[{"id":20643,"date":"2026-09-15T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ultradogme.com\/?p=20643"},"modified":"2026-09-15T20:18:47","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T20:18:47","slug":"deux-fois","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ultradogme.com\/2026\/09\/15\/deux-fois\/","title":{"rendered":"Ritual Remaking: Jackie Raynal\u2019s Deux Fois (1968)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Yasmina Price<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Make a rule. Break it. Doubling the fabular entry point of once upon a time<\/em>, Jackie Raynal\u2019s Deux Fois<\/em> (1968) is a springy cinematic exercise that plays with the levers of control and release. Luxuriating in the anatomy of visual storytelling, the film is an effervescent sequence of vignettes, sealed with the precision of a filmmaker whose training began as a technician. The title\u2019s twist on the narrative mode of fairytales signals its incorporation of the literary genre\u2019s original sinister qualities. Caught in a tangle of whimsy, lawless figures and inexplicable repetitions are constantly shadowed by the threat of violence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Towards the end of Deux Fois<\/em>, a typewritten text titled \u201cAchille and the Turtle\u201d starts with \u201cfor the third time.\u201d A segment in which Raynal enters a shop to buy soap\u2014uncertain of what she wants, doing a sniff test and inquiring about prices before making a decision\u2014repeats a third time. Her non-adherence to the formula she herself set then undergoes another twist, at least linguistically. Raynal first addresses the shopkeeper in Spanish, then French, and finally both, presenting what may be less a third repetition than a compressed synthesis of the previous two. In turn, the film\u2019s delightful chaos results from its admixture of a chilly, manicured construction with an exuberant, mischievous radiance. <\/p>\n\n\n

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\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Raynal\u2019s filmmaking is textured by the particular avant-garde non-conformity which differentiated the Zanzibar group from their contemporary corollaries in France. Unlike the Nouvelle Vague directors with whom she worked as an editor\u2014amongst others, Claude Chabrol, Jean Eustache and notably \u00c9ric Rohmer\u2014Raynal leaned more towards the sensorial derangement and anarchic unpredictability of the Surrealists and Situationists. Deux Fois<\/em> establishes its disorientating bearings from the ground up, as she displaces herself from the social, political, professional topography in Paris and France to plot the film in Barcelona. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There, Raynal deftly orchestrates an exquisite corpse of formal experimentation. Her conceptually daring film functions through an erotics of uncertainty and spontaneity to unwind any possibility of satisfied narrative expectation. Instead, it pointedly inhabits the qualities of an exercise or a sketch, absent of any preciousness to resolve. A cinematic seduction into a secret system of understanding, Deux Fois<\/em> is at once conspiratorial and estranging, offering the spectator the flattering disquiet of being in on the joke\u2014but only partially.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everything orbits around Raynal. The filmmaker first appears as someone being watched\u2014or at least as someone behaving as though she thinks she is being watched. Under presumed or fabricated surveillance, Raynal is framed in a medium shot, sitting on a balcony. With her head initially bowed almost as if in prayer, she is flanked by a vase filled with large feathery white stems on the right, facing a spread of food and glass bottle of coke which she eventually pours for herself. Her eyes dart nervously, looking mostly to the side and sometimes at the camera. With strange trills and guttural squawks for musical accompaniment, Raynal eats voraciously, while maintaining the fidgety unease of the paranoid object of an unverifiable gaze.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The irony is that this is Raynal\u2019s film, she is facing her own camera, and if a gaze is being directed towards her, it is most evidently the one she orchestrated herself. The theatrical agitation of these proceedings is heightened by a formal announcement of what is to come, starting with her saying \u201cAnd now, you will see a little girl on a train, then I will tell you a few little stories\u201d and continuing on to sketch out the rest of the film, before closing with \u201cThis evening will be the end of meaning. Ladies and gentlemen, good evening.\u201d After speaking, she remains rigidly posed and immobile, as though waiting for her photo to be taken. Another false start, the subversive ceremony has a ritualized quality, suggesting yet another system of meaning that will not deliver any stable coherence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Later, Raynal stands behind a table covered with numerous cameras. She picks them up one at a time, walks off screen, puts them back down, and repeats the process. The camera ritual places the technology in her hands and foregrounds the material objects which produce images. A claim on directorial control, Deux Fois<\/em> is a study in Raynal\u2019s technical expertise. When she began her work as a film editor, the profession was the intricate and underrecognized domain of a high percentage of women compared to other filmmaking labors. <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Varied events of gendered antagonism play out a feminist invective of conceptual and formal refashioning. Amongst them, the most overtly violent episode is also the one which does not repeat. Surrounded by a smudged landscape, Raynal appears in a close-up profile, a white scarf wrapped around her neck. Loud wind blows her hair around, before a pair of hands and hairy forearms gather her hair out of her face. What could have been a gesture of care quickly flips, as the hands aggressively pull her hair backwards until she disappears from view. The formal outlier in Deux Fois<\/em>, a digital, pixelated choreography showing two black figures against a brightly dotted grid, communicates similar hostilities. The likenesses of a woman and a man enter into a stylized hybrid of dancing and fighting. Their acrobatic discord shows them kicking and throwing each other around, with the woman at one point wielding a knife and afterwards tossing a chair. There is no feminist triumph: the woman ends up on the ground, pushed down by the man. Between the two episodes, Raynal and the abstracted figure are physically pushed out of the screen, waging a feminist battle for authority in the visual field. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

From its conception through its execution, Deux Fois<\/em> circles the question of how to re-make a cinematic image by intervening in the established, patriarchal arrangements of representational space. Raynal herself incarnates the transgressive visual choreography of the film. Thwarting expectations, its mixture of chilly calculations and fiery outbursts, alternating between repose and erratic expressivity, results in a suspended, partial paralysis. Even as it performs a repetitive refutation of firm beginnings or ends, Deux Fois<\/em> was the first film she directed. A take two on her ways into filmmaking, the formal dexterity of Raynal\u2019s piecemeal portraiture is a mutinous ritual of mediated self-creation.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deux Fois will screen as part of Jackie Raynal Presents at Anthology Film Archives September 15 \u2013 17.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n
Yasmina Price<\/a><\/strong> is a New York\u2013based writer and film programmer. She is devoted to visual culture from the African continent & diaspora, anticolonial cinema, and the experimental work of women filmmakers. Her work pays particular attention to the materiality of image-making and the politics of memory. She has programmed at Anthology Film Archives, Maysles Documentary Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Pan African Film & Arts Festival, the National Gallery of Art and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her writing has appeared in edited volumes, museum catalogues and journals such as The<\/em> Nation, Film Quarterly, The Baffler, <\/em>MUBI\u2019s Notebook, Hammer & Hope, World Records Journal <\/em>and Criterion\u2019s Current.<\/em> She holds a Ph.D. in Black Studies and Film & Media Studies from Yale University. 
<\/h6>\n\n\n\n

If you enjoyed this article, please<\/em> consider<\/em> supporting Ultra Dogme on Patreon<\/a>, Ko-fi<\/a>, or Substack<\/a><\/em>, so that we may continue publishing writing about film + music with love + care<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yasmina Price on Jackie Raynal’s Deux fois and its exquisite corpse of formal experimentation and feminist reclamation of the cinematic space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20661,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,18],"tags":[1289,321,329,336,359,1290,1291,1292],"class_list":["post-20643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay","category-film","tag-deux-fois","tag-experimental","tag-featured","tag-film","tag-french-cinema","tag-jackie-raynal","tag-yasmina-price","tag-zanzibar"],"yoast_head":"\nRitual Remaking: Jackie Raynal\u2019s Deux Fois (1968) - 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This multilingual album of folk songs from the organization\u2019s member countries forms the red thread of Sanaz Sohrabi\u2019s investigations into the latent histories of OPEC\u2019s decolonial ambitions, intertwining both the development of South-South solidarity for autonomy over oil and the movement\u2019s cultural outputs. The histories of energy sovereignty gained visual and cultural identity in stamps, envelopes, magazines and art. Over scenes flicking through these materials Sohrabi adapts communication theorist Marshall McLuhan\u2019s statement \u201cthe medium is the message\u201d, declaring that \u201coil became a medium and message\u201d for decolonial worldmaking. The vinyl itself, made of petroleum hydrocarbons extracted through the chemical processing of oil, becomes a literal solidifying of the political imaginaries symbolised in its recording.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"790\" height=\"444\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incompletre-calendar-5-1024x576.webp?resize=790%2C444&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-20419\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incompletre-calendar-5.webp?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incompletre-calendar-5.webp?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incompletre-calendar-5.webp?resize=768%2C432&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incompletre-calendar-5.webp?resize=1536%2C864&ssl=1 1536w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incompletre-calendar-5.webp?w=1920&ssl=1 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 790px) 100vw, 790px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>An Incomplete Calendar: Rhymes and Songs for OPEC<\/em> (2026) is the third in Sohrabi\u2019s trilogy on the relationship between oil and modernity in the late 20th century. The first two films in the series, <em>One Image, Two Acts<\/em> (2020), and <em>Scenes of Extraction<\/em> (2023) examine labor and geological exploitation during the operations of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum, BP) in Iran between 1908 and 1951. The images of these films were built through research into the BP archives and includes the BP sponsored corporate films which aimed to produce a controlled document of the company\u2019s oil extraction for public viewers in the UK. Like Onyeka Igwe\u2019s <em>No Dance, No Palaver<\/em> (2017-2018), Sohrabi\u2019s films read the colonial archive against the grain, reordering the perceptual information and temporalities of these images through speculative modes of representation and her own research informed prose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The films lead up to <em>An Incomplete Calendar<\/em> which studies the post-war nationalization of oil by countries in the Global South as both a tool to resist the continued neocolonialism of former colonial states and as a transnational project of solidarity. Sohrabi\u2019s research for the film is complemented by a narration from filmmakers, scholars and musicians set over archival material, much of which she collected herself on online markets \u2013 she first discovered <em>Rhymes and Songs for OPEC<\/em> on eBay. We hear from both Eduardo Prato Moros and Leonardo Monta\u00f1o Salas, choir members involved in the recording of the album who provide a first hand account of its production, as well as the historian Laleh Khalili whose scholarship on exploitation and oil has mapped capitalism\u2019s extractive nature in the development of our current crises. <\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"790\" height=\"444\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-2-1024x576.webp?resize=790%2C444&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-20420\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-2.webp?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-2.webp?