Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei

Mind the Gaps|Gasp of Catastrophe-Anderstreben G-forces of Kaizo Hayashi’s Cinema and Contemporary Art
By Leo Chanjen Chen


1 Stray Closer at the Gaps|Gasp of Catastrophe-Cinema with Contemporary Art

Ruins can invoke apocalyptic revelations while catastrophe often forces people to adapt and change their behavior that may in turn lead to new self-discoveries. Pandemic COVID 19 has since outbreak cornered most of us in catastrophe ruins of various kinds, to confront ourselves and surroundings while, at the same nighttime, also converge those forking paths of our private dreams into a cohabitated nightmare due to shared anxiety, as recent study on lockdown dreams concurred. When daytime reality turned too stressful to bear, dream sanctioned and comforted our desolate souls, a function also shared by arts.

Boccaccio wrote Decameron (1353) and Kamonochomei wrote Hojoki/The Ten Foot Square Hut (1212) to catharize plagues. Edogawa Ranpo, Japanese detective novelist named after Edgar Allan Poe, wrote puzzle-ridden and Ero-Guro style (erotic and grotesque) stories to entertain and purge nightmares after disasters by human and nature from 1920s onwards while people flocked into dream palaces of cinema during Great Depressions. For “Adjectives returned at nights”, said Roland Barthes, imaginative narrative description almost always co-develops with conscriptive inactivity. How then do cinema and contemporary arts commiserate, or coevolve, in our times of trouble?

In 2016, Japanese director Kaizo Hayashi shot his film BOLT (2019) about 2011 Fukushima earthquake aftermaths in Takamatsu Fine Art Museum by sharing the same set design for exhibition “CINEMATIZE” of contemporary art sculptor Yanobe Kenji with museum goers watching the shooting process. This co-creative and performative event is the salient point of departure for current MOCA Taipei exhibition “Straying Closer in Katastrophe- Anderstreben Arts of Kaizo Hayashi’s Cinema”. In the spirit and form of detective genre, puzzle-solving traits are also embedded in the title.

Japanese pronunciation of the first three Kanji characters in title著眠間- Ki Ne Ma, refers to cinema (as homonym) and dreams (as synonym). The last two Kanji characters 舛息/Catastrophe Gasping, originate from the oracle of catastrophe舛 (chuan) that features two opposing feet apart, pictographing a pausing stance before leaping into dance or continue walking, as the character dance (舞) also shared the same radical. Catastrophe Gasping 舛息(chuanxi) thus coinages an image of one taking deep breaths after catastrophe, pulling oneself together from ruins and prepare for next move. Henceforth, displaying films in Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei that were made in another contemporary art museum thus completes a cycle that jumps the gap between institutionalized fields of film and contemporary art production and exhibition. Moreover, the recreated set of a bar in MOCA Cube with secret screening room for both filmmaking and screening not only provides a place for further co-production, it also projects a tangential space off the co-creative cycle with changing dynamic equilibrium between cinema and contemporary arts in times of plague, both forced to bare down to express only the most urgent sine qua non message for catastrophe gasping.

2 Anderstreben Arts of Kaizo Hayashi’s Sehnsucht Imagery- Dream to BOLT

Selected by British Film Academy as the most significant Japanese film of 1986, “To Sleep so as to Dream” as a first film catapulted Kaizo Hayashi into spotlights, against 80s’ Kadogawa adaptation blockbusters and Terajima et milling experimental provocateurs, with shoe-string budget and no string affiliation nor institutional training. Inspired by the detective stories of Edogawa Ranpo and passionate about cinema, Hayashi dropped out of college and received detective license before dedicating to the detective genre rendering Ranpo visuality and leitmotif on screen, including the NHK “Black Lizard” (2020) of late.

However, at once individualistically romantic with naïveté and also an eager crowd-pleaser, such as the repeating image of hard-boiled eggs vs. slapstick comic body movements in his first film, Hayashi’s cinema eludes categorization between art-house and mainstream roadshow. A nostalgic longing for lost times, or the sense of sehnsucht, run through his cinematic dreamy imagery. Either for rescuing the lost art of silent cinema from the past in “To Sleep so as to Dream” or to redeem the future of life in “BOLT”, Hayashi’s cinema are dream paths straddling between past and future, theater and cinema, memory and visions. Preserving on film the Showa Asakusa street images of Théâtre de papier, Benshi film interpreter, magician and ventriloquism, cinema for Hayashi become the dream paths bringing back together all those various arts and objects from straying away or disappearing altogether. The term Anderstreben, “a partial alienation from its own limitation, through which the arts are able reciprocally to lend each other new forces” as defined by Walter Pater, perhaps still prescribes the aesthetics of Hayashi cinema as a meme, like grouping Dickens’s long novels and Ibsen’s short story together for their shared themes of identity searching.

