Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Wocico 2023 II World Cinema International Conference , Madrid, İspanya, 28 - 29 Eylül 2023
A Ryūsuke Hamaguchi Movie:
Walden
Simber Atay
Dokuz Eylül University Fine Arts
Faculty (Turkey)
Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Walden (2022) is an experimental film that invites the spectator
to contemplation, profoundly. Film is a 2 minutes monochrome record of a water
surface with reflections of trees, raindrops, swarming insects, several sounds of nature
etc. This movie also includes a double quote from Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden
but voiced by a woman from Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1955).
This film is crystallization of Hamaguchi’s style. He creates a deep romantic landscape
along this water surface by continuous and random visual variations occurring on the
surface. The two-minute duration of the film indicates a dialectic of existence
between Kronos and Aion in the Deleuzian sense.
The time of the movie is the eternal present time. Therefore, this water surface, which
is extremely natural, plain and clear at first impression, becomes an interface where
the spectator and the operator meet to explore together the potential for meaning
about the nature, life, cinema or in other words Dasein itself.
Walden was screened for the first time at The Festival Viennale (2022).
Therefore, this movie will be analyzed by mapping the following components in the
light of Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Meaning and Heidegger's The Origin of the Work
of Art: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s style throughout his movies, Douglas Sirk’s effect, the
actual importance Thoreau’s philosophy of nature and postmodern experimental art
approach.