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-2.webp?resize=768%2C432&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-2.webp?resize=1536%2C864&ssl=1 1536w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-2.webp?w=1920&ssl=1 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 790px) 100vw, 790px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By the mid-twentieth century, US, Britain, and the Netherlands controlled most of the world\u2019s oil production through the \u201cseven sisters\u201d companies, the result of earlier unequal colonial concessions that handed these companies exclusive rights to extract oil from other countries\u2019 lands. The post-war economic expansion was fueled by petroleum, enabling a growing car-dependent suburbia and the replacement of coal in manufacturing and heating. Western modernity increasingly relied on a steady source of oil to function, much of it imported from Arab states that kept little, if any, of the resulting profit. Founded as a cartel in 1960 to challenge Anglo-European domination of the oil market, OPEC aimed to collectively coordinate the production and sale of its member\u2019s petroleum resources. Originally composed of Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the organization later expanded to include states like Algeria, Libya, Ecuador, UAE, and Nigeria.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The circulatory nature of stamps issued by OPEC and newly independent states became an avenue for official displays of oil as a public good. Sohrabi describes them as \u2018haptic infrastructure(s)\u2019, operating like political manifestations in themselves where oil emerged as a motif of economic sovereignty and the fuel necessary to propel a state toward a European idea of modernization. In a stamp issued by Iraq, workers in construction overalls stretch out their arms amongst flying white doves. Against towering derricks one man holds a key up parallel to the towers: their access to oil (and the shared future symbolised by it) secured. In the top middle is an image of former president Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr from his 1972 speech when he announced the seizing of the foreign monopoly of oil in Iraq, which Sohrabi has also placed as a video excerpt playing on top of the stamps. Here technology and resource nationalization are translated into a public visual story of oil as an instrument in decolonial statebuilding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These are images made not to be filed in the archival drawer but to be dispensed across networks along with the ideas they relayed. Multiple scenes show Sohrabi sorting piles of envelopes with OPEC stamps. When opened the letters are revealed to be empty of content, a conversation interrupted or left unfulfilled. She narrates that the state-sponsored images of oil \u201cbecame an archive of their own historical movements and disappearances\u201d, out-living the political projects they once served. In the film, many of the stamps are unused, still held together in neat pairs by thinly dotted borders. Like the title <em>An Incomplete Calendar,<\/em> their idle nature points to an unfinished history of solidarity, speculating on the possibility such relations leave us in their contemporary absence. <\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"790\" height=\"444\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-3-1024x576.webp?resize=790%2C444&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-20421\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-3.webp?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-3.webp?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-3.webp?resize=768%2C432&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-3.webp?resize=1536%2C864&ssl=1 1536w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-3.webp?w=1920&ssl=1 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 790px) 100vw, 790px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The film\u2019s visual form of archive overlay is a continuation of Sohrabi\u2019s previous moving-image work, bringing several forms of media including print, audio and video together simultaneously. The opening scene of the Aula Magna hall at the Central University of Venezuela, Caracas shows empty chairs and resting instruments in a rehearsal room while music and clips of a performance of <em>Rhymes and Songs for OPEC<\/em> on the Aula Magna stage is superimposed. This splicing and layering disturbs an orderly historiography that would otherwise put these events safely in the past. Johan Grimonprez\u2019s electric <em>A Soundtrack to a Coup D\u2019Etat<\/em> (2024) on jazz during the Congo crisis comes to mind as another archival documentary looking at the contemporary geopolitical resonance of Cold War independence movements and music as a soft power. Like Grimonprez\u2019s decision to avoid a top down historical narrative by letting the images and music drive the story, Sohrabi is not interested in settling the legitimacy of oil as a decolonial tool. Instead her layering of archival material allows her to trace the conflicting desires conjured in the images of oil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Oil became a political leverage for the liberation struggle of Palestine even as early as 1967 when several Arab states imposed an oil embargo against countries supporting Israel in response to the Six-Day War. Sohrabi layers a spread of the magazine <em>Naft Al-\u2018Arab<\/em> (Arab Oil) with the title \u201cOil Weapon and the question of Palestine\u201d with a video of crowds in Beirut chanting \u201cArab oil is a step toward the liberation of Palestine\u201d. Periodicals such as <em>Naft Al-\u2018Arab<\/em> which were aimed at a general audience sought to both educate on and discuss the politics of oil for a greater good. Like stamps, these Arabic-language publications allowed the anticolonial imaginaries of oil to cross borders and build international constellations of action where states like Libya funneled oil revenue toward Palestinian liberation movements. While the 1967 embargo is largely considered to have been unsuccessful, the 1973 embargo by OPEC following the Yom Kippur War raised the price from $3.01 US dollars per barrel to $5.12 per barrel and reduced the export of oil from the Middle East to the West by 60-70%. While oil importing countries who provided political and military backing to Israel suffered economically, money was flowing into OPEC countries. The event echoes the larger claim by historian Christopher Dietrich that the nationalization of oil by anti-colonial movements was \u201cthe most concentrated nonviolent transfer of global wealth in human history\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"790\" height=\"444\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-1-1024x576.webp?resize=790%2C444&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-20422\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-1.webp?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-1.webp?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-1.webp?resize=768%2C432&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-1.webp?resize=1536%2C864&ssl=1 1536w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/an-incomplete-calendar-1.webp?w=1920&ssl=1 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 790px) 100vw, 790px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Still, Sohrabi also notes that oil profits largely had to be recycled through European and American banks \u2013 \u201cfinancial infrastructures that are hegemonically controlled by the United States dollar\u201d \u2013  since producing states often lacked the domestic financial infrastructure to absorb such surpluses. Some of this money was converted into cultural capital; in Nigeria it funded the construction of the National Theatre which hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, and in Iran it allowed the building of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art and the acquisition of a rich collection of Western modern art. Here, the art of Alexander Calder \u2013 an artist whose work was heavily funded by Standard Oil\u2019s Rockefeller family \u2013 which hangs in the museum and was also commissioned for the Aula Magna hall in Caracas, becomes the conjuncture where the slippery histories of oil, capital, and empire merge in the seeming neutrality of abstraction. These are the rare scenes in the film that are not made up of archival images, which places these histories in the present. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>An Incomplete Calendar<\/em> leaves out many events relating to OPEC\u2019s history: the 1975 siege on its headquarters in Vienna which called for the liberation of Palestine, how petrodollars have funded the rise of gulf autocracies, and oil\u2019s rapid destruction of our present and future. Sohrabi\u2019s approach is not a reconstructive historiography, rather the aim is to look at how oil\u2019s promise of economic emancipation proved to be inseparable from a continued colonial flow of raw material and capital between the North and the South. No reminder is needed that such modalities of extractivism find their like in our present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/ultradogme.com\/tag\/rebecka-ohrstrom-kann\/\">Rebecka \u00d6hrstr\u00f6m Kann<\/a> runs the newsletter\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/seeingfurther.substack.com\/?utm_source=ig&utm_medium=social&utm_content=link_in_bio&fbclid=PAcGRvZgJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA85MzY2MTk3NDMzOTI0NTkAAaeDdDtB0mHOAKqKXap-2-_eI0g0t9QcsRI6vdVI8PH455lLiy5Gw70fx2kkcQ_aem_mUFz2gyBOpy3TS6VUViUIQ&utm_id=97760_v0_s00_e0_tv3\">Seeing Further<\/a><\/em>, a listing for self-organised film in London. She is also a Research Assistant at Tate and an incoming PhD student in History of Art at the University of Oxford.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>If you enjoyed this article, please<\/em>\u00a0<em>consider<\/em>\u00a0<em>supporting Ultra Dogme on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/ultradogme\">Patreon<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ko-fi.com\/ultradogme\">Ko-fi<\/a>, or\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ultradogme.substack.com\/\">Substack<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0<em>so that we may continue publishing writing about film + music with love + care<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rebecka \u00d6hrstr\u00f6m Kann on Sanaz Sohrabi\u2019s An Incomplete Calendar: Rhymes and Songs for OPEC and its histories of energy sovereignty and decolonial worldmaking, told through a collage of political and cultural material, ephemera and echos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20418,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,18],"tags":[1282,1286,329,336,1288,1287,1285,1018,1284,1283],"class_list":["post-20417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay","category-film","tag-an-incomplete-calendar","tag-essay-film","tag-featured","tag-film","tag-iran","tag-non-aligned-movement","tag-opec","tag-palestine","tag-rebecka-ohrstrom-kann","tag-sanaz-sohrabi"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.9.1 - 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He did not want to separate the stable things which we see and the shifting way in which they appear. He wanted to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Cezanne’s Doubt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Whether or not the adage that words can rarely approximate the vivacity of the image holds true for cinema, it certainly seems true of Zhou Tao. Originally trained as a painter, Tao later turned to mixed media and video, and has, over the past decade or so, made some of the most remarkable moving image works of our time. There is something inherently slippery about his films\u2014the ease with which they render the everyday strange. Hovering somewhere between representation and abstraction, Tao\u2019s continually shifting works seem to demand a singular vocabulary: one oriented towards gesture, texture, intensity, and modes of attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Central to Zhou’s practice is what he calls the \u2018zone with folds\u2019: an organic coalescence of humans, machines, and environment, brought about through manipulations of focus, depth, scale, composition, and camera movement, elementary cinematic devices that in Zhou\u2019s hands implode all classical notions of time, space, and visual realism. Whether in the industrial park of <em>North of the Mountain<\/em> (2019), the wastelands and hilltops of <em>The Worldly Cave<\/em> (2017), or the vast expanses of the Gobi Desert in <em>The Periphery of the Base <\/em>(2024)<em>\u2014<\/em>a work that transfigures an unidentified megastructure into something approaching a fever dream<em>\u2014<\/em>Zhou\u2019s films present a topography in perpetual transformation, opening onto forms of perception rarely available to human experience.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"790\" height=\"444\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-3-1024x576.jpg?resize=790%2C444&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-20086\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-3.jpg?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-3.jpg?