods, but it simply took that much time to arrive at their themes.
So when you start work do you have a plan at all for what the eventual film will look like or just an idea for something you want to shoot? Does a vision for the film become clear as you shoot or does that happen mostly when editing? And how did a long term project like 13 come to be what it is, when did you realize you were going to need footage over years of time and how did you decide when it was ready to finish?
I never have the final film in mind when starting a project—just a simple idea of what I want to shoot. Oftentimes I start with a technical approach.
13 began with an idea to use ND filters for solar eclipse photography and multiple exposures to make numerous suns appear simultaneously on the screen. I discovered the themes over a five year period: abstraction and figuration, consciousness and unconsciousness. The resulting work revolves around time, shuttling back-and-forth between the sun and our daily lives.
It wasn’t as if I rationally decided mid-way that a prolonged shooting period was necessary. The five-year shoot became a kind of ascetic practice, to where I nearly began to see the act of shooting itself as the goal. Worried that I could keep filming forever, I returned to my original goal of making a film and created a deliberate structure to complete it.
If your working method is improvisational in that way, do you shoot a lot of stuff you don’t end up using? Do you have other long term filming projects that may or may not eventually become films?
The images I shoot often don’t go to use. I make many tests at the start of a project. I don’t want to waste too much film, so I often shoot digitally at first. Since digital and film are fundamentally different, these don’t serve as true tests but are effective as sketches. Footage at this stage never makes it into the final film.
I pursue the ideas that are promising through a process of trial and error. Only after that do I begin shooting on film. Even then, things rarely go exactly as planned. The odds of success are about fifty-fifty. But successful images are not always compelling ones, and important ideas are often buried in what I thought were failures. It’s not uncommon for footage that was initially rejected during production to be used in the final cut, altering the film’s overall direction. I currently have a film I am still in the middle of shooting. It’s been two years and I still don’t know how long the shoot will continue.
I often come up with new ideas while working on a project, so I sometimes work on multiple films simultaneously. Among my previous works, For rest, 13, and the mid-length narrative film Humoresque (2022) were all filmed at the same time.
That’s interesting to talk about using digital as a kind of sketch for the eventual work in film. I hadn’t thought of it in these terms but I suppose it’s a more fleshed out version of story boarding or scouting with a viewfinder. When you’re doing that sort of preparatory work with digital do you ever feel like digital offers something different that you’d want to explore in a video work or are you pretty committed to film as your medium?
Working digitally also offers various discoveries in the process of making a piece. I often end up with footage that exceeds my expectations. But, for me, there isn’t much dialogue or struggle with the medium itself.
Digital offers greater control compared to film, so it feels less like a dialogue with the medium and more like a dialogue with the subject. Each medium has its own strengths, so I want to make the most of both.
13 was shot on film but edited digitally. I initially adopted this workflow to avoid physically destroying the film by overdoing multiple exposures, but I came to see an immense potential in mixing film and digital. I consciously utilize this approach even more in the new piece I’m working on.
Your most recent film, Humoresque, is considerably longer than the earlier ones and something of a return to narrative form, at least in the sense that there are actors and scenes. Did that creative process feel different from the other works? Did you hire actors or cast people you already knew?
I agree, Humoresque is a kind of return to narrative form. The biggest difference as far as the creative process was directing the actors.
The presence of actors is the most significant element of this film, and they are played by my actual wife and son. The film’s concept is the fusing of a story set in an unreal world with the structure of a home movie, where a father points his camera toward his family. There was no script, and I just filmed fragmentary scenes of daily life. I minimally directed the action, leaving everything else up to the actors. As for my son, he was still very young and couldn’t act, let alone follow direction. He didn’t even know that I was filming a movie. The shoot primarily centered on how to get him to move, with my wife and the other characters essentially serving as guides.
Was there a crew for the film other than yourself?
There was a crew, albeit a small one. They weren’t professionals and didn’t have any specialized filmmaking skills. We just enlisted help from people close to us, which wasn’t strategic. We simply didn’t have the budget to hire professionals, but it may have had a very positive effect in terms of expanding the idea of the home movie.
