JYUNZOU

video, miniDV, 10min, 2003

In 'JYUNZOU', the concept of “territory” was developed further, and I attempted to catch not the change of “territory” through environmental changes of surroundings and the people it is composed of, but the situation where in the same environment with the same people several “territories” appear, and those correlating separations. In this work, I filmed the brief meeting between myself and old friends with whom I had lost touch long before, at the friends' rooms. The act of filming in documentary films is an act of connecting to the territory of the film and separating oneself from the reality of what is before one's eyes. Filming the reunion of my friend and I, meant for me attitudes of the two polar opposites of “intimacy” and “coldness of observer, informer” existing at the same time, and that, having a relationship and the doubling of roles being filmed (being the subject and friend), created several parallel territories.

The hint for this idea came from an intense feeling of inappropriateness in a scene that I saw when I was looking at a documentary work that I had, in which a camera-man/film-maker that had until then been totally outside acting as a calm observer, suddenly looked like he ordered the person being filmed to bring over a cigarette (I realized later that this was my misunderstanding). If that film-maker had not been an outside movie-maker, but a person extremely well-known to the young man, that calm perspective of an observer felt from the image, in what looked at a glance to be a stable everyday relationship, showed the fact there are many severed territories running parallel, and I thought that through the act of filming a change of perception may be possible.