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-3.jpg?resize=767%2C432&ssl=1 767w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-3.jpg?w=1272&ssl=1 1272w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 790px) 100vw, 790px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>The Rib of the Greater Bay Area<\/em> (2026)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>The Rib of the Greater Bay Area<\/em> (2026), Zhou’s latest work, takes as its point of departure a series of tourist spots across the Guangdong\u2013Hong Kong\u2013Macau Greater Bay Area. Capturing locations that had gone viral on the Chinese app Xiaohongshu, the film moves along the Pearl River towards the famous Victoria Harbour, seamlessly bridging the rural and the urban. There is the eventful\u2014a wedding photoshoot, a dazzling rainbow\u2014but also the nondescript \u2014people fishing, boats gliding, boys swimming, a stork stalking its prey\u2014all chanced upon by the camera. At times the camera abandons humans altogether and, much like a Chinese <em>shanshui<\/em> painting, attends instead to water in its myriad manifestations: swirling waves and ripples in hues of blue, green, ink-black, and gold, with sunlight scattering across its surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is something profoundly kinaesthetic about <em>Rib<\/em>: the camera is constantly panning, zooming, reframing, and refocusing, lingering on minute movements almost like improvised brushstrokes. Shot with a 600mm telephoto lens, Zhou’s images flatten and modulate the landscape into shifting masses of colour and texture. At the same time, objects in the foreground repeatedly drift in and out of view, filtering and obstructing the image, smearing translucent bokeh across the frame. For the technically versed, the transitions are easy enough to detect, but it is ultimately more rewarding to surrender to the film’s own visual logic, to let oneself be carried along by its peculiar magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In one of the film\u2019s most remarkable passages, the camera patiently observes a group of boys playing in the water. Near the top edge of the frame, the faint reflection of a passing boat drifts into view. Then, with a sudden jolt, the camera swerves upward. The image passes through blocks of indeterminate colour stripped of depth\u2014much like a Rothko painting\u2014before arriving at what appears to be the sky. It grows progressively hazier, dissolving into shards of orange and blue, and finally gives way to an all-encompassing white. The camera continues its ascent until the image collapses into blurry darkness: representation pushed to the very edge of the medium, confronting the limits of digital realism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is difficult to overstate the effect of these mutating sequences. One is left with a sense of awe at what is unfolding, at a reality constantly shifting under our feet while maintaining its synesthetic essence. The camera is less interested in revealing than in obstructing, and yet it is through this very obstruction that another mode of perception emerges: one grounded not in fixed categories but in brute sensation.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"790\" height=\"444\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-2-1024x576.jpg?resize=790%2C444&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-20087\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-2.jpg?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-2.jpg?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-2.jpg?resize=767%2C432&ssl=1 767w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-2.jpg?w=1272&ssl=1 1272w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 790px) 100vw, 790px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>The Rib of the Greater Bay Area<\/em> (2026)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Rib’s<\/em> images occasionally recall the luminous landscapes of Peter Hutton and James Benning, but the artist whose spirit most palpably animates Zhou’s durational textures is the experimental filmmaker and video artist Leighton Pierce. In works such as <em>Fifty Feet of String<\/em> and <em>Glass<\/em>, Pierce transforms ordinary domestic moments into something utterly strange and transfixing, an impressionistic world where boundaries dissolve and spill over into one another. In both Zhou’s and Pierce’s work, there is an intuitive calibration between filmmaker, camera, and landscape, as though bodily rhythm had become coterminous with the device\u2014the <em>kino-eye<\/em>\u2014and with the undulating world before it. The resemblance extends even to their descriptions of artistic practice: Pierce speaks of \u2018composing an experience for the audience\u2019, while Zhou describes himself as a \u2018collector of feelings\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is perhaps no coincidence that both Pierce and Zhou are repeatedly drawn to water, a fascination they share with the Lumi\u00e8re brothers, whose earliest films presented at the first ever public film screening in 1895\u2014<em>L\u2019arroseur arros\u00e9, La p\u00eache aux poissons rouges,<\/em> and <em>Baignade en mer<\/em>\u2014already revealed a fascination with its shifting surfaces. What water shares with film, and even more so with video, is temporality and movement as its ontological principle: a medium in perpetual transformation, capable of continually expanding and reorienting vision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In Zhou’s case, filming water\u2014and everything around it\u2014facilitates a radically open mode of perception, one that rejects the stability of figuration in favour of something more fluid and sensory: a liquid aesthetic. It is perhaps for this reason that the film’s shifting compositions never feel merely descriptive; they seem instead to inherit the liquidity of their subject.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is also something quietly political about Zhou\u2019s constantly shifting gaze, one that resists the fixity of things and places. Over the past few decades, the Greater Bay Area has become one of the defining landscapes of twenty-first-century Chinese modernity, repeatedly photographed, circulated, and consumed through the language of infrastructure and technological progress. Zhou’s camera continually slips away from these regimes of visibility. Instead, it redirects attention toward what they leave behind: the incidental, the peripheral, and the incorporeal\u2014to those moments in which the world presents itself before settling into a standardised image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Zhou’s soundscape reinforces this perceptual shift. While the film initially remains grounded in diegetic sound\u2014boats passing, distant conversations, bursts of music, the crash of water\u2014it gradually assumes a more enigmatic register. Voices and waves become intertwined with spectral hums and vibrations, the ambient frequencies of a smart city merging with the natural soundscape. Like the image, sound no longer anchors the viewer within a stable geography but continually unsettles orientation, making the familiar environment appear strangely porous.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"790\" height=\"444\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-4-1024x576.webp?resize=790%2C444&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-20088\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-4-scaled.webp?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-4-scaled.webp?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-4-scaled.webp?resize=768%2C432&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-4-scaled.webp?resize=1536%2C864&ssl=1 1536w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-4-scaled.webp?resize=2048%2C1152&ssl=1 2048w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area-4-scaled.webp?w=2370 2370w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 790px) 100vw, 790px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>The Rib of the Greater Bay Area<\/em> (2026)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the end, like most great moving image works, <em>The Rib of the Greater Bay Area<\/em> is less concerned with making an argument than with cultivating a particular quality of attention. The world Zhou evokes is undeniably mediated by technology and capital, yet it remains filled with pockets of wonder and opacity that elude their organising logic. Rather than asking us to recognise the world, Zhou repeatedly asks us to encounter it anew.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Writing on Kiarostami’s cinema, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy offers what might equally be described as a metaphysics of the moving image: \u2018But this does not mean a cinema treating of metaphysical themes; it means cinematic metaphysics, cinema as the place of meditation, as its body and its realm, as the taking-place of a relation to the sense of the world.\u2019<sup>1<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Something of this order seems to be at stake in Zhou’s practice. At a time when perception is increasingly organised by algorithmic images, and our capacity to surrender to an aesthetic impression is steadily eroding, Zhou’s work proposes another possibility: the moving image as the site where the inside meets the outside, and where the viewer meets the resplendence of the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>NOTES<\/strong><br>1. The Evidence of Film, Jean-Luc Nancy<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/ultradogme.com\/tag\/vedant-srinivas\/\">Vedant Srinivas<\/a> is a curator, writer, and film programmer from India. His writing has appeared in MUBI Notebook, Senses of Cinema, Cineaste, Documentary Magazine, Variety, Desistfilm, and Photog\u00e9nie, among other publications.\u00a0<\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>If you enjoyed this article, please<\/em> <em>consider<\/em> <em><a href=\"http:\/\/paypal.me\/VedantSrinivas\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tipping the author<\/a><\/em> <em>and\/or<\/em> <em>supporting Ultra Dogme on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/ultradogme\">Patreon<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/ko-fi.com\/ultradogme\">Ko-fi<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/ultradogme.substack.com\/\">Substack<\/a><\/em>, <em>so that we may continue publishing writing about film + music with love + care<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vedant Srinivas on Zhou Tao’s new film, The Rib of the Greater Bay Area and how his work presents ‘a topography in perpetual transformation, opening onto forms of perception rarely available to human experience.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20085,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,18],"tags":[321,329,336,1281,1280,918,1279],"class_list":["post-20076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay","category-film","tag-experimental","tag-featured","tag-film","tag-the-rib-of-the-greater-bay-area","tag-vedant-srinivas","tag-video","tag-zhou-tao"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.9.1 - 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It has been over three decades since filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos passed away, and yet the life-force behind his vast collection of works continues to resonate today. Before moving to Europe with his partner and fellow filmmaker Robert Beavers, Markopoulos was one of the most prominent figures in New American Cinema, alongside contemporaries such as Marie Menken, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, et al. Markopoulos was a champion of what could be described as cinema in its purest form: a practice disconnected from capitalism and the academic, anti-art dogma of parasitic institutions. Simultaneously, Markopoulos believed that ideal film-viewing was a product of a methodical, calculated process\u2014from content and execution, to projection and setting. His meticulous care and disillusionment with American filmgoing led to the creation of the Temenos (ancient Greek for \u201csacred grove\u201d or \u201ca piece of land cut off for the worship of God\u201d), an archive for the presentation of his films. <\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"790\" height=\"445\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/galaxie-2.jpg?resize=790%2C445&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19724\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/galaxie-2.jpg?w=856&ssl=1 856w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/galaxie-2.jpg?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/galaxie-2.jpg?resize=767%2C432&ssl=1 767w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 790px) 100vw, 790px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Mike and George Kuchar in <em>Galaxie<\/em> (Gregory Markopoulos, 1966). Frame enlargement from 16mm film strip.