Oh peace in our day, peace in our day
Our day in the sun
You got lost in a time gone by
A day in the sun
- the last
lines of “Prayer”, by Spooky Tooth and Pierre Henry, 1969
Nobuhiro Aihara (相原信洋,
1944-2011) is a unique individual in Japanese animation history. In the early part of his career he worked as
an animator on many renowned anime series and films from Obake no Q-tarō (Masaaki Ōsumi, 1965-67) and Kaibutsu-kun (Masaaki Ōsumi, 1968-69) to Gauche
the Cellist (Isao Takahata, 1982), Night
on the Galactic Railroad (Gisaburo Sugii, 1985), and Akira (Katsuhiro Otomo, 1988).
At the same
time; however, he was active in the avant-garde art and experimental film
scene, frequently travelling overseas to meet like-minded artists. Stone
(1975) is an early experimental work by Aihara that he made during a six-month
visit to Sweden. It opens with a montage
of Rorschach-style inkblot paintings. As
the camera distance widens between the camera and the paintings, we see that
the paintings are not being shot in a studio, but are taped to a large stone
with a forest in the background. The
camera distance continues to change with great regularity, as does the lighting
as the series was clearly shot over an extended period of time. Clouds pass through the sky, winds increase,
and the camera continues to widen the expanse of landscape, eventually tipping
up to a pixilation view of the sky altering sky shot through a fisheye lens. The sky darkens and opens on another
day. We can see hints of a person,
perhaps the artist, slightly off camera.
The camera eventually moves back into a close-up of the series of
inkblot paintings and the soundtrack alters from other-worldly sounds to the
lyrical strum of a guitar.
The haunting
soundtrack is uncredited, but it is the song “Prayer” by UK progressive rock
band Spooky Tooth in collaboration
with the French electronic and objet
trouvé (found-object) composer Pierre
Henry. It is the final track on
their join album Ceremony (1969),
which was designed to be listened to as if it were a church service. The lyrics to “Prayer” are derived from “The Lord’s
Prayer” with the additional refrain: “Deliver us, we pray, from every evil /
that's here, and to come, through the Virgin Mary / peace in our day, our day
in the sun”.
The camera
changes locations to a square structure made of large stones. Figures come and go, appearing to paint colourful
abstract art on the stones using a ladder.
The third setup uses the side of a red barn for the pixilated drawings. This time the camera goes in close enough for
us to see that the artists are actually using chalk rather than paint. As the camera moves back from a close-up on
the chalk to a fourth setup. This time
it is a tall brick house with the date 1926 on its façade. Over the course several days, the chalk
drawing continues with the artists coming and going. A young blond girl dressed in typical 70s
fashion with a poncho and headscarf, dances occasionally in and out of the
house. She helps with the chalk drawing,
dances in the street, and runs up to put her face into the camera. It is in this sequence that it becomes
obvious that Aihara did not take each frame at a constant rate. Sometimes the girl appears to move at a
regular 24 fps, while at other times the frames are temporally much further apart.
The film is
an expression of art and temporality.
The ephemeral nature of chalk art is contrasted with the more enduring
qualities of natural stones, brick houses, and the heavens above. Yet, as the use of pixilation demonstrates,
these things that seem permanent are also changing over time. The film reminded me very much of Lejf Marcussen’s similarly named Stones (Sten, 1982), which also screened at RICA Wissembourg 2014
as part of an hommage to the late Danish animator. Instead of drawing directly on the stones, Marcussen
superimposed images on stones – finding animal and human shapes and faces among
the natural faces of rock. As Henry David Thoreau is oft quoted as
saying: “This world is but a canvas to our imagination” (A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers, 1849).
I have not
been able to find any information about the choice of music for the soundtrack.
I think it was chosen more for its style than for the Christian text of the poem. Aihara regularly used psychedelic and
progressive rock for his soundtracks.
That being said, the feeling of spirituality that the music evokes
likely appealed to Aihara. The refrain “You
got lost in a time gone by / A day in the sun” also poetically expresses the
interplay of time in this unique experimental work.
Stone was shot on 16mm and appears on
the DVD Japanese Art Animation Film
Collection 11: The Animation Group of Three and Experimental Anime (日本アートアニメーション映画選集11 アニメーション三人の会と実験アニメ, 2004), which can
be found in the video archives of university libraries such as Musabi
and Tamagawa.
The entire 12 DVD collection 日本アートアニメーション映画選集 全１２巻 can be ordered
from Kinokuniya,
but it is unfortunately well out of the price range of the average individual.
Cathy Munroe
Hotes 2014