A recurring motif of cycling image permeates throughout Hayashi’s entire oeuvre, for merry-go-around, ferris-wheel, and gyroscopes large and small with their non-stop spinning images symbolizes the never-ending process of mystery solving, the fascination with uncertainty of future and lost past. It depicts the true spirit of story telling that can only show you direction or meaning when stopped, before moving onto the next step. Japanese name for gyroscope “happiness for oneself only” (独楽) not only predates Nolan’s “Inception” ending, it also incidentally mocked on Taiwan Eva Air’s pseudo-traveling of flight to nowhere in 2020. Devoid of sex and violence and yet not as sterile as contemporary arts, through his cinema Hayashi remains that pure adolescent yearning to reach for places before and after his time, when the present is only good for making dream paths. That is perhaps why Hayashi’s collaboration with contemporary sculptor Yanobe Kenji leaves no room for giant dolls Torayan et al. For 人形愛 an obsession with humanoid/mannequin both disguises and reveals Japanese desire for metamorphosis, surrogating means with endings, often blockages, while the pleasure of cinema remains on the road of dream paths always leading somewhere, never nowhere. Seijima Takumi’s painting “Road to Sea(e)” thus pivots the entire trilogy of BOLT as the threshold between reality of struggling for life before and dreaming towards acceptance of death after the event.

3 Two or Three thinGs I know about Cinema contra Contemporary Art- A Manual

Debates about cinema as art never ceases from its inception, and the inevitable straying together of both in plague time only rekindle the cinder remains.
For film to be as art the discussion is always based on its relationship with other arts. Hence like the pure image Godard looks for, image that doesn't represent anything but itself, as the absolute to measure any form from, film is art precisely because of its impurity, of its perpetual conflict with/in itself, such as narrative vs. non-narrative, entertainment vs art, cave reality vs reflection of outside…etc., for cinema is always engaging in the perpetual incorporation of other arts.

Alain Badiou thinks that because films think, it is the task of engaging viewers to transcribe and subscribe that thinking. “Through the experience of viewing, the movement of thought that constitutes the film is passed on to the viewer, who thereby encounters an aspect of the world and its exaltation and vitality as well as its difficulty and complexity.” Cinema, as and contra contemporary art, is an art form only when it renders Others and human presence visible, said Badiou.

Still idealistic and dream fighting invisible hands of kinds by praising cinema is Althusser’s student Jacques Rancière who considers the active participation of the spectator of cinema as an important characteristic of the aesthetic regime of art, a 180 degree reversal from earlier generation of French film theorists half century before. Quoting Joseph Jacotot that one needs to “learn something and relate everything else to it”, Rancière designates “intellectual emancipation” as the function of cinema which is not an established language yet but perhaps formulating discourses. Therefore to recognize cinema as art one always begins with challenging oppositions between active and passive, appearance and reality, viewing and knowing, and the whole nine yards.

Through this exhibition of Catastrophe Gasping, we can find several shared attributes, or gravity forces, between Hayashi’s cinema and contemporary arts- three centripetal forces converge to work the cinematic text and art objects, two centrifugal forces that prompts the viewer’s participations.

The 5 G/ Gravity Forces of Cinema contra Contemporary Art- A Manual of
Gadgetry, Gimmick, Game, Gag, Gap
Centripetal Gs
1.Gadget- Adorno comments on gadgeteering that split the wholesomeness of humanity between work and play, hence destroy the fun of work and work as fun. Both Hayashi’s cinema and contemporary arts are full of gadgetry, continue to suture the work/fun divide against division of labor.
2. Gimmick- To be Cute and/or Interesting, according to some critics such as Sianne Ngai, has become the gimmick that lures viewer into suspension of aesthetic judgment for instant and impulsive consumption. Both cinema and art thrive on this category, as attest by the Flight to Nowhere 2020 (ironically without vision).
3.Game- Concurring with Edogawa Ranpo that all detective fictions and cinema are games, Hayashi’s cinema differ from contemporary art’s games fundamentally. For Hayashi, games are sui generis and their means converge with purposes. For contemporary arts, more than often the games are always pointing elsewhere. The root of game- Ludus, refers to both play and school which perhaps confirm the nature of us as Homo Ludens.

Centrifugal Gs
4.Gag- The anticlimactic acts for intensified psychological affects work both way as Anderstreben, an aesthetics reinforced by plague time integration.

5.Gap- Walter Murch in “The Blink of An Eye” describes how bees get confused when their home beehives were moved away not too close nor too far. With gaps between cinema and contemporary arts, gaps between conceptual and perceptual neuro-activities, the Catastrophe Gasping juxtaposition of Kaizo Hayashi and MOCA Cube thus lift us to mind the gaps and leap with faith.