<br>(C) Temenos Verein 2003<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-3 wp-block-paragraph\">Yet in 1966, whilst still in New York, Markopoulos made what is perhaps the film most akin to Bazin\u2019s notion of form as transcending death: his complex portrait of the Greenwich Village art scene, <em>Galaxie<\/em>. The film\u2019s structure is ostensibly simple, composed of 33 intimate, 16mm portraits of filmmakers, writers, and artists in their homes or studios (among them Jonas Mekas, Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, Shirley Clarke, and Amy Taubin), the only accompanying sound is a Hindu bell. However, <em>Galaxie <\/em>is amongst the most formally ambitious of Markopoulos\u2019 films in its use of elaborate in-camera editing\u2014i.e. dissolves, superimpositions, multiple frames\u2014that all work toward an abrasively rhythmic structure. With each passing of a portrait, wherein the subject poses with a personal object of their choosing, the speed of the images becomes more and more frenetic until its conclusion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-4 wp-block-paragraph\">Critics and audiences have often likened <em>Galaxie <\/em>to Warhol\u2019s <em>Screen Tests<\/em> and have situated the former as a direct response to the latter. The similarities undoubtedly exist in the basic sense of practice, as do they in the case of Mekas\u2019 numerous works of portraiture, but <em>Galaxie\u2014<\/em>as with much of Markopoulos\u2019 work\u2014is an invention of its own brand of cinema. <em>Galaxie<\/em>,<em> <\/em>it seems, exists in some transitional space between the mechanical impulses of Warhol and the sentimentalism of Mekas, though it nonetheless holds both approaches close by in its own right. That is to say, <em>Galaxie<\/em>\u2019s form, though theoretically akin to both Warhol and Mekas, is more in tune with what Markopoulos posited as \u201ca new narrative film form,\u201d in which the form itself works to create \u201cthought images\u201d that evoke abstract emotion.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"666\" height=\"470\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/galaxie-5.jpg?resize=666%2C470&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19725\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/galaxie-5.jpg?w=666&ssl=1 666w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/galaxie-5.jpg?resize=300%2C212&ssl=1 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 666px) 100vw, 666px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Jonas Mekas in <em>Galaxie<\/em> (Gregory Markopoulos, 1966). Frame blow-up from 16mm film. <br>(C) Temenos Verein<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-5 wp-block-paragraph\">Because of this, <em>Galaxie <\/em>is more aptly dovetailed to something like Markopoulos\u2019 1969 film, <em>Sorrows\u2014<\/em>which depicts the decay of the Triebschen chateau\u2014than to the portraiture work of Warhol or Mekas. One could argue that the two films, though perhaps similar in form, are largely disparate within the scope of Markopoulos\u2019 oeuvre. Although <em>Galaxie <\/em>is a work of human portraiture in principle, it is simultaneously a work concerned with setting in the same way <em>Sorrows<\/em> is. As with Markopoulos, there is no definitive crux to a form that prioritizes abstraction, yet both films can be viewed through a lens that focuses on the effects of time. In <em>Sorrows<\/em>, that lens is far more discernible, as its primary occupation is that of a home\u2019s erosion. In the case of <em>Galaxie<\/em>, however, Markopoulos similarly gestures to the passage of time, yet far more obliquely. Its form, as aforementioned, is one in which the passage of time is indicated by an increasing freneticism, both in image and sound. As one portrait ends, another soon to begin, the frame becomes more elusive, refusing to hold on. Hence, <em>Galaxie<\/em>\u2019s form\u2014given that the film was entirely constructed in real time\u2014is a mirror to the human concept of time, which appears to accelerate at an ever-increasing rate until it is no more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-6 wp-block-paragraph\">Despite the obvious contextual framework of portraiture as a means to realism, <em>Galaxie<\/em> is nonetheless informed by Markopoulos as much as it is his subjects. In many ways, the film can be read both as a precursor to Markopoulos\u2019 eventual departure from American cinema and as the product of his nonconformity to the overt commodification of art in the New York film scene. A mere few years before making <em>Galaxie, <\/em>Markopoulos quit his job at a Greenwich Village bookstore on the advice of fellow avant-garde filmmaker Jack Smith. He lived largely in poverty and devoted the entirety of his time and effort to filmmaking. Thus, <em>Galaxie <\/em>also positions itself as an economically ambitious work, wherein the use of in-camera editing becomes at once an artistic choice and a financial one. In other words, the film\u2019s form takes on the energy of its subjects\u2019 milieu: dazzling, colorful, frenetic, chaotic, yet without significant financial means. It is also a kind of foreshadowing to Markopoulos\u2019 departure, as well as the eventual end of the artistic and social era portrayed. With each dissolve, whether from one frame to another or between subjects, one gets the impression that the people and places they inhabit are fading before their eyes. <em>Galaxie\u2014<\/em>despite its rigor and vibrancy\u2014is a melancholic mediation of a dying world, even if that fact is unknown to Markopoulos or his subjects. It also has perhaps the greatest affinity with Markopoulos\u2019 theory of form, where thought images give way to abstract emotion. With each use of in-camera dissolve, each ring of a bell, each increase of speed, we can feel the milieu slipping away, and with it, its inhabitants. If <em>Galaxie<\/em> is about this fading away, this quiet death, then it is also about life and the form that endures. With each dissolve, a new image appears.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/ultradogme.com\/tag\/joseph-dimacchia\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Joseph Dimacchia<\/a> is a writer, critic, and poet from Cleveland, Ohio. His work has appeared in In Review Online, Offscreen, La Piccioletta Barca, Full Stop, and elsewhere.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>If you enjoyed this article, please<\/em> <em>consider<\/em> <em><a href=\"https:\/\/paypal.me\/JosephDimacchia\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tipping the author<\/a><\/em> <em>and\/or<\/em> <em>supporting Ultra Dogme on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/ultradogme\">Patreon<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/ko-fi.com\/ultradogme\">Ko-fi<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/ultradogme.substack.com\/\">Substack<\/a><\/em>, <em>so that we may continue publishing writing about film + music with love + care<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joseph Dimacchia on Gregory Markopoulos’s Galaxie (1966), his complex portrait of the Greenwich Village art scene and rumination on the passage of time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19723,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,18],"tags":[321,329,336,1276,383,1277,1278],"class_list":["post-19089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay","category-film","tag-experimental","tag-featured","tag-film","tag-galaxie","tag-gregory-markopoulos","tag-joseph-dimacchia","tag-temenos"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.9.1 - 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The continued fascination with super-8mm film draws the era of its production into dialogue with the present. In an age of information saturation and pristine digital images, its renewed appeal lies not simply in nostalgia but in absence: the space to imagine. Joseph Bernard’s films also reveal an unexpected continuity with contemporary image culture, sharing its restless desire to arrest the elusive present moment before it slips away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-10 wp-block-paragraph\">Between 1975 and 1985, Joseph Bernard made one hundred silent, super-8 films. Before his death in 2025, he restored and released more than half of them, reviving a body of work that had remained largely unseen. The reappearance of his films writes a missing chapter in Detroit’s underground cinema history, revealing Bernard as perhaps its defining experimental filmmaker of the period.<sup>1<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-11 wp-block-paragraph\">Bernard’s work is primarily concerned with perception, movement, light, and the rhythms of ordinary life. His cinema is lyrical, and often diaristic, using abstraction and collage-like techniques, drawing the eye to the surface of the image and accepting rather than disguising the screen’s two-dimensionality. His images seem less to recede than to, one might say, <em>infold<\/em>, carrying the memory of depth within the surface itself: two dimensions marked by the memory of a third. It is this trace that destabilises the image: a visual field pulled backwards through the corruption of remembrance. The specimen under his microscope is suspended between concealment and revelation, like light surrendering its brilliance to successive layers of glass. Kierkegaard suggested that life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.<sup>2<\/sup> Bernard exemplified this paradox. A lifetime of looking is compressed into a decade of fleeting moments, resurrected forty years later, and restored not by the filmmaker who made them but by the person he became in the absence of filmmaking. Bernard found these films, just as we find them now, bearing the traces of their own making: an eye trying to hold on to moments as they disappear.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"790\" height=\"577\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-Detroit.png?resize=790%2C577\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19230\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-Detroit.png?resize=1024%2C748&ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-Detroit.png?resize=300%2C219&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-Detroit.png?resize=768%2C561&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-Detroit.png?resize=1536%2C1122&ssl=1 1536w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-Detroit.png?resize=2048%2C1495&ssl=1 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 790px) 100vw, 790px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Detroit Films (Reel 2)<\/em> (1985)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-12 wp-block-paragraph\">Filmmakers and film critics Fergus Daly and Katherine Waugh describe Tarkovsky’s cinema as a “search for lost time,” granting access not to ordinary recollection but to what Proust called “a little time in a pure state”: an involuntary encounter with the past as a living present.<sup>3<\/sup> As Deleuze writes, “the present is the actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror.”<sup>4 <\/sup>Bernard’s films extend this coexistence of past and present by revealing that the preserved past is never pristine. It is materially unstable\u2014scratched, bleached, and painted over. In Bernard’s cinema, preservation and disfigurement occur simultaneously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-13 wp-block-paragraph\">Bernard reminds us that super-8 continues to excite the digital imagination. Perhaps it speaks to a hunger not for the past itself, but for the appearance of authenticity. Like a forger in reverse, we modify our literal flesh to resemble our digital reflection. We no longer see ourselves through our own eyes, but through a gaze conditioned by algorithms that learn our desires only to return them, amplified and distorted, until aspiration, conformity, and identity become increasingly difficult to distinguish. We distress our digital ‘selfie’ with faux-analogue imperfections, endowing it with <em>pastness<\/em><sup> 5<\/sup> as if to further shunt ourselves from the present moment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-14 wp-block-paragraph\">Film critic Adrian Martin notes that much writing on photography and cinema has emphasised the image’s ubiquitous pastness, invoking Barthes’ <em>\u00e7a a \u00e9t\u00e9 <\/em>(“that-has-been”)<sup>i<\/sup>: the photograph bears witness to a moment that unquestionably existed before the camera, even as it reminds us that this moment has been irretrievably lost to time. Every filmed image arrives already marked by temporal distance, carrying with it the certainty that whatever we witness has, by definition, already occurred. In 2026, super-8 intensifies this condition, not simply by conjuring a past aesthetic but by bearing the visible traces of its own ageing; as if time has already acted upon the image itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-15 wp-block-paragraph\">We first perfect a digital image, then simulate its decay. Flann O’Brien’s satirical “book-handling” service, proposed in his 1941 <em>Cruiskeen Lawn <\/em>column for <em>The Irish Times<\/em>, has finally become reality. We can now pay a specialist to maul and relic the hot new bestseller.<sup>6<\/sup> As though reading it were not enough, you can also buy the dog-eared pages, underlined passages, a mottled cover, a cracked spine, and, for a premium, they’ll dab it with wine and go at it with a drill. As for the marginalia, \u201cthe moron who owns the book will be asked to write [it] (and shown how if necessary).\u201d<sup>7<\/sup> The illusion of wear\u2014of a life lived\u2014has become a commodity.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"790\" height=\"572\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-The-Function-of-Film.png?resize=790%2C572\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19235\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-The-Function-of-Film.png?resize=1024%2C742&ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-The-Function-of-Film.png?resize=300%2C217&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-The-Function-of-Film.png?resize=768%2C557&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-The-Function-of-Film.png?resize=1536%2C1113&ssl=1 1536w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-The-Function-of-Film.png?resize=2048%2C1484&ssl=1 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 790px) 100vw, 790px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>The Function of Film <\/em>(1982)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-16 wp-block-paragraph\">Ernie Gehr once remarked that the film image is comparable to a painting, insofar as you are looking at the image, not through it.