A RYÛSUKE HAMAGUCHI MOVIE: ‘WALDEN'

Abstract

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (1978) is one of the most important directors of contemporary cinema. He has won many awards with his films at the world's major film festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, and Venice and he received the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film in 2022 with his movie ‘Drive My Car’. Hamaguchi’s ‘Walden’ (2022) is one of Hamaguchi's recent movies. ‘Walden’ is a co-production of Austria, and Japan, premiered at The Festival Viennale (2022). Within Hamaguchi’s relatively mainstream cinema poetics, the movie ‘Walden’ is an experimental work that invites the spectator to a deep contemplation. The film is a 2-minute, almost monochrome record of a water surface with reflections of trees, raindrops, vibration waves, water rings, bird songs, swarming insects, several sounds of nature, a floating leaf, etc. In addition to the sounds of nature, the film includes a female voice excerpt with music from Douglas Sirk's ‘All That Heaven Allows’ (1955). Jean Wyman who is the protagonist “Cary Scott” of ‘All That Heaven Allows’, reads some lines from Henry David Thoreau's book Walden (1854). This movie at the same time is a documentary record of a water surface; a free cinematographic adaptation of Henri David Thoreau's autobiographical book ‘Walden’, a deep romantic landscape through continuous and random visual variations occurring on the surface and a crystallization of Hamaguchi’s style. Hamaguchi’s ‘Walden’ surface also becomes an interface where Hamaguchi the artist, and the spectator meet temporally to explore the noema of existence, nature, and cinema within a Heideggerian-verse. Besides the 2- minute durée of the film and its surface subject indicates a continuous oscillation between Kronos and Aion in the Deleuzian sense.