It does work very well. Your son may not know he’s an actor but he has a lovely screen presence. Maybe the intimacy is also a natural result of your real relationship to your subjects. I take it this was filmed around your actual home then?
Thank you! The location for the film was quite far from where I live. I live a bit more central in the city, so in a sense, this suburban landscape was a bit surreal for me. That distance may have allowed me to freely imagine a narrative in that space.
I’m interested in how even though, unlike your other films, on a shot by shot basis the passage of time occurs on the scope of human experience, you still capture something of how that experience stands in relation to other scales of time and space, like the changing of seasons or the lives of insects or the vastness of water. Did you make conscious adjustments knowing you were working in “real time” and in some sense capturing the passage of time in your own life?
I wanted to depict both the quiet moments that flow through our lives and the deep time of the surrounding nature as equally significant. I strive not to view the characters and background as separate, but to see the characters as part of the landscape. While I depicted this from a perspective beyond the human in my previous works, I captured them on a human scale (primarily my son’s) in this film. That is why I deliberately avoided controlling time through techniques like time-lapse or multiple exposure.
We should wrap this up, but before we do, I want to ask about your use of sound, which is one of my favorite things about your films and which we haven’t talked about yet. I’m especially interested in how you made the sound for dance (which functions much like a beat that the images “dance” to), in the voices used in EDEN, and in the sound recording for Humoresque, how much, if any of it, was recorded live alongside the images vs. composed separately afterward.
I think of sound as a major element in my films. I typically work on the sound myself.
For rest is the only film where I worked with a musician, who is also my cousin. (He appears in Humoresque as the man that brings the record). The sound in dance directly expresses the work’s theme. The piece’s subject is a room in which a woman lives. Her presence there isn’t physical, but rather a memory and an accumulation of time. Within that temporal scale, her cyclical daily life possesses rhythm and movement. I thought it was truly like a dance.
From there, I came up with the idea of constructing a beat using the ambient sounds of daily life in her room. I aimed for a soundtrack in which the various sounds ingrained in the room itself begin to play their own music. The vocals in EDEN serve as a guide from past to present and into the future, transforming from sounds emanating from a tape recorder in the film’s first half to background music in the latter half. This is a song I wrote, and it shares the same chord progression as all the music that plays throughout EDEN. My wife is the singer. I composed the melody and she wrote the lyrics. We repeatedly re-recorded the audio on a tape recorder to degrade the sound quality.
The sound for the films is entirely asynchronous, so there is no sync sound. This was also the case for Humoresque, where all sounds were composed and recorded separately to match the characters’ actions. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, there was simply too much ambient noise, like the sound of nearby cars or people’s voices, rendering synchronous recordings unusable. Secondly, emphasizing the sounds of the movement while removing the characters’ voices creates a surreal effect. Thirdly, much of the filming took place when my son couldn’t speak yet, and I found the way that he and my wife communicated through gestures and expressions to be incredibly visually compelling, and I wanted to make the most of that. This wasn’t an idea I had from the beginning, but as I was in the final stages of editing and creating the sound, I found that it felt much more natural to exclude human voices.
Thanks so much for your time and your very thoughtful answers, and above all for your wonderful films. I’m excited for a new audience to get to see them, and glad I had the opportunity to talk with you about them.
(In English): Thank you for your wonderful interview. I realized so much myself while answering your questions. It was a pleasure speaking with you. I look forward to the opportunity to speak with you again sometime.
Alex Fields is a film writer and postal worker in Knoxville, TN. They write regularly on formalist, experimental, and genre film for Tone Glow and their blog, Not Reconciled.
Monika Uchiyama is an artist and translator based in Tokyo. Her films have screened at festivals such as Art of the Real, Japan Avant-Garde and Experimental Film Festival, Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions. She works as a Japanese-English interpreter and translator specializing in the fields of visual arts, music, and cinema. She received her BA from CUNY City College in 2015 and her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018.
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