<sup>8<\/sup> Our digital world increasingly resembles a Leibnizian monad: each feed presents a complete world while remaining sealed within its own logic. Each is a closed perceptual universe. The distance between looking and seeing has never been wider.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-17 wp-block-paragraph\">Drawing, in part, on interviews with filmmaker and cinematographer Fred Kelemen, Waugh and Daly’s gallery exhibition <em>I See a Darkness <\/em>(2022) characterises analogue and digital images as differing not merely in their method of production, but in their relationship to reality itself. Whereas analogue film bears the direct chemical trace of its encounter with light, digital imaging samples incoming light and encodes those measurements as numerical information. Kelemen argues “we also lose black in digital processing because digital requires information, and black, or nothing, means an absence of information. Darkness on a digital copy will never really be black, because it’s a technology that does not understand nothingness.”<sup>9<\/sup><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-18 wp-block-paragraph\">Bernard’s rediscovered films arrive as super-8 itself undergoes a resurgence. At the same time, our culture is saturated with information at an increasingly granular level. From the perspective of media archaeology, this resurgence is not simply nostalgic but symptomatic: obsolete media return because they offer perceptual and aesthetic possibilities eclipsed by newer technologies. As one of the leading scholars in the field, Jussi Parikka, suggests that such past technologies are continually discovered anew.<sup>10<\/sup> The resurgence of retrograde image-forms speak to a desire for absence\u2014for images that leave something unknowable, a veil drawn across the eye. In a culture that increasingly equates visibility with truth, concealment becomes a radical aesthetic. By allowing detail to recede, these imperfect images occupy the interval between what is present and what is known. The Ganzfeld effect reminds us that ambiguity is rarely empty; where detail recedes, imagination fills the breach. We might find revelation in what the small gauge medium withholds.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"790\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-Full-Circle.png?resize=790%2C576\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19233\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-Full-Circle.png?resize=1024%2C747&ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-Full-Circle.png?resize=300%2C219&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-Full-Circle.png?resize=768%2C561&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-Full-Circle.png?resize=1536%2C1121&ssl=1 1536w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/JB-Full-Circle.png?resize=2048%2C1495&ssl=1 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 790px) 100vw, 790px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Full Circle (It\u2019s Always Been Around) <\/em>(1984)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-19 wp-block-paragraph\">The six films selected for this programme represent Bernard at his most reflective. By this point, his filmmaking had become a focused investigation of the medium itself, exposing the apparatus and laying bare his engagement with it. That trajectory culminates in 1985, after which Bernard stopped making films, lending this work an unintended sense of closure. Bernard’s decision to step away from filmmaking was almost certainly shaped by circumstance as much as inclination. By the mid-1980s, the pioneers of American experimental cinema had rejected one establishment only to become another. The avant-garde had acquired its own institutions, histories, and gatekeepers. Meanwhile, the small-gauge ecosystem was rapidly collapsing, and many accessible laboratories disappeared. Video had captured the imagination, and Kodak, rather than defending the home-movie culture it had created, increasingly redirected its investment towards electronic imaging and partnerships with companies like Sony.<sup>11<\/sup> By 1988, Kodak had entered the pharmaceutical industry for the first time, buying out an aspirin business.<sup>12 ii<\/sup> The company whose cellulose acetate had carried generations of flickering films concluded there was money to be made on either side of the headache.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-20 wp-block-paragraph\">Format remains less a choice and more an economic condition. Today, film is an increasingly expensive material practice. It is little wonder that key properties such as grain, soft focus, halation, and light leaksiii\u2014sites of inquiry for the analogue filmmaker\u2014have become simple drag-and-drop effects: passive decoration for the digital creator. The point is not that photochemistry is inherently superior, but that, in a film artist’s hands, every scratch, flare, splice, and fluctuation performs dramatic work. Imperfection can be both phenomenological and dramaturgical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-21 wp-block-paragraph\">I have no claim to objectivity here. Much of my own practice has been devoted to the romance of imperfection: the lived texture of light, the visible trace of time, the material presence of the image. Hence the persistent “we.” You’ll find me in the stalls with the other fetishists, sniffing at any stock with a base ISO above fifty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-22 wp-block-paragraph\">Bernard did not fetishise the exhibition experience. In my chats with him, he simply referred to cinema as “light in the dark.” Digital endowed his films with a clarity and silence that was impossible before. Whether you watch these films on a projection screen or a laptop screen, all that matters is sufficient darkness. Time contracts and expands across these six films. Allegro, adagio, scherzo\u2014a rhythmic montage solicits a playful fury of light, shadow, and silence. It is a silence that presses against the ear, summoned through the musicality of the cut, and the pulse of our own blood. These films form an expression of personal cinema that is intimate, poetic, and at times uncomfortable. Bernard remains at the threshold of this encounter, a spectral presence conducting from the penumbra. His images emerged through the commingled containers of life and art, developing organically, and carrying the residue of a lived experience filmed, and a filmed experience lived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-23 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Thanks:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-24 wp-block-paragraph\">Thanks to Ruair\u00ed McCann and Ultra Dogme for providing me with the opportunity to exorcise my demons. As ever, my thanks to Anja Mahler, Fergus Daly, Katherine Waugh, and Shane Vernon. This programme would not have been possible without the generosity of MariaLuisa Belmonte, and the late great J.B.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-25 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Notes:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-26 wp-block-paragraph\">(i) Adrian Martin also discusses <em>presentness<\/em>, citing Roger Munier as a counterpoint to Barthes’ emphasis on photographic pastness. For Munier, the image feels so immediate that its temporal distance almost disappears. See Martin, “Incursions,” 55\u201356.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-27 wp-block-paragraph\">(ii) Funny coincidence: Kodak briefly owned the U.S. rights to Bayer Aspirin through its acquisition of Sterling Drug, entirely unrelated to the Bayer colour filter array invented at Kodak in 1976 by Bryce Bayer and the subsequent de-Bayering (demosaicing) process by which full- colour images are reconstructed from sensor data. Conversely, Bayer AG, the German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate, also operated a photographic business through its subsidiary Agfa, a major manufacturer of photographic and motion picture film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-28 wp-block-paragraph\">(iii) One of the finest examples is Saul Levine’s Light Licks (1999\u20132014), a series of super-8 films exploring light leaks and the material nature of film itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-29 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>References:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">1) O’Toole, Owen. \u201cJoe Bernard.\u201d In Prismatic Music: The Super-8 Films of Joseph Bernard. Cinelicious Pics Blu-ray booklet, 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">2) Kierkegaard, S\u00f8ren. <em>Journals and Papers<\/em>. Edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967\u20131978. JP I 1030 (Pap. IV A 164 [1843]).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">3) Daly, Fergus, and Katherine Waugh. \u201cIvan’s Childhood.\u201d Senses of Cinema, no. 15 (July 2001). <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sensesofcinema.com\/2001\/cteq\/ivans-childhood\/\">https:\/\/www.sensesofcinema.com\/2001\/cteq\/ivans-childhood\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">4) Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013, p. 79.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">5) Martin, Adrian. \u201cIncursions.\u201d In The Language and Style of Film Criticism, edited by Alex Clayton and Andrew Klevan, 55\u201356. London: Routledge, 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">6) Scally, Derek. \u201c\u2018Coffee must be dropped at different height than wine\u2019: The Berlin team making books look well-read.\u201d The Irish Times, July 15, 2026. Accessed July 20, 2026. <br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/business\/2026\/07\/15\/we-all-have-unread-books-berlin-based-ageing- treatment-includes-spine-breaking-and-dog-ears\/\">https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/business\/2026\/07\/15\/we-all-have-unread-books-berlin-based-ageing- treatment-includes-spine-breaking-and-dog-ears\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">7) Myles na gCopaleen [Brian O’Nolan]. \u201cCruiskeen Lawn.\u201d The Irish Times, November 10, 1941. Accessed July 22, 2026. <br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/news\/cruiskeen-lawn-november-10th-1941-1.631082\">https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/news\/cruiskeen-lawn-november-10th-1941-1.631082<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">8) Gehr, Ernie. \u201cThoughts on Cinema with Ernie Gehr.\u201d Interview by Mark Webber. In Adventures in Virtuality: Proceedings of the 2008 Virtuality Conference, edited by Pablo Garcia and Spike Wolff, 66\u201367. Buffalo: University at Buffalo, 2010. Accessed July 20, 2026. <br><a href=\"https:\/\/doczz.net\/doc\/3918638\/thoughts-on-cinema-with-ernie-gehr\">https:\/\/doczz.net\/doc\/3918638\/thoughts-on-cinema-with-ernie-gehr<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">9) Waugh, Katherine, and Fergus Daly. I See a Darkness. Exhibition, Photo Museum Ireland, Dublin. 11\u201320 November 2022. Accessed 23 July 2026. <br><a href=\"https:\/\/photomuseumireland.ie\/exhibition\/katherine-waugh-fergus-daly-i-see-a-darkness\/\">https:\/\/photomuseumireland.ie\/exhibition\/katherine-waugh-fergus-daly-i-see-a-darkness\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">10) Parikka, Jussi. What Is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012, p. 2. 11)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">11) Eastman Kodak Company. \u201cMilestones.\u201d Accessed July 20, 2026.<br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.kodak.com\/en\/company\/page\/milestones\">https:\/\/www.kodak.com\/en\/company\/page\/milestones<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">12) Vinokurova, Natalya, and Rahul Kapoor. \u201cThe Problem of Sustaining a Successful Enterprise: Kodak\u2019s Multiple Takes at Strategic Renewal that Culminated in Failure.