I had the rare delight recently of seeing Takashi Sawa’s
experimental short Mathematica (マテマテカ, 1999). Sawa (澤隆志, b. 1971) is perhaps
best known for his work as program director at Image Forum, but along with
Takashi Nakajima, Takashi Ito, Takashi Makino and Takashi Ishida, he is also
one of the five great “Takeshis” of experimental filmmaking.
With his film Mathematica, Sawa trains his 8mm camera on the fine
details of the world that we often take for granted. Using the techniques of poetic montage, stop
motion animation, and 3D frottage (taking a rubbing of a textured surface),
Sawa explores the structures, spaces, and subtle changes over time that occur in
the natural world.
In an e-mail to me, Sawa explained that he was interested in exploring
the translation between timeline and depth, between 50 seconds and 2500mm, and
between film and lath. The average
person usually thinks about mathematics in terms of numbers, but in actuality mathematics
is study of the art and science of abstraction.
It examines how the world around us is made up of not only quantity but
also structure, space, and change. In
fact, Sir Isaac Newton famously called it the language in which the universe is
written (Opticks
, 1704).
, 1704).
In Mathematica, this is expressed through a montage of
images that demonstrate these mathematical concerns. Skin making itself smooth again after an
imprint of the title of the film has been pressed into it, the patterns of
wrinkles and lines on the skin, the rings of a tree, the mane of a sorrel horse,
a pencil frottage of the cross-section of a tree, the netting covering a
scaffolding, and film deteriorating. The
stop motion sequences of the tree-rings were for me the most fascinating. The movement of the rings created by the stop
motion causes the close-ups of the tree-rings to resemble other patterns of
nature that have also been the subject of mathematical conjecture: the waves of
the ocean or the formation of patterns on the sands of the desert. These sequences also draw attention not only
to patterns, structure, and space, but also to the concept of time.
In the catalogue of the Holland Animation Film Festival 2002, Sawa wrote about how the pleasure of animation is in the way
that it “breathes life in between frame and frame” and how “it is precisely the
continuous playback by means of intermittent movement of these gaps and
flickers that captivates both the makers and the audience of animation. In works of experimental animation, which are
made outside the system of film as industry, the question is how far we can
extend the magic of these gaps and afterimages.” (p. 14). With Mathematica, Sawa shows us how these
gaps and afterimages can be used to focus our awareness on the extraordinary
aspects of the commonplace in the world around us.
Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011
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