I had the rare delight recently of seeing Takashi Sawa’sexperimental short Mathematica (マテマテカ, 1999). Sawa (澤隆志, b. 1971) is perhapsbest known for his work as program director at Image Forum, but along withTakashi Nakajima, Takashi Ito, Takashi Makino and Takashi Ishida, he is alsoone of the five great “Takeshis” of experimental filmmaking.
With his film Mathematica, Sawa trains his 8mm camera on the finedetails of the world that we often take for granted. Using the techniques of poetic montage, stopmotion animation, and 3D frottage (taking a rubbing of a textured surface),Sawa explores the structures, spaces, and subtle changes over time that occur inthe natural world.
In an e-mail to me, Sawa explained that he was interested in exploringthe translation between timeline and depth, between 50 seconds and 2500mm, andbetween film and lath. The averageperson usually thinks about mathematics in terms of numbers, but in actuality mathematicsis study of the art and science of abstraction. It examines how the world around us is made up of not only quantity butalso structure, space, and change. Infact, Sir Isaac Newton famously called it the language in which the universe iswritten (Opticks
, 1704).
, 1704).
In Mathematica, this is expressed through a montage ofimages that demonstrate these mathematical concerns. Skin making itself smooth again after animprint of the title of the film has been pressed into it, the patterns ofwrinkles and lines on the skin, the rings of a tree, the mane of a sorrel horse,a pencil frottage of the cross-section of a tree, the netting covering ascaffolding, and film deteriorating. Thestop motion sequences of the tree-rings were for me the most fascinating. The movement of the rings created by the stopmotion causes the close-ups of the tree-rings to resemble other patterns ofnature that have also been the subject of mathematical conjecture: the waves ofthe ocean or the formation of patterns on the sands of the desert. These sequences also draw attention not onlyto patterns, structure, and space, but also to the concept of time.
In the catalogue of the Holland Animation Film Festival 2002, Sawa wrote about how the pleasure of animation is in the waythat it “breathes life in between frame and frame” and how “it is precisely thecontinuous playback by means of intermittent movement of these gaps andflickers that captivates both the makers and the audience of animation. In works of experimental animation, which aremade outside the system of film as industry, the question is how far we canextend the magic of these gaps and afterimages.” (p. 14). With Mathematica, Sawa shows us how thesegaps and afterimages can be used to focus our awareness on the extraordinaryaspects of the commonplace in the world around us.
Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011
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