\u201d Business History Review 99, no. 1 (2025): 3\u201338. Accessed July 20, 2026 https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1017\/S0007680525000236<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/ultradogme.com\/tag\/dean-kavanagh\/\">Dean Kavanagh<\/a> is a filmmaker and film archivist based in Dublin, Ireland. [<a href=\"https:\/\/www.deankavanagh.com\/\">Website<\/a>]<\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>If you enjoyed this article, please<\/em> <em>consider<\/em> <em>supporting Ultra Dogme on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/ultradogme\">Patreon<\/a><\/em>, <em>so that we may continue publishing writing about film + music with love + care<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dean Kavanagh reflects on Joseph Bernard’s perceptual universe and the shifting nature and notions of the film image and its relationships with time, space, light and economics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19229,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,18],"tags":[259,321,329,336,1099,609,824],"class_list":["post-19219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay","category-film","tag-dean-kavanagh","tag-experimental","tag-featured","tag-film","tag-joseph-bernard","tag-movie-club","tag-super-8"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.9.1 - 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Composed entirely of celluloid imports, the series will offer a rare opportunity to see Nobuo Nakagawa\u2019s <em>Farewell to the Highland Station<\/em> (1951), a deeply romantic film of the <em>kay\u014d eiga<\/em> (\u201csong film\u201d) genre that features a leading performance by Kagawa and has never before been shown in the United States. At a time when international cinema feels more accessible than ever\u2014with streaming platforms, restorations, and the growing prominence of repertory programming\u2014many historically significant films still remain out of circulation simply because they have never been translated or subtitled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-32 wp-block-paragraph\">A spotlight on the creation of new English subtitles for the film by Monika Uchiyama, Tokyo- and New York-based interpreter and translator, draws attention to the often-overlooked labor of translation and localization, offering a reminder that the circulation of world cinema depends not only on archives and exhibitors, but also on translators whose work fundamentally shapes how films travel across cultures. Writer Mako Fukata, who will manually advance the subtitles during the screening, spoke with Uchiyama about her navigation of linguistic and cultural nuances in translating the film, and about the often invisible labor involved in bringing a film like this to a new audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-33 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Mako Fukata: You created brand-new subtitles for Nobuo Nakagawa’s film <\/strong><strong><em>Farewell to the Highland Station<\/em><\/strong><strong> (1951), which has never been translated into English. You\u2019ve become known for doing so much amazing live interpreting work for a number of renowned Japanese filmmakers, but how was your experience subtitling a film like this?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-34 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Monika Uchiyama:<\/strong> I would say that my process of subtitling is closer to my interpreting work because, instead of working from an existing transcript and then translating that word-by-word, what becomes more important is the tone and how a line is delivered. I think what was interesting for me with <em>Farewell to the Highland Station<\/em> was considering the dated language delivery, and how much of that sensibility to preserve. Then there\u2019s also the question of how to try to make it as concise as possible. I tend to veer toward prioritizing readability rather than very precise accuracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-35 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Would you say this process of translation didn\u2019t feel all that different from your live interpreting work?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-36 wp-block-paragraph\">When it comes to translating text, it\u2019s quite different to interpreting. I would describe my live interpreting as being very impressionistic, meaning that I\u2019m not processing language by converting every sentence or every word into English as I listen. I\u2019m understanding language through the kind of impression that I get from it. That might look like images in my mind, or picturing the speaker\u2019s experience. I then try to convey that while preserving key words that I feel are important to that person\u2019s speech.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-37 wp-block-paragraph\">With translation of text, you have an obligation to be very precise with language and how it\u2019s converted on a vocabulary level. To me, subtitling is kind of in between. I\u2019m taking some of my skills as an interpreter in the way that I\u2019m listening to dialogue and how it\u2019s delivered, because when we\u2019re watching cinema, we\u2019re not just processing text. If you\u2019re a hearing person and you can experience the speech as it\u2019s delivered through sound, then we are not really processing language on a vocabulary level. Then there is the context provided through images and an actor\u2019s body language, too.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"769\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/46AB6E95-90A7-418A-A56D-79895B60E891-769x1024.jpg?resize=769%2C1024&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19102\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/46AB6E95-90A7-418A-A56D-79895B60E891.jpg?resize=769%2C1024&ssl=1 769w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/46AB6E95-90A7-418A-A56D-79895B60E891.jpg?resize=225%2C300&ssl=1 225w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/46AB6E95-90A7-418A-A56D-79895B60E891.jpg?resize=768%2C1023&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/46AB6E95-90A7-418A-A56D-79895B60E891.jpg?w=1126&ssl=1 1126w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 769px) 100vw, 769px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Monika Uchiyama<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-38 wp-block-paragraph\">Once, when I was interpreting for Ryusuke Hamaguchi, he was asked a question about the subtitling process and if he makes interventions in the making of them\u2014whether he provides guidance to the translator to preserve his artistic intention. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.interviewmagazine.com\/film\/ryusuke-hamaguchi-and-jeremy-o-harris-link-up-in-the-criterion-closet\">His answer was no<\/a>, that the subtitler does their own work. They\u2019re kind of creating a new layer of the piece through the act of translation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-39 wp-block-paragraph\">Part of what he said was that since the image, the voice, the sound, and the expression of the actor still exist for us to experience, it\u2019s not like the subtitles are doing all of the heavy lifting of conveying meaning or narrative. It\u2019s a combination of everything. So that became my guiding principle and helped me take the pressure off of being super fixated on the textual accuracy of the translation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-40 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Something you have to consider when subtitling a film, especially a film from a different time period, is how much to account for the historical specificity of its language. This film was made in 1951\u2014how did you navigate its being from an earlier time? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-41 wp-block-paragraph\">I think the one thing that I battled with while working on a film from this period was how much to localize the language to resemble that of a film from a similar era, but in an American or Western context. When you think of a Hollywood film from the \u201950s that\u2019s in black and white and formally similar, you might imagine a Transatlantic accent and a specific kind of delivery. One of the things I questioned was whether a translation felt too contemporary, or whether I was making assumptions about what I imagined a person from that period speaking English would sound like without doing the appropriate research. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-42 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>So you\u2019re negotiating not only between two languages, but between two different cultural and historical contexts. At the same time, was there anything about the subject matter and theme of the film that affected the way you approached the language?  <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-43 wp-block-paragraph\">I think the film itself is somewhat progressive in its themes. For the most part, it\u2019s just about two people falling in love, but there are interesting dynamics that make it veer away from what might be considered a very conservative love story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-44 wp-block-paragraph\">Particularly toward the end, with the dynamics between Keiko, who is arranged to be married to the leading man Toshio, the female doctor Mikami, and the heroine Nurse Izumi (who\u2019s played by Kyoko Kagawa)\u2014the way that they relate to each other as women feels quite contemporary. So I thought it should be simple language because it\u2019s so relatable and relevant: the way that they\u2019re moving around each other and trying to relate to each other while there\u2019s this power dynamic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-45 wp-block-paragraph\">Did you watch the film? Isn\u2019t it kind of feminist?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-46 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>I think it is too, yeah.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"768\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0493-768x1024.jpg?resize=768%2C1024&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19078\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0493-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C1024&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0493-scaled.jpg?resize=225%2C300&ssl=1 225w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0493-scaled.jpg?resize=1152%2C1536&ssl=1 1152w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0493-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C2048&ssl=1 1536w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0493-scaled.jpg?w=1920&ssl=1 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Kyoko Kagawa on the print of <em>Farewell to the Highland Station <\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-47 wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah and also there\u2019s a kind of frank discussion of gendered experience. The film really paints a picture of a conservative, patriarchal workplace, especially around Dr. Mikami, where there\u2019s this very strict hierarchy, and certainly there are probably a lot of moments where the women are incredibly disadvantaged, even though they\u2019re working just as hard as their male counterparts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-48 wp-block-paragraph\">But then the film also has this part where people talk about the incompetency of the male characters so aggressively and blatantly, like, \u201cOh, she\u2019s smarter,\u201d or, \u201cHe only gets that job because he has seniority.\u201d There\u2019s so much open discussion of the power imbalance, or joking about ability and merit and how people ascend to certain positions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-49 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The fact that Toshio is marrying into the family as the son-in-law of the chief director at his hospital feels like it places him under the power of his wife, Keiko, from the outset.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-50 wp-block-paragraph\">When it comes to her potential marriage to Toshio, Keiko seems to see things quite  pragmatically, which makes me wonder if it was radical for a female character in a melodrama in the \u201950s. There\u2019s a frankness about Keiko that seems unaffected by the expectations being projected onto her by other people and society\u2014the expectation of romance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-51 wp-block-paragraph\">So I feel there\u2019s some kind of layer of performance throughout the film, where they\u2019re going back and forth between performing a feminine role and being true to themselves. And if anything, Nurse Izumi represents the most feminine performance. She, quite frankly, barely has any lines. I think about the moment when Toshio is literally like, \u201cAnd now Nurse Izumi will sing us a song!\u201d and she has to perform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-52 wp-block-paragraph\">I feel like that\u2019s kind of her role\u2014that she\u2019s this performance of femininity, while Keiko and Dr. Mikami are closer to reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-53 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Those interplays of gender roles are tricky because, in Japanese culture, they\u2019re often implied through language and mannerisms in ways that might require more than just a literal translation.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-54 wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, that\u2019s something I think about when watching Japanese subtitles on English-language films. One kind of norm that I notice in subtitling is the gendering of language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-55 wp-block-paragraph\">Women characters will use female-coded language markers in the subtitles. Even if they\u2019re on screen and speaking in English in very flat, frank language, the subtitle might add a <em>wa<\/em> or <em>wayo<\/em> (which are the sentence-ending particles that are used to imply a feminine style of speech) at the end of their line. So there\u2019s a kind of established and forced gendered language in subtitles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-56 wp-block-paragraph\">When we\u2019re reading the subtitles, there are also all these other markers of gender already playing out on screen. So we shouldn\u2019t need that in the text itself because we\u2019re hearing the tone, vocal inflection, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-57 wp-block-paragraph\">I don\u2019t think of the subtitles that I made as being overly simple, but maybe they\u2019re missing a little bit of flourish or are a bit restrained. In a sense, it\u2019s my experiment in trusting how a viewer experiences film\u2014image, audio, and text\u2014as a total thing, instead of focusing on trying to make the audiovisual and textual components completely the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-58 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>But then, on the other hand, there\u2019s also the possibility that subtitles could kind of over-explain things, right? I think the ones you made for this movie are very concise, but just informative enough to bridge the gap between the cultural specificity of the language and a non-Japanese-speaking audience.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-59 wp-block-paragraph\">For most of the film, these characters are really chatty and very literal, and didn\u2019t require much cultural translation. But, for example, when Keiko arrives from Tokyo and calls Toshio by his first name, it surprises people from the village because using someone\u2019s first name indicates a certain degree of closeness or intimacy in Japanese culture. That\u2019s something you kind of have to put into the subtitles because it\u2019s specific to the culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-60 wp-block-paragraph\">My plan is to make things even more concise before the screening because the subtitles are going to be advanced manually, right? Are you going to do it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-61 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Yes, I am!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-62 wp-block-paragraph\">Okay, so in this case, I don\u2019t have to worry about timing because you\u2019re doing the difficult work of timing it! [<em>Laughs<\/em>] But for that reason, too, there\u2019s a need to keep everything very concise. When subtitles have to be timed manually, there\u2019s always the risk that they\u2019ll go by too quickly and people won\u2019t be able to read them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-63 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>I really appreciate your attention to line length. Because when you advance the subtitles manually, you have to quickly determine how long each subtitle should stay on screen depending on that. The longer a line is, the more time it should stay for better readability. But if the timing is too inconsistent between lines of different lengths, then that can both be more difficult to manage and also distracting to read.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-64 wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019m glad you gave me that perspective. With this film, which is a <em>kay\u014d eiga<\/em>\u2014a \u201csong film\u201d\u2014the narrative also plays out almost like a song. There\u2019s a strong sense that you don\u2019t want the subtitles to become a distraction by keeping them on screen too long. They become part of the graphic composition of the image, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-65 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>It\u2019s so interesting how you can tell whether subtitles were made with their method of projection in mind\u2014whether they\u2019re being projected on a big screen and advanced by a human or viewed on a computer screen. I compared your subtitles with the subtitles for <em>Five Sisters <\/em>(1954), which I\u2019m advancing the night after <em>Highland Station<\/em> at Asia Society and which were probably made by a fan, and I could really see the difference.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-66 wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, it\u2019s so interesting how the fan-sub community has become its own culturally distinct thing, because there\u2019s a kind of immediacy and passion behind them. A lot of the time, there\u2019s a real commitment to accuracy because of this sense that you want the person watching to get the whole experience of the dialogue. Then there\u2019s the balancing act of whether to prioritize meaning or prioritize length and readability. If every line were 100% accurate, that would be great, but oftentimes they don\u2019t need to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-67 wp-block-paragraph\">For example, with <em>Farewell to the Highland Station<\/em>, there are many parts where the audio on the file I had was very poor quality. So I went online to see if there was a DVD of the film that I could buy, and reviews for the Japanese DVD were people saying, \u201cI can\u2019t understand the audio. I wish this had Japanese subtitles.\u201d So there are parts where I had to guess a bit from context. If you can make out the reason for a scene existing, then one line not being completely by the book or 100% accurate doesn\u2019t necessarily impact the film overall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-68 wp-block-paragraph\">That\u2019s where I had to let myself off the hook, because there isn\u2019t a better-quality source. But that\u2019s also part of the experimental nature of what we\u2019re doing. We\u2019re working with a pretty freshly struck print from the last 15 years, and it needed to be imported into the U.S. so it could be screened at the Asia Society. I didn\u2019t have access to it during the subtitling process, so there\u2019s a little bit of experimentation involved.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"768\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0580-768x1024.jpg?resize=768%2C1024&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19084\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0580-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C1024&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0580-scaled.jpg?resize=225%2C300&ssl=1 225w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0580-scaled.jpg?resize=1152%2C1536&ssl=1 1152w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0580-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C2048&ssl=1 1536w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0580-scaled.jpg?w=1920&ssl=1 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Tech check at Asia Society<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-69 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>I can imagine those poor-quality audio sections would have been especially challenging when it came to the singing. How was translating the dialogue different from translating the songs?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-70 wp-block-paragraph\">Translating songs is harder because there\u2019s poetry involved, and it\u2019s very impressionistic. Talking about the wind, the stars, or the sky in a love song is very different from straightforward dialogue. With song lyrics, the poetry matters, but so does the rhythm. You also have to think about culturally specific ideas that might come through in the lyrics. But if you stick too closely to the original\u2014if it feels deliberately literal and stilted, and, let\u2019s say, it doesn\u2019t make any sense in English, but you keep it that way as an exact translation\u2014then that can reinforce the sense of the strangeness of the Japanese language from an English speaker\u2019s perspective. Then that becomes a consideration: \u201cDo I want to preserve a particular lyricism, or is what\u2019s trying to be said something that I could approximate in English without taking away from the fact that this is supposed to be a pop song?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-71 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Right. And I appreciate that idea of keeping something as it is, staying truthful to the original language as well. When I watch foreign-language films, if I watch an Italian film or a French film and the English translation feels strange to me, I can kind of clock it as, \u201cOh, it was probably meant to be strange,\u201d or that something was lost in translation.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-72 wp-block-paragraph\">I think some translators do argue against coddling the reader, or the speaker, of the target language\u2014that we should include a kind of awkwardness, or embrace certain things that might get lost in translation, as a way to challenge the language itself. I think that for this film, I didn\u2019t feel like taking that approach. Not that there were many parts that felt challenging like that\u2014I\u2019m not even sure there were any at all. But it\u2019s a pop song and a pop movie, and it\u2019s about the beauty of a person. And, like we said, there\u2019s this kind of performed femininity, specifically with the lead character, Nurse Izumi. So I\u2019m not trying to challenge that too aggressively, in this context. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-73 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>I also wanted to talk a little bit about the <\/strong><strong><em>kay\u014d eiga<\/em><\/strong><strong> genre, which seems to have been very popular in Japanese cinema during this period. The genre has similarities to the musical genre, but, like with this film, it seems like the song would typically come first and then the film would be built around it, so it\u2019s kind of a reverse of the traditional musical in which songs are written specifically for the purpose of the film. Is that right?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-74 wp-block-paragraph\">Yeah, I mean, I didn\u2019t know a ton about the genre. As far as music singles and their relation to certain films,  this was something I recently learned about through my interpreting work with the actress and singer Meiko Kaji. Recording an accompanying single for many of the films she was in was a requirement in her contract.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-75 wp-block-paragraph\">I don\u2019t know the backstory to this film very well, except for the fact that there was a hit song and they decided to pair a film with it. It\u2019s obviously about capitalizing on the popularity of something to create a product with wide appeal. I think the catchiness of the music is undeniable. The fact that the story actually tries to do something interesting with it says something about the writer and director of the film. They were given a constraint: \u201cMake a film using this music.\u201d And then they found a way to make it interesting for themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-76 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>I was surprised that this film had never been shown in the U.S. Its themes feel surprisingly progressive, and I wonder if it\u2019s been overshadowed by the director\u2019s better-known films, like <em>Jigoku <\/em>(1960) and <em>The Ghost of Yotsuya<\/em> (1959).<\/strong> <strong>I\u2019m glad that Joseph (Eusebio) and Akinaru (Rokkaku) discovered it and gave it an opportunity to be shown in the U.S., but I feel like a lot of Japanese films\u2014and international cinema in general\u2014still fly under the radar. Especially in New York, where independent theaters are doing more retrospectives and engaging with global cinema, there are still so many films that haven\u2019t been seen here.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-77 wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>What do you think about the process of discovering and bringing films like this to audiences in the U.S.?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-78 wp-block-paragraph\">It\u2019s all just such a labor of love, and it\u2019s incredible that Joseph and Akinaru put together this series. I want people to appreciate how difficult and labor-intensive it is not only to source these prints, but then to commission new subtitles and actually project those subtitles, making sure they\u2019re accurately shown alongside the film. It\u2019s such a precious experience. I\u2019m sure it\u2019s not commonplace in most cities to have the resources and ability to project subtitles alongside a print of a film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-79 wp-block-paragraph\">When I hear about people experiencing it for the first time, they\u2019re like, \u201cWow, I didn\u2019t even think about how that would be a thing.\u201d You think that if there\u2019s no print with burned-in subtitles, then we\u2019re screwed. But actually, we have this other way. It\u2019s exciting that you live in a city where that\u2019s something you get to do, and that\u2019s something people get to access. I hope people recognize the theatrical experience as something that is extremely rare and special, and as the culmination of so much effort from many different people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-80 wp-block-paragraph\">I think that\u2019s the value of going to see a film like this.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"768\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0587-768x1024.jpg?resize=768%2C1024&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-19082\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0587-scaled.jpg?resize=768%2C1024&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0587-scaled.jpg?resize=225%2C300&ssl=1 225w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0587-scaled.jpg?resize=1152%2C1536&ssl=1 1152w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0587-scaled.jpg?resize=1536%2C2048&ssl=1 1536w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0587-scaled.jpg?w=1920&ssl=1 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A reel of <em>Farewell to the Highland Station<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-81 wp-block-paragraph\"><em><strong>Farewell to the Highland Station <\/strong>plays August 14th at 7pm at Asia Society in New York as a part of ‘Kyoko Kagawa Rarities’, with original subtitles by Monika Uchiyama advanced live by Mako Fukata.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-text-color has-black-color has-alpha-channel-opacity has-black-background-color has-background is-style-wide\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/ultradogme.com\/tag\/mako-fukata\/\">Mako Fukata<\/a> is an independent writer and localization coordinator with a special interest in Japanese cinema. By day, she works as a floor manager at an independent movie theater; outside of work, she channels her creative passion and curiosity into writing, subtitling, curating film programs, and conducting interviews.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-black-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-82 wp-block-paragraph\"><em>If you enjoyed this article, please<\/em> <em>consider<\/em> <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.com\/paypalme\/makofukata\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tipping the author<\/a> and\/or<\/em> <em>supporting Ultra Dogme on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/ultradogme\">Patreon<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/ko-fi.com\/ultradogme\">Ko-fi<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/ultradogme.substack.com\/\">Substack<\/a><\/em>, <em>so that we may continue publishing writing about film + music with love + care<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mako Fukata spoke with interpreter Monika Uchiyama about the process of creating English subtitles for Nobuo Nakagawa\u2019s Farewell to the Highland Station (1951) and the rich and complex art of translation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19076,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,20],"tags":[1275,329,336,422,1273,1274,1179],"class_list":["post-19073","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film","category-interview","tag-farewell-to-the-highland-station","tag-featured","tag-film","tag-interview","tag-kyoko-kagawa","tag-mako-fukata","tag-monika-uchiyama"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.9.1 - 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P. Cavafy<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Homer\u2019s epic poems, <em>The Iliad <\/em>and <em>The Odyssey<\/em>, stand as pillars of Western cultural cannon, their influence likely comparable only to the <em>Bible<\/em>. The story has been told and retold, adapted and reinterpreted dozens of times. The story and its structure are so ubiquitous that everything from <em>Apocalypse Now <\/em>to <em>Spongebob<\/em><em> <\/em>owes something to the blind poet\u2019s work. Yet one of the most unique and atmospheric takes on the story remains Franco Piavoli\u2019s cult 1989 film <em>Nostos: Il Ritorno<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Born in 1933, Piavoli is something of a renaissance man, an artist with a passion and skill for poetry, painting, music and photography, all of which he tried before settling on cinema at the age of 21, while studying law. Hailing from the Lombardy region of Italy, this cult figure of post-war Italian cinema has a signature style built on compassion and tenderness for the natural world, which earned him the title of a pragmatic dreamer and praise from filmmakers like Tarkovsky and Brakhage, amongst others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">His films play out like city symphonies of the 1920s, only set in rural locales. He\u2019s Dziga Vertov, divorced from the city, working with his camera to present a different view of the world we think we know so well. His early films, like <em>Domenica Sera<\/em> (1962)<em> <\/em>which captures a Sunday evening dance, show his knack for combining beauty and melancholy, showing people as ingrained in the natural world, not just a part of it. His work treats atmosphere and narrative as deeply intertwined; the films are not really <em>about <\/em>anything as much as they want to create a feeling from the event captured. <\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"790\" height=\"599\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-3-1-1024x776.jpg?resize=790%2C599&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-18799\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-3-1.jpg?resize=1024%2C776&ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-3-1.jpg?resize=300%2C227&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-3-1.jpg?resize=768%2C582&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-3-1.jpg?w=1424&ssl=1 1424w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 790px) 100vw, 790px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Nostos: Il Ritorno<\/em> (1989)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Most of Piavoli\u2019s films feature none, or very little, dialogue. He treats language as a sound, more interested in its phonic qualities and ability to suggest emotions than conveying a particular meaning. Language is only a tool, not the key to understanding. His unique treatment of sound and visuals lets the viewer create their own stories and meanings, letting each viewing become a subjective experience. This idea was brought to its apex in <em>Nostos: Il Ritorno<\/em>, an adaptation of <em>The Odyssey <\/em>which decenters the human protagonist, stripping him of language and placing him in the grand, unpredictable nature. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Released in 1989, <em>Nostos: Il Ritorno <\/em>was Franco Piavoli\u2019s second feature, filmed largely without sets over a period of two years, using the existing landscapes of Sardinia, Lake Garda, Campania and Calabria. The film presents Odysseus\u2019 journey as both a physical and a metaphorical endeavour with an emphasis on the subjective. As the film begins, we see a boat on the open sea, its crew asleep. One of the men, our hero, dreams of a child playing with a hoop, the first of many times we will see this image. Almost immediately after, we are taken back to the burning of Troy, but there is no heroism, only the screams of women and a city in flames that plagues the soldiers\u2019 memories. The beginning sets up how valuable dreams and memories are in Piavoli\u2019s world, putting them on equal footing with the real. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The rest of <em>Nostos <\/em>flows in a similarly loose, episodic structure, where scenes follow one another like dreams, drifting in and out between the real and the imagined. It is the dream of the child with the hoop that propels Odysseus in his journey. He goes back to that image at key points of the story, the hazy world of dreams drawing him back to Ithaca. Odysseus travels through the Mediterranean and his consciousness, turning away from the spectacle and heroism, something Piavoli also did quite literally in his 1964 short <em>Evasi<\/em>, which captures a sporting event just by looking at the fans\u2019 reactions. <em>Nostos<\/em>, on the other hand, plays like a meditation. There is very little dialogue in the film, and when it does appear, it is a fictional mix of Sanskrit, Latin, and Armenian. This ambiguity creates a truly mythical portrayal of the ancient times, transporting us to a unique interpretation of the pre-Homeric world. The film does not need a legible language, because what it seeks to convey is that the feeling of wanting to return home is universal, and it needs no translation. <\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"790\" height=\"605\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-2.jpg?resize=790%2C605\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-18795\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-2.jpg?resize=1024%2C784&ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-2.jpg?resize=300%2C230&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-2.jpg?resize=768%2C588&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-2.jpg?w=1410&ssl=1 1410w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 790px) 100vw, 790px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Nostos: Il Ritorno<\/em> (1989)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The longing is conveyed solely through Odysseus\u2019 eyes and in the awe-inspiring nature around him. His silence, and the fictional tongue, lets the viewer reach their own conclusions. Franco Piavoli looks at Odysseus almost like an anthropologist, posing questions about man\u2019s place in the world. With no one around, in landscapes devoid of human presence, what can a hero, or any man, do? By stripping language and dialogues to the bare minimum, the film makes it easier for us to identify with the man beyond the myth. Even Odysseus gets homesick. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Piavoli\u2019s omission of language in <em>Nostos <\/em>also does away with the nature\/culture divide, framing the world as pre-Enlightenment thinkers might have seen it, not separating between man and nature, science and art. It is all one and the same, harmonious. The film\u2019s lush camera work enforces an affinity for the grand nature which recalls the Romantics and their idea of sublime. Piavoli finds it in the everyday aspects of this foundational Western text. He is less interested in cyclops and sirens than he is in the trees Odysseus might have hugged. When Odysseus loses his crew, we don\u2019t see their bodies, but only their helmets, sinking under the water. Moments later, the hero is in a fetal position on an empty beach, surrounded by nothing but sand. When he does meet another, like the nymph Calypso, their lovemaking is intercut with a river running through the landscape, the human, the natural, and the mystical combining. Piavoli\u2019s treatment of nature with a magical realism that makes one almost believe the Greeks\u2019 pantheism, that every part of the world is ruled by a presence mightier than man. <\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"790\" height=\"444\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-4-1024x576.webp?resize=790%2C444&ssl=1\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-18800\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-4.webp?resize=1024%2C576&ssl=1 1024w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-4.webp?resize=300%2C169&ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-4.webp?resize=768%2C432&ssl=1 768w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-4.webp?resize=1536%2C864&ssl=1 1536w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ultradogme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Nostos-4.webp?w=1920&ssl=1 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 790px) 100vw, 790px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Nostos: Il Ritorno<\/em> (1989)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The film ends in a synthesis, Odysseus finding home in a man-made structure, blending dreams and reality into one as he sees a sunny, serene landscape and children playing, along with his wife, Penelope, in the background. The long journey is done and in that moment we understand Odysseus completely, without a need for spoken language. What <em>Nostos <\/em>does sounds impossible. The film is a free reconstruction of a foundational Western text, something like reinventing the wheel. It\u2019s hard to suppress the feeling of awe that a work like this actually exists. One of fiction\u2019s most famous characters is transformed into a tabula rasa, inviting the viewers to project themselves on it while showing that the core elements of <em>The Odyssey <\/em>are so universal that even with an invented language it is possible to understand and relate to the story. Piavoli does not even try to subscribe to the collective illusions of what an epic should look or sound like. To him, the epic is in the everyday, which is why the story will continue to be interpreted and reinterpreted for centuries, if not millennia, to come, transcending time and language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity is-style-wide\"\/>\n\n\n\n<h5 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"https:\/\/ultradogme.com\/tag\/samuel-alexander\/\">Samuel Alexander<\/a> is a culture writer and photographer from Slovakia. His writing has appeared in Ringtone Magazine, HMOTA or SudetyRaport, and he runs the music blog not4climbing.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>If you enjoyed this article, please<\/em> <em>consider<\/em> <em><a href=\"https:\/\/paypal.me\/samuellalex\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">tipping the author<\/a><\/em> <em>and\/or<\/em> <em>supporting Ultra Dogme on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/ultradogme\">Patreon<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/ko-fi.com\/ultradogme\">Ko-fi<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/ultradogme.substack.com\/\">Substack<\/a><\/em>, <em>so that we may continue publishing writing about film + music with love + care<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Samuel Alexander on Franco Piavoli’s Nostos: Il Ritorno (1989), his mythopoetic and truly universal interpretation of The Odyssey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18796,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,18],"tags":[329,336,1262,1260,1261,1263],"class_list":["post-18498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essay","category-film","tag-featured","tag-film","tag-franco-piavoli","tag-nostos-il-ritorno","tag-samuel-alexander","tag-the-odyssey"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.9.1 - 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